Letter: The market free falls and inflation

The recent free fall in the markets and skyrocketing inflation are symptoms of terminal disease, not causes.

The disease is the British System of Political Economy, which has slowly taken over the Hamiltonian American System since Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971. Gold backing of the dollar and fixed exchange rates were abandoned, giving us a fiat currency that speculators could now gamble with. Soon, Paul Volker instituted the “controlled disintegration” of the economy, hiking interest rates up to 20%. Businesses needing to borrow in order to retool or expand were instead given taxpayer money by successive administrations and Congresses to offshore and relocate. The productive economy that had supplied the nation with necessary hard infrastructure and had helped the nation’s soft infrastructure, health care and education prosper was dismantled. The mantras of deregulation, privatization, and globalization were the buzzwords for treatments that allowed the disease to metastasize. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. initiated the Project for a New American Century. No nation would be allowed to challenge the Unipolar overlords. Resistance means warfare. The looting of the productive economy continued and accelerated. Bubble after bubble of worthlessness bursts. Money printing allows corporate parasites to live until the next unpayable due date.

The solution? Establish a New Bretton Woods, restore the Glass Steagall separation between commercial and investment banks, provide credit for productive purposes through a national bank, and tell Charles III, and all the Anglophiles here, to remember July 4, 1776.

Nicholas C. Kockler

Woodstock