El Presidente Negro has now announced his economic team and as expected Geithner is Treasury Sec. and his mentor, Lawrence Summers, will be head of the White House's National Economic Council. The other economic appointment of note is Christina Romer.
While the first two have long standing ties to both the world of governmental economics in the US, e.g. Summers used to be Treasury Sec. and Geithner used to work for the treasury, and globalist financial institutions, Geithner with the IMF and Summers with the World Bank, Romer is a lifetime academic. This might inspire a certain degree of confidence that she isn't just another member of the club finding a way to warm their own feet at the fire or toe the party line. As the Wall Street Journal economics blog put it:
That the Romers are so well-regarded by their peers of both parties has many economists cheered that the Obama administration is going for the top minds in the field rather than those who adhere most closely to party lines. - WSJ
However reassuring academic expertise may be to poorly educated people, it is no guarantee of credibility or freedom from corruption. Earlier this year, UK television's Channel 4 broadcast a documentary show titled The Artful Codgers. The show told the story of two working class pensioners and their son who successfully defrauded the high class art world of hundreds of thousands of pounds for works faked by the son in the shed of their council house. You can watch part one of the show here, and the rest on youtube:
This single story illustrates how education and letters following your name can be rendered useless by someone willing and able to deceive and defraud. And there are plenty of more adept deceivers and defrauders in this world than George and Olive Greenhalgh.
So, is there any sign that Romer's education and credentials are in effect meaningless, and that she too is part of the same club as Geithner and Summers? Well, she's regarded as a mainstream economist, and a glance at the titles of her books on amazon certainly suggest that. Talk of 'business cycles' show that she understands the economy as a sort of repetitive progression of peaks and troughs. Nothing particularly suspicious about any of that, until you throw in the fact that she was vice president of the American Economic Association, which for a long time has been a propaganda arm of the elite designed to project this idea that no one is ultimately in control of the economy. That peaks and troughs are natural.
That this is the purpose of the AEA was first noted by historian Anthony Sutton, who explained how the association was set up by Richard T. Ely, a close associate of Andrew Dickson White and Daniel Gilman, both members of The Order, the Yale secret society.
Academic associations are a means of conditioning or even policing academics. Although academics are great at talking about academic freedom, they are peculiarly susceptible to peer group pressures. And if an academic fails to get the word through his peer group, there is always the threat of not getting tenure. In other words, what is taught at University levels is passed through a sieve. The sieve is faculty conformity...So, Geithner and Summers are there to manage the economy in the interests of their (and Obama's) Wall Street paymasters. Romer is there to provide confidence (after all, that is the political role of expertise) and to ensure that the myth of an arbitrary, evolutionary economy remains the popular view of what's happened. This in turn ensure there is no demand for the criminal bankers who led us to this position to be held to account for their actions. Along with the Israeli terrorist and people who want to destroy Russia we've now got a man who thinks pollution should be outsourced to countries where the dollar cost of a life is lowest. Wonderful prospects abound for this administration.
...We have already noted that member Andrew Dickson White founded and was first President of the American Historical Association and therefore was able to influence the constitution and direction of the AHA. This has generated an official history and ensured that existence of The Order is never even whispered in history books, let alone school texts. An economic association is also of significance because it conditions how people who are not economists think about the relative merits of free enterprise and state planning. State economic planning is an essential part of State political control. Laissez faire in economics is the equivalent of individualism in politics. And just as you will never find any plaudits for the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution in official history, neither will you find any plaudits for individual free enterprise. - Sutton, How the Order controls Education
Across the pond in my home country, Gordon is reportedly looking to borrow record amounts of money to spend on the economy. Now, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but Brown in his lengthy time as chancellor mentioned a thing or two about golden rules. The first of these was that over the course of an economic cycle the government could only borrow money to invest. The oft-repeated example was that borrowing to build a hospital was fine but borrowing to pay the wages of nurses was not. However, Gordon is now borrowing to pay the wages of bankers. In the case of Northern Rock, the pseudo-nationalised British bank, the boss walked away with over three quarters of a million pounds. Now, this dwarfs the near $50 million the former Chief Exec of AIG managed to extort, but it's still a lot of money.
The other rule is that public debt should not rise above 40% of national income. According to the CIA, we already passed that level by 2007, and according to a report by the Centre for Policy Studies, the true figure is something like 127% of GDP, or £1,854 billion. The external debt of over $10 trillion, the second highest in the world behind the USA, suggests Gordon's rules were outdated before he'd even mentioned them. And it seems Gordon has finally realised this, though it took a financial panic of biblical proportions to do it. So what is he going to replace them with? Sikh values, apparently:
"Treating others as you would like to be treated yourself is a rule that I believe has got relevance to every community in this country, building tolerance, building justice, building equality and building fairness," - SIFY newsDoesn't sound too bad if you ask me. We'll see if he follows through, given how strictly he kept to his previous rules...