By Rachael Woodhouse
GCN Live.com
As America heads into the November elections and the economy continues to sputter, more and more people are joining the ranks of the politically disenchanted.
Harley Schlanger: historian, musician, regular contributor to the Schiller Institute website, and the Western States spokesman for the LaRouche PAC.
Harley Schlanger of LaRouchePAC.org stopped by on Wednesday, August 25th, to chat with Dr. Bill Deagle on GCN’s Nutrimedical Report. Schlanger and Deagle touched on a variety of subjects, but their main focus was on the continued double-dip recession (depression?) that continues to make Americans uneasy about their economic future.
Schlanger got right to the point at the start of the interview. “I don’t believe there’s a double dip recession; I don’t think we got out of the collapse.”
“I think if you look at this from the top, the discussion that’s gone on with the regulatory process overall with the Dodd-Frank bill and some of the other things, it’s sort of like offering chemo to a corpse,” Schlanger offered as an analogy. “You’re a little late, and it’s the wrong prognosis. What we’re dealing with is a system that’s dead. And this is what LaRouche emphasized back in July of this year when he said it’s going to become clear to everyone by the period of early August to the end of September that you can’t put this system back together again, you can’t bail it out, you can’t save it.”
Are his observations correct? If this weekend’s huge rally organized by talk host Glenn Beck is any indication, yes, Americans are growing more concerned by the minute. However, Beck’s rally carried the message of “renewal” and its attendees appeared upbeat. Then again, as the Wall Street Journal duly noted:
The event featured three hours of religious and patriotic speeches but offered few details on how to fix the country’s problems.
Of course, the power brokers in Washington keep saying they know how to fix what ails the economy. “What we’ve seen is two desperate efforts, coming from two of the architects, the most recent architects of this crisis: Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary and former President of the New York Federal Reserve,” Schlanger said. “What Bernanke did with the federal open market committee two weeks ago is essentially say we’re opening the flood gates to hyperinflation. He basically took reports from the Fed from around the country that said there’s no industrial activity, there’s no lending, there’s no credit going out to small business, to home owners, to people who would use the credit to buy something. Instead, there’s a dramatic contraction. And what did he say? We’ve got to give more money to the banks.”
Bernanke and Geithner, the men Schlanger is fingering as the main current culprits in America's impending economic collapse.
At the August 10th meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9-to-1 to leave the Fed Funds Rate unchanged. That means the Fed Fund Rate will remain at a historical low. With classic hubris, the Fed announced in a press release that the pace of economic recovery “has slowed” since June of this year.
“So Bernanke announced that they’re going to keep interest rates low, that the Fed would buy more treasuries, and the Fed will buy mortgage-backed securities – which are pretty much worthless – from Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac]. Then, the next week which is last week, Geithner had a so-called summit on housing,” Schlanger told Deagle. “Now was he talking about how to help people stay in their homes? Was he talking about how to help people who are underwater or in to foreclosure? No, he was talking about how to keep mortgage-backed securities at face value. He was talking about pumping three trillion dollars into the banking system, on top of what they’ve already done.”
“What you have is with Bernanke and Geithner, they’re serving as the undertakers, because along with Larry Summers, they believe in a crazy theory of an Austrian fascist economist named Josef Schumpeter, and Schumpeter believes in something called creative destruction, which is that you have to wipe out an economy until you can have something new develop.”
Economist Joseph A. Schumpeter…presented a case that while Marx was wrong about how capitalism would collapse, he was probably correct that it eventually would. Schumpeter also contends that socialism may eclipse free-market economies, news he feels society should greet with angst. He believed that capitalism’s doom would proceed not from a revolution by an angry proletariat, but rather as a result of successes that would give rise to a class of elites who would gradually institute systems of central control. (from getabstract.com)
Schlanger’s summation on the situation at hand is bleak, especially as it is balanced on the premise that the destruction occurring is deliberate. “So you have, on the one hand, just the plain old liberal idiots who say [to] pump money and the liberal Keynesians. On the other hand, you have the neo-con Austrian fascists who say ‘let it all collapse.’ Now with either of those scenarios, who benefits? The cartels. The banks. The financial institutions. The insurance companies. The drug companies. And who gets hit? The people. Working people. Elderly, retired, young people. This is a policy which is moving toward a global fascism. And that’s the starting point that people have to look at.”