Written by Jaron Pearlman   

Socialism. It is a word that is at the forefront of the 2016 elections, and a very pertinent subject for tax season as well. Yet, as with many of the words that are used in the political arena, its meaning is not fully addressed and its implications are by and large ignored or misconstrued. While many find that capitalism and socialism are diametrically opposed, the current system of governance in the United States actually has a significant amount of ideological overlap that is entrenched in both sides of the bipartisan system.
By definition socialism is a system in which industry, infrastructure, and services are held afloat or distributed by social programs, through the collection and allocation of tax dollars from a nation’s citizens.
Through taxation, the government is placed with the responsibility of properly using taxpayer funds for a multitude of reasons, like healthcare and college tuition, which have been getting much media attention of late. Yet, the definition of socialism has a broader effect that encompasses much more than just the platforms of Democratic politicians. Any publicly funded endeavor or nationalized industry can be considered a socialistic program: the military, defense contractors, public works, TSA, the DEA, the FDIC; even the bailouts of big businesses. Thus, even Republicans and right wing conservatives are in favor of many social programs.

No matter the nature of the collection or use, a program that uses socialized funds from average Americans or private businesses is socialism.

When an agency like the TSA monopolizes a venture such as airport security in a no-bid environment, it is in effect socialized and subsidized with tax dollars sanctioned for use by Congress. It is the job of the legislature to discern the use and collection of taxes, hence why it has the authority to create or remove any socialized entity, from the Federal Reserve to the Internal Revenue Service.

The overlap of socialism and capitalism is most visible when the element of free enterprise is pushed to the curb, say for example in the practice of bailouts. When a national or multinational business is so big and influential it receives preferential treatment from the government and supersedes traditional capitalism, it becomes a state capitalist company. In the practice of state capitalism, democracy is usurped in lieu of the beck and call of major corporations who determine policy and action within the government that they effectively buy or sell.
Even if say, a state capitalist company goes bankrupt due to poor business practice they can receive (at their own demand) a bailout from Congress and the US Treasury, with the bill footed without consent by the American people.

Make no mistake- this is a form of socialism manifested in the darkest folds of capitalistic hypocrisy. In the words of American screenwriter and novelist T. Rafael Cimino, “The political spectrum is not a straight, bi-polar line. It is a circle.”

Let us examine the historical state of American affairs through this lens.

For 2016, we the people are presented with a seeming many choices for the direction of our nation. While the themes for this election seem varied, each has a common tie. While the right wing pushes for ‘fiscal responsibility’ the left pushes for ‘social responsibility’, both are lead by the nose by the most devious and well-hidden taxation: that of monetary inflation.
The senseless and blind inflation of the US dollar not only makes perpetual war a feasible policy, but also inevitably betrays social programs, making them into aristocratic piggy banks destined for deficit. In this way each political candidate, each platform, no matter how responsible or revolutionary sounding, is destined to fail and perpetuate a morbid American dream that many of us see on the horizon.

Inflation itself is the practice of printing more money and pushing it into the economy. The caveat to this however, is that the more money there is in the economy, the less it is worth. When inflation was used in the USA in the past, it came with two conditions:

One is a standard to which money value is held. In the past US dollar notes could be redeemed and valued at a rate that corroborated with US gold holdings. By having a definite limit to the amount of value money could have, a reasonable amount of liquidity was assured. In other words, money couldn’t be devalued so much that a carton of milk would end up costing twenty dollars, because that amount of inflation couldn’t be issued. Goods and services would remain at a reasonable cost because the worth of US dollars could be held to a standard quality, even in global trade.

The other condition was a governing body in charge of inflating and resolving inflation responsibly in a pre-determined amount of time. These institutions are called Central Banks, and are created by Congress usually for the purpose of resolving war debts and economic recovery (the latter is of questionable legitimacy). The basic premise is by taking on lenders to the American government, more expenditure can be made for social programs- yielding interest of course to those who issue the loans.

The USA has had two Central Banks prior to its current one, The Federal Reserve, and each has been charged with the practice of inflating the money supply to finance debts resulting from the Revolutionary War and The War of 1812. With both of these there had been a Charter that limits the lifespan of these organizations, dictating an end to perpetual inflation and the recovery to the worth of the American dollar.

The current Central Bank of the US is a different beast however. The Federal Reserve System was advertised as a means of reigning in World War One debts and providing security to social spending in the budding of industrial America, but its true purpose was much less altruistic.
At the turn of the century, American banking and loan access was becoming increasingly diversified and truly blooming in the free market. Interest rates on loans were varied and one could shop between a plethora of banking institutions for anything from business start-ups to debt resolutions. The larger and more established banks saw this as a threat to dominance of the banking industry and took it upon themselves to orchestrate the creation of the third central bank of the United States. At Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, representatives from JP Morgan, Kuhn Loeb & Co, The Rockefellers, as well as the European Central Banking families of the Warburgs and Rothschilds, met to draw up plans for the Federal Reserve Charter. This banking system was designed for preferential treatment of the larger banks they represented, and to monopolize/control interest rates on loans as well as monetary inflation.

If interest rates could be controlled and set by the Federal Reserve, they could push smaller banks out of the free market arena and pressure them into poor business practices where bankruptcy would force them to liquidate or be acquired by larger banks.
If inflation could be controlled permanently they could bail out any company they wished at any time, and funnel funds into whatever avenue they chose. Of course the resulting deteriorative quality of the American dollar would be passed on as a near invisible tax to the American people; in the form of lesser purchasing power and lowered international monetary standing.
Even if larger banks fell victim to the same toxic loan rates that killed smaller banks, or the unrealistic reserve to loan ratios they deemed acceptable, there was an assured bailout from their brainchild, The Federal Reserve.

The only thing holding back total fiscal upheaval was the aforementioned gold standard that took several decades to pressure out politically, shuddering with the Keynesian Bretton Woods System in 1944 and uttering its final breath in 1971 when President Nixon abolished it.
It is no coincidence that the removal of gold standardization began during World War Two, and yielded the creation of both the International Monetary Fund as well as the World Bank. These subjects will be revisited later.

Without the restraint of gold, American dollars could now be inflated indefinitely and became what is known as fiat currency. Thus it would no longer matter if the checkbooks balanced or the checks cleared for anything the US government spent its money on, all Congress had to do was approve action for the US Treasury and Federal Reserve to issue more dollars for any problem. Much like morphine for a critical health condition, this practice eases the pain in the short term while letting the patient still slowly die.

But how exactly does this apply to the Presidential race, modern Congressional action, or America in 2016?

First of all the obvious result of endless money flow is the potential for endless war. War is an expensive endeavor, and has the potential to be a boon for a variety of private industries. Besides the reaping of global and international resources (such as oil, gold holdings, pharmaceutical ingredients, and more), the machines of war hold vast potential to empower defense contractors and private security firms. While perhaps funneling a weakening currency to various companies seems counterproductive, the results of siphoning global resources from war torn nations is not. Exerting control over Iraqi oil, Afghani poppy, West African precious stones, or any nation’s physical gold holdings and/or trade routes can yield true profits.

This doesn’t even touch on the rebuilding of said destroyed nations that is often contracted via no bid deals to state capitalist companies like Halliburton. In fact, even defense contractors like Lockheed Martin (who was bailed out and essentially nationalized in 1971) get no bid contracts for their munitions and participation in endless war.

The money used to finance perpetual invasions is just a formality that levies the future of the American economy against privatized gain resulting from a modern state capitalist imperialism.
Creating global strife is big business, and has been sanctioned by the Bushes, Clintons, Reagan, Carter, LBJ, Obama, moguls like Donald Trump, and countless others from the State Department, US Treasury, Federal Reserve, Congress, and elsewhere.

But this same list is guilty of massive and dangerous fraud on the other side of the board as well. Inflation and hidden taxation also betrays domestic social programs, a perfect example being social security.

Consider this practice:

Money is collected from every American for a socialized fund, meant to aid citizens post employment. However, the agency that holds these funds is independent of government oversight, and as such can lend these collected funds to any group that it pleases- without consent of the people.
Congressional approval allows these funds to be lent out for any purpose, Pentagon funding, bailouts, private security, or any multitude of obscure programs. The guarantee on this practice comes from the Federal Reserve who promises interest on this “loan” back to the American people. This interest however is tacked onto the national debt which itself is a deficit owed by Americans and their children.

In essence this means the citizens of the USA owe interest to themselves, for a loan that was taken out of a socialized fund and will not be repaid.

The reality of this is that social security, like many social programs, is abused in to a deficit; and the money sent out of it back to the citizens is created out of thin air by the magical vice of monetary inflation. The money contributed to this fund does not even exist, and the checks cut to social security beneficiaries comes from an inflationary supply that decimates purchasing power and is just as dangerous to the national economy as perpetual wartime spending.
Currently, social security is the second largest holder of American debt next to China.
Even a promising politician such as Bernie Sanders fails to address the vampiric nature of this paradigm, which has the potential to further increase inequality as well as national poverty.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there. One of the biggest changes to global affairs as a result of a fiat dollar was the creation of the IMF and World Bank. These institutions are backed by the US dollar and serve, supposedly, to promote infrastructural and economic growth throughout the world. When a nation defaults, like Greece or Ukraine, they are able to get loans from these organizations to manage their debts. But, since their payments are received via US dollars (essentially an extension of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve) that loan is coming from the American people- again without democratic consent.
The supply of American money is again extended and lessened by these loans, which usually find their way into bureaucratic and oligarchic pockets, never to even be seen by Grecian or Ukrainian citizens. Backing the majority of intergovernmental loans with American money augments an ever-growing debt and taxation to countless future generations of Americans, also propelling inflation.

So we can consolidate inflationary dangers into three largely generalized categories: That of war and imperialism, failed and abused social programs, and aristocratic international cartels. Each of these serves state capitalism in their own way, and many of these state capitalist companies are multinational, manipulating an entire group of nations to their advantage. The US just happens to be the bottomless piggy bank footing the bill.

Out of this we can determine the quintessential question of ‘Qui bono?’ or ‘Who benefits?”. Clearly inflation doesn’t help American citizens (as Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen would like us to believe), nor does it help average global citizens in warzones, nor does it help nations whose poor business practices lead to default. Who it does yield a boon to is internationalists and international companies, who gain from weak national governments and state capitalist policies.

Multinational trade moguls can take over a world with a weak spectrum of national strengths easily; hence the degradation of the United States economy is actually practical to those pulling the strings. It makes it worth mentioning again the creators of the Federal Reserve System, all of whom were (and are) internationalists.

Another incarnation of this manipulative system is the Council on Foreign Relations, who by no coincidence has many members of former multinational companies. While publicly they aim to promote a more even keel of global rights and living standards, their true aim is the homogenization of the lower class and an increased divide between the worldwide bottom 99% and the aristocratic 1%. Free trade agreements, national trade deficits, and decreased industrial autonomy all harm the free market American people pride themselves over so ignorantly. All of these aid a purpose designed to subjugate true geopolitical discourse and further an agenda that is truly a worldwide aristocratic vision.

However, this strategy is not easily controlled and there are many dangerous ways it can blow up in its handlers’ faces. Take for instance the German Reichsbank that overinflated money and lead to the Third Reich, the Housing Bubble that literally stopped the world economy in 2008, or the Great Depression of the 1930s that was actually a Savings and Loan crises resulting from unrealistic and irresponsible lending.

When referring to socialism it is imperative that the people control its devices, or it will be hijacked immediately, harshly, and sometimes irrevocably. The current political system in America and the world has been misused, and lies have been repeated for so long that the true narrative is hardly recognizable, unless one has the right eyes to see its true dirty underbelly. In this election and the next, this tax season and the next, the average global citizen is played against themselves, USED against themselves, labeled as collateral for dirty loans, and LIED to regarding the nature of their future and purpose of their hard work.

I conclude with a simple point- there will be no revolution politically until these harsh realities are addressed. The purpose of an organized society is socialism in one form or another, in order to have liquidity of goods and services between individuals. But left in the hands of others, without proper democracy, human social nature is destined to be molested and used against itself. The only way to change the system is to learn about it, address its failures to us, and eviscerate the functionless social leeches that aim to lead us into oblivion.