An excellent article by Prabhat Patnaik on networkideas.org, the website of International Development Economics Associates, starts off with Lenin and goes on to talk about the role that the IMF and the World Bank play to create a "group of core ideologues" to exert "peer pressure" on elites to adopt a belief system that is friendly to global finance capital. This helps to explain why Obama picked the economic advisers he did:
How people like Summers, Geithner and Rubin come to occupy such important political positions within the U.S. system is pretty obvious. American Presidential elections require massive amounts of money, a good chunk of which invariably comes from Wall Street. The story doing the rounds for a while was that Obama had got most of his funds from small donations of $100 each garnered through the internet; but this was complete nonsense. Obama like others before him had also tapped Wall Street and the appointment of the trio, who had organized Wall Street finance for him, was a quid pro quo. The elevation of members of the global financial community to run the American economy therefore should cause no surprise.
I love the light tough of his title. Anyhow, here's the beginning of the article, which is well worth reading. Hat-tip to LF.
The Global Financial Community
Read the rest of the article.
