Why the Senate Won’t Touch Jamie Dimon

Posted on Jun 21, 2012

DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

(Page 2)

All of which suggests we could actually have a felon at the helm of our ship of state.

There is a movement afoot to get Dimon replaced on the Board, on the ground that his directorship represents a clear conflict of interest. In May, Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren called for Dimon’s resignation from the NY Fed board, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has used the uproar over the speculative JPM losses to promote an overhaul of the Federal Reserve. In a release to reporters, Warren said:

“Four years after the financial crisis, Wall Street has still not been held accountable, and that lack of accountability has history repeating itself—huge, risky financial bets leading to billions in losses. It is time for some accountability. . . . Dimon stepping down from the NY Fed would be at least one small sign that Wall Street will be held accountable for their failures.”

But what chance does even this small step have against the gun-to-the-head persuasion of a nightmare collapse of the entire U.S. debt scheme?

Propping Up a Pyramid Scheme

Is there no alternative but to succumb to the Mafia-like Wall Street protection racket of a covert derivatives trade in interest rate swaps? As Willie and Kirby observe, that scheme itself must ultimately fail, and may have failed already. They point to evidence that the JPM losses are not just $3 billion but $30 billion or more, and that JPM is actually bankrupt.

The derivatives casino itself is just a last-ditch attempt to prop up a private pyramid scheme in fractional-reserve money creation, one that has progressed over several centuries through a series of “reserves”—from gold, to Fed-created “base money,” to mortgage-backed securities, to sovereign debt ostensibly protected with derivatives. We’ve seen that the only real guarantor in all this is the government itself, first with FDIC insurance and then with government bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks. If we the people are funding the banks, we should own them; and our national currency should be issued, not through banks at interest, but through our own sovereign government.

Unlike Greece, which is dependent on an uncooperative European Central Bank for funding, the U.S. still has the legal power to issue its own dollars or borrow them interest-free from its own central bank. The government could buy back its bonds and refinance them at 0% interest through the Federal Reserve—which now buys them on the open market at interest like everyone else—or it could simply rip them up.

The chief obstacle to that alternative is the bugaboo of inflation, but many countries have proven that this approach need not be inflationary. Canada borrowed from its own central bank effectively interest free from 1939 to 1974, stimulating productivity without creating inflation; Australia did it from 1912 to 1923; and China has done it for decades.

The private creation of money at interest is the granddaddy of all pyramid schemes; and like all such schemes, it must eventually collapse, despite a quadrillion dollar derivatives edifice propping it up. Willie and Kirby think that time is upon us. We need to have alternative, public and cooperative systems ready to replace the old system when it comes crashing down.

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