The passage below is from Donald Gibson's excellent book, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency. It details JFK's economic policies, and the furious opposition of Wall Street, Finance magazine, David Rockefeller, and other potentates of the plutocracy.
Specifically, JFK’s battle, via tax policy, to steer investment from short-term speculation to productive industry -- a battle resumed somewhat diffidently by Clinton -- and his foreign policy promoting indigenous economic development in the Third World as a bulwark against the expansion of Communism, versus the exploitative “shock doctrine” of the Chicago School that eventually triumphed in the stirrups of the IMF and World Bank. This war has been going on for a long time, with the Reagan/Bush imperialist oligarchs mostly victorious over the last 3 decades, but in another episode of blowback, it seems the Chicago cattle prod has short circuited from overuse and finally zapped the Yankee bully wielding it.
Every fear Quigley expressed has come to pass...
It is finance capital and the organized sectors of big business that Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s Georgetown professor, viewed around 1960 as a potential threat to the well-being of the United States as a nation and to Western civilization in general. At the heart of this concern was Quigley’s conclusion, validated by events prior to and following 1960, that the groups in command of the nation’s financial and corporate establishment were inclined to place their interests in protecting their own power and in extracting profits from other economic sectors ahead of the well-being of the majority of human beings. Based on his analysis of the history, of periods of progress and of decline in Western and non-Western civilizations, Quigley was convinced that tendencies present in the finance-monopoly sector of the U.S. economy would, if not checked or circumvented, lead to the decline of the United States. He also thought that such a decline would involve Western civilization in general...
“The destructive influence of finance capital and monopolistic industries had been somewhat blunted by the reforms and government policies of the 1930s and 1940s... These developments, in Quigley’s view, temporarily checked tendencies leading to economic decline, imperialist wars, and cultural irrationality...
“The decline can be reversed. However, consistent with Quigley’s observations, there is little indication that such a change is going to come from the financial-corporate establishment, which means that the system will have to be changed through reforms or circumvention.”
-- Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency
Well, the reforms have been fig leaves, and I have no idea what "circumvention" would entail -- we barter for our bread and circuses?