http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7813

The Financial Tsunami: The Financial Foundations of the American Century

.............America’s Second Revolution: the eyes on the Prize

Federal Reserve monetary policy has been typically misrepresented as a series of ad hoc pragmatic responses to recurring crises in post-war banking and finance. The reality is that it has faithfully followed a coherent hidden thread of policy that was first laid out in 1973 by the spokesman then for America’s most powerful establishment family.

The policy was outlined in a little-noted book titled, ominously enough, “The Second American Revolution.” It was written by John D. Rockefeller III, scion of the powerful Standard Oil and Chase Manhattan Bank empire, and, along with his three brothers—David, Nelson and Laurance—architect of the world arrangement after 1945 known as the American Century.

In his book, Rockefeller declared the establishment’s determination to roll back concessions grudgingly granted by the wealthy and powerful during the Great Depression. Rockefeller issued the call in 1973, long before Jimmy Carter or Margaret Thatcher came to office to implement it. He called for a “deliberate, consistent, long-term policy to decentralize and privatize many government functions…to diffuse power throughout the society.” 10 The latter was a witting deception as his intent was not to diffuse power, but just the opposite—to concentrate that economic and banking power into the hands of a tight-knit elite.

Privatization of essential and socially useful government functions that had been established often with great social agitation and political pressure during the difficult crises of the 1930’s, was the Rockefeller agenda. In brief, it was the removal of Depression era government regulations on all aspects of economic and social life in America.

Above all, deregulation of Wall Street and financial markets was the goal, along with a radical reduction in the equalizing of wealth, as seen by Rockefeller and friends, inherent in such programs as Social Security. The George W. Bush “tax cuts for the wealthy” were just a continuation of a three decade agenda of the powerful establishment circles.

Hard as it may be to believe, all major US policy from the 1970’s through the misnamed sub-prime crisis today, had a connecting continuous thread. Key Fed and Treasury and other US policymakers always held their “eyes on the Prize.”

The “Prize” was untold financial gains to be won through a rollback of major concessions to the working blue collar and middle income Americans, concessions granted during the Great Depression by powerful establishment circles led by the Rockefeller and Morgan banking groups, to forestall a more radical revolt.

Social Security was one target for rollback. Financial deregulation and above all repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, was another. Here a well-connected Wall Street banker named Alan Greenspan was to play the decisive role on behalf of the financial deregulation agenda in his tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman lasting from 1987 through 2006. Securitization of sub-prime or junk mortgages was to have been his crowning legacy. As it looks at this writing, it certainly will be, though perhaps not as he and others in Wall Street intended. It will more likely be a crown of disgrace.