The Root Cause Of Racism: Liberal Democracy; aka, The Lack Of Equal Access To Equity-In Financial Markets

 

What is the difference between Liberal Democracy and Democracy?

Liberal democracy is a representative democracy with protection for individual liberty and property by rule of law. An illiberal democracy has weak or no limits on the power of the elected representatives to rule as they please.

 

What is the opposite of liberal democracy?

An illiberal democracy is a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it is not an open society.

 

What is an example of liberal democracy?

Liberal democracies usually have universal suffrage, granting all adult citizens the right to vote regardless of ethnicity, sex, property ownership, race, age, sexuality, gender, income, social status, or religion. ... For example, in the United States, 2/3 of states require their citizens to provide identification to vote.

Today, the global scene is very different. Liberal democracy faces multiple external challenges—from ethnonational autocracies, from regimes claiming to be based on God’s word [ like German Jews in America and/or Israel claiming to be real Jews instead of immigrants from Germany ] rather than the will of the people, from the success of strong-handed meritocracy in places such as Singapore, and, not least, from the astonishing economic accomplishments of China’s market-Leninist system.

 

But there is also an internal challenge to liberal democracy—a challenge from populists who seek to drive a wedge between democracy and liberalism. Liberal norms and policies, they claim, weaken democracy and harm the people. Thus, liberal institutions that prevent the people from acting democratically in their own interest should be set aside. It is this challenge on which I wish to focus.

 

There is also an internal challenge to liberal democracy—a challenge from populists who seek to drive a wedge between democracy and liberalism. Liberal norms and policies, they claim, weaken democracy and harm the people.

Across Europe and North America, long-established political arrangements are facing a revolt. Its milestones have included the Brexit vote; the 2016 U.S. election; the doubling of support for France’s National Front; the rise of the antiestablishment Five Star Movement in Italy; the entrance of the far-right Alternative for Germany into the Bundestag; moves by traditional right-leaning parties toward the policies of the far-right in order to secure victories in the March 2017 Dutch and October 2017 Austrian parliamentary elections; the outright victory of the populist ANO party in the Czech Republic’s October 2017 parliamentary elections; and most troubling, the entrenchment in Hungary of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy,” which seems to be emerging as a template for Poland’s governing Law and Justice party and—some scholars believe—for insurgent parties in Western Europe as well. This revolt threatens the assumptions that shaped liberal democracy’s forward march in the 1990s and that continue to guide mainstream politicians and policymakers of the center-left and center-right.

 

What is the main religion in Germany? God or money!

According to a Christian survey taken in the Federal Republic of Germany Bundesrepublik Deutschland; aka, Germany around two-thirds of the German population identify themselves as Christian. But the Germans who actually attend church; or participate in church charities are very significantly low.

GERMANY’S 3 ECONOMIC INDICATORS VS AMERICA’S ECONOMIC OUTLOOK

1. The important role of industry in Germany

In Germany, the share of industry in gross value added is 22.9 percent, making it the highest among the G7 countries. The strongest sectors are vehicle construction, electrical industry, engineering, and chemical industry.

2. High export quota in Germany

Together with China and the USA, Germany is one of the three largest exporting nations. In 2017 Germany exported goods worth 1,278.9 billion euros. The export quota was almost 40 percent and over 50 percent in industry.

3. Open economy in Germany

Judging by the importance of foreign trade for the gross domestic product (GDP), Germany is the most open economy among the G7 states. The foreign trade quota is currently 84.4 percent – that’s the sum of imports and exports in relation to GDP. In comparison, the USA quota is 26.7 percent.

The United States Of America’s Greatest Threat: A Confederacy With Germany & the Jim Crow South White [ And Black ] Racist Ideology

During the post-Civil War era and specifically after President Abraham Lincoln’s assignation around 1865 to the 1933s. More specifically, many Americans of President

Roosevelt’s generation rejected the “Gilded Age” (the 1870s-1900) of unregulated

business expansion and the thirst for riches with little consideration of public and

private morality. Many Americans and the Roosevelt administration were disgusted by the materialism, unrestrained greed of their elders, and their belief in “market values,” they were seeking a new moral purpose and more important tests of character other than wealth gathering. 

• After the Civil War had taught many Americans to stand up for their opinions and get things done through hard work, discipline, and clear language-could save lives and save a nation from going to war again.

• Many politicians and public servants of those who took public office had been social workers concerned with the inequity of American life. 

• Many Americans saw government as a regulator of the economy and the last

resource of distressed Americans. This is reflected in FDR’s 1933 Inaugural speech when he declared,

  “…restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values nobler than mere monetary profit…” FDR rejected the fear-mongering of his opponents and acknowledged the reality of public and private despair by stating in that same address that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It was this rejection of fear and

getting things done that FDR and his generation embraced. By facing problems head-on, trying new things based on humanitarian and not market values, and recognizing the needs of all Americans, the New Deal transformed the political and social landscape for all Americans. In the process, mechanisms and mindsets were established

that would end the Depression, reaffirm American democracy, enable victory in WW 2, and shape the America in which we live today. FDR and the missionary generation unified a frightened nation and gave it hope. The American encounter with

Nazi Germany revealed much about the dangers of our own racism, bigotry, susceptibility to demagogues, and our limitations and potential as a people. That struggle continues.

THE NEW JIM CROW UNDER LIBERAL DEMOCRACY: Double, Trible & Under Cover American Citizens Are Becoming More Deceitful & Political Poison To The Republic.

Caste Systems, Bondage & Slavery By Another Name

The Root Cause of Economic Survival & Freedom, the destruction of any and/or all Jim Crow Systems.

Did you know that Barbarism was advanced in America and internationally? Many white and black families, communities, churches, and court systems faced Nazi-Germany violence in Germany [ and in the Jim Crow South of America ] which made their way to the U.S. which during the 1920s to 1950s- we as a nation witnessed an upsurge in racial lynchings.

• Racial violence and the specific institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South had become a fundamental piece of southern identity; aka, the Confederate South.

 Many African-Americans were villainized as fears grew that the Roosevelt

administration might undermine the system created in the years following the Civil War.

After President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the so-called Black Codes were established in 1865 that created a new caste system that echoed slavery, segregated former black slaves, and made them indentured servants.

Within six months of the end of the Civil War, white supremacy in the Jim Crow South had been reestablished in states such as Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina where cruel punishments were meted out. The foundations of this new universe were buttressed by President Johnson’s embrace of the former leaders of the Confederacy and their racism. Johnson began the process of undermining Reconstruction that sought to grant equality for all African-Americans.

Never Forget History & Never Repeat History.

In vetoing the 1866 Civil Rights Act, Johnson explained away his inability unwillingness to protect African-Americans from other ethnic races too-such as police ordered massacres and intimidation by invoking the concept of States’ Rights to argue that the federal government had no jurisdiction.

 A Republican Congress overturned Johnson’s veto and many African-Americans embraced educational initiatives of the Freedmen's Bureau. With Reconstruction, former slaves now counted as full citizens and swelled congressional delegations. 

African-Americans, who made up 36% of the Southern population, were elected to almost 20% of state political offices at the height of Reconstruction. This worked only if these new freedoms and rights were protected by the federal government. Southern states had no intention of letting that happen. 

Starting with President Johnson, African-Americans were quickly intimidated, murdered, threatened, and harassed until they were disenfranchised through poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics. Thus, white [ even Germans & Europeans who migrated to America-who did not fight in any wars, but left their own lands and despised their own laws ] Southerners received disproportionate power at the state and national level in one of the great failures of Reconstruction. Southern demagogues quickly pandered to anxieties that these gains for blacks engendered. 

New mythology was developed and embraced that justified a new system. Although much of the post-Civil War violence in the South had been white against white violence (against the many deserters from the Confederate Army, those loyal to the Union, those opposed to the KKK), the arrests of thousands of blacks on inconsequential charges, or laws written to specifically intimidate African-Americans or no charges at all, was deeply rooted in the institutions and culture of the antebellum South. 

African-Americans were seen as the root cause for the lawlessness in a double

standard that sanctioned white violence and murder. The reality of post-Civil War Southern paralysis (physical and financial destruction; death and grieving; the terrible vulnerability of whites who now desperately relied on blacks to rebuild and survive) was

transformed into a new parable. The moral universe created by the traumatized rebels re-envisioned Southern white superiority and self-reliance that excluded any and all blacks-even our very own unique African-American population.

For example: the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass published in 1845 revealed the chilling psychology of this perpetrator framework rooted in slavery. This bogus Southern narrative was encapsulated in two Hollywood movies: D.W. Griffith’s

1915 racist The Birth of a Nation and 1939’s Gone With the Wind.

14 The KKK, established in 1866, attempted to fight Reconstruction by embracing the new mythology, invoking the dead martyrs of the Confederacy (thus, the

white ghostly hoods), and target and slaughter blacks and Reconstructionist Republicans, in order to continue the war for slavery. 

The U.S. Department of Justice was created under President Grant to battle the Klan and its offshoots. Grant’s federal war on the depravity of the Klan was one of his great successes. Such success reinforced the primacy of “States Rights” for Southerners bent on utilizing state sovereignty to suppress African-Americans. Americans. Despite Grant’s intervention, or perhaps because of it, Northerners began to drift away from the

ideals of the Civil War and reconstruction and embrace its own racism here at home-as we do today in the year of our Lord, April 30, 2021. 

GDP: Private Consumption + Investments + Government Spending + Net Exports

GDP = C + I + G + NE

THE SOLUTION: EQUITY AND SUSTAINED ECONOMIC GROWTH

• During periods of growth, well-being is likely to increase. However, when output shrinks rather than expands, general well-being also declines. If such a period of world GDP contraction lasts for at least two consecutive quarters within a year, it is called a recession. If the contraction is particularly long-lived or very severe, it is called a depression. In the past 30 years, only three periods—1990, 1998, and 2008–2009—qualified as recessions, during which the world GDP per person was contracting. Though it is useful to consider the measures of overall global growth and contraction, expansion and contraction of an economy are often localized within countries. For instance, the International Monetary Fund suggests that the world economy will increase at about 3.5 percent annually, but Venezuela, Brazil, Greece, Russia, and Ecuador all experienced recessions in 2015.15

• To keep economies out of recession, or at least reduce the amount of time they are in recession, policymakers can use both fiscal policy and monetary policy to encourage growth. Think of an economy as a car traveling down the road; these policy tools are like the gas pedal, spurring economic growth.

When the growth of GDP slows, it most often does so because private consumption and investment decline. People may be concerned about the future, and so decide to delay large discretionary purchases such as a home or car and the financial burdens such purchases impose. Similarly, companies are unlikely to make investments if they see a slump in demand. With that in mind, the goal of governments using fiscal policy is to jump-start spending and investment.

Fiscal Policy

Fiscal policy consists of government actions intended to spark or diminish consumption. In most cases governments struggle to stimulate growth, but in rare cases governments must try to slow an economy that is growing too rapidly. These policies include taxation and spending actions, such as increasing government spending—paid for by either raising taxes or running budget deficits—or encouraging private spending by lowering taxes to increase individuals' discretionary income. In the United States, such fiscal policy actions must be initiated by the president or by Congress. For instance, a decision by the United States to increase its government spending can benefit certain industries. For example, when military spending increases in the United States, the three largest defense companies in the world—Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing—benefit substantially. As a result, these companies will hire more talent and invest more in new technology. Similarly, increased government spending in general helps construction firms and information technology systems consultants who develop computer systems for public sector organizations. Despite these obvious benefits, the overall effect of government spending, and whether it actually helps a country's economy and private sector, is a hotly debated topic.

Many nations responded to the global recession of 2008–2009 with significant new government spending programs.

For instance, in Ireland, Greece, Spain, and the United States all incurred deficit spending of 40 percent or more of their GDPs during the period 2008–2012. Unlike more moderate government spending, which is paid for with increased taxes, deficit spending does not just replace flagging private consumption with government spending; rather, it attempts to spark consumption by borrowing from investors with a promise of future repayment. These investors are typically foreign institutions—like the European banks and governments that own Greece's debt, or like China and Japan, which own around $3 trillion and $1 trillion of U.S. debt, respectively.

Monetary Policy

Monetary policy has the same general goal as fiscal policy. However, monetary policy consists of manipulations in the interest rates, banking rules, and the volume of currency in a country. In the United States, these policies are tools of the Federal Reserve Bank, or the Fed, which operates independently of Congress and the administration. Three primary levers operate monetary policy: (1) the discount rate, (2) the reserve requirement, and (3) open market operations.

Central banks such as the European Central Bank (ECB) in the European Union, the Bank of Japan, and the Fed decide how much to charge commercial banks for borrowing money. That interest rate is called the discount rate. In reality, banks rarely borrow directly from central banking authorities; more often, they borrow from one another to meet their short-term cash needs. However, because a nation's banks have the option to borrow directly from the central bank, the central bank's discount rate sets the interest rate for interbank loans as well. Thus, when the central bank lowers the discount rate, the cost of borrowing becomes cheaper throughout the economy—typically increasing consumption and investment but at the expense of savings (people spend rather than save).

If the economy slows, central banks can lower interest rates to encourage spending. For example, if the discount rate goes down from 2% to 1%, then Bank of America will be able to get loans from other banks and the central bank at 1%. This means a loan for a car that would have cost you 5% would most likely now go down to 4%. This is great news for people who need loans for consumption and investments. But it also means that people who want to save their money with Bank of America will likely receive a lower interest rate on their savings account. On the other hand, when the Fed raises the discount rate, the banking industry profits as a result of stemming the decline in banks' net interest margins. Simply put, because some of the interest rates that banks charge on loans are directly tied to the Fed's target rate, banks immediately earn more interest on those loans. For example, on December 16, 2015, when the Fed announced that it would end its zero interest rate policy, shares of large banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group both surged on the same day.

Adjustments in the reserve requirement have the effect of enlarging or shrinking the amount of money the nation's commercial banks must keep on hand as a safety measure. By raising or lowering the requirement, policymakers can affect how much money banks have available for loans. Lowering the requirement (reducing the amount banks must keep in reserve) releases money into the economy by increasing the availability of funds banks can lend businesses to fuel spending and investment. Raising the requirement, on the other hand, forces banks to keep more money in reserve. This restricts the total value of loans banks can make, thereby reducing the availability of credit for businesses and in turn shrinking their spending and investment.

Reserve requirements vary by country. For example, the Chinese government typically requires their banks to maintain high reserves. This has helped China to reduce what many people feel could be a current housing bubble within the country. However, knowing that banks have sufficient reserves if people start defaulting on their loans helps to keep the market stable—something the US would have benefited from before the housing bubble burst in 2008.

For the most part, however, central banks typically operate behind the scenes, letting the economy work on its own and making only minor adjustments to keep growth under control. However, since the recession in 2008–2009, in an effort to stabilize economies around the world, central banks have increased their direct involvement in money markets, using tools called open market operations.

Open market operations are operations by a central bank to buy or sell government bonds, corporate bonds, or equities. These actions include policies such as quantitative easing, whereby a central bank prints money and uses it to buy government bonds, corporate bonds, or equities (stock shares). This action increases the amount of money in the economy, with the expectation that it will flow to banks that will lend it to consumers and investors, increasing consumption and investment and thus economic growth. Since the recession of 2008–2009, the Fed has engaged in unprecedented levels of open market operations in the United States. As a result, the Fed owns nearly $2 trillion worth of the U.S. government's debt and nearly $1.2 trillion of U.S. mortgage debt. The Fed's goal is eventually to sell these securities back into the market and return the money supply to its original level, but it must be careful of the speed at which it sells them because it doesn't want to drive down the price of the securities. Like policymakers in the United States, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has encouraged the Bank of Japan to increase the money supply to try to fuel economic growth. This action is a direct attempt to reverse a nearly 20-year trend of declining output.18

Similarly, in 2014 the ECB set out to stimulate growth in the Eurozone (the 19 EU member countries that have adopted the euro as their common currency). The bank introduced negative interest rates and cheap long-term funding for banks in order to encourage them to increase credit availability to businesses. Then, in January 2015, the ECB began a $1.1 trillion program of quantitative easing to further increase the money supply. Under the program, the ECB purchases €60 billion per month of mostly government bonds from EU member countries. While the full results have yet to be seen, growth is still slow across Europe.19

Websites & Works Cited

Fernando, Jason. “Gross Domestic Product (GDP).” Investopedia, Investopedia, 26 Apr. 2021, www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gdp.asp.

“Figure 2f from: Reshchikov A (2013) New Species of Lathrolestes Förster (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) from Côte d’Ivoire. Biodiversity Data Journal 1: e1005. Https://Doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.1.e1005.” doi:10.3897/bdj.1.e1005.figure2f.

UChicago. “‘The New Jim Crow’ - Author Michelle Alexander, George E. Kent Lecture 2013.” YouTube, YouTube, 15 Mar. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gln1JwDUI64.

“Why Is the German Economy so Strong?” Deutschland.de, 18 July 2018, www.deutschland.de/en/topic/business/why-is-the-german-economy-so-strong-seven-reasons.