The world’s citizens now see why governments have allowed themselves and their taxpayers to be trapped by the lords of finance. The bankers were their paymasters and funded their elections to office, bribed their officials, manipulated their regulators and public opinion. Through advertising and financing of mass-media, financial moguls and media moguls converged with political moguls worldwide into concentrated conglomerates (matching those in finance and industry): News Corp., Disney, NBC (owned by GE), Viacom, Clear Channel, as well as Comcast, Verizon and ATT now seeking to dominate the internet. All this is textbook fascism.
To save sovereign governments from further co-option and corruption, these government “leaders” and their economic “wise men” must now rise to the occasion. Together, they must act to downsize and curb the rogue global casino. The G-20 Summit in Toronto, June 26-27, is their next opportunity to re-assert control on behalf of their citizens and the global public interest. Will leadership come from Europe, China, India, the USA or Brazil?
To foster the transition from the monopoly of fiat money circuits (now just as bad as gold-based money) to 21st century electronic and local currencies, the G-20 needs to downsize financial sectors. Wall Street and London’s bloated financial sectors have little social purpose and produce nothing. High-frequency trading by computer programs now account for about 70% of Wall Street’s daily trading. Proprietary trading and risk-taking must be separated from government-subsidized deposit-taking banks. The best way to accomplish this is for the G-20 to agree on a less than 1% financial transactions tax (FTT) across the board. There are no good arguments against the FTT (debated since its introduction by economist James Tobin in the 1970s and recommended by Larry Summers in his 1989 paper. FTT is easily collectible, using the computer program on all trading screens (Henderson and Kay, “A foreign exchange transaction reporting system (FXTRS) for Central Banks,” Futures 1999). Money-laundering and tax haven operations in, for example, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Caymen, the Bahamas, the US states of Delaware and Nevada, Guernsey, Jersey and London can continue to be “shamed” by black-listing in the Financial Authorities Task Force publications.
