10 Books Every Student Should Read!

A definitive list of books that you need to read: 50% off for the month of September.

https://www.versobooks.com/lists/4000-10-books-every-student-should-read

03 September 2018

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Reading List

The start of the academic year has got us thinking about the books that transformed our thinking; classics from across our publishing that we think should be on everyone's bookshelves.

Whether you are just starting out, or your student days are far behind you, here is a definitive list of books that you need to read: all 50% off for the month of September. 

See all our student reading here!

Imagined Communities

by Benedict Anderson

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256 pages / September 2016 / 9781784786755

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“One of the greatest … deserves still to be central to our thinking about the world.”

– T. J. Clark, London Review of Books

The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations.

Minima Moralia

by Theodor Adorno

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256 pages / January 2006 / 9781844670512

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“The best thoughts of a noble and invigorating mind.”

– Observer

"A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature."—Susan Sontag

A reflection on everyday existence in the 'sphere of consumption of late Capitalism', this work is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece.

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

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224 pages / May 2017 / 9781786630681

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“The Origin of Capitalism was one of those ‘Aha!’ moments. Wood was an extraordinarily rigorous and imaginative thinker, someone who breathed life into Marxist political theory and made it speak—not to just to me but to many others—at multiple levels: historical, theoretical, political.”

– Corey Robin, Jacobin

How did the dynamic economic system we know as capitalism develop among the peasants and lords of feudal Europe?

In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state.

Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, et al.

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220 pages / January 2007 / 9781844675708

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“This is vital reading for anyone concerned with the relationship between art and socialism.”

– John Fowles

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Democracy Against Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

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320 pages / February 2016 / 9781784782443

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“Reading a Wood essay is a shock to the system, demanding the reader take a position, often leaving you invigorated and slightly bruised in the process.”

– Michael Watson, Red Pepper

Historian and political thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of “postmodern” fragmentation, “difference,” and con-tingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subject it to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the critical program of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political power. She goes on to explore the concept of democracy in both the ancient and modern world, examining its relation to capitalism, and raising questions about how democracy might go beyond the limits imposed on it.

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

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912 pages / May 2014 / 9781781683170

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“One of the great French intellectual activists of the twentieth century.”

– David Harvey

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now available for the first time in one complete volume. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, Critique was an inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France. It is a founding text of cultural studies and a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the "trivial" details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet remaining the only source of resistance and change. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

The Left Hemisphere

by Razmig Keucheyan

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304 pages / November 2014 / 9781781685594

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“A dizzying menagerie of anti-capitalist thought.”

– PopMatters

This book–one of our Back to University bestsellers–offers the first global cartography of the expanding intellectual field of critical contemporary thought. A panoramic account of the world’s leading writers and thinkers; more than thirty authors and intellectual currents of every continent are presented in a clear and succinct manner. A history of critical thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is also provided, helping situate current thinkers in a broader historical and sociological perspective.

If They Come in the Morning …

Edited by Angela Y. Davis

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288 pages / November 2016 / 9781784787691

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“Angela Davis taught me that I did not have to tolerate the racism I was suffering in the playground, she told me that I was not alone … it was in this book that I first came across the word ‘solidarity.’”

– Benjamin Zephaniah

One of America’s most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis’s incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.

With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power.

Fortunes of Feminism

by Nancy Fraser

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256 pages / April 2013 / 9781844679843

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“Nancy Fraser is among the very few thinkers in the tradition of critical theory who are capable of redeeming its legacy in the twenty-first century.”

– Axel Honneth

Nancy Fraser’s classic work traces the feminist movement’s evolution since the 1970s and anticipates a new—radical and egalitarian—phase of feminist thought and action. Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis. Feminism can be a force working in concert with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier waves of women’s liberation. This powerful new account is set to become a landmark of feminist thought.

Dialectic of Enlightenment

by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

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288 pages / / 9781784786793

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—Powell’s

“A classic of twentieth-century thought.”

– Times Literary Supplement

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer are the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and this book is their magnum opus. Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the most celebrated works of modern social philosophy and continues to impress in its wide-ranging ambition.

A classic of twentieth-century thought, charting how society devours itself through the very rationality that was meant to set it free.

How Nike Uses Liberal Multiculturalism to Hide Abuse

BY Nicholas Powers

Truthout

https://truthout.org/articles/how-nike-uses-liberal-multiculturalism-to-hide-abuse/

If people say your dreams are crazy…” an unseen man says in the new Nike ad. On screen, a child wrestler with a leg amputation goes for the win, a Muslim woman boxes and a refugee scores for the national team. “Good,” the voice says. “Stay that way.”

The ad cuts to Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback blacklisted for kneeling during the national anthem to protest the police killings of unarmed Black people. It is a breathtaking moment. It is also a liberal alibi for massive, ongoing harm.

Behind the Nike swoosh is the struggle of a million workers who stitch Nike shoes and gear. They are part of the 70 million-strong global garment industry workforce, fighting for better pay and conditions even as their jobs are automated. When we buy Nike’s seemingly rebellious liberalism, we buy into reformist politics that excludes their dream, which is to earn a living wage.

Express Yourself

“Yo man, your Jordans are fucked up,” the friend taunted Buggin Out, whose Nikes were scuffed by a passerby. Everyone in the theater laughed. It was 1989 and we sat spellbound by Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing because the scene reflected our lives. People took their shoes way too seriously. It was why I never wore Nikes. I had friends who were robbed at gunpoint and walked home in socks.

Why the violence? It’s not just a ’90s thing. It happens now. The answer: People hunger for status. They stare at athletes and celebrities, who float in a world of wealth. Stars wear nice clothes and glittering watches. They drive cars like spaceships on wheels. If we can’t be them, we can at least wear what they wear and borrow the décor of their lifestyles.

Since the 1920s advertising revolution, capitalism has sold commodities by associating them with an identity. Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations,” began this with World War I propaganda and then sold his “psychological warfare” to American companies. He framed their products not as things to answer needs but as symbols to satisfy desires. He wrote in his 1928 book Propaganda, “A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because [a person] has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol.”

Advertising sold people symbols like instant food, which signified modern convenience, or soap “scientifically” guaranteed to kill germs. Each generation found its desire for safety or upward mobility or rebellion quickly commodified. In the television series Mad Men, 1960s ad executive Don Draper’s meditation led to the “I Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. A Coke is just corn syrup and water in a bottle, but in the alchemy of advertising, it was reborn as a symbol of the Hippie Counter Culture.

Six decades after the release of Bernays’s book, Nike tapped into his propaganda model for its 1988 Just Do It campaign. It made sneakers into symbols of American independence. The first ad showed an 80-year-old man cheerfully jogging the Golden Gate Bridge. Nike sold an athletic Horatio Alger story where normal people lift themselves up with extreme effort. The human spirit shined through sweat-soaked faces.

Three decades later, Nike relaunched the Just Do It campaign. Today, capitalism is global and it must respond to the collective desire of an audience beyond America. Again, Nike tapped into the Horatio Alger lift-yourself-up mythos, but now the achievement is not just athletic prowess but a multicultural liberalism. In Nike’s new ad, refugees become national superstars. A young woman is both homecoming queen and football player. A young Black girl from Compton reigns supreme in tennis. Finally, Colin Kaepernick looks into the camera and poof, Nike becomes a symbol of justice.

Yet it isn’t. Take a look at the label. You can read where the factories are located. They are where a struggle involving millions of people won’t be made into any commercial.

Behind the Swoosh

Indonesia. Vietnam. Honduras. I thumbed through labels at Macy’s. Every shoe had a Nike swoosh. Every shirt had a number like Michael Jordan’s 23 or a famous American face on the front. Yet when I looked inside, the labels all pointed back to Global South nations.

Nike sells rebellion to Global North consumers through the faces of well-paid celebrities on its apparel while its goods are made primarily by people in the Global South who barely eke out a living. When they fight for better wages or working conditions, their heroism does not make them eligible to become rebels, mythologized in Nike’s ads.

Nike is a criminal enterprise. Capitalism is a system of theft and Nike is a near-perfect model of it. Phil Knight, the founder and CEO has a net worth of nearly $35 billion. Jordan earned $100 million from Nike and other deals. Lebron James signed a lifetime deal with Nike worth over a billion. Now Kaepernick is next in line for more ads, a sneaker line and jerseys — all of which will add up to a pretty penny.

Where does this vast sum of money come from? Nike is a corporate vacuum sucking up the surplus value from workers. It has a million laborers, mostly women, in 42 nations, including Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Each country gets paid its own rate. Workers line up in rows near conveyor belts or sewing machines for long hours. In Indonesia, the assemblers get paid $3.50 per day. In Vietnam, they are paid around $42 a week or $171 per month.

The workers receive anything close to the product’s final value. When a Nike sneaker is put on the store shelf, it gets a near 43 percent retail markup and consumers in the Global North buy it for nearly a $100. Our money goes to store employees, managers, regional managers, the CEO, celebrity advertising and the accounts of stockholders. The workers — mainly women in the Global South — who are exposed to toxic chemicals, faint from heat, forced to work overtime and whose wages are sometimes stolen — never see that much-needed money.

This system has many apologists, including among liberals. The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff infamously wrote a series of articles saying in essence, sweatshops are good. “People always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop,” he wrote in a 2009 Op-Ed, “No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.”

He is right in the short term, but his limited, liberal imagination doesn’t see the longer trajectory of capitalism. Nike already has enough money to raise the pay of workers to more than a living wage. Instead, it chose to move out of nations with rising wage demands like China to go to Vietnam, where labor is cheaper.

Meanwhile, new 3D printing technology is making fully automated factories possible. Sweatshops could become obsolete — along with the workers who currently depend on them for survival. Against this, people protest. They fight to keep the jobs they have. In Indonesia, demonstrations against Nike cutting orders were held in 2007. One sign read, “Nike is a Blood Sucking Vampire.” In July 2017, workers and students held a Global Day of Action Against Nike after a watchdog group, Workers Rights Consortium, got inside a Nike plant in Hansae, Vietnam, and found wage theft, padlocked doors and workers fainting from heat.

In San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the SITRASTAR union protested outside of the Nike factory and store after the company stopped production at their factory. More than 350 union members were jobless. “If there is no peace for us,” union leader Waldin Reyes shouted, “Let there be no peace for them.”

It shows the double bind of Global South workers. They have to fight for higher pay and humane conditions and fight to keep the sweatshops. Without them, they’d plummet into severe poverty.

Unlike the customers buying Nike for an imaginary status of rebellion, here are people fighting for a very real goal: survival.

The People’s Shoe

“Don’t believe you have to be like anybody,” Kaepernick says in the ad, “To be somebody.” We see a brain tumor survivor who ran the Ironman race and Lebron opening a new school. Each mini-story is a triumph over great odds. Kaepernick’s soulful stare sells the ad because he sacrificed his career to silently protest innocent Black people being killed by the state.

It worked. Once more, Americans line up to buy Nike’s symbolic rebellion. Sales spiked after the new ad. It makes me uneasy. In the ’90s, impressionable youth bought Nikes because they represented athletic glory and status. Now I fear some will buy them because they’re convinced by Nike’s suggestion that they represent the struggle against anti-Black police violence.

Too often, they can’t afford the sneakers. Nike’s CEO and the stockholders are at the center of a vast money vacuum. They exploit low-wage workers at the factory floor and exploit customers, many of whom are youth of color, who are desperate to buy meaning for their lives.

Imagine a different ad. One where a union leader like Waldin Reyes smiles on screen and proudly holds up The People’s Shoe, a sneaker line made by a worker’s cooperative. No billion-dollar CEO. No billion-dollar celebrities.

Instead the workers wave to the camera as they leave the shop early to see their children. The camera follows one woman to her brightly lit home. Her clothes are drying on the line as her family sits at a long table, laughing and eating. She takes a People’s Shoe, shows it to the camera and says, “Just Organize.”

Bernie Sanders calls for a new international left to fight Steve Bannon’s right-wing “Movement”

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Supposed genius Steve Bannon thinks he can lure progressives into the nationalist right. Sanders says no thanks

https://www.salon.com/2018/09/14/bernie-sanders-calls-for-a-new-international-left-to-fight-steve-bannons-right-wing-movement/

I wrote earlier in the week about Steve Bannon's ties to far-right politicians in Europe. In fact, Bannon is in Italy right now schmoozing with his newest political ally, Matteo Salvini, who's the interior minister and leads the country's nationalist, anti-immigrant party. The New York Times describes Salvini as "the most powerful figure in Italy’s new populist government." He's an emerging far-right superstar known for his puckish habit of owning the libs by quoting Benito Mussolini.

According to the Times, Salvini has signed on to Bannon's new so-called organization, "The Movement" in order to "help bring about a continent-wide populist takeover during European Parliamentary elections next spring." Bannon will offer a meeting space and supposed expertise in various aspects of campaigning for far-right populist leaders. (Apparently, his three months of experience working for Donald Trump in the flukiest presidential election in U.S. history qualifies him as a political guru.)

Salvini has other things in common with Trump and the Republicans besides Steve Bannon. He and his party are being investigated by government prosecutors for allegedly stealing tens of millions of euros. (Funny how all these "populists" are always stealing money with both hands.) Just to make things even more interesting, Buzzfeed report that Salvini's close aide, Gianluca Savoini, "has links to mercenaries fighting alongside pro-Russian and neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine." Savoini himself is the leader of a pro-Russia "cultural organization" which Buzzfeed's research showed has disseminated pro-Kremlin propaganda. He has been pushing hard to remove Italian sanctions against Russia. What a small world.

Evidently, Salvini has recently met with Hungary's nationalist anti-immigrant prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is also interested in joining up with Bannon's new movement. Banding together to defeat liberals across the continent is a curious form of nationalism but that seems to be the plan.

Zack Beauchamp of Vox got a first-hand look at this new movement when he went to Hungary to check out the Orbán government. His report is chilling. He describes an authoritarian state with border fences, byzantine bureaucracy designed to thwart democratic governance, a stifled press overwhelmed with government propaganda and a kleptocratic economy. He dubs it "soft fascism," which sounds better than it actually is:

[A] political system that aims to stamp out dissent and seize control of every major aspect of a country’s political and social life, without needing to resort to “hard” measures like banning elections and building up a police state.

He observes how this provides a model for the U.S., not by dramatically imposing dictatorial rule but rather through "a series of changes to electoral rules and laws imposed over time that might individually be defensible but in combination with corruption and demagogic populism creates a new system — one that appears democratic but functionally is not."

Bannon has said that Orbán, who has been in office since 2010, was “Trump before Trump.”

Bannon thinks he's smarter than everybody else and often tries to co-opt the populist left into his warped vision. He told CNN's Fareed Zakaria last June that he believes he can peel off at least 25 percent of Bernie Sanders' followers to form a nationalist governing majority. Just last week, he warned progressives that the establishment would obstruct their agenda if a Democrat won the White House, just as he believes it is staging a "coup" against Donald Trump.

I suspect many members of the American left have been looking for their leaders to speak out on this.  On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders came through with a searing op-ed in the Guardian condemning this far-right movement and calling it out for the serious threat it is. He calls it "a global struggle taking place of enormous consequence. Nothing less than the future of the planet – economically, socially and environmentally – is at stake ... we are seeing the rise of a new authoritarian axis."

Sanders didn't use the term "axis" by accident. He writes:

While these regimes may differ in some respects, they share key attributes: hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish financial interests. ... This trend certainly did not begin with Trump, but there’s no question that authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn inspiration from the fact that the leader of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy seems to delight in shattering democratic norms.

It is extremely important that one of the most important leaders of the American left puts this is such stark and evocative terms.  He calls out the corrupt, authoritarian leadership of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, China and more and makes the connections among them clear, calling them part of a  "common front" sharing tactics and even some of the same mega-rich funders.

Sanders doesn't offer specific policies to combat this threat, beyond his social-democratic economic agenda and standard non-interventionist philosophy but that's not the important part. He is issuing a wake-up call to the American left:

In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.

Such a movement must be willing to think creatively and boldly about the world that we would like to see. While the authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-second world war global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth, it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists now.

We must look honestly at how that order has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support for their agenda. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a genuinely progressive global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace.

Neither the American left nor the international left is buying into Bannon and company's cramped, ugly, Hobbesian worldview and it never will. The right-wing racists and nationalists are on their own.

Nina Turner Interview With Jordan Chariton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Dgsm6Lans

2018 Candidates - Justice Democrats

https://www.justicedemocrats.com/candidates/




























We’re running a broad slate of candidates across the country — most of whom we have counted on you to nominate. Some have been previously involved in politics but most are running for the first time. They are educators, nurses, small business owners, and local community organizers. Every one of them is concerned about their community, our country, and making sure every person has the same protections, rights, and opportunities.

FEMA Left 20,000 Pallets of Water Bottles on Puerto Rico Runway for at Least Four Months

https://www.ecowatch.com/puerto-rico-fema-water-bottles-2604612943.html

As the federal government prepares for Hurricane Florence this week, alarming photos are raising fresh questions about its response to Hurricane Maria last year.

The photos, first reported by CBS Wednesday after going viral on social media the day before, show potentially millions of water bottles sitting on a runway in Ceiba, Puerto Rico nearly a year after the storm.

The water bottles were delivered to Puerto Rico by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Director of Disaster Operations Marty Bahamonde confirmed to CBS.

"If [FEMA] put that water on that runway there will be hell to pay ... If we did that, we're going to fess up to it," a senior FEMA official told CBS News' David Begnaud, who has covered the Maria recovery process extensively.

However, in an interview with CBS Thursday morning, FEMA Deputy Administrator Daniel Kaniewski defended the placement of the water bottles.

He said they were excess water bottles not needed during recovery that were taken out of storage and placed on the runway in January to save money.

"I'm confident that those that needed those bottles of water got them during the response phase and these were excess bottles of water that were, again, transferred to save money for the American taxpayer in January," Kaniewski said.

The bottles were transferred to the Puerto Rican government in April, Kaniewski said, according to a transcript of the interview tweeted by Begnaud.

In a video posted on Twitter, Begnaud raised questions about Kaniewski's answers.

"If you're trying to save the taxpayer money, why wouldn't you move it to another facility where you house supplies that can be used in a later disaster?" Begnaud asked.

Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration Executive Director Carlos Mercader confirmed the April transfer in a statement provided to CBS Wednesday.

According to that statement, a career official from Puerto Rico's General Services Administration (GSA) requested the excess water bottles from FEMA on April 17 and the request was granted April 26.

The GSA claimed about 20,000 pallets of water, CBS reported.

On May 30, the government collected some of the water bottles from the landing strip and distributed 732 pallets of water between that date and Aug. 12, the statement said.

The government stopped distributing the bottles when they received complaints about the taste and odor of the water. The Puerto Rican government then decided to test the bottles and return them to the federal government.

The water bottles sat on the runway for four months before being passed off to the Puerto Rican government, according to Kaniewski 's own account.

Challenging Kaniewski's timeline is the statement by a member of the Puerto Rico United Forces of Rapid Action Abdiel Santana, who took the photos of the bottles that began circulating on social media Tuesday.

He told CBS Wednesday he originally noticed the bottles last fall and took photos at the time.

Begnaud said on Twitter that blue shows up on satellite images of the runway starting in January.

The federal government's response to Hurricane Maria has been in the news in recent weeks after the Puerto Rican government raised the official death toll from 64 to 2,975 this August.

In a press conference Tuesday, President Donald Trump dismissed those criticisms, saying his administration's response to Hurricane Maria was "incredibly successful."

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz criticized his self-congratulatory tone in an interview Tuesday, CNN reported, saying no public official should ever be content with everything they did in response to a disaster.

"But the president continues to refuse to acknowledge his responsibility, and the problem is that if he didn't acknowledge it in Puerto Rico, God bless the people of South Carolina and the people of North Carolina," Cruz said.

In a tweet Thursday, Trump doubled down, denying the accuracy of the revised death toll of nearly 3,000.

"3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico," Trump tweeted.

Cruz tweeted back her vehement disagreement, The Guardian reported Thursday.

"This is what denial following neglect looks like: Mr Pres in the real world people died on your watch. YOUR LACK OF RESPECT IS APPALLING!," she wrote.

Central Banks Have Gone Rogue, Putting Us All at Risk

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/central-banks-have-gone-rogue-putting-us-all-at-risk/

Excluding institutions such as Blackrock and Vanguard, which are composed of multiple investors, the largest single players in global equity markets are now thought to be central banks themselves. An estimated 30 to 40 central banks are invested in the stock market, either directly or through their investment vehicles (sovereign wealth funds). According to David Haggith at Zero Hedge:

Central banks buying stocks are effectively nationalizing U.S. corporations just to maintain the illusion that their “recovery” plan is working. … At first, their novel entry into the stock market was only intended to rescue imperiled corporations, such as General Motors during the first plunge into the Great Recession, but recently their efforts have shifted to propping up the entire stock market via major purchases of the most healthy companies on the market.

The U.S. Federal Reserve, which bailed out General Motors in a rescue operation in 2009, was prohibited from lending to individual companies under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, and it is legally barred from owning equities. It parks its reserves instead in bonds and other government-backed securities. But other countries have different rules, and central banks are now buying individual stocks as investments, with a preference for big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. Those are the stocks that dominate the market, and central banks are aggressively driving up their value. Markets, including the U.S. stock market, are thus literally being rigged by foreign central banks.

The result, as noted in a January 2017 article at Zero Hedge, is that central bankers, “who create fiat money out of thin air and for whom ‘acquisition cost’ is a meaningless term, are increasingly nationalizing the equity capital markets.” Or at least they would be nationalizing equities, if they were actually “national” central banks. But the Swiss National Bank, the biggest single player in this game, is 48 percent privately owned, and most central banks have declared their independence from their governments. They march to the drums not of government but of private industry.

Marking the 10th anniversary of the 2008 collapse, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretaries Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson wrote in a Sept. 7 New York Times op-ed that the Fed’s tools needed to be broadened to allow it to fight the next anticipated economic crisis, including allowing it to prop up the stock market by buying individual stocks.

To investors, propping up the stock market may seem like a good thing, but what happens when the central banks decide to sell? The Fed’s massive $4 trillion economic support is now being taken away, and other central banks are expected to follow. Their U.S. and global holdings are so large that their withdrawal from the market could trigger another global recession. That means when and how the economy will collapse is now in the hands of central bankers.

Moving Goal Posts

The two most aggressive central bank players in the equity markets are the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan.  The goal of the Bank of Japan, which now owns 75 percent of Japanese exchange-traded funds, is evidently to stimulate growth and defy longstanding expectations of deflation. But the Swiss National Bank is acting more like a hedge fund, snatching up individual stocks because “that is where the money is.”

About 20 percent of the SNB’s reserves are in equities, and more than half of that is in U.S. equities. The SNB’s goal is said to be to counteract the global demand for Swiss francs, which has been driving up the value of the national currency, making it hard for Swiss companies to compete in international trade. The SNB does this by buying up other currencies, and because it needs to put them somewhere, it’s putting that money in stocks.

That is a reasonable explanation for the SNB’s actions, but some critics suspect it has ulterior motives. Switzerland is home to the Bank for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ bank” in Basel, where central bankers meet regularly behind closed doors. Dr. Carroll Quigley, a Georgetown history professor who claimed to be the historian of the international bankers, wrote of this institution in” Tragedy and Hope” in 1966:

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.  This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks, which were themselves private corporations.

The key to their success, said Quigley, was that they would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers. The goal was to establish an independent (privately owned or controlled) central bank in every country. Today, that goal has largely been achieved.

In a paper presented at the 14th Rhodes Forum in Greece in October 2016, Dr. Richard Werner, director of international development at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, argued that central banks have managed to achieve total independence from government and total lack of accountability to the people, and that they are now in the process of consolidating their powers. They control markets by creating bubbles, busts and economic chaos. He pointed to the European Central Bank, which was modeled on the disastrous earlier German central bank, the Reichsbank. The Reichsbank created deflation, hyperinflation and the chaos that helped bring Adolf Hitler to power.

The problem with the Reichsbank, said Werner, was its excessive independence and its lack of accountability to German institutions and Parliament. The founders of postwar Germany changed the new central bank’s status by significantly curtailing its independence. Werner wrote, “The Bundesbank was made accountable and subordinated to Parliament, as one would expect in a democracy. It became probably the world’s most successful central bank.”

But today’s central banks, he said, are following the disastrous Reichsbank model, involving an unprecedented concentration of power without accountability. Central banks are not held responsible for their massive policy mistakes and reckless creation of boom-bust cycles, banking crises and large-scale unemployment. Youth unemployment now exceeds 50 percent in Spain and Greece. Many central banks remain in private hands, including not only the Swiss National Bank but the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Italian, Greek and South African central banks.

Banks and Central Banks Should Be Made Public Utilities

Werner’s proposed solution to this dangerous situation is to bypass both the central banks and the big international banks and decentralize power by creating and supporting local not-for-profit public banks. Ultimately, he envisions a system of local public money issued by local authorities as receipts for services rendered to the local community. Legally, he noted, 97 percent of the money supply is already just private company credit, which can be created by any company, with or without a banking license. Governments should stop issuing government bonds, he said, and instead fund their public sector credit needs through domestic banks that create money on their books (as all banks have the power to do). These banks could offer more competitive rates than the bond markets and could stimulate the local economy with injections of new money. They could also put the big bond underwriting firms that feed on the national debt out of business.

Abolishing the central banks is one possibility, but if they were recaptured as public utilities, they could serve some useful purposes. A central bank dedicated to the service of the public could act as an unlimited source of liquidity for a system of public banks, eliminating bank runs since the central bank cannot go bankrupt. It could also fix the looming problem of an unrepayable federal debt, and it could generate “quantitative easing for the people,” which could be used to fund infrastructure, low-interest loans to cities and states, and other public services.

The ability to nationalize companies by buying them with money created on the central bank’s books could also be a useful public tool. The next time the mega-banks collapse, rather than bailing them out, they could be nationalized and their debts paid off with central bank-generated money.

There are other possibilities. Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts argues that we should also nationalize the media and the armaments industry. Researchers at the Democracy Collaborative have suggested nationalizing the large fossil fuel companies by simply purchasing them with Fed-generated funds. In a September 2018 policy paper titled “Taking Climate Action to the Next Level,” the researchers wrote, “This action might represent our best chance to gain time and unlock a rapid but orderly energy transition, where wealth and benefits are no longer centralized in growth-oriented, undemocratic, and ethically dubious corporations, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron.”

Critics will say this would result in hyperinflation, but an argument can be made that it wouldn’t. That argument will have to wait for another article, but the point here is that massive central bank interventions that were thought to be impossible in the 20th century are now being implemented in the 21st, and they are being done by independent central banks controlled by an international banking cartel. It is time to curb central bank independence. If their powerful tools are going to be put to work, it should be in the service of the public and the economy.