This page will cover the history of modern economics and the subversive origins of the global economic situation we now face.

 

BABYLON, O' BABYLON
Babylon O' Babylon,
You rob the souls of men;
You force them into poverty,
And rob them once again.
You've never given anything
But pain and misery;
Your pleasure is their grievances,
Your red eyes shine with glee;
You rob the widows' houses,
The Orphans you destroy;
You are the works of darkness,
And terror you deploy;
0' how you love your silver,
Your gold's become your pride;
But when the son of God returns,
You'll find no place to hide.
His angels will encircle you,
And stamp you into hell;
Just as your father, Lucifer,
From heaven's war he fell;
Your days are surely numbered,
Your empire shall pass;
Your merchants and your servants
Will cry, "Alas, Alas;
“That great and mighty city,
With burning cinders smell;
She's gone unto her father,
into the pits of hell."
The days of grace have passed you by,
The Judgement now is set;
The gnash of teeth and pestilence,
For reward is what you'll get;
The demons that begat you,
Will dwell eternally;
With Jezebel and Lucifer,
In Judgement's fiery sea;
The whoremongers and Antichrist,
Will share in your reward;
That eternal lake of fire,
Will be your room and board;
You gave up eternal pleasure,
For the artifice of gold;
And when you held it in your hand,
You were powerful and bold;
But now where is your power,
Your golden god is dead;
You've lost your silk and glory,
And the crowns upon your head;
Your rubies now have lost their gleam,
Your diamonds' sparkle fail;
When your memory returns to these,
We’ll hear your woeful wail;
Then those of us who gave our lives,
And betrothed the King of Kings;
Who sacrificed thru love and pain,
For splendored eternal things;
We'll gaze upon you briefly,
As we enter thru the gate;
We'll be singing songs of Joy,
But for you it’s now too late;
You said you were of Abraham,
Of Isaac and Israel;
But Jesus said if you were of us,
That you'd be with us still;
0' Synagogue of Satan,
With your covert societies;
You've spilled the blood of martyrs.
With your murder sprees;
You brought abominations,
And Baalam philosophy:
With you out from Babylon,
From your captivity;
You spread it out through all the lands,
And thought you'd done so Well;
And those who bow the knee to you,
Are twice the child of hell;
Praise be to our Father,
And His sacrificial lamb;
And those of you who hate Him,
Will be rewarded as the damned:
O' children of the prince of hell,
Your nature proved your deeds;
Your fruit is of the thistles,
Your gardens grow the weeds;
Life lasts only moments
As a puff of smoke it's gone;
We'll all be pleading mercy,
For all our human wrongs;
But those of us who've cleansed ourselves;
Through the blood of Christ, Jesus;
We’ll look back upon our lives,
As if sin never was;
And we’ll rejoice exceedingly,
When the scroll of names is read;
And wondrously marvel,
At "Mystery Babylon" - the living dead!
A Poem by Yorie Von Kahl, Political Prisoner of an unjust system

The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it

Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy”, co-authored by three economists from the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank’s new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don’t suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It’s this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say “there’s just not enough money” to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending “crowding out” the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: “Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits” … “In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.”

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognize as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There’s really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So, for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What’s more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with “quantitative easing” they’ve been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there’s no question of public spending “crowding out” private investment. It’s exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it’s obviously true. The Bank’s job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It’s possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realized the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that’s what’s happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.

The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it | David Graeber | The Guardian

“When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”― Napoleon Bonaparte

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."— Mayer Amschel Rothschild

We are all voluntary servants of our feudal banking overlords

In a word… lawyers are the source of the confusion. Lawyers who teach in law school, lawyers on the bench, lawyers who write things like legal definitions, lawyers who have been writing legislation for 248-years on the basis of British Common Law instead of Constitutional Law, lawyers who argue their political interest in a court, lawyers the media tells you are “experts” and “scholars.” Yes…lawyers!

The “love of money” isn’t the only root of all evil. The “love of unbridled power” is too!

Most Americans think their elected Presidents and Legislators run this country, but it isn’t so. Lawyers run this country, and they have ever since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. This is the Supreme Court case that established the courts as the final arbiters of truth, justice and the American way, even though the Constitution says no such thing.

NOTE: At the adoption of the Constitution, the definition of “interpret” was essentially for the courts to translate legalese into plain English so that citizens could know and protect their own Rights. In the case of the Constitution, the founding documents were not written in legalese, requiring a legal “expert” to translate the foundational documents into plain English for the average citizen. The Founders intentionally wrote and adopted the Constitution in plain English, so that any citizen able to read and comprehend English, can properly interpret the documents for themselves.

Since this case, lawyers have felt untethered to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Through the unconstitutional use of British Common Law practices, they have done exactly what Thomas Jefferson warned us about between 1804 and 1823…on the heels of the Marbury v. Madison decision.

• “Nothing in the Constitution has given them [the federal judges] a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the Executive to decide for them. . . . The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.” (Letter to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804)
• “You seem . . . to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so . . . and their power [is] the more dangerous, as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.” (Letter to William Jarvis, Sept. 28, 1820)
• “At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life if secured against all liability to account.” (Letter to A. Coray, October 31, 1823)

To put a very fine point on this matter, the 14^th Amendment became obsolete once the former slave families were granted freedom, citizenship and voting rights via the Reconstruction Amendments.

However, the lawyers have continued to amend the intent and purpose of the 14^th to suit their political agendas and ambitions via the overt abuse of that one sentence ever since.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

While these words were quite clearly directed solely at former slave families during reconstruction, with no mention of “birthrights” or “gay marriage,” the clear intent and purpose of these words were only applicable to the former slave families at the time of its adoption, just as the 13^th and 15^th apply only to that special class as well.

The 14th Amendment vs. Real Birthrights – News With Views

THEY ARE GETTING READY TO ROB YOU! AND POSSIBLY EVEN KILL YOU?

" ...control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite-just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless, they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane, they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals."---Industrial Society and it's Future, Ted Kaczynski

When the International Bankers bring about the next great crash they will be playing for total stakes—total control of the world! The stage is now all set for this planned catastrophe—only the timing is not known. The results will make the Crash of 1929 look like a time of great prosperity.

It takes little effort to visualize the astounding fortunes which will be made when the banks (controlled by the Internationalists, of course!) foreclose on the unpaid mortgages on millions of properties around the nation. That one move alone will leave “that dark crew of financial pirates" (Congressman Louis T. McFadden) in total control of most of the property in the United States!

With this in mind, the reader should begin to grasp a little of the tremendous insight and understanding possessed by Abraham Lincoln some 115 years ago: “‘I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of our country: Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed."

Lincoln further stated that the bankers and credit dealers have placed the American citizen in this position: “They have him in his prison house. They have searched his person and have left no prying instrument with him. One after another, they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of one hundred keys which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different places; and they stand musing as to what invention in all the dominion of mind and matter can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is." (Other People's Money, Brandeis, p. 1).

Page 193 Fourth Reich Of The Rich : John LItteral : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

America has a for-profit socialist economy that exists to subsidize Jewish bankers, one could say America has the worst of both Capitalism and Socialism. Jewish bankers rob you of your hard-earned money using the Federal income as the interest pay to their private Federal Reserve system.

D.O.G.E SHOULD STAND FOR DEPARTMENT OF GOYIM ERADICATION!

Elon Musk went full Satan this Halloween by wearing ‘The Devil’s Champion’ costume which featured an upside-down cross inside the head of Baphomet

Just in case you’re wondering whose side that Twitter owner Elon Musk is playing for, God or the Devil, he was considerate enough yesterday to clear up that burning issue. How did he do that? By donning a $7,500.00 Halloween costume called ‘The Devil’s Champion’ that features a satanic, upside-down Christian cross located in the head of Baphomet in the center of the breastplate.

“Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand.” Psalm 109:6 (KJB)

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Elon Musk is a Satanist per se, but when you add it up, it sure does get close. Musk is definitely in minion territory for sure, and as such, the Devil has blessed him with riches beyond a modern-day comparison, which brings with it nearly limitless power and influence. I wonder if he will be wearing his ‘Devil’s Champion’ costume on the day his company Neuralink starts implanting microchips into people’s brains? Oh yeah, man, that’s what’s coming.

Elon Musk Wears Halloween Costume Called 'The Devil's Champion' Complete With An Upside-Down Christian Cross In The Head Of Baphomet • Now The End Begins

Jewish millionaire Javier Mileli plunders Argentina's economy for his wealthy Billionaire friends.

(Disclaimer: the commentator in the video is a Chicom shill and baby murder supporting liberal cuck, but what he is saying about this wicked greedy fox Javier Mileli is right on the money.)

Javier Milei’s fondness for Judaism has been a defining element of his public persona. Now, Argentina’s Catholic president says he has Jewish heritage of his own.

Milei made the revelation while speaking Wednesday night at the Shul of Bal Harbor, a large Chabad synagogue in the Miami area that was honoring the right-wing politician as an “International Ambassador of Light” in part because of his support for Israel, which makes him stand out among Latin American leaders and is a departure from his predecessor’s stance.

“My grandfather was truly a great influence. … I used to learn values from him and learned a lot,” Milei said, speaking in Spanish with a simultaneous translation. “The most interesting thing is that, shortly before he passed away he discovered that he was Jewish. He didn’t know but someone told him, ‘Your mother was Jewish, so you are Jewish.'”

He continued, “So all the values that I received from him came from Judaism.”

The revelation was the latest Jewish development for Milei, extending a record that has included visiting the grave of the last Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi in New York; traveling to Israel and praying at the Western Wall; and appointing his own rabbi to be Argentina’s ambassador to Israel. Milei has said that he wants to convert to Judaism but sees the duties of the presidency as incompatible with Jewish observance.

Tour also includes meeting with Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro interview

The Shul of Bal Harbour’s sold-out annual dinner honored Milei alongside his sister and advisor Karina Milei for “their unwavering dedication to spreading freedom, hope and positivity in the face of darkness,” according to the invitation distributed by the synagogue. It added, “Their tireless efforts for Israel and the global community have been a shining beacon, inspiring a brighter, more compassionate world.”

Louis Har, an Argentine Israeli who was freed from captivity in Gaza in December, presented Milei with a yellow ribbon in support of the remaining hostages, according to pictures shared on social media from the event. And Milei posted a picture of the award he was given, a colorful plaque in the shape of the Torah and inscribed with a verse from the book of Isaiah in Hebrew and Spanish, on Instagram Thursday. The verse includes a variation on the phrase “light unto the nations” — a traditional Jewish imperative to act as a moral exemplar.

Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt, who has headed Chabad in Argentina since 1978, traveled with Milei and his entourage on a commercial flight to Miami, in keeping with the president’s austerity spending.

(Argentina’s Javier Milei reveals he has Jewish heritage - The Jerusalem Post)

What is happening in Argentina is happening all over the world, including the United States of America. The American Republic is being robbed and plundered by a cabal of criminals, many of whom are of the concision. Currently lies are being spread that Ukraine is filled with rare earth minerals, the bankers are prepping the West for a World War with Russia. The Military-Industrial Complex controlled by the Rothschild bankers are deliberately destroying the American and British economies to force the poor and working classes into joining the military. The elites are right now trying to gut the system, getting rid of Medicare and other social programs, they are creating a state of austerity. This declining economy is on purpose with the goal of driving youth into the Military.  

Sadly, the welfare system has been abused by many free-loaders and degenerate welfare leaches (especially in the United Kingdom which is filled with lazy bums) the elite are cutting these programs because they are trying to move the people around. Things will be made so miserable that those considered by the elites "useless eaters" or weighing down the system will be driven to either kill themselves or forced into Re-Education Camps. Within 5 to 10 years America will be bought up by Foreigners and these foreigners will become the Landlords of America.

They are making people so broke that the masses will all accept jobs at pennies on the dollar, and many in order to avoid homelessness will gladly sign up for the Military for a nice hot bowl of rations and a nice warm bed in an army barracks. Trump (Whether you agree or not is a felon), Musk is certainly a thief, and these globalists are all thieves they don't belong to any particular nation, they are above taxes, or any national laws. They are not legally the citizens of any nation state. These people only have control because they have the power of the media and power of technology. If we would separate ourselves from their system than they would show their true colors and engage in violence against the masses of humanity.

Because Americans already sold their freedom for the security of the Government Welfare system they will be in for a rude awakening for when the money dries up and they find the rug has been pulled from under them and the bankers have taken all of their money. Once America is successfully weakened a World Parliament will be created and will rule the Earth from Jerusalem. The end of the American Empire will give birth to a Socialist New World Order of Jewish controlled tyranny. This new order will be governed according to the traditions of the Talmud and the loosely interpreted 7 Noahide laws. 

Christians will be persecuted, and soldiers will go door to door to confiscate firearms from the hands of private citizens. Eventually those who resist the edicts of the New World Government will experience the death penalty via beheading. All of this evil will be the order created out of the chaos of economic collapse the ultra-rich elites are plotting for the global economy and America in particular.

 

BIG BROTHER BECOMES LITTLE BROTHER

Corporations are the new nation state, U.S. intelligence admits

Envious of the power and wealth of corporate America, the head of U.S. intelligence has issued a new directive calling on the spy agencies to “routinize”  and “expand” their partnerships with private companies. Agencies are even authorized to incur “risk” in these relationships, the directive says. The move underscores the awesome power of corporations — the appistocracy, as I call them, or “non-state entities,” the directive’s euphemistic term.

Called Intelligence Community Directive 406, the order was signed on January 16 by then-President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence in the final days of the administration. It lays out new ways for spy agencies to capitalize on the information and expertise of these corporate superpowers, which could be anything from social media platforms to AI firms. It is not yet clear how the Trump administration plans to exercise these authorities.

There is an unspoken and unsettling context to this effort: these corporations have become more powerful than many nation states. Top companies are now worth more than the GDPs of most countries. Where the CIA once might have coveted the secrets of Albania, now it is Apple, whose wealth exceeds all but the four richest countries.

Sources: Barron’s, World Bank

So eager is the intelligence community to access corporate knowledge that the directive even orders agencies to embrace “risk acceptance” in its interactions with these firms. Specifically, the directive says agencies should:

“Prioritize NSE [National Security Entity] engagements through risk acceptance that encourages and promotes information sharing with NSEs.”

In other words, take more risks in forging new partnerships, favoring cooperation over security and loosening the restrictions for sharing classified information.

To facilitate state-corporate partnerships, the directive authorizes the intelligence community to bypass its notorious secrecy in several ways. First, by “expanding the use of one-time read-ins” — that is, allowing private individuals to be briefed on U.S. intelligence without a traditional security clearance. Second, by employing “declassification processes” to authorize the release of intelligence, specifically to cooperating companies and entities. And third, allowing intelligence agencies to create “new, collaborative processes” for sharing intelligence, including by “relationship development” and “relationship management.”

Though the directive provides no examples and few specifics on what type of cooperation and “engagement” it is unleashing, their target clearly includes the appistocracy who attended President Trump’s inauguration last week. Many believed the billionaire tech executives in attendance (e.g. Bezos, Zuck and Musk) were broadcasting their support in exchange for Trump’s support later. The reality, however, is even more alarming. The appistocracy doesn’t need the government. The government needs them. And they know it. 

Given the vast power of individual companies, and introducing the prospect that one corporate executive might seek special favor, the directive warns that “IC [intelligence community] elements shall not show preferential treatment or provide an unfair competitive advantage to any NSE or individuals associated with an NSE.” Perhaps someone should tell that to Musk, the Twitter (X), SpaceX, and Tesla owner who has become so close to President Trump that he’s been dubbed the “First Buddy.”

The directive is vague on the why this is all happening now, saying only that “NSEs are pivotal” to national security and “essential to maintaining U.S. advantage.” But past documents provide some clues.

“Increasingly, informed judgments reside with not just state actors but also non-state entities (NSEs), from companies to academia to cities to civil society organizations,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its own 2024 strategy document. In other words, the secrets (“informed judgments”) of the world increasingly exist behind corporate firewalls. The main job of a spy is to know things and if the knowers are private companies, that’s who they’re going to target.

NSEs do include non-corporate groups like academia and non-profits, but their resources are small potatoes compared to those of private industry. So when the National Director of Intelligence participates in a ribbon cutting at the University of Virginia to celebrate their partnership, as Avril Haines did last year, that is only a small fraction of the NSE partnerships — most of which aren’t announced and exist in highly classified exchanges.

I once had a conversation with an FBI intelligence official, who I asked about the Bureau’s surveillance capabilities. He scoffed, explaining that what they had was a joke compared to what Google had. Then-CIA Director William Burns, unusually candid for an intelligence official, basically said as much in remarks delivered at a recent Billington Cybersecurity Summit:

“I think 60 or 70 years ago, the truth was, the US government was investing very heavily at the height of the Cold War and led in research and development…It’s the private sector today that drives innovation.”

“We face a real challenge [in] building greater flexibility and how we connect better with the private sector. We’re never going to be able to match the private sector salaries or, you know, economic benefits that you can find.”

Several years ago an FBI recruiter lamented to me how difficult hiring cyber talent had become, given how much better tech companies pay than the Bureau. “All we can offer is patriotism,” I recall her sighing.

The intelligence community already has a huge contracting relationship with these “non-state agencies,” buying goods and services (Amazon, for example, is the largest provider of cloud services for the intelligence world.) And it has highly secret “sensitive” industrial relations arrangements, where, for instance, it obtains code-breaking materials. But the new directive goes one step further than all that, encouraging America’s spies to make the corporations partners in their quest for secrets. Put simply, corporations now know more about the world than America’s spies.

Big Brother Becomes Little Brother - Ken Klippenstein

“Dark Globalization”: The New Dimensions And Continued Progress Of The Plutocratic Insurgency

We have previous discussed in these pages a new and largely ignored form of insurgency warfare:  the globalized elite’s coordinated, targeted efforts to dispossess the general public.  Dr. Robert Bunker (on the staff of the US Army War College) and Pamela Bunker coined the term “plutocratic insurgency” to describe this novel form of warfare.  In a brilliant series of articles published on the Small Wars Journal website, Bunker has made a compelling case that what he calls “extra-sovereign actors” (i.e., globalized elites moving themselves and their capital freely across international boundaries) have been permitted to wage non-traditional warfare against the societies in which they operate.

 

Bunker’s work is ground-breaking, and his ideas deserve wide dissemination.  I have done what I can in this regard, devoting a podcast program specifically to this topic.  He argues that we need to expand significantly our definition of what constitutes “insurgency.”  Some features of the insurgency we have already discussed:  targeted job obsolescence, the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, the lack of student loan debt relief, the silencing of dissent in mainstream media, and the erosion of public educational standards.  Most recently, Dr. Bunker has published two additional articles featuring other features of the plutocratic insurgency:  the privatization of public spaces, and the construction of “techno-palaces” for extra-sovereign actors.

The “Techno-Palaces of the Global Elites”

In July 2017, Dr. Bunker described how extra–sovereign actors physically remove themselves from the squalor and turbulence of the societies in which they parasitically operate.  The following excerpt describes the phenomenon:

Who: The global elite of the world. Only about 40,000 extra-sovereign individuals are able to afford the ten-million dollar plus price of the units in the more prestigious of these residential towers.

What: The building of techno-palaces (e.g. ‘needle-towers’ and other post-modernist architectural forms) that provide full amenities and are guarded 24-hours by private security personnel.

When: These new urban residences of a transnational plutonomy began to be completed in 2014 and are now spreading to key nodal global city hubs.

Where: This phenomenon initially took place in New York City due to its concentration of global financial capital and limited building space, however, concentrations of global elites in other key cities of the world are also now moving into similar residences though they presently tend to be less expensive.

Why: These residences are likely being purchased due to a combination of factors including their locations in major global financial centers, luxury appointments, high-technology feel, secure nature, and the networking environments they provide to the world’s richest families for business facilitation and marriage alliances between their offspring.

Analysis: One of the authors became aware of the existence of what are, essentially, the new ‘techno-palaces’ of the global elite when travelling to New York City earlier this year. At the time, the One57 (“The Billionaire Building”—Image 2), 432 Park Ave (“Tallest Residential Tower in the Western Hemisphere”—Image 3), and 56 Leonard (“Jenga Skyscraper”—Image 4) high-rise residences—while quite amazing—made little sense. These post-modern architectural structures seemed like they had been erected in the city as part of a bad B movie ‘alien colonization’ story line which it turns out—tragically for the American middle and lower classes—is not too far off the mark.

It turns out that they are being marketed to the global elite—comprised of about 40,000 extra-sovereign citizens (representing about .000005% of the world’s 7.5 billion population)—who are buying them up in what has quickly developed into a seller’s market. The New York City abodes have an average price in the +$10 million range and represent a component of what we term ‘Dark Globalization.’ Living in high-tech skyscraper enclaves guarded by 24-hour private security forces has become another visible road sign on the way to that dystopian future in which a few ‘haves’ possess massive wealth well beyond the rest of the world’s population combined—with an unbridgeable gap in between.

The first of these structures began appearing in New York City with the completion of the One57 building in May 2014 along with the growing number of such completed structures now beginning to drastically alter the city skyline (See Images 2-7, 9). Their erection is due to a combination of factors including the desirability of living in a global hub that generates great financial wealth, a shortage of buildable land within key sections of the city, and an excess of disposable wealth accumulated by the world’s elite. Recent advances in construction techniques have further allowed for the building of very thin ‘needle’ structures that are extremely tall in size—rivaling that of the world’s tallest buildings, even such as One World Trade Center—yet are very narrow at their base.

A precursor to these techno-palaces may be the $1 billion dollar ‘Antilla’ residence of Mukesh Ambani—an industrial, technology, and property magnate—built in Mumbai and completed in November 2010 (See image 1). While only 568 feet tall, it is technically a single unit residence, as opposed to the more typical 1,000 feet tall skyscrapers containing dozens of global elite palatial suites.  For less affluent billionaires than Ambani, bargain penthouses (singles up to quads) are going at more affordable prices ranging in the $50 through $250 million range with about $90-100 million now appearing to be a popular price for the most elite among them.

The expectation is that—now that these ‘techno palaces’ are becoming the de facto global elite residences in New York City—they will begin to emerge across the globe in its major financial centers. This is already seemingly the case with their construction being mimicked in a number of other major financial cities worldwide such as Sydney, Hong Kong, and Tokyo and, with more sensible height limits of course placed upon them, in London (See Image 8). One architect interviewed in 2016 already noted that in the United States “San Francisco, Miami, and Boston already have mini–needle towers underway,“ and “Other cities such as Seattle and Atlanta will follow.”

Following that bad alien colonization storyline, the projection is that in the coming decades the new extra-sovereign masters of humanity will raise up many more such gleaming towers to look down from as they further separate themselves from the rest of us. Like master puppeteers, these scions of predatory capitalism are engaged in a sustained global insurgent campaign that is neither understood nor recognized by lesser political elites, the middle strata, or the masses. Instead, we simply marvel at the pretty new shimmering needle-like structures arising in our cities, quite blissfully unaware of the dystopian socio-economic futures they may represent for our children and our children’s children.

Readers are encouraged to visit Bunker’s original article, where additional citations and photographs of the buildings in question are provided.

Privatizing Urban Public Spaces

An even more sinister feature of the plutocratic insurgency is the creeping confiscation of lands and resources in the public domain.  Bunker explains this in detail:

Privately owned public spaces (Pops) are becoming key fixtures in cities around the world. This privatization of public space creates corporately controlled spaces governed by obscure private rules and policed by private security entities with minimal state control. A lack of transparency (as the rules governing policing of these spaces are not always made public) challenges free movement and liberties in these ‘pseudo-public spaces’ that are reminiscent of feudal enclaves. This situation removes public spaces from the commons and places this territory in the hands of corporate or plutocratic elite rather than under state control.

What is often not appreciated is that the curtailing of free speech and other rights goes hand-in-hand with the confiscation of public lands.  Instead, the media distracts the public with dramatic or lurid images of “demonstrators” clashing with each other.  At the same time, the land on which such groups fights is being stolen right out from under them both.

Privately owned public spaces (Pops) include small plazas, atriums, arcades, gardens, terraces, and small parks, squares, snippets (micro-parcels) and other indoor and outdoor spaces on private land open for public use through an easement or zoning concession. In some cases, developers were allowed to build taller or denser structures if they provided public access to public space. Over time, some of the property owners reverted to sole private use by denying public access, limiting operating hours or allowing adjacent tenants (like cafés) to usurp the space and violate public use provisions. In San Francisco, they are known as Privately-Owned Public Open Spaces (POPOS), emphasizing outdoor venues.

In addition to private spaces developed for public use, there is a trend for existing public spaces to be ‘adopted’ by private corporations or public-private partnerships (P3) essentially privatizing public space. These “sales’ of public goods for limited public use or private use have the potential to be abused and deny the public their traditional right to the commons. In New York City, for example, over half (182 of 333) of the Pops were violating their usage requirements agreements with the City.

In San Francisco, the diversion of public space to private use has increased civic tensions in as many components of San Francisco’s urban spaces (bus stops, parks, plazas, streets, and sidewalks) are limiting public access. These limits threaten freedom of movement, recreation, speech, and expression through increased privatization, policing, and reduction of public spaces. This denial of access to the urban commons is similar to the wealthy denying access to beaches,waterways and rivers such as the Thames.

In London centuries of tradition are being erased as cash-strapped local councils sell off public squares and parks to corporations and foreign landholders. As the Guardian has observed:

“The public spaces of London, the collective assets of the city’s citizens, are being sold to corporations – privatised – without explanation or apology. The process has been strategically engineered to seem necessary, benign and even inconsequential, but behind the veil, the simple fact is this: the United Kingdom is in the midst of the largest sell-off of common space since the enclosures of the 17th and 18th century, and London is the epicentre of the fire sale.’’

The new pseudo-private spaces are creating an opportunity for open, accessible public space in economic hard times, but this potential is often short-changed by exclusion and limitation of the traditional freedom of the commons. In London, the beneficiaries of many of these spaces are sovereign wealth funds and the regulations governing their use are secret or the enforcement arms of the Pops won’t share their contents (or don’t know of their existence) making these ostensibly public spaces essentially private in nature. Examples of this type of space include:

“major areas of open land around Paddington Station (encompassing both Merchant Square and Paddington Central), nearly seven acres of open space owned by Arsenal Football Club in Islington, busy shopping and dining plazas in Covent Garden and Victoria, and the pseudo-public area around one of London’s most iconic attractions, the London Eye.”

Such usurpation of public space often yields conflict. Such conflicts have been long recognized as features of the urban ‘power-counterpower’ struggle. Urbanist Jane Jacobs identified early manifestations of the contest for urban land use when describing the negative effects of urban renewal and displacing people (often the urban poor) from neighborhoods to build expressways and refined (or gentrified) public spaces. Mike Davis echoed those concerns when he described urban apartheid in Los Angeles’ spatial segregation, gated communities, and militarized security of privatized spaces in City of Quartz. The culmination of this plutocratic land use paradigm is seen in Bladerunner-like scenarios of wealthy enclave outposts like Dubai and the geographically distributed micro-enclaves known as Pops, and their alter ego the competing global slums.

In London, these struggles came to the forefront during the Occupy Protests. The exclusion of the public from Pops also raises concerning about the plutocratic domination of property, especially since “nearly half the country is already owned by 0.06% of the population and furthering that trend is exacerbating social inequality.”According to the Guardian:

In 2011, the consequences of privatising public land came into sharp focus when Occupy protesters were forced out of Paternoster Square by a court order that revealed that the space was owned by the Mitsubishi Estate Company. It seemed, at the time, too dystopian to be true, that the rules imposed by a corporation could supersede the law of the land.

Soon after, we began hearing about confrontations in other pseudo-public spaces, such as on the land of More London, where City Hall is a public island in a sea of privatised open air space owned by Kuwaiti land barons. It transpires that for the past few decades almost every major redevelopment in London has resulted in the privatisation of public space, including areas around the Olympic Stadium, King’s Cross and Nine Elms.

A similar situation occurred when Occupy protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park, New York City—a highly visible privately owned park that raised First Amendment concerns.[15] Policing privatized spaces (Pops) or mass private property raises a number of concerns including fragmenting provision of public safety services and the distribution of rights and authority among public and private actors with private concerns often outweighing public liberty interests as the promotion of corporate interest outweighs concerns for public justice.

Concerns about the outsourcing of accountability and lack of transparency complicate the public-private interaction on these quasi-public spaces. The quest for maintaining public order has resulted in conflicting views over security and access as historically public squares started to restrict access and install ubiquitous CCTV monitoring on private streets and in public places with private security essentially acting in lieu of public police. Among the actions banned in these spaces are begging, homelessness, skateboarding, busking (street music), and a range of typically protected speech: handing out political leaflets, soliciting signatures for petitions, and political demonstrations.

Concerns over privatization and urban land use also complicate the security situation and are evident in São Paulo where squatters have occupied spaces. They have also been voiced in Barcelona where squatters from the Indignodos (15-M) movement occupy public spaces to protest economic and social exclusion.

Rising urban crime and instability have led some to consider privatizing public streets so that persons frequenting ‘public’ gathering spaces can be subject to searches and weapons screening. Such a proposal is currently being considered in Kansas City that seeks to privatize portions of the public streets in the Westport Entertainment District.

Calls to curtail public space and liberties are fuelled by insecurity and fear of street gangs and crime. They also inhibit security by ‘over fortifying’ public spaces in a manner that restricts legitimate use which itself would help contain crime. This manipulation of the spatial dynamics of the city contributes to “the architecture of dissent” where design and land use influences urban protest, crime, and conflict.

This contest is being fueled by two interconnected trends playing out in the global network of cities: criminal insurgency and plutocratic insurgency. These ‘Twin Insurgencies” are changing the distribution of power and profit in the licit, illicit, and grey markets. The contest for spatial domination in cities is long-standing, ranging from the Classical era through the Middle Ages to today’s emerging global network states. Preserving access to public spaces fills an essential role in ensuring access to the political realm—that is, ensuring the physical space and transactions necessary to promote the free flow of ideas in the Agora.

Although it is beyond the scope of Bunker’s article, the confiscation of land by the plutocracy is not limited to urban areas.  In the United States, corporate entities have been lobbying the government for years to gain access to the vast tracts of unspoiled national park lands in the western half of the country.  The national park legacy of Theodore Roosevelt is now under attack as never before.  Corporate entities want to “privatize” (i.e., exploit for their own financial gain) the national parks, or “turn them over” to the states, which is another way of putting these precious resources in the hands of easily-manipulated state legislatures.  Since Congress is now largely penetrated and compromised by plutocrat money, we can expect little resistance from the executive branch, regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office.

Role Of The Media:  Distract And Reframe

One final dimension of the continued progress of the insurgency is the use of the media to “distract” the public and reframe the war in ways that prevent the public from uniting against the plutocratic insurgents.  Remember that a necessary condition of the insurgency is that it operates in the shadows.  It does not want attention, because if the public really knew what was going on, it would demand immediate action.

Instead, the media’s task is to distract the public.  As the public’s share of the pie becomes smaller and smaller, and resources get harder to acquire, a mad scramble for crumbs from the plutocratic table ensues.  The public balkanizes itself into groups based on political affiliation, class, ethnicity, religion, or whatever else, in an effort to fight for what little is left.  The extremes of both sides of the political spectrum are thus used as “safety valves” to enable the public to blow off steam at favored bugbears, while attention is safely siphoned away from the real threat to public safety:  the extra-sovereign actors of the plutocratic insurgency itself.

Education and awareness is a critical component in this fight for the future.  We must read, understand, and internalize the words of Sallust about the venality and lack of public accountability of the super-rich:

After riches began to be considered a substitute for honor, and when glory, power, and force followed as a consequence, virtue grew feeble; humble circumstances were held a disgrace, and innocence began to be regarded with malice.  As wealth grew steadily, luxury and greed combined with arrogance took possession of the youth.  They freely took what they wanted, consumed with reckless abandon, and placed scant value on their own possessions while coveting those of others; shame, modesty, and all things human and divine were thought of as nothing.  There was no sense of moderation.

It is worth the effort, when you examine the homes and villas constructed in the fashion of cities, to see the temples of the gods made by our most pious ancestors.  Truly they adorned the homes of the gods with piety, and their own homes with glory; neither did they take anything away from their defeated enemies except their license to cause harm.  In contrast, the modern individual—that most lazy of men—takes away, using the greatest treachery, everything from our allies that our strong, victorious ancestors left them.  It is almost as if inflicting an injury were the same as the rightful exercise of power.

Why should I relate these things?  They are credible to no one except those who have seen them:  can mountains be cut through by groups of men, or can someone build on the sea?  For them their riches seem to have been a mockery; they might have made use of them reputably, yet they rushed to expend them indecently.

The lust for sex, gluttonous eating, and other frivolities advanced in no small way; men acted as women, and women uncovered their modesty; they combed land and sea to find culinary delicacies; they slept before their bodies needed sleep; they waited for neither hunger nor thirst, nor cold or exhaustion, but preempted all these things by their soft-living.  These vices incited the youth to wrongdoing once their family resources had run out.  A mind imbued with evil habits is not easily kept free from wantonness; and ever more immoderately, their minds had surrendered themselves to all varieties of material gain and profligacy. [Catiline XII et. seq.]

On a personal level, the only antidote to this ethic of amoral materialism is a broad education in the classics (with its timeless emphasis on character, virtue, and public duty); on the public level, we must see the embracing of something akin to Theodore Roosevelt’s “new nationalism” adapted to the needs of 2017.  Unless the insurgency is confronted and rolled back, the vast economic inequalities prevailing today will continue, and the ultimate outcomes will be ugly.

“Dark Globalization”: The New Dimensions And Continued Progress Of The Plutocratic Insurgency | Quintus Curtius

YOU ARE BEING ECONOMICALLY RAPED!

Thomas W. Chittum in page 148 of his book Civil War Two: THE COMING BREAKUP OF AMERICA says the following in his book

Projection 4: Foreigners Hold Most Federal Debt

"Another typical statistic of third-world countries is their governments' indebtedness to foreigners. The elites of third- world countries loot their own powerless poor until they have so little left it's hardy worth stealing. At that point they turn to the international money markets. What does the US economic establishment think of foreign dominance of our country? Consider this passage from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial titled "The Next Fifty Years":

(The Wall Street Journal, "The Next Fifty Years", August 14,1995, p. 16) 126 "We'll settle happily for a whole world growing richer under Asia's economic lead, but the challenge facing the region isn't asserting leadership in the face of a jealous and declining West. It's the management of Asia's internal rivalries...."

What they failed to mention is that the working people of America aren't growing richer. In fact, they've been sinking since the seventies. In America the rich really are getting richer and the workers poorer exactly as blueprinted. Why bother to risk investing in new factories that might fail when they can get a guaranteed return on US government bonds? That foreigners are also buying up that debt and taking over our country and turning it into a huge Tijuana doesn't bother them at all. When foreigners hold more federal debt than American citizens, it will be another plain sign that America is just another third-world country.

How far away is that? In 1969, only 5% of our federal debt was held by foreigners. In 1990, that figure had grown to 17% (Don Barlett and James Steele, America, What Went Wrong?, Andrews and McMell Books, 1992, p. 50). At this rate, most federal debt will be held by foreigners by the year 2048. Since trends like this tend to accelerate as economic conditions worsen, the date most US debt is held by foreigners may come much sooner than 2048. "

Page 275 of the New Confessions of the Economic Hit Man, John Perkins writes "One percent of Americans received 95 percent of all the wealth created since the depression was officially pronounced as ended in 2009, while 90 percent of us became poorer. For every $1 billion of wealth created, the average US citizen gets one dollar. Globally, eighty-five individuals own more resources than half of the world's population."

Page 513 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin 5th Edition

"In 1999, a report published by The Economic Policy Institute revealed that the average middle-class American family was working an average of six weeks more each year than when the study began in 1989.  Yet, this was still not enough. To maintain their old lifestyle, these families were consuming the last of their savings and going into debt. In 1999, the average personal savings rate finally became a negative one percent, which means that the facade of prosperity is now paid for with borrowed money. The message here is that real wages in America have declined. Young couples with a single income now have a lower standard of living than their parents did. In spite of two incomes, the net worth of the average household is falling. For many it has become negative. The percentage of Americans who own their homes is dropping. The age at which a family acquires a first home is rising.  Mortgage foreclosures are increasing. The number of families in the middle class is falling.  Savings accounts are smaller. Family debt is greater. The number of people below the officially define poverty level is rising.  The percentage of people working beyond age 65 is rising. There are as many personal bankruptcies as divorces.  Most Americans are broke at age 65." --Get the book here on his website.

Bible Law vs. The United States Constitution by Ted Weiland 

Debt Slavery

Another unlawful type of slavery, legalized, in part, by Article 1 (US CONSTITUTION), involves debt obligations and unlawful taxation:

The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant [slave, NASB] to the lender. (Proverbs 22:7)

Shackled with both national and private debt (via the Federal Reserve, fiat “money,” usury banking, and income and property taxes), all United States citizens are, in fact, slaves:

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.⁴³

When the Africans were freed, they went from private slaves to federal slaves. With combined taxation presently at an approximate national average of 51%, it might be argued they had more freedom before 1865:

Those four million slaves of the mid-1880s were “privately owned,” forced to labor on private plantations. Today’s slaves are “federally owned”; they labor on government plantations…. Each of us is made part slave and each of us is left part free. That way we can live in our “own” home, work at our “own” job, attend our “own” church, and even go bowling on Friday nights … as long as we render unto Caesar that which he demands. Such a convenient arrangement should not blind us to the fact that involuntary servitude is being forced upon citizens by excessive government spending.⁴⁴

Women liberation was by Elite Jews to tax women by getting them into the work force and to brainwash their children in the public schools

THE 10-POINT PLAN OF THE TALMUDIC JEWS TO TAKE DOWN AMERICA

1. Corrupt the young, get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial. Destroy their ruggedness.

2. Get control of all means of publicity.

3. Get people’s minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books and other trivialities.

4. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.

5. Destroy the people’s faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and obloquy.

6. Always preach true democracy but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.

7. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit and produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.

8. Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders, and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward such disorders.

9. By specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues, honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.

10. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the populace helpless.

by Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom, Emeritus Professor of Geography, February, 2016

Epigraph Quotes

Maurice Strong, Secretary General of UN Conference of Environment and Development (Rio Earth Summit): “Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of morality control.” (Imposition of Jewish Noahide Laws onto non-Jewish population?).

Ted Turner: “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO courier, 1991: “In order to save the planet it would be necessary to kill 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.”

Initiative for the United Nations, ECO-92 Earth Charter: “The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.”

Henry Lamb on UN Agenda 21: “Page 993 after describing these “protected areas” sums it all up by saying: “The recently published Wildlands Project in the United States is the central theme of protected areas.

And on page 15 of the Wildlands Project, Dr. Reed Noss says that we must convert at least 50% of the land area of North America to wilderness off limits to human beings.”

Those “core wilderness areas” are to be interconnected by “wilderness corridors” off limits to human beings. Those wilderness areas are to surrounded by “buffer zones” that may have limited resource use under the supervision and permitting of the federal government in collaboration with non-government organizations.

Human population is to be resettled into the remaining 25% of the land into communities that are described as “sustainable communities.

Perhaps the most startling thing I can share with you is that all of the conspiracy theories that you’ve ever heard about one-world-government, about the UN takeover of the world, all of those conspiracies have now been laid to rest. There is nothing conspiratorial about it. It’s all published.”

This website has exposed so many aspects of the (Jewish/British) “Global Governance” conspiracy that it is now possible to formulate a “working hypothesis” regarding the goals and the methods of the long-sought Jewish/British/Satanic New World Order. The weight of accumulated evidence suggests the following hypothesis:

UN Agenda 2030 (aka Agenda 21) is the Rothschild/Bavarian Illuminati Plan for world domination, “Tikkun Olam” (Hebrew; “repair of the world), and establishment of a “Jewish Utopia”/Jewish Universal Empire.

I submit that this hypothesis adequately and accurately explains and accounts for the data presented on this website. The advantage of formulating such a hypothesis is that the hypothesis can be tested by evidence thereby confirmed or falsified. This is the scientific method. I should note that I arrived at this hypothesis largely by “inductive” means, that is, by first assembling many, many facts and then determining the best general explanation for those facts. The following “big picture” explanation, including identification of the ends/goals and means/methods used by the global power elite generally support the hypothesis articulated above.

Recall, that Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, commonly asserted (after Machiavelli) that “the ends justify the means.” It is now possible to identify the ends/goals of the (Jewish Illuminati) New World Order as well as the means/methods by which it is being implemented.

“The Ends”

1) To establish one-world-government and one-world-religion under control of Jewish/British corporate masters and Sanhedrin (Jewish rabbincal leaders) in Israel. This would accomplish the long-sought Jewish/Masonic/Satanic goal of “Tikkun Olam” (“repair and re-invention of the world” along Talmudic and Kabbalistic lines). It would also usher in the Kingdom of Satan on earth and result in the enslavement and extermination of the vast majority of humanity.

“The Means”

As per the plan put forth by Adam Weishaupt for the Bavarian Illuminati (principally including the House of Rothschild, the Sanhedrin (Elders of Zion/Frankist Jews), and leading intellectuals of the time), ushering in the Jewish Universal Empire required the destruction of monarchies, nations, religions, the family, and private property, i.e., all institutions that stand in the way of complete totalitarian rule by (Jewish) theocrats. Weishaupt’s Plan incorporated and extended the 25 points of the 1773 “Rothschild Plan.” Condensed and summarized, the main points of 1773 “Rothschild Plan” were:

1) Use violence and terrorism rather than academic discussions,
2) Preach “liberalism” to usurp political power,
3) Initiate class warfare
4) Politicians must deceive the masses,
5) Dismantle “existing forces of order and regulation,”
6) Remain invisible until “our forces” are unstoppable,
7) Use mob psychology to control “the goyim” (non-Jews), for ‘without absolute despotism one cannot rule efficiently”,
8) Advocate use of alcohol, drugs, moral corruption, and all forms of vice by “agenturs” to corrupt youth,
9) Seize property by any means to secure submission and sovereignty,
10) Foment wars and control peace conferences so that neither side gains territory, placing them further in our debt,
11) Choose candidates for public office who will be “servile and obedient to our commands,”
12) Use the press for propaganda,
13) Make the masses believe they have been prey of criminals, then restore order to appear as saviors,
14) Create financial panics and use hunger to control the masses,
15) Infiltrate Freemasonry to take advantage of the Grand Orient Lodges to cloak the true nature of their work in philanthropy. Spread atheistic/materialistic ideology amongst the “Goyim” (non-Jews).
16) When the hour strikes for our sovereign Lord of the entire world (Lucifer) to be crowned, banish everything that might stand in his way,
17) Use systematic deception, high-sounding phrases, and popular slogans. “The opposite of what has been promised can always be done afterwards…. That is of no consequence.”
18) Impose a Reign of Terror as the quickest way to bring about speedy subjugation of the Goyim (non-Jews),
19) Masquerade as political, financial, and economic advisers,
20) Ultimate world government is the goal. Establish huge monopolies, so that even the largest fortunes of the Goyim will depend on us so they will “go to the bottom” together with the credit of their governments on the day after the great “political smash,”
21) Use economic warfare. Rob the “Goyim” of their landed properties and industries with a combination of high taxes and unfair competition.
22) Make the “Goyim” destroy each other so there will only be the proletariat left in the world. (In the thought of extremist Jews like Trotsky the "proletariat" were a metaphor for Jews.  Trotsky defined "worker" as a leftist (mostly Jewish) revolutionary. Therefore, he can say that Jacob Schiff was a "worker" but the counterrevolutionary peasant in eastern Ukraine was a "capitalist." Check out this broadcast The Orthodox Nationalist: Leon Trotsky and the Permanent Oligarchy)
23) Call it the New Order. Appoint a dictator.
24) Fool, bemuse, and corrupt the youth by teaching them theories and principles we know to be false.
25) Substitute arbitration for laws.

The Rothschild plan clearly overlaps significantly with the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” (1896, 1934, 2012). Both diabolical plans are designed to destroy the “Goyim” (non-Jews) and usher in the kingdom of their “sovereign lord of the entire world,” i.e., Lucifer.

2016 Progress Report: Progress Toward Implementing “The Plan:”

How have Illuminati agent-provacateurs accomplished their goals?

1) Destruction of monarchies was largely accomplished by the French and Russian Revolutions and the First and Second World Wars, all of which were fomented by Jewish international financiers and Jewish/Masonic agent provocateurs.

2) Destruction of nations has been and is being accomplished by: a) innumerable wars of aggression, now primarily directed against the enemies of Israel by its proxy, the United States, b) de-stablization and subversion of foreign and domestic governments and populations by American, British, and Israeli intelligence agencies, c) predatory lending policies (and “structural adjustment programs”) of international lending institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, d) waging covert war against domestic populations through “social engineering,” mind control, creation of dangerous cults, propaganda, and cultural subversion, and e) forced mass immigration of illegal aliens and refugees into First World nations. The intended end result of these programs are that nations become “failed states” that can no longer provide protection and a decent living standard for their own peoples.

3) Destruction of religion (particularly Christianity) has been accomplished incrementally by: a) corruption and co-option of Christian doctrines by introduction of “revised” Bible versions, b) infiltration and corruption/co-option of Christian churches and organizations by paid agents of the Jewish Illuminati, etc., c) introduction of innumerable New Age false religions and cults (primarily by Jews and/or Freemasons), d) the ecuminical and interfaith movements that attempt to merge, blend, and thereby destroy all religions except Judaism/Freemasonry/Satanism.

4. Destruction of the family has been accomplished by: a) the feminist movement, b) the sexual revolution, c) dissemination of birth control devices, family planning agencies, etc., d) economic policies that force both parents into the work place, e) avid promotion of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) lifestyles, and f) “affirmative action programs” that penalize and under-compensate competent white males.

5. Destruction of private property has and is being accomplished through: a) artificially-created financial crises, Unconstitutional laws that favor corporate “persons” over real persons, and “sustainable development” policies promoted by governments worldwide that implement Agenda 21 (now Agenda 2030).

Conclusions regarding events, institutions, and information featured on this webite:

1) Operation 9/11 was an Illuminati/Tavistock/CIA/Mossad “state-sponsored, false-flag, synthetic terror event” designed as trauma-based mind control of the world’s domestic population. It served as pretext to prosecute a series of proxy wars for (“Eretz” or “Greater”) Israel and to implement a vast international intelligence/police/Gestapo state.

2) The phony environmental movement, spear-headed by the fraudulent “climate change” issue, is a mechanism by which the United Nations hopes to control/destroy the industrialize nations and control the world’s resources and all economic activity. The false premise is that in order to “save the earth,” all human activity and resource consumption must be regulated by the UN, as world government.

3) Government-sponsored mind control, media propaganda, and social engineering projects formulated and executed by a host of military/intelligence agencies, think tanks and corporate and private sector entities, manipulates public opinion such that a majority of the population acquiesces to the dictates of Big Brother.

4) Cults and bogus New Age religions are created by intelligence agencies and Jews, primarily, in order to further control and enslave the populace and to deceive well-meaning dupes into supporting the New Age/Talmudic World Order.

5) The ecumenical/interfaith/New Age movements are used as means of destroying and replacing all non-Jewish religions.

6) Gang stalking (aka organized stalking, vigilante stalking, counterintelligence stalking) is used as means of “neutralizing” non-cooperating elements in the emerging Talmudic world order. In the process, private security contractors, in cooperation with intelligence agencies, local police, and networks of citizen spies, target Christians, dissidents, whistle-blowers, etc. for destruction, utilizing a suite of surveillance and harassment techniques in combination with “non-lethal (electronic) weapons.”

7) The (Talmudic) world court system, centered in Jerusalem, would force the world’s non-Jewish population to abide by the Talmudic Seven Noahide Laws. This “justice system” would allow Jewish judges to summarily execute non-desirables (such as Christians) for offenses as minor as worshipping Jesus Christ as Lord.

8) Depopulation: The worldwide atmospheric spraying of coal fly-ash (chemtrails) is now being used to weaken the immune systems of the global population. Electromagnetic zapping, via HAARP and other “ionospheric heaters,” is being used as mind control and mood alteration of the populace.

9) The United Nations, or “world instrument,” is the prototypical world government. UN Agenda 21 (now Agenda 2030) is the plan to control all aspects of human life everywhere. The UN insists that the human population must be radically reduced and/or controlled in order to “save the earth.” (See United Nations Agenda 21 (aka Agenda 2030) is blueprint for the global enslavement under Jewish corporate masters, http://911nwo.com/?p=4099)

United Nations Agenda 2030 is the plan to implement complete global tyranny (“Tikkun Olam”) by 2030: Here is how they mean to do it.

Warning: We have now entered the dystopian world forecast by Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”) and George Orwell (“1984” and “Animal Farm”). As per “1984,” our common language is so fraught with “double-speak” or “new-speak” that we need to learn to decode all official proclamations! Just as the Seven Talmudic Noahide Laws sound good at first blush, but on inspection can result in mass killing of Christians and other undesirables, these 17 goals sound benign at first, but decoded, they are draconian. “Since these supposedly non-binding international agreements can sometimes be a bit tricky to decode, what with all the weaponized buzz terms and semantics games, we’ve prepared a handy dandy translator on the 17 new Agenda 2030 goals.”

The 17 official goals of UN Agenda 2030 are listed below along with two translations of the UN’s “2030 Agenda blueprint for globalist government.” (Translation 1 is by Mike Adams and Translation 2 is by Aaron and Melissa Dyke):

Goal 1) End poverty in all its forms everywhere

Translation 1: Put everyone on government welfare, food stamps, housing subsidies and handouts that make them obedient slaves to global government. Never allow people upward mobility to help themselves. Instead, teach mass victimization and obedience to a government that provides monthly “allowance” money for basic essentials like food and medicine. Label it “ending poverty.”
Translation 2: Centralized banks, IMF, World Bank, Fed to control all finances

Goal 2) End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

Translation 1: Invade the entire planet with GMOs and Monsanto’s patented seeds while increasing the use of deadly herbicides under the false claim of “increased output” of food crops. Engineer genetically modified plants to boost specific vitamin chemicals while having no idea of the long-term consequences of genetic pollution or cross-species genetic experiments carried out openly in a fragile ecosystem.
Translation 2: GMO

Goal 3) Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

Translation 1: Mandate 100+ vaccines for all children and adults at gunpoint, threatening parents with arrest and imprisonment if they refuse to cooperate. Push heavy medication use on children and teens while rolling out “screening” programs. Call mass medication “prevention” programs and claim they improve the health of citizens.
Translation 2: Mass vaccination, Codex Alimentarius

Goal 4) Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

Translation 1: Push a false history and a dumbed-down education under “Common Core” education standards that produce obedient workers rather than independent thinkers. Never let people learn real history, or else they might realize they don’t want to repeat it.
Translation 2: Translation: UN propaganda, brainwashing through compulsory education from cradle to grave

Goal 5) Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Translation 1: Criminalize Christianity, marginalize heterosexuality, demonize males and promote the LGBT agenda everywhere. The real goal is never “equality” but rather the marginalization and shaming of anyone who expresses any male characteristics whatsoever. The ultimate goal is to feminize society, creating widespread acceptance of “gentle obedience” along with the self-weakening ideas of communal property and “sharing” everything. Because only male energy has the strength to rise up against oppression and fight for human rights, the suppression of male energy is key to keeping the population in a state of eternal acquiescence.
Translation 2: Population control through forced “Family Planning”

Goal 6) Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

Translation 1: Allow powerful corporations to seize control of the world’s water supplies and charge monopoly prices to “build new water delivery infrastructure” that “ensures availability.”
Translation 2: Privatize all water sources, don’t forget to add fluoride

Goal 7) Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all

Translation 1: Penalize coal, gas and oil while pushing doomed-to-fail “green” energy subsidies to brain-dead startups headed by friends of the White House who all go bankrupt in five years or less. The green startups make for impressive speeches and media coverage, but because these companies are led by corrupt idiots rather than capable entrepreneurs, they always go broke. (And the media hopes you don’t remember all the fanfare surrounding their original launch.)
Translation 2: Smart grid with smart meters on everything, peak pricing

Goal 8) Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Translation 1: Regulate small business out of existence with government-mandated minimum wages that bankrupt entire sectors of the economy. Force employers to meet hiring quotas of LGBT workers while mandating wage tiers under a centrally planned work economy dictated by the government. Destroy free market economics and deny permits and licenses to those companies that don’t obey government dictates.
Translation 2: TPP, free trade zones that favor megacorporate interests

Goal 9) Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

Translation 1: Put nations into extreme debt with the World Bank, spending debt money to hire corrupt American corporations to build large-scale infrastructure projects that trap developing nations in an endless spiral of debt. See the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins to understand the details of how this scheme has been repeated countless times over the last several decades.
Translation 2: Toll roads, push public transit, remove free travel, environmental restrictions

Goal 10) Reduce inequality within and among countries

Translation 1: Punish the rich, the entrepreneurs and the innovators, confiscating nearly all gains by those who choose to work and excel. Redistribute the confiscated wealth to the masses of non-working human parasites that feed off a productive economy while contributing nothing to it… all while screaming about “equality!”
Translation 2: Even more regional government bureaucracy

Goal 11) Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

Translation 1: Ban all gun ownership by private citizens, concentrating guns into the hands of obedient government enforcers who rule over an unarmed, enslaved class of impoverished workers. Criminalize living in most rural areas by instituting Hunger Games-style “protected areas” which the government will claim are owned by “the People” even though no people are allowed to live there. Force all humans into densely packed, tightly controlled cities where they are under 24/7 surveillance and subject to easy manipulation by government.
Translation 2: Big brother big data surveillance state

Goal 12) Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

Translation 1: Begin levying punitive taxes on the consumption of fossil fuels and electricity, forcing people to live under conditions of worsening standards of living that increasingly resemble Third World conditions. Use social influence campaigns in TV, movies and social media to shame people who use gasoline, water or electricity, establishing a social construct of ninnies and tattlers who rat out their neighbors in exchange for food credit rewards.
Translation 2: Forced austerity

Goal 13) Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

Translation 1: Set energy consumption quotas on each human being and start punishing or even criminalizing “lifestyle decisions” that exceed energy usage limits set by governments. Institute total surveillance of individuals in order to track and calculate their energy consumption. Penalize private vehicle ownership and force the masses onto public transit, where TSA grunts and facial recognition cameras can monitor and record the movement of every person in society, like a scene ripped right out of Minority Report.
Translation 2: Cap and Trade, carbon taxes/credits, footprint taxes (aka Al Gore’s wet dream)

Goal 14) Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development

Translation 1: Ban most ocean fishing, plunging the food supply into an extreme shortage and causing runaway food price inflation that puts even more people into economic desperation. Criminalize the operation of private fishing vessels and place all ocean fishing operations under the control of government central planning. Only allow favored corporations to conduct ocean fishing operations (and make this decision based entirely on which corporations give the most campaign contributions to corrupt lawmakers).
Translation 2: Environmental restrictions, control all oceans including mineral rights from ocean floors

Goal 15) Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

Translation 1: Roll out Agenda 21 and force humans off the land and into controlled cities. Criminalize private land ownership, including ranches and agricultural tracts. Tightly control all agriculture through a corporate-corrupted government bureaucracy whose policies are determined almost entirely by Monsanto while being rubber-stamped by the USDA. Ban woodstoves, rainwater collection and home gardening in order to criminalize self-reliance and force total dependence on government.
Translation 2: More environmental restrictions, more controlling resources and mineral rights

Goal 16) Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

Translation 1: Grant legal immunity to illegal aliens and “protected” minority groups, which will be free to engage in any illegal activity — including openly calling for the mass murder of police officers — because they are the new protected class in society. “Inclusive institutions” means granting favorable tax structures and government grants to corporations that hire LGBT workers or whatever groups are currently in favor with the central planners in government. Use the IRS and other federal agencies to selectively punish unfavorable groups with punitive audits and regulatory harassment, all while ignoring the criminal activities of favored corporations that are friends of the political elite.
Translation 2: Translation: More UN “peacekeeping” missions (ex 1, ex 2), remove 2nd Amendment in USA

Goal 17) Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

Translation 1: Enact global trade mandates that override national laws while granting unrestricted imperialism powers to companies like Monsanto, Dow Chemical, RJ Reynolds, Coca-Cola and Merck. Pass global trade pacts that bypass a nation’s lawmakers and override intellectual property laws to make sure the world’s most powerful corporations maintain total monopolies over drugs, seeds, chemicals and technology. Nullify national laws and demand total global obedience to trade agreements authored by powerful corporations and rubber-stamped by the UN.
Translation 2: Remove national sovereignty worldwide

The goal of Agenda 2030, then, is: Total enslavement of the planet by 2030. As the UN document says, “We commit ourselves to working tirelessly for the full implementation of this Agenda by 2030.”

If you read the full document and can read beyond the fluffery and public relations phrases, you’ll quickly realize that this UN agenda is going to be forced upon all the citizens of the world through government coercion. Nowhere does this document state that the rights of the individual will be protected. Nor does it even acknowledge the existence of human rights granted to individuals by the Creator. Even the so-called “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” utterly denies individuals the right to self defense, the right to medical choice and the right to parental control over their own children.

The UN is planning nothing less than a global government tyranny that enslaves all of humanity while calling the scheme “sustainable development” and “equality.” 1984 has finally arrived. And of course, it’s all being rolled out under the fraudulent label of “progress.”

JEWISH COMMUNISM IS SIMPLY JEWISH CAPITALISM IN A DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE OF GROWTH! IT IS THE PROCESS BY WHICH THE ELITE JEWS STEAL YOUR HARD-EARNED WEALTH AND HORDE IT FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR CRONIES! IT IS THE CRIMINAL PROCESS OF THEFT VIA COLLECTIVIZATION AND THEN HOARDING THE STOLEN LOOT VIA PRIVATIZATION. IT COULD ALSO BE CALLED A CORPORATE TAKEOVER OF GOVERNMENT BY THE ELITE JEWS. THE ELITE JEWS DID THE SAME IN RUSSIA VIA THE FAILED COLLECTIVIZATION POLICIES OF LENIN ONCE THEY ROBBED THE GOYIM, THEY PRIVATIZED EVERYTHING UNDER A MONOPOLY STATE CAPITALISM CALLED THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY AND SLOWLY PRIVATIZED MORE AND MORE OF THE USSR UNTIL THE COLLAPSE IN THE 80S! THAT IS THE COMMUNIST ORIGIN OF THE RUSSIAN AND UKRANIAN OLIGARCHS OF TODAY.

The following texts will provide both historical backgrounds explaining the current global economic crisis and the history of modern economic systems. Also provided further down would be economic solutions provided by the Divine Law of the Most High God as contained in his Laws, Statutes and Judgements. 

THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC 

When we think of events that have transpired in history over the last one hundred to two hundred years, there are certain events that stand out as ones of great horror, great surprise and great sadness. Of the many that come to mind the most devastating have been the destruction of the the World Trade Center in New York City and the sinking of the Titanic. 

The greatest tragedies in the last two hundred years can be traced to the Jesuits. We will now show that the Jesuits planned and carried out the sinking of the Titanic, and we will show why they did it. 

Since the early 1830’s, America did not have a central bank. The Jesuits desperately wanted another central bank in America so that they would have a bottomless reservoir from which to draw money for their many wars and other hideous schemes around the world. 

In 1910, seven men met on Jekyll Island just off the coast of Georgia to establish a central bank, which they called the Federal Reserve Bank. These men were Nelson Aldrich and Frank Vanderlip, both representing the Rockefeller financial empire; Henry Davison, Charles Norton, and Benjamin Strong, representing J.P. Morgan; and Paul Warburg, representing the Rothschild banking dynasty of Europe. We have already seen that the Rothschilds were the banking agents for the papacy’s Jesuits, holding “the key to the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church.” 

The Morgans were friendly competitors with the Rothschilds and became socially close to them. Morgan’s London-based firm was saved from financial ruin in 1857 by the Bank of England over which the Rothschilds held great influence. Thereafter, Morgan appears to have served as a Rothschild financial agent and went to great length to appear totally American.... 

His [Rockefeller’s] entry into the field was not welcomed by Morgan, and they became fierce competitors. Eventually, they decided to minimize their competition by entering into joint ventures. In the end, they worked together to create a national banking cartel called the Federal Reserve System. — G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, American Opinion Publishing, p. 209. (Emphasis supplied). 

These three financial families, the Rothschilds, Morgans, and Rockefellers all do the bidding of the Jesuit Order because of Jesuit infiltration in their organizations. They do whatever is necessary to destroy constitutional liberty in America and to bring the pope to world domination. As we look back over the 20th century, we see how successful the Jesuits have been. They have continued to squander the wealth of America and continually attack its great constitution and civil liberties. Daily, the power of the pope in Vatican City increases. One day they will achieve total power again. 

The building of the Titanic began in 1909 at a shipyard in Belfast, the capitol of Northern Ireland. Belfast was a Protestant haven and was hated by the Jesuits. World War One began just a few years later. 

The Titanic was one of a fleet of ships owned by the White Star Line, an international shipping company. 

Banking was not the only business in which Morgan had a strong financial interest. Using his control over the nation’s railroads as financial leverage, he had created an international shipping trust which included Germany’s two largest lines plus one of the two in England, the White Star Lines. — Ibid, p. 246. 

There were a number of very rich and powerful men who made it abundantly clear that they were not in favor of the Federal Reserve System. J.P. Morgan was ordered by the Jesuits to build the Titanic. This ‘unsinkable’ ship would serve as the death ship for those who opposed the Jesuits’ plan for a Federal Reserve system. 

These rich and powerful men would have been able to block the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and their power and fortunes had to be taken out of their hands. They had to be destroyed by a means so preposterous that no one would suspect that they were murdered, and no one would suspect the Jesuits. The Titanic was the vehicle of their destruction. In order to further shield the papacy and the Jesuits from suspicion, many Irish, French, and Italian Roman Catholics immigrating to the New World were aboard. They were people who were expendable. Protestants from Belfast who wanted to immigrate to the United States were also invited on board. 

All the wealthy and powerful men the Jesuits wanted to get rid of were invited to take the cruise. Three of the richest and most important of these were Benjamin Guggenheim, Isador Strauss, the head of Macy’s Department Stores, and John Jacob Astor, probably the wealthiest man in the world. Their total wealth, at that time, using dollar values of their day was more than 500 million dollars. Today that amount of money would be worth nearly eleven billion dollars. These three men were coaxed and encouraged to board the floating palace. They had to be destroyed because the Jesuits knew they would use their wealth and influence to oppose a Federal Reserve Bank as well as the various wars that were being planned. 

Edward Smith was the captain of the Titanic. He had been traveling the North Atlantic waters for twenty-six years and was the world’s most experienced master of the North Atlantic routs. He had worked for Jesuit, J.P. Morgan, for many years. 

Edward Smith was a ‘Jesuit tempore co-adjator.’ This means that he was not a priest, but he was a Jesuit of the short robe. Jesuits are not necessarily priests. Those who are not priests serve the order through their profession. Anyone could be a Jesuit, and their identity would not be known. Edward Smith served the Jesuit Order in his profession as a sea captain. 

Many interesting points about the Titanic are discussed in a videotape made by National Geographic in 1986. The videotape is entitled The Secrets of the Titanic. When the Titanic departed from Southern England on April 10, 1912, Francis Browne, the Jesuit master of Edward Smith, boarded the Titanic. This man was the most powerful Jesuit in all of Ireland and answered directly to the general of the Jesuit Order in Rome. The videotape declares:

A vacationing priest, Father Francis Browne, caught these poignant snapshots of his fellow passengers, most of them on a voyage to eternity. The next day Titanic made her last stop off the coast of Queenstown, Ireland. Here tenders brought out the last passengers; mostly Irish immigrants headed for new homes in America. And here, the lucky Father Browne disembarked.... Father Browne caught Captain Smith peering down from Titanic’s bridge, poised on the brink of destiny. — The Secrets of the Titanic, National Geographic, video tape, 1986.

Here is Jesuit treachery at its finest. The Provincial [Father Francis Browne] boards Titanic, photographs the victims, most assuredly briefs the Captain concerning his oath as a Jesuit, and the following morning bids him farewell. — Eric J. Phelps, Vatican Assassins, Halycon Unified Services, p. 427. 

Browne went over with Edward Smith one last time exactly what he was supposed to do in the North Atlantic waters. The Jesuit General told Francis Browne what was to happen; Browne then tells Smith and the rest is history. Edward Smith believed that the Jesuit General . . . 

is the god of the [Jesuit] society, and nothing but his electric touch can galvanize their dead corpses into life and action. Until he speaks, they are like serpents coiled up in their wintry graves, lifeless and inactive; but the moment he gives the word of command, each member springs instantaneously to his feet, leaving unfinished whatsoever may have engaged him, ready to assail whomsoever he may require to be assailed, and to strike wheresoever he shall direct a blow to be stricken. — R.W. Thompson, The Footprints of the Jesuits, Hunt and Eaton, pp. 72, 73. 

Edward Smith was given an order to sink the Titanic and that is exactly what he did. 

By the command of God, [the Jesuit General] it is lawful to murder the innocent, to rob, to commit all lewdness, because he [the Pope] is Lord of life, and death, and of all things; and thus to fulfill his mandate is our duty. — W. C. Brownlee, Secret Instructions of the Jesuits, American and Foreign Christian Union, p. 143. 

There is no record in history of an association whose organization has stood for three hundred years unchanged and unaltered by all the assaults of men and time, and which has exercised such an immense influence over the destinies of mankind… ‘The ends justify the means,’ is his favorite maxim; and as his only end, as we have shewn, is the order, at its bidding the Jesuit is ready to commit any crime whatsoever. — G. B. Nicolini, The History of the Jesuits, Henry G. Bohn, pp. 495, 496, emphasis added. 

Let us remember the oath that every person takes to become a part of the Jesuit Order: 

I should regard myself as a dead body, without will or intelligence, as a little crucifix which is turned about unresistingly at the will of him who holds it as a staff in the hands of an old man, who uses it as he requires it, and as it suits him best. — R. W. Thompson, The Footprints of the Jesuits, Hunt and Eaton, p. 54. 

When a person takes the Jesuit Oath, he is bound to his master until the day that he dies. Edward Smith had become a man without will or intelligence. He would commit any crime the Order wanted him to commit. Edward Smith had been required for martyrdom. On board the Titanic that night, Edward Smith knew his duty. He was under oath. 

The ship had been built for the enemies of the Jesuits. After three days at sea with only one pair of glasses for the bridge, Edward Smith propelled the Titanic full speed ahead, twenty-two knots, on a moonless dark night through a gigantic ice field nearly eighty square miles in area. Edward Smith did this despite at least eight telegrams warning him to be more cautious because he was going too fast. 

Did Edward Smith need one caution? No, he had been traveling those waters for twenty-six years. He knew there were icebergs in that area. But eight cautions did not stop this man who was under the Jesuit oath, and under orders to destroy the Titanic. 

The absurdity of warning veteran Captain Edward Smith repeatedly on Titanic’s tragic night to slow down is nothing short of preposterous. The fact that Smith never listened or heeded the warnings is insane. He had been given orders from his god in the Vatican, and nothing would turn him from his course. 

The encyclopedias paint a very tragic picture of Smith in his last hours. When it came time to give the order to load and lower the lifeboats, Smith wavered and one of his aids had to approach him for the order to be given. Smith’s legendary skills of leadership seem to have left him; he was curiously indecisive and unusually cautious on that fatal night. Are these words to describe a legendary sea captain with 26 years of experience, or are these words to describe a man who was struggling in his mind whether he should do his duty as a sea captain or obey his master who told him to sink the ship? 

John Jacob Astor’s wife got into a life boat and was saved, while John Jacob Astor perished in the waters of the North Atlantic. There were not enough lifeboats and many of them were only half full with only women and children. 

To prevent nearby freighters from responding with help, the distress flares were white when they should have been red. White flares to passing freighters state that everybody was having a party. 

One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the sinking of the Titanic, lies at the door of the Jesuit Order. The unsinkable ship, the floating palace was created to be the tomb for the wealthy, who opposed the Federal Reserve System. By April, 1912, all opposition to the Federal Reserve was eliminated. In December of 1913, the Federal Reserve System came into being in the United States. Eight months later, the Jesuits had sufficient funding through the Federal Reserve bank to begin World War One.

Exploring Real History: Part 3: The Secret Terrorists...The Sinking of the Titanic...WW1...WW2

The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege by Kevin Carson (The article is linked here)

INTRODUCTION

Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation, including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.

The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.

Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randroids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state - i.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism.

But genuine markets have a value for the libertarian left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our enemies. In fact, capitalism - a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor--could not survive in a free market. As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus value - i.e., capitalism - cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market anarchist Benjamin Tucker - from whom right-libertarians selectively borrow - regarded himself as a libertarian socialist.

It is beyond my ability or purpose here to describe a world where a true market system could have developed without such state intervention. A world in which peasants had held onto their land and property was widely distributed, capital was freely available to laborers through mutual banks, productive technology was freely available in every country without patents, and every people was free to develop locally without colonial robbery, is beyond our imagination. But it would have been a world of decentralized, small-scale production for local use, owned and controlled by those who did the work - as different from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery.

THE SUBSIDY OF HISTORY

"Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries.

For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all for labor to be separated from property. Marxians and other radical economists commonly refer to the process as "primitive accumulation." "What the capitalist system demanded was. . . a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labor into capital." That meant expropriating the land, "to which the [peasantry] has the same feudal rights as the lord himself." [Marx, "Chapter 27: The Expropriation," Capital vol. 1]

To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land.

J. L. and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field system as a survival of the free peasant society of Anglo-Saxon times, with landlordism superimposed on it. The gentry saw surviving peasant rights as a hindrance to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural community was "taken to pieces. . . and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government." [The Village Labourer 27-28, 35-36].

When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic lands to the nobility, the latter "drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub tenants and threw their holdings into one." [Marx, "The Expropriation"]. This stolen land, about a fifth of the arable land of England, was the first large-scale expropriation of the peasantry.

Another major theft of peasant land was the "reform" of land law by the seventeenth century Restoration Parliament. The aristocracy abolished feudal tenures and converted their own estate in the land, until then "only a feudal title," into "rights of modern private property." In the process, they abolished the tenure rights of copyholders. Copyholders were de jure tenants under feudal law, but once they paid a negligible quit-rent fixed by custom, the land was theirs to sell or bequeath. In substance copyhold tenure was a manorial equivalent of freehold; but since it derived from custom it was enforceable only in the manor courts. Under the "reform," tenants in copyhold became tenants at-will, who could be evicted or charged whatever rent their lord saw fit [Marx, "The Expropriation..."].

Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons--in which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England [Village Labourer 42]. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields...." [Captain Swing 27].

The ruling classes saw the peasants' right in commons as a source of economic independence from capitalist and landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated "a dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor on the masters' terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up a mischievous race of people'." "[E]very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer "possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings" meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work." [Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 219-220, 358]. Sir Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into "a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others." There would, "perhaps, be more labour, because there will be more compulsion to it." [Marx, "The Expropriation...."].

Marx cited parliamentary "acts of enclosure" as evidence that the commons, far from being the "private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords," actually required "a parliamentary coup detat... for its transformation into private property." ["The Expropriation...."]. The process of primitive accumulation, in all its brutality, was summed up by the same author:

these new freedmen [i.e. former serfs] became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire ["Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation," Capital Vol. 1].

Even then, the working class was not sufficiently powerless. The state had to regulate the movement of labor, serve as a labor exchange on behalf of capitalists, and maintain order. The system of parish regulation of the movement of people, under the poor laws and vagrancy laws, resembled the internal passport system of South Africa, or the reconstruction era Black Codes. It "had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer," Marx wrote, "as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov on the Russian peasantry." ["The Expropriation..."] Adam Smith ventured that there was "scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age... who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlements." [Wealth of Nations 61].

The state maintained work discipline by keeping laborers from voting with their feet. It was hard to persuade parish authorities to grant a man a certificate entitling him to move to another parish to seek work. Workers were forced to stay put and bargain for work in a buyer's market [Smith 60-61].

At first glance this would seem to be inconvenient for parishes with a labor shortage [Smith 60]. Factories were built at sources of water power, generally removed from centers of population. Thousands of workers were needed to be imported from far away. But the state saved the day by setting itself up as a middleman in providing labor-poor parishes with cheap surplus labor from elsewhere, depriving workers of the ability to bargain for better terms. A considerable trade arose in child laborers who were in no position to bargain in any case [the Hammonds, The Town Labourer 1:146].

Relief "was seldom bestowed without the parish claiming the exclusive right of disposing, at their pleasure, of all the children of the person receiving relief," in the words of the Committee on Parish Apprentices, 1815 [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:44, 147]. Even when Poor Law commissioners encouraged migration to labor-poor parishes, they discouraged adult men and "Preference was given to 'widows with large families of children or handicraftsmen... with large families.'" In addition, the availability of cheap labor from the Poor Law commissioners was deliberately used to drive down wages; farmers would discharge their own day laborers and instead apply to the overseer for help [Thompson 223-224].

Although the Combination Laws theoretically applied to masters as well as workmen, in practice they were not enforced against the latter [Smith 61; the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:74]. "A Journeyman Cotton Spinner" - a pamphleteer quoted by E. P. Thompson [pp. 199-202] - described "an abominable combination existing amongst the masters," in which workers who had left their masters because of disagreement over wages were effectively blacklisted. The Combination Laws required suspects to answer interrogations on oath, empowered magistrates to give summary judgment, and allowed summary forfeiture of funds accumulated to aid the families of strikers [Town Labourer 123-127]. And the laws setting maximum rates of pay amounted to a state enforced system of combination for the masters. As Adam Smith put it, "[w]henever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between the masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters." [p. 61].

The working class lifestyle under the factory system, with its new forms of social control, was a radical break with the past. It involved drastic loss of control over their own work. The seventeenth century work calendar was still heavily influenced by medieval custom. Although there were long days in spurts between planting and harvest, intermittent periods of light work and the proliferation of saints days combined to reduce average work-time well below our own. And the pace of work was generally determined by the sun or the biological rhythms of the laborer, who got up after a decent night's sleep, and sat down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who had access to common land, even when he wanted extra income from wage labor, could take work on a casual basis and then return to working for himself. This was an unacceptable degree of independence from a capitalist standpoint.

"In the modern world most people have to adapt themselves to some kind of discipline, and to observe other' people's timetables, ...or work under other people's orders, but we have to remember that the population that was flung into the brutal rhythm of the factory had earned its living in relative freedom, and that the discipline of the early factory was particularly savage.... No economist of the day, in estimating the gains or losses of factory employment, ever allowed for the strain and violence that a man suffered in his feelings when he passed from a life in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key on him, and for fourteen hours he had not even the right to whistle. It was like entering the airless and laughterless life of a prison" [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:33-34].

The factory system could not have been imposed on workers without first depriving them of alternatives, and forcibly denying access to any source of economic independence. No unbroken human being, with a sense of freedom or dignity, would have submitted to factory discipline. Stephen Marglin compared the nineteenth century textile factory, staffed by pauper children bought at the workhouse slave market, to Roman brick and pottery factories which were manned by slaves. In Rome, factory production was exceptional in manufactures dominated by freemen. The factory system, throughout history, has been possible only with a work force deprived of any viable alternative.

The surviving facts... strongly suggest that whether work was organized along factory lines was in Roman times determined, not by technological considerations, but by the relative power of the two producing classes. Freedmen and citizens had sufficient power to maintain a guild organization. Slaves had no power - and ended up in factories ["What Do Bosses Do?"].

The problem with the old "putting out" system, in which cottage workers produced textiles on a contractual basis, was that it only eliminated worker control of the product. The factory system, by eliminating worker control of the production process, had the advantage of discipline and supervision, with workers organized under an overseer.

"the origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist's for the worker's control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman's choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice."

Marglin took Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time. This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then cutting it, etc.).

"without specialization, the capitalist had no essential role to play in the production process. If each producer could himself integrate the component tasks of pin manufacture into a marketable product, he would soon discover that he had no need to deal with the market for pins through the intermediation of the putter-outer. He could sell directly and appropriate to himself the profit that the capitalist derived from mediating between the producer and the market."

This principle is at the center of the history of industrial technology for the last two hundred years. Even given the necessity of factories for some forms of large-scale, capital-intensive manufacturing, there is usually a choice between alternate productive technologies within the factory. Industry has consistently chosen technologies which de-skill workers and shift decision-making upward into the managerial hierarchy. As long ago as 1835, Dr. Andrew Ure (the ideological grandfather of Taylorism and Fordism), argued that the more skilled the workman, "the more self-willed and... the less fit a component of a mechanical system" he became. The solution was to eliminate processes which required "peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand... from the cunning workman" and replace them by a "mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it." [Philosophy of Manufactures, in Thompson 360]. And the principle has been followed throughout the twentieth century. William Lazonick, David Montgomery, David Noble, and Katherine Stone have produced an excellent body of work on this theme. Even though corporate experiments in worker self-management increase morale and productivity, and reduce injuries and absenteeism, beyond the hopes of management, they are usually abandoned out of fear of loss of control.

Christopher Lasch, in his foreword to Noble's America by Design, characterized the process of de-skilling in this way:

"The capitalist, having expropriated the worker's property, gradually expropriated his technical knowledge as well, asserting his own mastery over production....

"The expropriation of the worker's technical knowledge had as a logical consequence the growth of modern management, in which technical knowledge came to be concentrated. As the scientific management movement split up production into its component procedures, reducing the worker to an appendage of the machine, a great expansion of technical and supervisory personnel took place in order to oversee the productive process as a whole" [pp. xi-xii].

The expropriation of the peasantry and imposition of the factory labor system was not accomplished without resistance; the workers knew exactly what was being done to them and what they had lost. During the 1790s, when rhetoric from the Jacobins and Tom Paine were widespread among the radicalized working class, the rulers of "the cradle of liberty" lived in terror that the country would be swept by revolution. The system of police state controls over the population resembled an alien occupation regime. The Hammonds referred to correspondence between north-country magistrates and the Home Office, in which the law was frankly treated "as an instrument not of justice but of repression," and the working classes "appear[ed]... conspicuously as a helot population." [Town Labourer 72]

"... in the light of the Home Office papers, ...none of the personal rights attaching to Englishmen possessed any reality for the working classes. The magistrates and their clerks recognized no limit to their powers over the freedom and the movements of working men. The Vagrancy Laws seemed to supercede the entire charter of an Englishman's liberties. They were used to put into prison any man or woman of the working class who seemed to the magistrate an inconvenient or disturbing character. They offered the easiest and most expeditious way of proceeding against any one who tried to collect money for the families of locked-out workmen, or to disseminate literature that the magistrates thought undesirable"[Ibid. 80].

Peel's "bobbies" - professional law enforcement - replaced the posse comitatus system because the latter was inadequate to control a population of increasingly disaffected workmen. In the time of the Luddite and other disturbances, crown officials warned that "to apply the Watch and Ward Act would be to put arms into the hands of the most powerfully disaffected." At the outset of the wars with France, Pitt ended the practice of quartering the army in alehouses, mixed with the general population. Instead, the manufacturing districts were covered with barracks, as "purely a matter of police." The manufacturing areas "came to resemble a country under military occupation." [Ibid. 91-92]."

"British manufacturing was created by state intervention to shut out foreign goods, give British shipping a monopoly of foreign commerce, and stamp out foreign competition by force. As an example of the latter, British authorities in India destroyed the Bengalese textile industry, makers of the highest quality fabric in the world. Although they had not adopted steam-driven methods of production, there is a real possibility that they would have done so, had India remained politically and economically independent. The once prosperous territory of Bengal is today occupied by Bangladesh and the Calcutta area [Chomsky, World Orders Old and New].

The American, German and Japanese industrial systems were created by the same mercantilist policies, with massive tariffs on industrial goods. "Free trade" was adopted by safely established industrial powers, who used "laissez-faire" as an ideological weapon to prevent potential rivals from following the same path of industrialization. Capitalism has never been established by means of the free market, or even by the primary action of the bourgeoisie. It has always been established by a revolution from above, imposed by a pre-capitalist ruling class. In England, it was the landed aristocracy; in France, Napoleon II's bureaucracy; in Germany, the Junkers; in Japan, the Meiji. In America, the closest approach to a "natural" bourgeois evolution, industrialization was carried out by a mercantilist aristocracy of Federalist shipping magnates and landlords [Harrington, Twilight of Capitalism].

Romantic medievalists like Chesterton and Belloc described the process in the high middle ages by which serfdom had gradually withered away, and the peasants had transformed themselves into de facto freeholders who paid a nominal quit-rent. The feudal class system was disintegrating and being replaced by a much more libertarian and less exploitative one. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the likely outcome would have been "a system of relatively equal small-scale producers, further flattening out the aristocracies and decentralizing the political structures." By 1650 the trend had been reversed, and there was "a reasonably high level of continuity between the families that had been high strata" in 1450 and 1650. Capitalism, far from being "the overthrow of a backward aristocracy by a progressive bourgeoisie," "was brought into existence by a landed aristocracy which transformed itself into a bourgeoisie because the old system was disintegrating." [Historical Capitalism 41-42, 105-106]. This is echoed in part by Arno Mayer [The Persistence of the Old Regime], who argued for continuity between the landed aristocracy and the capitalist ruling class.

The process by which the high medieval civilization of peasant proprietors, craft guilds and free cities was overthrown, was vividly described by Kropotkin [Mutual Aid 225]. Before the invention of gunpowder, the free cities repelled royal armies more often than not, and won their independence from feudal dues. And these cities often made common cause with peasants in their struggles to control the land. The absolutist state and the capitalist revolution it imposed became possible only when artillery could reduce fortified cities with a high degree of efficiency, and the king could make war on his own people. And in the aftermath of this conquest, the Europe of William Morris was left devastated, depopulated, and miserable.

Peter Tosh had a song called "Four Hundred Years." Although the white working class has suffered nothing like the brutality of black slavery, there has nevertheless been a "four hundred years" of oppression for all of us under the system of state capitalism established in the seventeenth century. Ever since the birth of the first states six thousand years ago, political coercion has allowed one ruling class or another to live off other people's labor. But since the seventeenth century the system of power has become increasingly conscious, unified, and global in scale. The current system of transnational state capitalism, without rival since the collapse of the soviet bureaucratic class system, is a direct outgrowth of the seizure of power "four hundred years" ago. Orwell had it backwards. The past is a "boot smashing a human face." Whether the future is more of the same depends on what we do now."

IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY

Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters. It acts first of all to conceal class conflict and exploitation behind a smokescreen of "national unity" or "general welfare." Those who point to the role of the state as guarantor of class privilege are denounced, in theatrical tones of moral outrage, for "class warfare." If anyone is so unpardonably "extremist" as to describe the massive foundation of state intervention and subsidy upon which corporate capitalism rests, he is sure to be rebuked for "Marxist class war rhetoric" (Bob Novak), or "robber baron rhetoric" (Treasury Secretary O'Neill).

The ideological framework of "national unity" is taken to the point that "this country," "society," or "our system of government" is set up as an object of gratitude for "the freedoms we enjoy." Only the most unpatriotic notice that our liberties, far from being granted to us by a generous and benevolent government, were won by past resistance against the state. Charters and bills of rights were not grants from the state, but were forced on the state from below.

If our liberties belong to us by right of birth, as a moral fact of nature, it follows that we owe the state no debt of gratitude for not violating them, any more than we owe our thanks to another individual for refraining from robbing or killing us. Simple logic implies that, rather than being grateful to "the freest country on earth," we should raise hell every time it infringes on our liberty. After all, thats how we got our liberty in the first place. When another individual puts his hand in our pocket to enrich himself at our expense, our natural instinct is to resist. But thanks to patriotism, the ruling class is able to transform their hand in our pocket into "society" or "our country."

The religion of national unity is most pathological in regard to "defense" and foreign policy. The manufacture of foreign crisis and war hysteria has been used since the beginning of history to suppress threats to class rule. The crooked politicians may work for the "special interests" domestically, but when those same politicians engineer a war it is a matter of loyalty to "our country."

The Chairman of the JCS, in discussing the "defense" posture, will refer with a straight face to "national security threats" faced by the U. S., and describe the armed forces of some official enemy like China as far beyond "legitimate defensive requirements." The quickest way to put oneself beyond the pale is to point out that all these "threats" involve what some country on the other side of the world is doing within a hundred miles of its own border. Another offense against fatherland worship is to judge the actions of the United States, in its global operations to keep the Third World safe for ITT and United Fruit Company, by the same standard of "legitimate defensive requirements" applied to China.

In the official ideology, America's wars by definition are always fought "for our liberties," to "defend our country," or in the smarmy world of Maudlin Albright, a selfless desire to promote "peace and freedom" in the world. To suggest that the real defenders of our liberties took up arms against the government, or that the national security state is a greater threat to our liberties than any foreign enemy we have ever faced, is unforgiveable. Above all, good Americans don't notice all those military advisers teaching death squads how to hack off the faces of union organizers and leave them in ditches, or to properly use pliers on a dissident's testicles. War crimes are only committed by defeated powers. (But as the Nazis learned in 1945, unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the new hegemonic power.)

After a century and a half of patriotic indoctrination by the statist education system, Americans have thoroughly internalized the "little red schoolhouse" version of American history. This authoritarian piety is so diametrically opposed to the beliefs of those who took up arms in the Revolution that the citizenry has largely forgotten what it means to be American. In fact, the authentic principles of Americanism have been stood on their head. Two hundred years ago, standing armies were feared as a threat to liberty and a breeding ground for authoritarian personalities; conscription was associated with the tyranny of Cromwell; wage labor was thought to be inconsistent with the independent spirit of a free citizen. Today, two hundred years later, Americans have been so Prussianized by sixty years of a garrison state and "wars" against one internal enemy or another, that they are conditioned to genuflect at the sight of a uniform. Draft dodgers are equivalent to child molesters. Most people work for some centralized corporate or state bureaucracy, where as a matter of course they are expected to obey orders from superiors, work under constant surveillance, and even piss in a cup on command.

During wartime, it becomes unpatriotic to criticize or question the government and dissent is identified with disloyalty. Absolute faith and obedience to authority is a litmus test of "Americanism." Foreign war is a very useful tool for manipulating the popular mind and keeping the domestic population under control. War is the easiest way to shift vast, unaccountable new powers to the State. People are most uncritically obedient at the very time they need to be most vigilant.

The greatest irony is that, in a country founded by revolution, "Americanism" is defined as respecting authority and resisting "subversion." The Revolution was a revolution indeed, in which the domestic political institutions of the colonies were forcibly overthrown. It was, in many times and places, a civil war between classes. But as Voltairine de Cleyre wrote a century ago in "Anarchism and American Traditions," the version in the history books is a patriotic conflict between our "Founding Fathers" and a foreign enemy. Those who can still quote Jefferson on the right of revolution are relegated to the "extremist" fringe, to be rounded up in the next war hysteria or red scare.

This ideological construct of a unified "national interest" includes the fiction of a "neutral" set of laws, which conceals the exploitative nature of the system of power we live under. Under corporate capitalism the relationships of exploitation are mediated by the political system to an extent unknown under previous class systems. Under chattel slavery and feudalism, exploitation was concrete and personalized in the producer's relationship with his master. The slave and peasant knew exactly who was screwing them. The modern worker, on the other hand, feels a painful pounding sensation, but has only a vague idea where it is coming from.

Besides its function of masking the ruling class interests behind a facade of "general welfare," ideological hegemony also manufactures divisions between the ruled. Through campaigns against "welfare cheats" and "deadbeats," and demands to "get tough on crime," the ruling class is able to channel the hostility of the middle and working classes against the underclass.

Especially nauseating is the phenomenon of "billionaire populism." Calls for bankruptcy and welfare "reform," and for wars on crime, are dressed up in pseudo-populist rhetoric, identifying the underclass as the chief parasites who feed off the producers' labor. In their "aw, shucks" symbolic universe, you'd think America was a Readers Digest/Norman Rockwell world with nothing but hard-working small businessmen and family farmers, on the one hand, and welfare cheats, deadbeats, union bosses and bureaucrats on the other. From listening to them, you'd never suspect that multibillionaires or global corporations even exist, let alone that they might stand to benefit from such "populism."

In the real world, corporations are the biggest clients of the welfare state, the biggest bankruptcies are corporate chapter eleven filings, and the worst crimes are committed in corporate suites rather than on the streets. The real robbery of the average producer consists of profit and usury, extorted only with the help of the state - the real "big government" on our backs. But as long as the working class and the underclass are busy fighting each other, they won't notice who is really robbing them.

As Stephen Biko said, "The oppressors most powerful weapon is the mind of the oppressed."

THE MONEY MONOPOLY

In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. Under capitalism, access to capital is restricted by the money monopoly, by which the state or banking system is given a monopoly on the medium of exchange, and alternative media of exchange are prohibited. The money monopoly also includes entry barriers against cooperative banks and prohibitions against private issuance of banknotes, by which access to finance capital is restricted and interest rates are kept artificially high.

Just in passing, we might mention the monumental hypocricy of the regulation of credit unions in the United States, which require that their membership must share some common bond, like working for the same employer. Imagine the outrage if IGA and Safeway lobbied for a national law to prohibit grocery co-ops unless the members all worked for the same company! One of the most notable supporters of these laws is Phil Gramm, that renowned "free marketeer" and economics professor - and foremost among the banking industry's whores in Congress.

Individualist and mutualist anarchists like William Greene [Mutual Banking], Benjamin Tucker [Instead of a Book], and J. B. Robertson [The Economics of Liberty] viewed the money monopoly as central to the capitalist system of privilege. In a genuinely free banking market, any group of individuals could form a mutual bank and issue monetized credit in the form of bank notes against any form of collateral they chose, with acceptance of these notes as tender being a condition of membership. Greene speculated that a mutual bank might choose to honor not only marketable property as collateral, but the "pledging ... [of] future production." [p. 73]. The result would be a reduction in interest rates, through competition, to the cost of administrative overhead - less than one percent.

Abundant cheap credit would drastically alter the balance of power between capital and labor, and returns on labor would replace returns on capital as the dominant form of economic activity. According to Robinson,

"Upon the monopoly rate of interest for money that is... forced upon us by law, is based the whole system of interest upon capital, that permeates all modern business.

With free banking, interest upon bonds of all kinds and dividends upon stock would fall to the minimum bank interest charge. The so-called rent of houses... would fall to the cost of maintenance and replacement.

All that part of the product which is now taken by interest would belong to the producer. Capital, however... defined, would practically cease to exist as an income producing fund, for the simple reason that if money, wherewith to buy capital, could be obtained for one-half of one per cent, capital itself could command no higher price" [pp. 80-81].

And the result would be a drastically improved bargaining position for tenants and workers against the owners of land and capital. According to Gary Elkin, Tucker's free market anarchism carried certain inherent libertarian socialist implications:

It's important to note that because of Tucker's proposal to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his so-called Individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers' control but would in fact promote it. For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to (1) demand and get workplace democracy, and (2) pool their credit buy and own companies collectively.

The banking monopoly was not only the "lynchpin of capitalism," but also the seed from which the landlord's monopoly grew. Without a money monopoly, the price of land would be much lower, and promote "the process of reducing rents toward zero." [Gary Elkin, "Benjamin Tucker - Anarchist or Capitalist"].

Given the worker's improved bargaining position, "capitalists' ability to extract surplus value from the labor of employees would be eliminated or at least greatly reduced." [Gary Elkin, Mutual Banking]. As compensation for labor approached value-added, returns on capital were driven down by market competition, and the value of corporate stock consequently plummeted, the worker would become a de facto co-owner of his workplace, even if the company remained nominally stockholder-owned.

Near-zero interest rates would increase the independence of labor in all sorts of interesting ways. For one thing, anyone with a twenty-year mortgage at 8% now could, in the absence of usury, pay it off in ten years. Most people in their 30S would have their houses paid off. Between this and the nonexistence of high-interest credit card debt, two of the greatest sources of anxiety to keep one's job at any cost would disappear. In addition, many workers would have large savings ("go to hell money"). Significant numbers would retire in their forties or fifties, cut back to part-time, or start businesses; with jobs competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would be revolutionary.

Our hypothetical world of free credit in many ways resembles the situation in colonial societies. E. G. Wakefield, in View of the Art of Colonization, wrote of the unacceptably weak position of the employing class when self-employment with one's own property was readily available. In colonies, there was a tight labor market and poor labor discipline because of the abundance of cheap land. "Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-labourer remain indecently low. The wage-labourer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist."

Where land is cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourers' share of the product, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.

This environment also prevented the concentration of wealth, as Wakefield commented: "Few, even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth." As a result, colonial elites petitioned the mother country for imported labor and for restrictions on land for settlement. According to Wakefield's disciple Herman Merivale, there was an "urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers - for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them." [Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism; Marx, Chapter 33: "The New Theory of Colonialism," in Capital Vol. 1].

In addition to all this, central banking systems perform additional service to the interests of capital. First of all, the chief requirement of finance capitalists is to avoid inflation, in order to allow predictable returns on investment. This is ostensibly the primary purpose of the Federal Reserve and other central banks. But at least as important is the role of the central banks in promoting what they consider a "natural" level of unemployment - until the 1990s around six per cent. The reason is that when unemployment goes much below this figure, labor becomes increasingly uppity and presses for better pay and working conditions and more autonomy. Workers are willing to take a lot less crap off the boss when they know they can find a job at least as good the next day. On the other hand, nothing is so effective in "getting your mind right" as the knowledge that people are lined up to take your job.

The Clinton "prosperity" is a seeming exception to this principle. As unemployment threatened to drop below the four per cent mark, some members of the Federal Reserve agitated to raise interest rates and take off the "inflationary" pressure by throwing a few million workers on the street. But as Greenspan [Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan] testified before the Senate Banking Committee, the situation was unique. Given the degree of job insecurity in the high-tech economy, there was "[a]typical restraint on compensation increases." In 1996, even with a tight labor market, 46% of workers at large firms were fearful of layoffs - compared to only 25% in 1991, when unemployment was much higher.

The reluctance of workers to leave their jobs to seek other employment as the labor market tightened has provided further evidence of such concern, as has the tendency toward longer labor union contracts. For many decades, contracts rarely exceeded three years. Today, one can point to five- and six-year contracts - contracts that are commonly characterized by an emphasis on job security and that involve only modest wage increases. The low level of work stoppages of recent years also attests to concern about job security.

Thus the willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented. For the bosses, the high-tech economy is the next best thing to high unemployment for keeping our minds right. "Fighting inflation" translates operationally to increasing job insecurity and making workers less likely to strike or to look for new jobs.

PATENTS

The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it. Right-libertarian Murray Rothbard considered patents a fundamental violation of free market principles.

The man who has not bought a machine and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasions of property rights on the market. [Man, Economy, and State vol. 2 p. 655]

Patents make an astronomical price difference. Until the early 1970s, for example, Italy did not recognize drug patents. As a result, Roche Products charged the British national health a price over 40 times greater for patented components of Librium and Valium than charged by competitors in Italy [Raghavan, Recolonization p. 124].

Patents suppress innovation as much as they encourage it. Chakravarthi Raghavan pointed out that research scientists who actually do the work of inventing are required to sign over patent rights as a condition of employment, while patents and industrial security programs prevent sharing of information, and suppress competition in further improvement of patented inventions. [op. cit. p. 118] Rothbard likewise argued that patents eliminate "the competitive spur for further research" because incremental innovation based on others' patents is prohibited, and because the holder can "rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent," "with no fear of a competitor improving his invention." And they hamper technical progress because "mechanical inventions are discoveries of natural law rather than individual creations, and hence similar independent inventions occur all the time. The simultaneity of inventions is a familiar historical fact." [op. cit. pp. 655, 658-659].

The intellectual property regime under the Uruguay Round of GATT goes far beyond traditional patent law in suppressing innovation. One benefit of traditional patent law, at least, was that it required an invention under patent to be published. Under U.S. pressure, however, "trade secrets" were included in GATT. As a result, governments will be required to help suppress information not formally protected by patents [Raghavan, op. cit. p. 122].

And patents are not necessary as an incentive to innovate. According to Rothbard, invention is rewarded by the competitive advantage accruing to the first developer of an idea. This is borne out by F. M. Scherer's testimony before the FTC in 1995 [Hearings on Global and Innovation-Based Competition]. Scherer spoke of a survey of 91 companies in which only seven "accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments." Most of them described patents as "the least important of considerations." Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be "the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales." In another study, Scherer found no negative effect on R & D spending as a result of compulsory licensing of patents. A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.

The one exception was drugs, in which 60% supposedly would not have been invented. I suspect disingenuousness on the part of the respondants, however. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices.

The injustice of patent monopolies is exacerbated by government funding of research and innovation, with private industry reaping monopoly profits from technology it didn't spend a penny to develop. In 1999, extending the research and experimentation tax credit was, along with extensions of a number of other corporate tax preferences, considered the most urgent business of the Congressional leadership. Hastert, when asked if any elements of the tax bill were essential, said: "I think the [tax preference] extenders are something we're going to have to work on." Ways and Means Chair Bill Archer added, "before the year is out... we will do the extenders in a very stripped down bill that doesn't include anything else." A five-year extension of the research and experimentation credit (retroactive to 1 July 1999) was expected to cost $13.1 billion. (That credit makes the effective tax rate on R & D spending less than zero.) [Citizens for Tax Justice, GOP Leaders Distill Essence of Tax Plan].

The Government Patent Policy Act of 1980, with 1984 and 1986 amendments, allowed private industry to keep patents on products developed with government R & D money - and then to charge ten, twenty, or forty times the cost of production. For example, AZT was developed with government money and in the public domain since 1964. The patent was given away to Burroughs Wellcome Corp. [Chris Lewis, "Public Assets, Private Profits"].

As if the deck were not sufficiently stacked already, the pharmaceutical companies in 1999 actually lobbied Congress to extend certain patents by two years by a special act of private law [Benjamin Grove, "Gibbons backs drug-monopoly bill"].

Patents have been used throughout the twentieth century "to circumvent antitrutst laws," according to David Noble. They were "bought up in large numbers to suppress competition," which also resulted in "the suppression of invention itself." [America by Design, pp. 84-109]. Edwin Prindle, a corporate patent lawyer, wrote in 1906:

Patents are the best and most effective means of controlling competition. They occasionally give absolute command of the market, enabling their owner to name the price without regard to the cost of production.... Patents are the only legal form of absolute monopoly [America by Design p. 90].

Patents played a key role in the formation of the electrical appliance, communications, and chemical industries. G. E. and Westinghouse expanded to dominate the electrical manufacturing market at the turn of the century largely through patent control. In 1906 they curtailed the patent litigation between them by pooling their patents. AT&T also expanded "primarily through strategies of patent monopoly." The American chemical industry was marginal until 1917, when Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer seized German patents and distributed them among the major American chemical companies. DuPont got licenses on 300 of the 735 patents [America by Design pp. 10, 16].

Patents are also being used on a global scale to lock the transnational corporations into a permanent monopoly of productive technology. The single most totalitarian provision of the Uruguay Round is probably its "intellectual property" provisions. GATT has extended both the scope and duration of patents far beyond anything ever envisioned in original patent law. In England, patents were originally for fourteen years - the time needed to train two journeymen in succession (and by analogy, the time necessary to go into production and reap the initial profit for originality). By that standard, given the shorter training times required today, and the shorter lifespan of technology, the period of monopoly should be shorter. Instead, the U.S. seeks to extend them to fifty years [Raghavan, Recolonization pp. 119-120]. According to Martin Khor Kok Peng, the U.S. is by far the most absolutist of the participants in the Uruguay Round. Unlike the European Community, and for biological processes for animal and plant protection [The Uruguay Round and Third World Sovereignty p. 28].

The provisions for biotech are really a way of increasing trade barriers, and forcing consumers to subsidize the TNCs engaged in agribusiness. The U.S. seeks to apply patents to genetically-modified organisms, effectively pirating the work of generations of Third World breeders by isolating beneficial genes in traditonal varieties and incorporating them in new GMOs - and maybe even enforcing patent rights against the traditional variety which was the source of the genetic material. For example Monsanto has attempted to use the presence of their DNA in a crop as prima facie evidence of pirating - when it is much more likely that their variety cross-pollinated and contaminated the farmer's crop against his will. The Pinkerton agency, by the way, plays a leading role in investigating such charges - that's right, the same folks who have been breaking strikes and kicking organizers down stairs for the past century. Even jack-booted thugs have to diversify to make it in the global economy.

The developed world has pushed particularly hard to protect industries relying on or producing "generic technologies," and to restrict diffusion of "dual use" technologies. The U. S. - Japanese trade agreement on semi-conductors, for example, is a "cartel-like, 'managed trade' agreement." So much for "free trade." [Dieter Ernst, "Technology, Economic Security and Latecomer Idustrialization," in Raghavan Pp. 39-40].

Patent law traditionally required a holder to work the invention in a country in order to receive patent protection. U.K. law allowed compulsory licensing after three years if an invention was not being worked, or being worked fully, and demand was being met "to a substantial extent" by importation; or where the export market was not being supplied because of the patentee's refusal to grant licenses on reasonable terms [Raghavan pp. 120, 138].

The central motivation in the GATT intellectual property regime, however, is to permanently lock in the collective monopoly of advanced technology by TNCs, and prevent independent competition from ever arising in the Third World. It would, as Martin Khor Kok Peng writes, "effectively prevent the diffusion of technology to the Third World, and would tremendously increase monopoly royalties of the TNCs whilst curbing the potential development of Third World technology." Only one percent of patents worldwide are owned in the Third World. Of patents granted in the 1970s by Third World countries, 84% were foreign-owned. But fewer than 5% of foreign-owned patents were actually used in production. As we saw before, the purpose of owning a patent is not necessarily to use it, but to prevent anyone else from using it [op. cit. pp. 29-30].

Raghavan summed up nicely the effect on the Third World:

"Given the vast outlays in R and D and investments, as well as the short life cycle of some of these products, the leading Industrial Nations are trying to prevent emergence of competition by controlling... the flows of technology to others. The Uruguay round is being sought to be used to create export monopolies for the products of Industrial Nations, and block or slow down the rise of competitive rivals, particularly in the newly industrializing Third World countries. At the same time the technologies of senescent industries of the north are sought to be exported to the South under conditions of assured rentier income" [op. cit. p. 96].

Corporate propagandists piously denounce anti-globalists as enemies of the Third World, seeking to use trade barriers to maintain an affluent Western lifestyle at the expense of the poor nations. The above measures - trade barriers - to permanently suppress Third World technology and keep the South as a big sweatshop, give the lie to this "humanitarian" concern. This is not a case of differing opinions, or of sincerely mistaken understanding of the facts. Setting aside false subtleties, what we see here is pure evil at work - Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever." If any architects of this policy believe it to be for general human well-being, it only shows the capacity of ideology to justify the oppressor to himself and enable him to sleep at night.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to "externalize its costs" on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses. Chomsky described this state capitalist underwriting of shipping costs quite accurately:

One well-known fact about trade is that it's highly subsidized with huge market-distorting factors.... The most obvious is that every form of transport is highly subsidized.... Since trade naturally requires transport, the costs of transport enter into the calculation of the efficiency of trade. But there are huge subsidies to reduce the costs of transport, through manipulation of energy costs and all sorts of market- distorting functions ["How Free is the Free Market?"].

Every wave of concentration of capital has followed a publicly subsidized infrastructure system of some sort. The national railroad system, built largely on free or below-cost land donated by the government, was followed by concentration in heavy industry, petrochemicals, and finance. The next major infrastructure projects were the national highway system, starting with the system of designated national highways in the 1920s and culminating with Eisenhower's interstate system; and the civil aviation system, built almost entirely with federal money. The result was massive concentration in retail, agriculture, and food processing.

The third such project was the infrastructure of the worldwide web, originally built by the Pentagon. It permits, for the first time, direction of global operations in real time from a single corporate headquarters, and is accelerating the concentration of capital on a global scale. To quote Chomsky again, "The telecommunications revolution... is... another state component of the international economy that didn't develop through private capital, but through the public paying to destroy themselves...." [Class Warfare p. 40].

The centralized corporate economy depends for its existence on a shipping price system which is artificially distorted by government intervention. To fully grasp how dependent the corporate economy is on socializing transportation and communications costs, imagine what would happen if truck and aircraft fuel were taxed enough to pay the full cost of maintenance and new building costs on highways and airports; and if fossil fuels depletion allowances were removed. The result would be a massive increase in shipping costs. Does anyone seriously believe that Wal-Mart could continue to undersell local retailers, or corporate agribusiness could destroy the family farm?

Intellectually honest right libertarians freely admit as much. For example, Tiber Machan wrote in The Freeman that

Some people will say that stringent protection of rights [against eminent domain] would lead to small airports, at best, and many constraints on construction. Of course - but what's so wrong with that? Perhaps the worst thing about modern industrial life has been the power of political authorities to grant special privileges to some enterprises to violate the rights of third parties whose permission would be too expensive to obtain. The need to obtain that permission would indeed seriously impede what most environmentalists see as rampant - indeed reckless - industrialization. The system of private property rights - in which... all... kinds of... human activity must be conducted within one's own realm except where cooperation from others has been gained voluntarily--is the greatest moderator of human aspirations.... In short, people may reach goals they aren't able to reach with their own resources only by convincing others, through arguments and fair exchanges, to cooperate ["On Airports and Individual Rights"].

The logjams and bottlenecks in the transportation system are an inevitable result of subsidies. Those who debate the reason for planes stacked up at O'Hare airport, or decry the fact that highways and bridges are deteriorating several times faster than repairs are being budgeted, need only read an economics 101 text. Market prices are signals that relate supply to demand. When subsidies distort these signals, the consumer does not perceive the real cost of producing the goods he consumes. The "feedback loop" is broken, and demands on the system overwhelm it beyond its ability to respond. When people don't have to pay the real cost of something they consume, they aren't very careful about only using what they need.

It is interesting that every major antitrust action in this century has involved either some basic energy resource, or some form of infrastructure, on which the overall economy depends. Standard Oil, AT&T, and Microsoft were all cases in which monopoly price gouging was a danger to the economy as a whole. This brings to mind Engels' observation that advanced capitalism would reach a stage where the state - "the official representative of capitalist society"--would have to convert "the great institutions for intercourse and communication" into state property. Engels did not foresee the use of antitrust actions to achieve the same end [Anti-Duhring].

MILITARY KEYNESIANISM

The leading sectors of the economy, including cybernetics, communications, and military industry, have their sales and profits virtually guaranteed by the state. The entire manufacturing sector, as a whole, was permanently expanded beyond recognition by an infusion of federal money during World War II. In 1939 the entire manufacturing plant of the U.S. was valued at $40 billion. By 1945, another $26 billion worth of plant and equipment had been built, "two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds." The top 250 corporations in 1939 owned 65% of plant and equipment, but during the war operated 79% of all new facilities built with government funds [Mills, The Power Elite p. 101].

Machine tools were vastly expanded by the war. In 1940, 23% of machine tools in use were less than 10 years old. By 1945, the figure had grown to 62%. The industry contracted rapidly after 1945, and would probably have gone into a depression, had it not returned to wartime levels of output during Korea and remained that way throughout the Cold War. The R & D complex, likewise, was a creation of the war. Between 1939 and 1945, the share of AT&T research expenditures made up of government contracts expanded from 1% to 83%. Over 90% of the patents resulting from government-funded wartime research were given away to industry. The modern electronics industry was largely a product of World War II and Cold War spending (e.g., miniaturization of circuits for bomb proximity fuses, high capacity computers for command and control, etc.) [Noble, Forces of Production pp. 8-16].

The jumbo jet industry would never have come about without continuous Cold War levels of military spending. The machine tools needed for producing large aircraft were so complex and expensive that no "small peacetime orders" would have provided a sufficient production run to pay for them. Without large military orders, they would simply not have existed. The aircraft industry quickly spiraled into red ink after 1945, and was near bankruptcy at the beginning of the 1948 war scare, after which Truman restored it to life with massive spending. By 1964, 90% of aerospace R & D was funded by the government, with massive spillover into the electronics, machine tool, and other industries [Noble, Forces of Production pp. 6-7; Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948].

OTHER SUBSIDIES

Infrastructure and military spending are not the only examples of the process by which cost and risk are socialized, and profit is privatized - or, as Rothbard put it, by which "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs." ["Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"]. Some of these government assumptions of risk and cost are ad hoc and targeted toward specific industries.

Among the greatest beneficiaries of such underwriting are electrical utilities. Close to 100% of all research and development for nuclear power is either performed by the government itself, in its military reactor program, or by lump-sum R & D grants; the government waives use-charges for nuclear fuels, subsidizes uranium production, provides access to government land below market price (and builds hundreds of miles of access roads at taxpayer expense), enriches uranium, and disposes of waste at sweetheart prices. The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 limited the liability of the nuclear power industry, and assumed government liability above that level [Adams and Brock pp. 279-281]. A Westinghouse official admitted in 1953,

If you were to inquire whether Westinghouse might consider putting up its own money.., we would have to say "No." The cost of the plant would be a question mark until after we built it and, by that sole means, found out the answer. We would not be sure of successful plant operation until after we had done all the work and operated successfully.... This is still a situation of pyramiding uncertainties.... There is a distinction between risk-taking and recklessness [Ibid. pp. 278-279].

So much for profit as a reward for the entrepreneur's risk. These "entrepreneurs" make their profits in the same way as a seventeenth-century courtier, by obtaining the favor of the king. To quote Chomsky,

"the sectors of the economy that remain competitive are those that feed from the public trough.... The glories of Free Enterprise provide a useful weapon against government policies that might benefit the general population.... But the rich and powerful... have long appreciated the need to protect themselves from the destructive forces of free-market capitalism, which may provide suitable themes for rousing oratory, but only so long as the public handout and the regulatory and protectionist apparatus are secure, and state power is on call when needed" (Chomsky, Deterring Democracy p. 144].

Dwayne Andreas, the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, admitted that "[t]here is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians." [Don Carney, "Dwayne's World"].

Big business also enjoys financial support through the tax code. It is likely that most of the Fortune 500 would go bankrupt without corporate welfare. Direct federal tax breaks to business in 1996 were close to $350 billion [Based on my crunching on numbers in Zepezauer and Naiman, Take the Rich Off Welfare]. This figure, for federal corporate welfare alone, is over two-thirds of annual corporate profits for 1996 ($460 billion) [Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996].

Estimates of state and local tax breaks is fairly impressionistic, since they vary not only with each critic's subjective definition of "corporate welfare," but involve the tax codes of fifty states and the public records of thousands of municipalities. Besides money pimps in the state and local governments are embarassed by the sweet deals they give their corporate johns. In my own state of Arkansas, the incorruptible Baptist preacher who serves as governor opposed a bill to require quarterly public reports from the Department of Economic Development on its special tax breaks to businesses. "[K]eeping incentive records from public scrutiny is important in attracting business," and releasing "proprietary information" could have a "chilling effect." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 3 Feb. 2001]. But state and local corporate welfare could easily amount to a figure comparable to federal.

Taken as a whole, direct tax breaks to business at all levels of government are probably on the same order of magnitude as corporate profits. And this understates the effect of corporate welfare, since it disproportionately goes to a handful of giant firms in each industry. For example, accelerated depreciation favors expansion by existing firms. New firms find it of little benefit, since they are likely to lose money their first few years. An established firm, however, can run a loss in a new venture and charge the accelerated depreciation against its profits on old facilities [Baratz, "Corporate Giants and the Power Structure"].

The most outrageous of these tax expenditures is the subsidy to the actual financial transactions by which capital is concentrated. The interest deduction on corporate debt, most of which was run up on leveraged buyouts and acquisitions, costs the treasury over $200 billion a year [Zepezauer p. 122-123]. Without this deduction, the wave of mergers in the 1980s, or the megamergers of the 1990s, could never have taken place. On top of everything else, this acts as a massive direct subsidy to banking, increasing the power of finance capital in the corporate economy to a level greater than it has been since the Age of Morgan.

A closely related subsidy is the exemption from capital gains of securities transactions involved in corporate mergers (i.e. "stock swaps") - even though premiums are usually paid well over the market value of the stock [Green p. 11]. The 1986 tax reform included a provision which prevented corporations from deducting fees for investment 'banks and advisers involved in leveraged buyouts. The 1996 minimum wage increase repealed this provision, with one exception: interest deductions were removed for employee buyouts [Judis, "Bare Minimum"].

Right libertarians like Rothbard object to classifying tax expenditures as subsidies. It presumes that tax money rightfully belongs to the government, when in fact the government is only letting them keep what is rightfully theirs. The tax code is indeed unfair, but the solution is to eliminate the taxes for everyone, not to level the code up [Rothbard, Power and Market p. 104]. This is a very shaky argument. Supporters of tax code reform in the 1980s insisted that the sole legitimate purpose of taxation was to raise revenue, not to provide carrots and sticks for social engineering purposes. And, semantic quibbling aside, the current tax system would be exactly the same if we started out with zero tax rates and then imposed a punitive tax only on those not engaged in favored activities. Either way, the uneven tax policy gives a competitive advantage to privileged industries.

POLITICAL REPRESSION

In times of unusual popular consciousness and mobilization, when the capitalist system faces grave political threats, the state resorts to repression until the danger is past. The major such waves in this country - the Haymarket reaction, and the red scares after the world wars - are recounted by Goldstein [Political Repression in Modern America]. But the wave of repression which began in the 1970s, though less intense, has been permanently institutionalized to a unique extent.

Until the late 1960s, elite perspective was governed by the New Deal social contract. The corporate state would buy stability and popular acquiescence in imperialist exploitation abroad by guaranteeing a level of prosperity and security to the middle class. In return for higher wages, unions would enforce management control of the workplace. But starting during the Vietnam era, the elite's thinking underwent a profound change.

They concluded from the 1960s experience that the social contract had failed. In response to the antiwar protests and race riots, LBJ and Nixon began to create an institutional framework for martial law, to make sure that any such disorder in the future could be dealt with differently. Johnson's operation GARDEN PLOT involved domestic surveillance by the military, contingency plans for military cooperation with local police in suppressing disorder in all fifty states, plans for mass preventive detention, and joint exercises of police and the regular military [Morales, U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning]. Governor Reagan and his National Guard chief Louis Giuffrida were enthusiastic supporters of GARDEN PLOT exercises in California. Reagan was also a pioneer in creating quasi-military SWAT teams, which now exist in every major town.

The wave of wildcat strikes in the early 1970s showed that organized labor could no longer keep its part of the bargain, and that the social contract should be reasessed. At the same time, the business press was flooded with articles on the impending "capital shortage," and calls for shifting resources from consumption to capital accumulation. They predicted frankly that a cap on real wages would be hard to force on the public in the existing political environment [Boyte, Backyard Revolution pp. 13-16]. This sentiment was expressed by Huntington et al. in The Crisis of Democracy (a paper for the Trilateral Institution - a good proxy for elite thinking); they argued that the system was collapsing from demand overload, because of an excess of democracy.

Corporations embraced the full range of union-busting posibilities in Taft-Hartley, risking only token fines from the NLRB. They drastically increased management resources devoted to workplace surveillance and control, a necessity because of discontent from stagnant wages and mounting workloads [Fat and Mean]. Wages as a percentage of value added have declined drastically since the 1970s; all increases in labor productivity have been channelled into profit and investment, rather than wages. A new Cold War military buildup further transferred public resources to industry.

A series of events like the fall of Saigon, the nonaligned movement, and the New International Economic Order were taken as signs that the transnational corporate empire was losing control. Reagan's escalating intervention in Central America was a partial response to this perception. But more importantly the Uruguay Round of GATT snatched total victory from the jaws of defeat; it ended all barriers to TNCs buying up entire economies, locked the west into monopoly control of modern technology, and created a world government on behalf of global corporations.

In the meantime the U.S. was, in the words of Richard K. Moore, importing techniques of social control from the imperial periphery to the core area. With the help of the Drug War and the National Security State, the apparatus of repression continued to grow. The Drug War has turned the Fourth Amendment into toilet paper; civil forfeiture, with the aid of jailhouse snitches, gives police the power to steal property without ever filing charges - a lucrative source of funds for helicopters and kevlar vests. SWAT teams have led to the militarization of local police forces, and cross-training with the military has led many urban police departments to view the local population as an occupied enemy [Weber, Warrior Cops].

Reagan's crony Giuffrida resurfaced as head of FEMA, where he worked with Oliver North to fine-tune GARDEN PLOT. North, as the NSC liaison with FEMA from 1982-84, developed a plan "to suspend the constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." [Chardy, "Reagan Aides and the 'Secret' Government"]. GARDEN PLOT, interestingly, was implemented during the Rodney King Riots and in recent anti-globalization protests. Delta Force provided intelligence and advice in those places and at Waco [Rosenberg, The Empire Strikes Back; Cockburn, The Jackboot State].

Another innnovation is to turn everyone we deal with into a police agent. Banks routinely report "suspicious" movements of cash; under "know your customer" programs, retailers report purchases of items which can conceivably be used in combination to manufacture drugs; libraries come under pressure to report on readers of "subversive" material; DARE programs turn kids into police informers.

Computer technology has increased the potential for surveillance to Orwellian levels. Pentium III processors were revealed to embed identity codes in every document written on them. Police forces are experimenting with combinations of public cameras, digital face-recognition technology, and databases of digital photos. Image Data LLC, a company in the process of buying digital drivers licence photos from all fifty states, was exposed as a front for the Secret Service.

CONCLUSION

It is almost too easy to bring back Bob Novak and Secretary O'Neill for another kick--but I can't resist. "Marxist class warfare?" "Robber baron rhetoric?" Well, the pages above recount the "class warfare" waged by the robber barons themselves. If their kind tend to squeal like pigs when we talk about class, it's because they've been stuck. But all the squealing in the world won't change the facts.

But what are the implications of the above facts for our movement? It is commonly acknowledged that the manorial economy was founded on force. Although you will never see the issue addressed by Milton Friedman, intellectually honest right libertarians like Rothbard acknowledge the role of the state in creating European feudalism and Amerian slavery. Rothbard, drawing the obvious conclusion from this fact, acknowledged the right of peasants or freed slaves to take over their "forty acres and a mule" without compensation to the landlord.

But we have seen that industrial capitalism, to the same extent as manorialism or slavery, was founded on force. Like its predecessors, capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer's market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market. To quote Benjamin Tucker again, landlords and capitalists cannot extract surplus value from labor without the help of the state. The modern worker, like the slave or the serf, is the victim of ongoing robbery; he works in an enterprise built from past stolen labor. By the same principles that Rothbard recognized in the agrarian realm, the modern worker is justified in taking direct control of production, and keeping the entire product of his labor.

In a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else's labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery.

All these forms of slavery together probably amount to half our working hours. If we kept the full value of our labor, we could probably maintain current levels of consumption with a work week of twenty hours. As Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated to produce a dollar he never received.

Our survey also casts doubt on the position of "anarchist" social democrat Noam Chomsky, who is notorious for his distinction between "visions" and "goals." His long-term vision is a decentralized society of self-governing communities and workplaces, loosely federated together - the traditional anarchist vision. His immediate goal, however, is to strengthen the regulatory state in order to break up "private concentrations of power," before anarchism can be achieved. But if, as we have seen, capitalism is dependent on the state to guarantee it survival, it follows that it is sufficient to eliminate the statist props to capitalism. In a letter of 4 September 1867, Engels aptly summed up the difference between anarchists and state socialists: "They say 'abolish the state and capital will go to the devil.' We propose the reverse." Exactly.

 

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Big Business and the Rise of American Statism

Center for a Stateless Society » Big Business and the Rise of American Statism

This essay constitutes a part of “revisionism” in history, largely domestic history. The term revisionism originally came into use referring to historiography after World War I. A group of young historians, eager to uncover the realities behind the blanket of myths surrounding the origins of this crucial conflict, discovered as a result of their investigations that Germany and Austria were not, contrary to popular mythology, solely responsible for the outbreak of that crisis. Thus, reevaluating the history of the immediate past, these historians came to see the Treaty of Versailles, forced upon the losers of that war, as monstrously unjust, and maintained that the rigid enforcement of its terms would lead to further world conflict. They came to advocate a radical overhauling and revision of the Versailles Treaty — whence the term “revisionism.”

Since then, revisionism has been applied to virtually any renegade school of thought in historiography that took issue with the “official government line” on important events in history. As it is used today, revisionism is a general concept subsuming a wide variety of schools or integrating conceptions of man’s past. For at the time when any set of events occurs, in any context, there is almost always a specific set of interpretations of events, a given historical paradigm, which spreads throughout a given culture to the relative exclusion of other interpretations.

Those schools of historiography that are responsible for refuting the popular myths, for revising the historical record in accordance with new evidence, are thus called revisionist in nature. In this preface, it is my intention to sketch briefly what I consider to be the nature and status of history as a field of investigation. I want especially to focus on the crucially important, yet neglected, relationship of philosophy to history. In the nineteenth century, practically every great philosopher made extensive use of history, particularly in fields such as social philosophy; and every great historian was usually well acquainted with philosophy. Yet today historians and philosophers often seem to be completely cut off from one another. This is unfortunate, for history is vitally important to the philosopher, at the very least in illustrating his theories, in filling in the outlines of an abstract theory with concrete units and events. Similarly, philosophy is critically important to history in at least two interrelated ways: philosophy necessarily serves as a critic, and a guide, on two important levels — methodology, and evaluation. No one who deals with questions of responsibility, causality, or even the problem of “knowing” concrete events to which the human mind no longer has direct access through immediate awareness (as opposed to inference), can escape the importance of philosophy.

But the problem is more complicated than that. Today, certain philosophers tend to dismiss specific social theories, such as libertarianism and laissez-faire, almost out-of-hand, usually because of alleged historical figures regarding centralization of economic power, depressions, unemployment, imperialism, war and so forth. And certain historians (usually those operating from an implicit philosophic base such as Marxism), in an attempt to pump “relevance” into history, insist on drawing explicitly nonhistorical conclusions from purely historical data. Thus, such key revisionist authors as Gabriel Kolko and William Appleman Williams often mention in the course of their historical studies that such-and-such was “a necessary consequence of American capitalism.” Aside from the enormous problems involved in the question of “necessity” as such in all fields, surely, we face here more than a strictly historic judgment! At the barest minimum, such a statement would put the responsibility of proof on the shoulders of the proponent, who must marshal not only historical data, but economic theory and social philosophy as well — not to mention epistemology, which alone can provide him with a systematic methodology. Notice this intricate statement in Joyce and Gabriel Kolko’s masterly The Limits of Power: “A society’s goals, in the last analysis, reflect its objective needs — economic, strategic, and political — in the light of the requirements of its very specific structure of power.” This is certainly not a strictly historical judgment. These questions immediately arise: What does it mean to talk of a “society’s” goals? What are a “society’s objective needs, and how does one determine them? What are the “requirements” of a specific structure of power, and what is meant here by the term “specific structure of power”? The point is not to fall back on agnosticism and skepticism, but to raise the question of whether or not such questions can be answered — or even raised — from within the context of history alone. If they cannot be, then we obviously fall into such fields as economics and philosophy. But philosophy first: it is only philosophy that, properly speaking, will give us the means of answering the very question of whether or not such-and-such a problem can be answered by historical inquiry alone.

Although I have stressed the dependence of history on philosophy, I do not mean to imply that history is merely tangential to philosophy. The philosopher, in my view, should, if nothing else, regard history as a testing ground, an experimental laboratory in which he conceptually can apply his theories (particularly social and political theories, and ethics) in an attempt to see if they make sense. A philosopher who preaches total state control of individual human actions and decisions, for instance, might profitably look at history for instances of what has happened as his ideal has been approached, approached as a limit case. If he finds destruction, chaos and the like, then the burden of explaining this within the confines of his assertions of the supposedly beneficial nature of state control comes into play. Similarly, if an advocate of laissez-faire holds that depressions are impossible or unlikely in a free market economy, then he must be prepared to explain the nature and genesis of historical depressions by another theory than the prevalent ones, and to call into play historical data which other schools either neglect or misinterpret. Finally, the philosopher can profitably regard historical evaluations and interpretations as practice for actually applying his theories in interpreting contemporary events.

Since space does not permit me to detail every major issue in the philosophy of history, I shall restrict myself to presenting some of the more interesting points which a developed philosophy of history should focus on. And within these limits, I shall summarize my own approaches to some key problem areas.

What is history? History is a selective recreation of the events of the past, according to a historian’s premises regarding what is important and his judgment concerning the nature of causality in human action. This selectivity is a most important aspect of history, and it is this alone which prevents history from becoming a random chronicling of events. And since this selectivity is necessary to history, the only remaining question is whether or not such judgments will be made explicitly or implicitly, with full knowledge of what one considers to be important and why, or without such awareness. Selection presupposes a means, method, or principle of selection. The historian’s view of the nature of causality in human action also is determined by a principle of selection. He can have a conscious theory, such as economic determinism, or attempt to function without one. But without one, the result of historical investigation is likely to appear disintegrated and patched together. In this case, the historian depends necessarily on philosophy, on economics and on psychology. If he is not aware of his selections and presuppositions, then the result is a bad historian, or at best a confused one. Charles A. Beard was more self-conscious than most about the problems of historical method, yet he still could write, at the apex of his career, an essay entitled “Written History as an Act of Faith.” Of philosophical evasion and bankruptcy are bad historians born, as are professionals in so many other fields. A professional in any field has the unshakable responsibility to be aware of and name his primaries, those presuppositions which function as axiomatic in his field. If he intends to be taken seriously, then he should be prepared to defend them. Evasion on any level produces disastrous consequences for man; on the highest political and intellectual levels, evasion can result in such things as physical destruction, or in entire generations of scholars being misled in their scholarly pursuits.

A popular philosophical doctrine holds that the methodology of history is entirely different from the methodology of other sciences. Yet fundamentally the methodology of all sciences is the same — logic. The nature of the evidence relevant to one field may differ from that relevant to another, and this indeed accounts for the apparent differences of method. Yet truths in any field are in fact verified by a process of applying man’s reason to objective evidence. By “reason” I mean simply the faculty of integrated awareness which is responsible for all of man’s knowledge above the perceptual level; by “objective evidence” I mean reality as presented to the intellect — “objective” meaning that which is determined by the nature of the entities existing in reality, and “evidence” referring to that context or “segment” of reality which a consciousness has become aware of.

The nature of the objective evidence which is largely considered in history is simply human testimony, direct or indirect. History as a field deals with past human thought and actions. Since we have no direct awareness of the contents of anyone’s consciousness but our own, we must rely on inference from what a person says, and what he does. Considered from a different perspective, history deals with the ends that men have held in the past, and the means that they have adopted to attain these ends. Since no two individuals are specifically alike in every particular characteristic, it is impossible to recreate the past in the form of a laboratory experiment and to observe the effects of single causal factors on human action. Thus, all that one can do is to collect evidence concerning the context of individual men, their ideas and their actions, using a theory or model of the nature of causality in human action that interprets or selectively reconstructs events of the past, omitting what one judges to be unimportant, and offering an explanation for what one does consider to be important, in light of the evidence available. Utopian “completeness” is neither possible nor necessary in knowledge — in history or anywhere else. All knowledge is contextual, but this does not in any way hinder knowledge from being valid.

Turning from this sketch of historical method, I shall indicate, briefly, the value of history. Traditionalists often seek to use history as a guide to action, spurning abstract guides to conduct provided by the science of ethics, and adopting conventions and traditions instead. Yet it should be noted at the outset that to use history in any reasonable way to find rules of conduct presupposes a rational ethic. One must use a rational ethic to differentiate “good” traditions from bad, and in fact to supersede history altogether in projecting what is possible to man. If something has happened in history, then one rationally can conclude that it is possible for man; if something has not happened in history, the reverse is not true — one cannot conclude that it is not possible for man. History can illustrate principles but cannot verify or refute them. It is important to point out the submission of history to a rational ethic in this regard.

People distraught with the present often seek stability and refuge in the past, idealizing it beyond recognition. Such an attitude, however, will only lead to a life built on illusions, to despair that tomorrow things will only be worse, and a general feeling of impotence and inefficacy, with the result that those who accept such a view will not act to attain a better future.

But to act to change things for the better presupposes not only that one understands a rational ethic and its principles, but that one has some idea of “where one is,” historically speaking. One has to answer the question: what is the present context of man? To answer this takes a knowledge of what ends men have sought up to now, in a broad cultural and political sense, and what means they have adopted to attain them. One then applies the principles of a rational philosophy to his actions; understanding his context, he acts to change things in a certain direction.

If either history or philosophy, specifically, ethics, is left out of this, an ideology is necessarily incomplete. On the one hand there is the error of those who, like William Appleman Williams, “are committed to the proposition that History is the most consequential way of learning who we are and what we should do.” On the other hand, there is the fallacy of those who develop a social philosophy and attempt to apply it without any knowledge of what is going on in the world.

In response to Williams, it can be said that history cannot tell us “What we should do.” At best, it can pinpoint problems which people historically have faced, and solutions which they have attempted to apply.

In response to the others, it should be stated that the application of the most consistent philosophy to real events requires a journalistic knowledge of the state of the world. This differentiates ideology from philosophy. Whereas philosophy abstracts from time, and hence from history, the fundamental truths about man and his relationship to reality, ideology is a consistent world view. It integrates philosophy with one’s context, applies the principles of philosophy to the concrete realities of the world. Philosophy is concerned with the nature and validity of human knowledge, with validating and detailing the precepts of a rational ethic with truth. Ideology is concerned with applying philosophy to any given historical context — with making truth relevant, which comes from an integrated focus on man as he is in any historical context.

The transition from philosophy to ideology is largely accomplished by history. To use an analogy, philosophy discovers a rational ethic, but every given individual must apply its precepts to his own life by identifying the context he faces and making concrete choices by means of logic. The “major premise” in this version of the Aristotelian “practical syllogism” is the ethical premise itself. The “minor premise” is the concrete in anyone’s life which the principles subsume. The “conclusion” is the action to be taken.

Similarly in the transition from philosophy to ideology, the major premise is the ethical-philosophic principle; the minor premises are the concrete details, or “existential premises” summarizing some aspect of the context of man in some historical period. The conclusion is the ideological stand to be taken.

It is important to emphasize the overwhelming necessity of having a valid existential premise in either the individual or the general case. In ideology, invalid historical or existential premises can make the stand taken totally inconsistent with the basic thrust of the philosophy which generated it initially. The result of errors may be that the ideological stand ends up on the wrong side of the fence.

Now a word on some of my own positions on basic issues. Believing that the universe consists of a number of distinct entities which are related to each other by both real and mental relations (having an objective foundation in fact), I hold that things necessarily act in accordance with their individual natures, producing results in accordance with such natures. Concepts and theories are therefore formed by integrating particulars according to common characteristics into new mental entities.

In history, I hold that events consist of the actions of individuals motivated toward certain ends and using certain means to attain them. But since individuals often have the same values and conceptions of appropriate means to attain their ends, they often work together. In fact, the whole function of institutions is to enable individual human actions to be systematically and consciously integrated in producing common ends. It is this fact which gives rise to all classifications and hence all “class analysis.” “Classes” in social theory, or political theory, or historical investigation, must of necessity be groups of individuals having common characteristics. It is my view that man has free will, and that the concept and existence of free will is a necessary postulate if an obvious fact of man’s nature is to be explained: his capacity for conceptual and propositional speech, and his ability to identify facts of reality. Determinism, in the strict sense, is contradictory. For if a man’s mental processes — specifically, his attempts at reasoning — are not free, if they are determined by environment and heredity, then there is no means of claiming that theory x is true is true and y is false — since man can have no way of knowing that his mental processes might not be conditioned to force him to believe that x is logical, when in fact it is not.

This means that “classes” in history are not primarily economic, in the usual sense of the term, but rather, are ethical. Man is not born with values, or preferences except on a sensory level (pleasure or pain), and he does not merely absorb values from a culture like a sponge absorbs water. Rather, men must choose their values, by intention or default. And the realm of chosen values is the realm of ethics. This belief in ethical classes is the root of my disagreement with Marxism.

A related fallacy of Marxism, especially in relation to its effect in guiding historical investigation, is its simplistic conception of what constitutes a class “interest.”

“Interests” are not primary, nor automatic. Apart from that category of things which actually benefit men (whether or not men are aware of them) “interests” can only be arrived at through a process of consciousness, evaluation. This means that, given an objective standard of the organism’s life and well-being, a given man’s values and conception of his own or his “class’s” interests can be right or wrong. More importantly, classes are derived from and validated by reference to concrete individuals, actions and values, not vice versa. Classifications are derived from things, not vice versa.

This is important to focus on for a moment. For Marx, despite all his anti-Idealistic and anti-Hegelian rhetoric, is really an Idealist and Hegelian on the issue of classification. Whatever attempts he makes to get around this point, Marx is still asserting, at root, that a classification (a social class) precedes and determines the characteristic of those who are members or units of the classification. Marx is, in fact, very unclear on the nature of the exact process of causation which occurs in the interaction between those people who own the “means of production,” their ideas (“interests”) and actions, and those people relating to them. Since any such theory of causality in human action is vitally important in historical investigation, it is to be expected that Marxism corrupts historical investigation.

Interestingly enough, this is very relevant to the subject of this essay: the role of big business in promoting American statism. For if nothing else, this essay shows that the “class lines” in American history are different from what they were thought to be. Some of the men in larger businesses supported and even initiated acts of government regulation while others, particularly relatively smaller and more competent competitors, opposed such regulation. Thus we have a clear-cut case in American history that contradicts Marxian theory: the lines of battle and conflict were not drawn merely over the issue and criterion of individuals’ relation to the means of production, but on much more complicated grounds. A better classification might be along the lines set down by Franz Oppenheimer: the state-benefited and the state-oppressed — those who gained their wealth by means of confiscation, robbery and restriction of other people’s noncoercive activities, and those who gained their wealth by means of free trade in a free market, by the method of voluntary exchange. But even here the lines are not clear-cut, and we find cases of those who were honest producers sanctioning theft and parasitism, as well as cases of those who were parasites and benefiters from statism opposing controls — twin cases of hypocrisy and altruism.

Needless to add, many contemporary Marxists have responded to the challenge with ever new wings being added on to classical Marxist theory to “explain,” in an ad hoc fashion, the events which do not fit into classic Marxist paradigms. Historically, whenever defenders of some classic paradigm, in any field, begin to confront problems which conflict with the basic theory, they begin increasingly to modify the particulars of the theory to conform to fact without ever questioning the basic paradigm itself. But sooner or later any such imitation of the path taken by the followers of Ptolemy must end in the same way: the paradigm will collapse and be replaced by a new paradigm which explains all the known facts in a much simpler manner, thus conforming to a fundamental rule of scientific methodology: Occam’s razor.

The new paradigm, I think, will be the paradigm of libertarianism.

The purpose of this particular essay is simply to apply some of the principles of libertarianism to an interpretation of events in a very special and important period of human history. I have attempted to give a straightforward summary of New Left revisionist findings in one area of domestic history: the antitrust movement and Progressive Era. But I have done so not as a New Leftist, not as a historian proper, but as a libertarian, that is, a social philosopher of a specific school.

In doing this summary, I have two interrelated purposes: first, to show Objectivists and libertarians that certain of their beliefs in history are wrong and need to be revised under the impact of new evidence, and simultaneously to illustrate to them a specific means of approaching historical problems, to identify one cause of the growth of American statism and to indicate a new way of looking at history. Secondly, my purpose is to show New Left radicals that far from undermining the position of laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to what they call state capitalism, a system of government controls which is not yet socialism in the classic sense), their historical discoveries actually support the case for a totally free market. Then, too, I wish to illustrate how a libertarian would respond to the problems raised by New Left historians. Finally, I wish implicitly to apply Occam’s razor by showing that there is a simpler explanation of events than that so often colored with Marxist theory. Without exception, Marxist postulates are not necessary to explain the facts of reality.

Conflicting Schools of Thought

In historiography different schools of thought exist in much the same way and for the same reason as in many other fields. And in history, as in those other fields, different interpretations, no matter how far removed from reality, tend to go on forever, oblivious to new evidence and theories. In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn shows in the physical sciences how an existing paradigm of scientific explanation tends to ignore new evidence and theories, being overthrown only when: (a) the puzzles and problems generated by a false paradigm pile up to an increasingly obvious extent, so that an ever-wider range of material cannot be integrated into the paradigm, and an ever-growing number of problems cannot be solved, and (b) there arises on the scene a new paradigm to replace the old.

In history, perhaps more than in most other fields, the criteria of truth have not been sufficiently developed, resulting in a great number of schools of thought that tend to rise and fall in influence more because of political and cultural factors than because of epistemological factors. The result also has been that in history there are a number of competing paradigms to explain different sets of events, all connected to specific political views. In this essay, I shall consider three of them: the Marxist view, the conservative view and the liberal view. I shall examine how these paradigms function with reference to one major area of American history — the Progressive Era — and with respect to one major issue: the roots of government regulation of the economy, particularly through the antitrust laws and the Federal Reserve System. Other incidents will also be mentioned, but this issue will be the focus.

Among these various schools, nearly everyone agrees on the putative facts of American history; disagreements arise over frameworks of interpretation and over evaluation.

The Marxists, liberals, and conservatives all agree that in the economic history of America in the nineteenth century, the facts were roughly as follows. After midcentury, industrialization proceeded apace in America, as a consequence of the laissez-faire policies pursued by the United States government, resulting in increasing centralization and concentration of economic power.

According to the liberal, in the nineteenth century there was an individualistic social system in the United States, which, when left unchecked, led inevitably to the “strong” using the forces of a free market to smash and subdue the “weak,” by building gigantic, monopolistic industrial enterprises which dominated and controlled the life of the nation. Then, as this centralization proceeded to snowball, the “public” awoke to its impeding subjugation at the hands of these monopolistic businessmen. The public was stirred by the injustice of it all and demanded reform, whereupon altruistic and far-seeing politicians moved quickly to mash the monopolists with antitrust laws and other regulation of the economy, on behalf of the ever-suffering “little man” who was saved thereby from certain doom. Thus did the American government squash the greedy monopolists and restore competition, equality of opportunity and the like, which was perishing in the unregulated laissez-faire free market economy. Thus did the American state act to save both freedom and capitalism.

The Marxists also hold that there was in fact a trend toward centralization of the economy at the end of the last century, and that this was inherent in the nature of capitalism as an economic system. (Some modern, more sophisticated Marxists maintain, on the contrary, that historically the state was always involved in the so-called capitalistic economy.) Different Marxists see the movement towards state regulation of the economy in different ways. One group basically sees state regulation as a means of prolonging the collapse of the capitalistic system, a means which they see as inherently unstable. They see regulation as an attempt by the ruling class to deal with the “inner contradictions” of capitalism. Another group, more sophisticated, sees the movement towards state regulation as a means of hastening the cartelization and monopolization of the economy under the hands of the ruling class.

The conservative holds, like the liberal, that there was indeed such a golden age of individualism, when the economy was almost completely free of government controls. But far from being evil, such a society was near utopian in their eyes. But the government intervened and threw things out of kilter. The consequence was that the public began to clamor for regulation in order to rectify things that were either not injustices at all, or were injustices imposed by initial state actions. The antitrust laws and other acts of state interference, by this view, were the result. But far from seeing the key large industrialists and bankers as monopolistic monsters, the conservatives defend them as heroic innovators who were the victims of misguided or power-lusting progressives who used big businessmen as scapegoats and sacrifices on the altar of the “public good.”

All three of the major schools of interpretation of this crucial era in American history hold two premises in common: (a) that the trend in economic organization at the end of the nineteenth century was in fact towards growing centralization of economic power, and (b) that this trend was an outcome of the processes of the free market. Only the Marxists, and then only a portion of them, take issue with the additional premise that the actions of state regulation were anti-big business in motivation, purpose and results. And both the conservatives and the liberals see a sharp break between the ideas and men involved in the Progressive Movement and those of key big business and financial leaders. Marxists disagree with many of these views but hold the premise that the regulatory movement itself was an outgrowth of the capitalistic economy.

The Marxists, of course, smuggle in specifically nonhistorical conclusions and premises, based on their wider ideological frame of reference, the most prominent being the idea of necessity applied to historical events.

Although there are many arguments and disputes between adherents of the various schools, none of the schools has disputed the fundamental historical premise that the dominant trend at the end of the last century was toward increasing centralization of the economy, or the fundamental economic premise that this alleged increase was the result of the operations of a laissez-faire free market system.

Yet there are certain flaws in all three interpretations, flaws that are both historical and theoretical, flaws that make any of the interpretations inadequate, necessitating a new explanation. Although it is not possible here to argue in depth against the three interpretations, brief reasons for their inadequacy can be given.

Aside from the enormous disputes in economics over questions such as whether or not the “capitalistic system” inherently leads toward concentration and centralization of economic power in the hands of a few, we can respond to the Marxists, as well as to others, by directing our attention to the premise that there was in fact economic centralization at the turn of the century. In confronting the liberals, once more we can begin by pointing to the fact that there has been much more centralization since the Progressive Era than before, and that the function, if not the alleged purpose, of the antitrust and other regulatory laws has been to increase, rather than decrease, such centralization. Since the conservatives already question, on grounds of economic theory, the premise that the concentration of economic power results inevitably from a free market system, we must question them as to why they believe that (a) a free market actually existed during the period in question, and (b) how, then, such centralization of economic power resulted from this supposed free market.

Aside from all the economic arguments, let us look at the period in question to see if any of the schools presented hold up, in any measure or degree.

The Roots of Regulation

In fact, and in history, the entire thesis of all three schools is botched, from beginning to end. The interpretations of the Marxists, the liberals and the conservatives are a tissue of lies.

As Gabriel Kolko demonstrates in his masterly The Triumph of Conservatism and in Railroads and Regulation, the dominant trend in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth was not towards increasing centralization, but rather, despite the growing number of mergers and the growth in the overall size of many corporations,

toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial leaders, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible trends under control. … As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could [control and stabilize] the economy. … Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly which caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it. [1]

While Kolko does not consider the causes and context of the economic crises which faced businessmen from the 1870s on, we can at least summarize some of the more relevant aspects here. The enormous role played by the state in American history has not yet been fully investigated by anyone. Those focusing on the role of the federal government in regulating the economy often neglect to mention the fact that America’s ostensive federalist system means that the historian concerned with the issue of regulation must look to the various state governments as well. What he will find already has been suggested by a growing number of historians: that nearly every federal program was pioneered by a number of state governments, including subsidies, land grants and regulations of the antitrust variety. Furthermore, often neglected in these accounts is the fact that the real process of centralization of the economy came not during the Progressive Era, but rather (initially) during the Civil War, with its immense alliance between the state and business (at least in the more industrialized North). Indeed, such key figures in the progressive Era as J. P. Morgan got their starts in alliances with the government of the North in the Civil War. The Civil War also saw the greatest inflationary expansion of the monetary supply and greatest land grants to the railroads in American history. These and other related facts mean that an enormous amount of economic malinvestment occurred during and immediately after the Civil War, and the result was that a process of liquidation of malinvestment took place: a depression in the 1870s.

It was this process of inflationary book caused by the banking and credit system spurred by the government and followed by depressions, that led the businessmen and financial leaders to seek stabilizing elements from the 1870s on. One of the basic results of this process of liquidation, of course, was a growth in competition. The thesis of the Kolko books is that the trend was towards growing competition in the United States before the federal government intervened, and that various big businessmen in different fields found themselves unable to cope with this trend by private, economic means. Facing falling profits and diffusion of economic power, these businessmen then turned to the state to regulate the economy on their behalf. What Kolko and his fellow revisionist James Weinstein (The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918) maintain is that business and financial leaders did not merely react to these situations with concrete proposals for regulations, but with the ever more sophisticated development of a comprehensive ideology which embraced both foreign and domestic policy. Weinstein in particular links up the process of businessmen turning to the state for favors in response to problems which they faced and the modern “corporate liberal” system. he maintains that the ideology now dominant in the U.S. had been worked out for the most part by the end of the First World War, not during the New Deal, as is commonly held, and that the “ideal of a liberal corporate social order” was developed consciously and purposefully by those who then, as now, enjoyed supremacy in the United States: “the more sophisticated leaders of America’s largest corporations and financial institutions.” [2] In examining this thesis, I shall focus predominantly on the activities of the national Civics Federation (NCF), a group of big businessmen that was the primary ideological force behind many “reforms.”

Since the basic pattern of regulation was first established in the case of the railroads, a glance at this industry will set the basis for an examination of the others.

American industry as a whole was intensely competitive in the period from 1875 on. Many industries, including the railroads, had over-expanded and were facing a squeeze on profits. American history contains the myth that the railroads faced practically no competition at all during this period, that freight rates constantly rose, pinching every last penny out of the shippers, especially the farmers, and bleeding them to death. Historian Kolko shows that:

Contrary to the common view, railroad freight rates, taken as a whole, declined almost continuously over the period [from 1877 to 1916] and although consolidation of railroads proceeded apace, this phenomenon never affected the long-term decline of rates or the ultimately competitive nature of much of the industry. In their desire to establish stability and control over rates and competition, the railroads often resorted to voluntary, cooperative efforts.

When these efforts failed, as they inevitably did, the railroad men turned to political solutions to [stabilize] their increasingly chaotic industry. They advocated measures designed to bring under control those railroads within their own ranks that refused to conform to voluntary compacts. … [F]rom the beginning of the 20th century until at least the initiation of World War I, the railroad industry resorted primarily to political alternatives and gave up the abortive efforts to put its own house in order by relying on voluntary cooperation. … Insofar as the railroad men did think about the larger theoretical implications of centralized federal regulation, they rejected … the entire notion of laissez-faire [and] most railroad leaders increasingly relied on a Hamiltonian conception of the national government. [3]

The two major means used by competitors to cut into each other’s markets were rate wars (price cutting) and rebates; the aim of business leaders was to stop these. Their major, unsuccessful, tool was the “pool” which was continuously broken up by competitive factors. [4] The first serious pooling effort in the East, sponsored by the New York Central, had been tried as early as 1874 by Vanderbilt; the pool lasted for six months. In September 1876, a Southwestern Railroad Association was formed by seven major companies in an attempt to voluntarily enforce a pool; it didn’t work and collapsed in early 1878. Soon it became obvious to most industrial leaders that the pooling system was ineffective.

In 1876 the first significant federal regulatory bill was introduced into the House by J. R. Hopkins of Pittsburgh. Drawn up by the attorney for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, it died in committee.

By 1879, there was “a general unanimity among pool executives … that without government sanctions, the railroads would never maintain or stabilize rates.” [5] By 1880, the railroads were in serious trouble; the main threat was identified as “cutthroat competition.”

Far from pushing the economy toward greater centralization, economic forces indicated that centralization was inefficient and unstable. The push was towards decentralization, and smaller railroads often found themselves much less threatened by economic turns of events than the older, more established and larger business concerns.

Thus, the Marxist model finds itself seriously in jeopardy in this instance, for the smaller forms and railroads, throughout the crises of the 1870s and 1880s often were found to be making larger profits on capital invested than the giant businesses. Furthermore, much of the concentration of economic power, which was apparent during the 1870s and on, was the result of massive state aid immediately before, during, and after the Civil War, not the result of free market forces. Much of the capital accumulation — particularly in the cases of the railroads and banks — was accomplished by means of government regulation and aid, not by free trade on a free market.

Also, the liberal and conservative models which stress the supposed fact that there was growing centralization in the economy and that competition either lessened or became less intense, are both shaken by historical facts. And we already have seen that it was the railroad leaders, faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, who initiated the drive for federal government regulation of their industry.

Rate wars during 1881 pushed freight rates down 50 percent between July and October alone; between 1882 and 1886, freight rates declined for the nation as a whole by 20 percent. Railroads were increasingly talking about regulation with a certain spark of interest. Chauncey Depew, attorney for the New York Central, had become convinced “of the [regulatory commission’s] necessity … for the protection of both the public and the railroads. [6] He soon converted William H. Vanderbilt to his position. [7]

Agitation for regulation to ease competitive pains increased, and in 1887, the Interstate Commerce Act was passed. According to the Railway Review, an organ of the railroad, it was only a first step.

The Act was not enough, and it did not stop either the rate wars or rebates. So, early in 1889 during a prolonged rate war, J. P. Morgan summoned presidents of major railroads to New York to find ways to maintain rates and enforce the act, but this, too, was a failure. The larger railroads were harmed most by this competition; the smaller railroads were in many cases more prosperous than in the early 1880s. “Morgan weakened rather than strengthened many of his roads … [and on them] services and safety often declined. Many of Morgan’s lines were overexpanded into areas where competition was already too great.” [8] Competition again increased. The larger roads then led the fight for further regulation, seeking more power for the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC).

In 1891, the president of a midwestern railroad advocated that the entire matter of setting rates be turned over to the ICC. An ICC poll taken in 1892 of fifteen railroads showed that fourteen of them favored legalized pooling under Commission control.

Another important businessman, A. A. Walker, who zipped back and forth between business and government agencies, said that “railroad men had had enough of competition. The phrase ‘free competition’ sounds well enough as a universal regulator,” he said, “but it regulates by the knife.” [9]

In 1906, the Hepburn Act was passed, also with business backing. The railroad magnate Cassatt spoke out as a major proponent of the act and said that he had long endorsed federal rate regulation. Andrew Carnegie, too, popped up to endorse the act. George W. Perkins, an important Morgan associate, wrote his boss that the act “is going to work out for the ultimate and great good of the railroad.” But such controls were not enough for some big businessmen. Thus E. P. Ripley, the president of the Santa Fe, suggested what amounted to a Federal Reserve System for the railroads, cheerfully declaring that such a system “would do away with the enormous wastes of the competitive system, and permit business to follow the line of least resistance” — a chant later taken up by Mussolini.

In any case, we have seen that (a) the trend was not towards centralization at the close of the nineteenth century — rather, the liquidation of previous malinvestment fostered by state action and bank-led inflation worked against the bigger businesses in favor of the smaller, less overextended businesses; (b) there was, in the case of the railroads anyway, no sharp dichotomy or antagonism between big businessmen and the progressive Movement’s thrust for regulation; and (c) the purpose of the regulations, as seen by key business leaders, was not to fight the growth of “monopoly” and centralization, but to foster it.

The culmination of this big-business-sponsored “reform” of the economic system is actually today’s system. The new system took effect immediately during world War I when railroads gleefully handed over control to the government in exchange for guaranteed rate increases and guaranteed profits, something continued under the Transportation Act of 1920. The consequences, of course, are still making themselves felt, as in 1971, when the Pennsylvania Railroad, having cut itself off from the market and from market calculation nearly entirely, was found to be in a state of economic chaos. It declared bankruptcy and later was rescued, in part, by the state.

Regulation Comes to the Rest of the Economy

Having illustrated my basic thesis through a case study of the origins of regulation in the railroad industry, I shall now look at the rest of the American economy in this period and examine, however briefly, the role that big business had in pushing through acts of state regulation.

I should also mention, at least in passing, big businessmen not only had a particularly important effect in pushing through domestic regulation, but they fostered interventionism in foreign policy as well. What was common to both spheres was the fact that the acts of state intervention and monetary expansion by the state-manipulated banking system had precipitated depressions and recessions from the 1870s though the 1890s. The common response of businessmen, particularly big businessmen — the leaders in various fields — was to promote further state regulation and aid as a solution to the problems caused by the depressions. In particular vogue at the time — in vogue today, as a matter of fact — was the notion that continued American prosperity required (as a necessary condition) expanded markets for American goods and manufactured items. This led businessmen to seek markets in foreign lands though various routes, having fulfilled their “manifest destiny” at home.

Domestically, however, the immediate result was much more obvious. From about 1875 on, many corporations, wishing to be large and dominant in their field, over-expanded and over-capitalized. Mediocre entrepreneurship, administrative difficulties and increasing competition cut deeply into the markets and profits of many giants. Mergers often were tried, as in the railroad industry, but the larger mergers brought neither greater profits nor less competition. As Kolko states: “Quite the opposite occurred. There was more competition, and profits, if anything, declined.” A survey of ten mergers showed, for instance, that the companies earned an average of 65 percent of their pre-consolidation profits after consolidation. Over-centralization inhibited their flexibility of action, and hence their ability to respond to changing market conditions. In short, things were not as bad for other industries as for the railroads – they were often worse.

In the steel industry, the price of most steel goods declined more or less regularly until 1895, and even though prices rose somewhat thereafter, there was considerable insecurity about what other competitors might choose to do next. A merger of many corporations in 1901, based on collaboration between Morgan and Carnegie, resulted in the formation of U. S. Steel. Yet U.S. Steel’s profit margin declined over 50 percent between 1902 and 1904. In its first two decades of existence, U. S. Steel held a continually shrinking share of the market. Due to technological conservatism and inflexible leadership, the company became increasingly costly and inefficient. Voluntary efforts at control failed. U. S. Steel turned to politics.

In the oil industry, where Standard Oil was dominant, the same situation existed. In 1899 there were 67 petroleum refiners in the U.S.; within ten years, the number had grown to 147 refiners.

In the telephone industry, things were in a similar shape. From its foundation in 1877 until 1894, Bell Telephone (AT&T) had a virtual monopoly in the industry based on its control of almost all patents. [10] In 1894 many of the patents expired. “Bell immediately adopted a policy of harassing the host of aspiring competitors by suing them (27 suits were instituted in 1894-95 alone) for allegedly infringing Bell patents.” [11] But such efforts to stifle competition failed; by 1902, there were 9,100 independent telephone systems; by 1907, there were 22,000. Most had rates lower than AT&T.

In the meat packing industry too, the large packers felt threatened by increasing competition. Their efforts at control failed. Similar diffusion of economic power was the case in other fields, such as banking, where the power of the eastern financiers was being seriously eroded by midwestern competitors.

This, then, was the basic context of big business; these were the problems that it faced. How did it react? Almost unanimously, it turned to the power of the state to get what it could not get by voluntary means. Big business acted not only through concrete political pressure, but by engaging in large-scale, long-run ideological propaganda or “education” aimed at getting different sections of the American society united behind statism, in principle and practice.

Let us look at some of the activities of the major organizational tool of big business, the National Civics Federation. The NCF was actually a reincarnation of Hamiltonian views on the relation of the state to business. Primarily an organization of big businessmen, it pushed for the tactical and theoretical alliance of business and government, a primitive version of the modern business-government partnership. Contrary to the consensus of many conservatives, it was not ideological innocence that led them to create a statist economic order — they knew what they were doing and constantly said so.

The working partnership of business and government was the result of the conscious activities of organizations such as the NCF created in 1900 (coincided with the birth of what is called the “Progressive Movement”) to fight with increasing and sustained vigor against what it considered to be its twin enemies: “the socialists and radicals among workers and middle class reformers, and the ‘anarchists’ among the businessmen” (as the NCF characterized the National Association of Manufacturers). The smaller businessmen, who constituted the NAM, formed an opposition to the new liberalism that developed through cooperation between political leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson, and the financial and corporate leaders in the NCF and other similar organizations. The NCF before World War I was “the most important single organization of the socially conscious big businessmen and their academic and political theorists.” The NCF “took the lead in educating the businessmen to the changing needs in political economy which accompanied the changing nature of America’s business system.” [12]

The early leaders of the NCF were such big business leaders as Marcus A. Hanna, utilities magnate Samuel B. Insull, Chicago banker Franklin MacVeagh (later Secretary of the treasury), Charles Francis Adams and several partners in J. P. Morgan & Co. The largest contributor to the group was Andrew Carnegie; other important members of the executive committee included George W. Perkins, Elbert H. Gary (a Morgan associate and a head of U. S. Steel after Carnegie), Cyrus McCormick, Theodore N. Vail (president of AT&T) and George Cortelyou (head of Consolidated Gas).

The NCF sponsored legislation to promote the formation of “public utilities,” a special privilege monopoly granted by the state, reserving an area of production to one company. Issuing a report on “Public Ownership of Public Utilities,” the NCF established a general framework for regulatory laws, stating that utilities should be conducted by legalized independent commissions. Of such regulation one businessman wrote another: “Twenty-five years ago we would have regarded it as a species of socialism”; but seeing that the railroads were both submitting to and apparently profiting from regulation, the NCF’s self-appointed job of “educating” municipal utilities corporations became much easier.

Regulation in general, far from coming against the wishes of the regulated interests, was openly welcomed by them in nearly every case. As Upton Sinclair said of the meat industry, which he is given credit for having tamed, “the federal inspection of meat was historically established at the packers’ request. … It is maintained and paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers.” [13]

However, one interesting fact comes in here to refute the Marxist theory further. For the Marxists hold that there are fundamentally two opposing “interests” which clash in history: the capitalists and the workers. But what we have seen, essentially, is that the interests (using the word in a journalistic sense) of neither the capitalists nor the workers, so-called, were uniform or clear-cut. The interests of the larger capitalists seemed to coincide, as they saw it, and were clearly opposed to the interests of the smaller capitalists. (However, there were conflicts among the big capitalists, such as between the Morgan and Rockefeller interests during the 1900s, as illustrated in the regimes of Roosevelt and Taft.) The larger capitalists saw regulation as being in their interest, and competition as opposed to it; with the smaller businessmen, the situation was reversed. The workers for the larger businesses also may have temporarily gained at the expense of others through slight wage increases caused by restrictions on production. (The situation is made even more complicated when we remember that the Marxist belief is that one’s relationship to the means of production determines one’s interests and hence, apparently, one’s ideas. Yet people with basically the same relationship often had different “interests” and ideas. If this in turn is explained by a Marxist in terms of “mystification,” an illuminating explanation in a libertarian context, then mystification itself is left to be explained. For if one’s ideas and interests are an automatic function of the economic system and one’s relationship to the means of production, how can “mystification” arise at all?)

In any case, congressional hearings during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt revealed that “the big Chicago packers wanted more meat inspection both to bring the small packers under control and to aid them in their position in the export trade.” Formally representing the large Chicago packers, Thomas E. Wilson publicly announced: “We are now and have always been in favor of the extension of the inspection.” [14]

In both word and deed American businessmen sought to replace the last remnants of laissez-faire in the United States with government regulation – for their own benefit. Speaking at Columbia University in February 1908, George W. Perkins, a Morgan associate, said that the corporation “must welcome federal supervision administered by practical businessmen.” [15]

As early as 1908, Andrew Carnegie and Ingalls had suggested to the NCF that it push for an American version of the British Board of Trade, which would have the power to judge mergers and other industrial actions. As Carnegie put it, this had “been found sufficient in other countries and will be so with us. We must have our industrial as we have a Judicial Supreme Court.” [16] Carnegie also endorsed government actions to end ruinous competition.

It always comes back to me that government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem. … There is nothing alarming in this; capital is perfectly safe in the gas company, although it is under court control. So will all capital be, although under government control. [17]

AT&T, controlled by J. P. Morgan as of 1907, also sought regulation. The company got what it wanted in 1910, when telephones were placed under the jurisdiction of the ICC, and rate wars became a thing of the past. President T. N. Vail of AT&T said, “we believe in and were the first to advocate … governmental control and regulation of public utilities.”

By June of 1911, Elbert H. Gary of U. S. Steel appeared before a congressional committee and announced to astonished members, “I believe we must come to enforced publicity and governmental control even as to prices.” He virtually offered to turn price control over to the government. Kolko states that,

the reason Gary and Carnegie were offering the powers of price control to the federal government was not known to the congressmen, who were quite unaware of the existing price anarchy in steel. The proposals of Gary and Carnegie, the Democratic majority on the committee reported, were really “semisocialistic” and hardly worth endorsing. [18]

Gary also proposed that a commission similar to the ICC be set up to grant, suspend and revoke licenses for trade and to regulate prices.

In the fall of 1911, the NCF moved in two fronts: it sent a questionnaire to 30,000 businessmen to seek out their positions on a number of issues. Businessmen favored regulation of trade by three to one.

In November of 1911, Theodore Roosevelt proposed a national commission to control organization and capitalization of all inter-state businesses. The proposal won an immediate and enthusiastic response from Wall Street.

In 1912, Arthur Eddy, an eminent corporation lawyer, working much of the time with Standard Oil, and one of the architects of the FTC, stated boldly in his magnum opus, The New Competition, what had been implicit in the doctrines of businessmen all along: Eddy trumpeted that “competition was inhuman and war, and that war was hell.”

Thus did big businessmen believe and act.

Meanwhile, back at the bank, J. P. Morgan was not to be left out. For Morgan, because of his ownership or control of many major corporations, was in the fight for regulation from the earliest days onward. Morgan’s financial power and reputation were largely the result of his operations with the American and European governments; his many dealings in currency manipulations and loans to oppressive European states earned him the reputation of a “rescuer of governments.” One crucial aspect of the banking system at the beginning of the 1900s was the relative decrease in New York’s financial dominance and the rise of competitors. Morgan was fully aware of the diffusion of banking power that was taking place, and it disturbed him.

Hence, bankers too turned to regulation. From very early days, Morgan had championed the cause of a central bank, of gaining control over the nation’s credit through a board of leading bankers under government supervision. By 1907, the NCF had taken up the call for a more elastic currency and for greater centralization of banking.

Nelson Aldrich proposed a reform bank act and called a conference of twenty-two bankers from twelve cities to discuss it. The purpose of the conference was to “discuss winning the banking community over to government control directed by the bankers for their own ends.” A leading banker, Paul Warburg, stated that “it would be a blessing to get these small banks out of the way.” [19]

Most of his associates agreed. In 1913, two years after the conference, and after any squabbles over specifics, the Federal Reserve Act was passed. The big bankers were pleased.

These were not the only areas in which businessmen and their political henchmen were active. Indeed, ideologically speaking, they were behind innumerable “progressive” actions, and even financed such magazines as The New Republic. Teddy Roosevelt made a passing reference to the desirability of an income tax in his 1906 message to Congress, and the principle received support from such businessmen as George W. Perkins and Carnegie, who often referred to the unequal distribution of wealth as “one of the crying evils of our day.” Many businessmen opposed it, but the Wall Street Journal said that it was certainly in favor of it.

The passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission occurred in 1914. Once established, the FTC began its attempt to secure the “confidence” of “well-intentioned” businessmen. In a speech before the NCF, one of the pro-regulation powerhouses, J. W. Jenks, “affirmed the general feeling of relief among the leaders of large corporations and their understanding that the FTC was helpful to the corporations in every way.” [20]

In this crucially important era, I have focused on one point: big business was a major source of American statism. Further researches would show, I am convinced, that big business and financial leaders were also the dominant force behind America’s increasingly interventionist foreign policy, and behind the ideology of modern liberalism. In fact, by this analysis sustained research might show American liberal intellectuals to be the “running dogs” of big businessmen, to twist a Marxist phrase a bit.

Consider the fact that the New Republic has virtually always taken the role of defender of the corporate state which big businessmen carefully constructed over decades. Consider the fact that such businessmen as Carnegie not only supported all the groups mentioned and the programs referred to, but also supported such things as the Big Navy movement at the turn of the century. He sold steel to the United States government that went into the building of the ships and he saw in the Venezuela boundary dispute the possibility of a large order for armor from the United States Navy. [21] Carnegie, along with Rockefeller and, later, Ford, was responsible for sustained support of American liberalism through the foundations set up in his name.

J. P. Morgan, the key financial leader, was also a prime mover of American statism. His foreign financial dealings led him to become deeply involved with Britain during World War I, and this involvement in turn led him to help persuade Wilson to enter the war on Britain’s behalf, to help save billions of dollars of loans which would be lost in the event of a German victory.

In a more interesting light, consider the statements made in 1914 by S. Thruston Ballard, owner of the largest wheat refinery in the world. Ballard not only supported vocational schools as a part of the public schools (which would transfer training costs to taxpayers), restrictions on immigration, and a national minimum wage, he saw and proposed a way to “cure” unemployment. He advocated a federal employment service, public works, and if these wee insufficient, “government concentration camps where work with a small wage would be provided, supplemented by agricultural and industrial training.” [22]

Consider the role of big businessmen in pushing through public education in many states after World War I. Senator Wadsworth spoke before a NCF group in 1916, pointing out that compulsory government education was needed “to protect the nation against destruction from within. It is to train the boy and girl to be good citizens, to protect against ignorance and dissipation.” This meant that the reason to force children to go to school, at gunpoint if necessary, was so that they could be brainwashed into accepting the status quo, almost explicitly so that their capacity for dissent (i.e., their capacity for independent thinking) could be destroyed. Thus did Wadsworth also advocate compulsory and universal military training: “Our people shall be prepared mentally as well as in a purely military sense. We must let our young men know that they owe some responsibility to this country.”

Indeed, we find V. E. Macy, president of the NCF at the close of the war, stating that it was not “beside the mark to call attention to the nearly thirty million minors marching steadily toward full citizenship,” and ask “at what stage of their journey we should lend assistance to the work of quickening … the sense of responsibility and partnership in the business of maintaining and perfecting the splendid social, industrial, and commercial structure which has been reared under the American flag.” The need, Macy noted, was most urgent. Among American youths there was a widespread “indifference toward, and aloofness from, individual responsibility for the successful maintenance and upbuilding of the industrial and commercial structure which is the indispensable shelter of us all.” [23]

Big business, then, was behind the existence and curriculum of the public educational system, explicitly to teach young minds to submit and obey, to pay homage to the “corporate liberal” system which the politicians, a multitude of intellectuals and many big businessmen created.

My intention here simply has been to present an alternative model of historical interpretation of key events in this one crucial era of American history, an interpretation which is neither Marxist, liberal nor conservative, but which may have some elements in common with each.

From a more ideological perspective, my purpose has been to present an accurate portrait of on aspect of “how we got here,” and indicate a new way of looking at the present system in America.

To a large degree it has been and remains big businessmen who are the fountainheads of American statism. If libertarians are seeking allies in their struggle for liberty, then I suggest that they look elsewhere. Conservatives, too, should benefit from this presentation, and begin to see big business as a destroyer, not as a unit, of the free market. Liberals should also benefit and reexamine their own premises about the market and regulation. Specifically, they might reconsider the nature of a free market and ponder on the question of why big business has been opposed to precisely that. Isn’t it odd that the interests of liberals and key big businessmen have always coincided? The Marxists, too, might rethink their economics, and reconsider whether or not capitalism leads to monopoly. Since it can be shown scientifically that economic calculation is impossible in a purely socialistic economy, and that pure statism is not good for man, perhaps the Marxists might also look at the real nature of a complete free market, undiluted by state control.

Libertarians themselves should take heart. Our hope lies, as strange as it may seem, not with any remnants from an illusory “golden age” of individualism, which never existed, but with tomorrow. Our day has not come and gone. It has never existed at all. It is our task to see that it will exist in the future. The choice and the battle are ours.

Capitalism Depends on Artificial, State-Enforced Stability

Center for a Stateless Society » Capitalism Depends on Artificial, State-Enforced Stability

I appreciate the thoughtful tone of Derek’s response, and I’m certainly gratified by whatever role I may have played in inspiring him to take up brewing beer. And having been strongly influenced by the work of Elinor Ostrom myself, I was pleased to learn that an Ostrom scholar was invited to respond to my article for this symposium.

As for his actual argument, I think his restatement of my positions is quite fair.

Despite the friendly tone of his counter-argument, however, I find myself at somewhat of a loss as to what his material points of disagreement actually are.

After summarizing my arguments — I repeat, quite fairly — Derek goes on to state, briefly, his reasons for believing that markets will lead to capitalism. But he states these reasons for all intents and purposes as bare assertions, simply restating the positions I attempted to refute without actually providing any new material on why my arguments to the contrary are wrong. Next, in the interest of fairness, he summarizes my arguments regarding countervailing tendencies that would prevent markets from leading to a concentration of capital and restoration of capitalism without the involvement of a state. Then he restates his own original assertions. At no point does he evaluate our respective positions, where they directly contradict each other, in terms of evidence.

Derek’s general position is that “[m]arkets tend, in largely spontaneous ways, to generate capitalism … [I]f we replaced corporate control with market competition, we would, in a relatively short time, be back to concentrated markets.” In addition, he feels that markets as such are “to a large extent oppressive and ecologically destructive.”

He cites Marx’s argument that capital tends to become concentrated, and “competition tends to lead to the removal of smaller enterprises and a drive to monopoly.” This happens because “economies of scale mean larger firms often drive out smaller.” He acknowledges that I “challenge” Marx’s position in “an interesting way” — but provides no material basis for deciding between Marx’s position and mine where they differ.

Derek also repeats the standard Marxist arguments regarding capital accumulation and the substitution of physical capital for human labor-power. The consequences are that the first firms to invest in new technology drive out those that don’t, and increased capital accumulation leads to increased average firm size and market concentration. He also mentions Brewer’s argument, in Marxist Theories of Imperialism, that competition, with attendant pressure to cut costs by adopting technical improvements, is “the primary driving force in capitalism.” Brewer gives his stamp of approval to the idea that “large-scale production is more efficient than small-scale,” and that large firms will be “better able to survive … in slumps.”

All these assertions — and I repeat, unsupported assertions are what they are — either reflect dated technological assumptions that were more appropriate for the early and mid-20th century (if even then) or were never entirely true. Behind all of them is the implicit assumption that efficiency in production directly correlates with capital-intensiveness, scale and cost in production technology. I have argued at length elsewhere [1] that this was only true — if it ever was — during a particular phase of industrial history (and even then, the superior efficiency was to a large extent illusory and resulted from state actions to externalize inefficiency cost or insulate large firms from competition). Although acknowledging I have made such arguments, Derek provides no reason either as to why he finds them unconvincing or why the reader should.

As to the allegedly relentless competitive pressure to cut costs, that’s certainly the conventional wisdom. And it’s the party line among corporate management, who justify downsizings, speedups and stagnant wages by reference to the “competitive global economy.”

But in fact, corporate capitalism is characterized far more by the suppression of competition. Competition is mainly for the small players. Far from constantly adopting more efficient technical innovations under the pressure of competition, the large corporations in any particular industry are more likely to collude in spooning out technical improvements in dribs and drabs as they retire old equipment. For example, consider the Big Three US auto companies which, according to the Nader Group, agreed in the early ’60s not to introduce various new features until all three companies were ready to introduce them at the same time. Or the major telecommunications companies, which generally provide the same lousy bandwidth and data caps and high rates in any given geographical area, while pocketing the billions in excess rates they collected based on the original promise to build out fiber optic infrastructure.

And throughout industrial history, the major corporate players’ relationship to new technology has been characterized by collusion more than competition. Rather than one firm adopting an innovation and taking over an industry, firms have established cartels through the exchange and pooling of patents.

Far from being better able to endure the ups and downs of market competition because they’re larger and more efficient, the big players depend on the state to stabilize the marketplace and erect entry barriers to protect them against competition from more efficient small players.

As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in The New Industrial State, in the very heyday of mass-production capitalism — a system he enthusiastically endorsed — competition is the one thing that large-scale industry cannot deal with. If anything, capital-intensiveness results in fragility, not resilience; the long-term planning horizons of the large manufacturing corporation mean that it has to undertake production with a reasonable assurance that what is produced after several years of design, planning and retooling will be consumed. What large-scale, capital-intensive, mass-production industry needs, above all else, is stability and predictability. Rather than having a superior ability to weather the storms of market competition, large-scale industry is a hothouse flower that depends on the state to reshape the surrounding society to remove as much uncertainty and instability as possible.

That was the primary reason for what Gabriel Kolko, in The Triumph of Conservatism, called the “political capitalism” of the Progressive Era regulatory state: state intervention in the market to rationalize the economy and restrict competition to acceptable levels, and enable corporations to extract reasonable, predictable profits in the long run.

Capital-intensiveness carries with it high overhead — and overhead is the essence of fragility. It is the high overhead of large, capital-intensive firms that requires them to have a guaranteed outlet for their product and creates the imperative of suppressing competition. The higher the overhead, the larger the minimum regular revenue stream required to service it — just to run in place, in other words. The lower the overhead, on the other hand, the more agile and resilient a firm is; likewise the better able it is to ride out bad times without going in the hole, and the more of the revenue stream is income free and clear in good times.

And an increasing share of production technology even within the centralized corporate economy is small-scale, better suited to lean on-demand production for local industrial districts than to a mass consumer society. It’s just that the technologies of the new economy are enclosed within corporate walls through the use of state-enforced monopolies — like patents and trademarks — to suppress competition.

Derek also argues that markets “tend to encroach on more and more of human life … Money tends to move into new areas of society,” and ever-growing areas of life are incorporated into the cash nexus.

But as David Graeber argued in Debt, market exchange (not the predominance of the cash nexus as the primary way of organizing life) has existed on a stable basis in various times and places without turning into capitalism. The exchange of goods with money prices has been a part of economic life in many societies over the past few thousand years. But the hegemony of the cash nexus, and monetization of most of life, to the exclusion of other forms of organizing production and consumption within the social economy is a pathological phenomenon associated with militaristic, aggressive states (as in the Axial age of empires dating from the mid-1st millennium B.C. to the mid-1st millennium A.D., and the even more virulent imperial states that arose in early modern Western Europe and conquered and enslaved most of the world).

And as Derek acknowledges, my enthusiasm for ideas of Ostrom’s like natural resource commons (as well as my equal enthusiasm for organizing a growing share of activity through the post-money, abundance-based communism of P2P networks) should make it plain that my idea of a market society is simply one in which market exchange is part of the mix — and not necessarily even a very large part of it.

He also raises the possibilities suggested by Marx himself — for example, he hints that the developing world outside Europe might in some way leapfrog the Western European model of industrial capitalism and evolve directly into communism through such pre-capitalist institutions as the Russian Mir. I think had he lived to see speculations like those of Kropotkin’s on the decentralizing potential of electrically powered machinery, in Fields, Factories and Workshops, he might have moderated his views on the association between progress and capital-intensiveness and further developed his thoughts on the possibility of much of the world using small-scale, ephemeral technology to bypass the Dark Satanic Mills and go directly towards distributed socialism.

I’m not entirely sure whether Derek has fully taken into account the extent to which my socialistic idea of a “free market society” differs from conventional anarcho-capitalist visions of a society dominated by money exchange and business firms. But that difference leaves a lot of room for agreement between me and Derek on what kind of free society could exist on a stable basis without degenerating into capitalism — perhaps more than Derek has considered. But Derek himself recognizes that there is a great deal of commonality in the kind of post-corporate world we desire, with both of us desiring “a diverse economy, which moves beyond the state and the market to the commons.”

While he sees value in markets, he does to some extent over leap the conventional assumptions, like both Marx and Ostrom, recognizing that economic activity extends beyond markets and states. This position is vitally important because there is a large and increasingly militant rebellion against corporate neoliberalism taking place.  In Europe, parties like Podemos and Syriza have risen on opposition to austerity and corporate control. I am still amazed that my friend Jeremy Corbyn, a lonely left-wing MP who was more popular with Greens than his own party, has won a landslide victory to lead the opposition Labour Party here in the UK.  In Rojava and the rest of Kurdistan, the revolutionary Kurds, learning from their own participatory experiments and the writings of green anarchist Murray Bookchin, are creating a left libertarian non state.

Like Derek, I have felt enthusiasm not only for Ostrom’s thought, but for the rise of offshoot political movements from M15 and Syntagma. I see a great deal of promise in Corbyn’s distinction between state and social ownership — perhaps even some hope of a partial move back towards Colin Ward’s vision of public services organized around mutuals and friendly societies instead of government and corporate bureaucracies.

Derek finally notes that to the extent we hope to prevent a “diverse market plus commons economy” from degenerating back into capitalism,

will require precise mechanism, perhaps some kind of jubilee as advocated in the Torah for wiping out debt and redistributing resources…. While we cannot at a stroke move beyond both markets and states, we can I believe to some extent roll both markets and states back, democratize the economy and create institutional governance which is participatory rather than elitist.

There’s much we can agree on here. Like Graeber, I sympathize strongly with the traditional revolutionary program throughout history of abolishing debts and redividing the land. I view the vast majority of today’s land titles as artificial and based on past robbery or enclosure and believe that a libertarian system of ownership (including common ownership) based on appropriation by use and with reasonable standards for constructive abandonment would lead to a state of affairs in which most land was owned by people personally occupying and using it. I believe, likewise, that the vast majority of existing debt is odious and should be wiped clean, and that enforcement of even legitimate debt should be mainly through reputational mechanisms rather than legal enforcement of payment.

In a society based on these principles, and a money system based on the constant mutual advance of credit of the sort Graeber described in the credit-clearing systems of medieval villages, I believe the countervailing measures against the concentration of land and capital would be quite similar to those of the biblical Jubilee system. And in a society where one’s right to an aliquot share of natural resource commons was guaranteed by custom, and a major share of one’s own subsistence needs could be met within the household economy without permission from (or the payment of rent to) anybody else, the floor of guaranteed comfortable subsistence even in bad times would be quite high by historic standards.

And I repeat, the world in which these things existed (whether that of the Israelite league of the central Palestinian highlands in the Book of Judges or that of the commoners described by J.M. Neeson) was destroyed primarily by the action of the state.

So, to a large extent, I think that once we get beyond the respective connotations that we attach to the word “market” and get to concrete particulars, the potential area of agreement between Derek and me is very large indeed.

Notes: 

1. Kevin Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (2010); See also, Carson, “Introduction to the C4SS Edition of Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (2014).

Theories of Monopoly Capital

INTRODUCTION

My starting point for this article is a ground-breaking study by Joseph Stromberg. In "The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire,"[1] Stromberg provides an insightful Austrian analysis of state capitalist cartelization as the cause of crises of overproduction and surplus capital. In the course of his argument, he makes reference to Progressive/Revisionist and (to a lesser extent) Marxist theories of imperialism, and analyzes their parallels with the Austrian view.

Although the state capitalism of the twentieth century (as opposed to the earlier misnamed "laissez faire" variant, in which the statist character of the system was largely disguised as a "neutral" legal framework) had its roots in the mid-nineteenth century, it received great impetus as an elite ideology during the depression of the 1890s. From that time on, the problems of overproduction and surplus capital, the danger of domestic class warfare, and the need for the state to solve them, figured large in the perception of the corporate elite. The shift in elite consensus in the 1890s (toward corporate liberalism and foreign expansion) was as profound as that of the 1970s, when reaction to wildcat strikes, the "crisis of governability," and the looming "capital shortage" led the power elite to abandon corporate liberalism in favor of neo-liberalism.

But as Stromberg argues, the American ruling class was wrong in seeing the crises of overproduction and surplus capital as "natural or inevitable outgrowths of a market society."[2] They were, rather, the effects of regulatory cartelization of the economy by state capitalist policies.

The effects of the state's subsidies and regulations are 1) to encourage creation of production facilities on such a large scale that they are not viable in a free market, and cannot dispose of their full product domestically; 2) to promote monopoly prices above market clearing levels; and 3) to set up market entry barriers and put new or smaller firms at a competitive disadvantage, so as to deny adequate domestic outlets for investment capital. The result is a crisis of overproduction and surplus capital, and a spiraling process of increasing statism as politically connected corporate interests act through the state to resolve the crisis.

Although I cannot praise Stomberg enough for this contribution, which I use as a starting-point, I diverge from his analysis in several ways. Stromberg, himself a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist affiliated with the Mises Institute, relies mainly on Schumpeter's analysis of "export-dependent monopoly capitalism," as read through a Misean/Rothbardian lens. Secondarily, he relies on "corporate liberal" historians like Williams, Kolko and Weinstein. To the extent that he refers to Marxist analyses of monopoly capital, it is mainly in passing, if not utterly dismissive. But such theorists (especially Baran and Sweezy of the Monthly Review group, James O'Connor, and Paul Mattick) have parallelled his own Austrian analysis in interesting ways, and have provided unique insights that are complementary to the Austrian position.

Starting with Stromberg's article as my point of departure, I will integrate both his and these other analyses into my own mutualist framework. More importantly, as a mutualist, I go much further than Stromberg and the Austrians in dissociating the present corporate system from a genuine free market. Following the economic arguments of Benjamin Tucker and other mutualists, I distinguish capitalism from a genuine free market, and treat the state capitalism of the twentieth century as the natural outgrowth of a system which was statist from its very beginning.

THE RISE OF STATE CAPITALISM

Stromberg's argument is based on Murray Rothbard's Austrian theory of regulatory cartelization. Economists of the Austrian school, especially Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Rothbard, have taken a view of state capitalism in many respects resembling that of the New Left. That is, both groups portray it as a movement of large-scale, organized capital to obtain its profits through state intervention into the economy, although the regulations entailed in this project are usually sold to the public as "progressive" restraints on big business. This parallelism between the analyses of the New Left and the libertarian Right was capitalized upon by Rothbard in his own overtures to the Left. In such projects as his journal Left and Right, and in the anthology A New History of Leviathan (coedited with New Leftist Ronald Radosh), he sought an alliance of the libertarian Left and Right against the corporate state.

Rothbard treated the "war collectivism" of World War I as a prototype for twentieth century state capitalism. He described it as

a new order marked by strong government, and extensive and pervasive government intervention and planning, for the purpose of providing a network of subsidies and monopolistic privileges to business, and especially to large business, interests. In particular, the economy could be cartelized under the aegis of government, with prices raised and production fixed and restricted, in the classic pattern of monopoly; and military and other government contracts could be channeled into the hands of favored corporate producers. Labor, which had been becoming increasingly rambunctious, could be tamed and bridled into the service of this new, state monopoly-capitalist order, through the device of promoting a suitably cooperative trade unionism, and by bringing the willing union leaders into the planning system as junior partners.[3]

This view of state capitalism, shared by New Leftists and Austrians, flies in the face of the dominant American ideological framework. Before we can analyze the rise of statist monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century, we must rid ourselves of this pernicious conventional wisdom, common to mainstream left and right. Both mainline "conservatives" and "liberals" share the same mirror-imaged view of the world (but with "good guys" and "bad guys" reversed), in which the growth of the welfare and regulatory state reflected a desire to restrain the power of big business. According to this commonly accepted version of history, the Progressive and New Deal programs were forced on corporate interests from outside, and against their will. In this picture of the world, big government is a populist "countervailing power" against the "economic royalists." This picture of the world is shared by Randroids and Chicago boys on the right, who fulminate against "looting" by "anti-capitalist" collectivists; and by NPR liberals who confuse the New Deal with the Second Advent. It is the official ideology of the publick skool establishment, whose history texts recount heroic legends of "trust buster" TR combating the "malefactors of great wealth," and Upton Sinclair's crusade against the meat packers. It is expressed in almost identical terms in right-wing home school texts by Clarence Carson and the like, who bemoan the defeat of business at the hands of the collectivist state.

The conventional understanding of government regulation was succinctly stated by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the foremost spokesman for corporate liberalism: "Liberalism in America has ordinarily been the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community."[4] Mainstream liberals and conservatives may disagree on who the "bad guy" is in this scenario, but they are largely in agreement on the anti-business motivation. For example, Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business Review lamented in 1968: "Business has not really won or had its way in connection with even a single piece of proposed regulatory or social legislation in the last three-quarters of a century."[5]

The problem with these conventional assessments is that they are an almost exact reverse of the truth. The New Left has produced massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, virtually demolishing the official version of American history. (The problem, as in most cases of "paradigm shift," is that the consensus reality doesn't know it's dead yet). Scholars like James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko and William Appleman Williams, in their historical analyses of "corporate liberalism," have demonstrated that the main forces behind both Progressive and New Deal "reforms" were powerful corporate interests. To the extent that big business protested the New Deal in fact, it was a case of Brer Rabbit's plea not to fling him in the briar patch.

The following is intended only as a brief survey of the development of the corporate liberal regime, and an introduction to the New Left (and Austrian) analysis of it.

Despite Schlesinger's aura of "idealism" surrounding the twentieth century welfare/regulatory state, it was in fact pioneered by the Junker Socialism of Prussia--the work of that renowned New Age tree-hugger, Bismarck. The mainline socialist movement at the turn of the century (i.e., the part still controlled by actual workers, and not coopted by Fabian intellectuals) denounced the tendency to equate such measures with socialism, instead calling it "state socialism." The International Socialist Review in 1912, for example, warned workers not to be fooled into identifying social insurance or the nationalization of industry with "socialism." Such state programs as workers' compensation, old age and health insurance, were simply measures to strengthen and stabilize capitalism. And nationalization simply reflected the capitalist's realization "that he can carry on certain portions of the production process more efficiently through his government than through private corporations..... Some muddleheads find that will be Socialism, but the capitalist knows better."[6] Friedrich Engels took this view of public ownership:

At a further stage of evolution this form [the joint-stock company] also becomes insufficient: the official representative of capitalist society - the state - will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into state property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication - the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.[7]

The rise of "corporate liberalism" as an ideology at the turn of the twentieth century was brilliantly detailed in James Weinstein's The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State.[8] It was reflected in the so-called "Progressive" movement in the U.S., and by Fabianism, the closest British parallel. The ideology was in many ways an expression of the world view of "New Class" apparatchiks, whose chief values were planning and the cult of "professionalism," and who saw the lower orders as human raw material to be managed for their own good. This class is quite close to the social base for the Insoc movement that Orwell described in 1984:

The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.[9]

The key to efficiency, for the New Class, was to remove as much of life as possible from the domain of "politics" (that is, interference by non-professionals) and to place it under the control of competent authorities. "Democracy" was recast as a periodic legitimation ritual, with the individual returning between elections to his proper role of sitting down and shutting up. In virtually every area of life, the average citizen was to be transformed from Jefferson's self-sufficient and resourceful yeoman into a client of some bureaucracy or other. The educational system was designed to render him a passive and easily managed recipient of the "services" of one institution after another. In every area of life, as Ivan Illich wrote, the citizen/subject/resource was taught to "confuse process and substance."

Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

As a corollary of this principle, the public was taught to "view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one's own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion."[10]

Although the corporate liberal ideology is associated with the New Class world view, it intersected in many ways with that of "enlightened" employers who saw paternalism as a way of getting more out of workers. Much of corporate leadership at the turn of the century

revealed a strikingly firm conception of a benevolent feudal approach to the firm and its workers. Both were to be dominated and co-ordinated from the central office. In that vein, they were willing to extend... such things as new housing, old age pensions, death payments, wage and job schedules, and bureaus charged with responsibility for welfare, safety and sanitation.[11]

And the New Class mania for planning and rationality was reflected within the corporation in the Taylorist/Fordist cult of "scientific management," in which the workman was deskilled and control of the production process was shifted upward into the white collar hierarchy of managers and engineers.[12]

The New Class intellectuals, despite their prominent role in formulating the ideology, were coopted as a decidedly junior partner of the corporate elite. As Hilaire Belloc and William English Walling perceived, "Progressives" and Fabians valued regimentation and centralized control much more than their allegedly "socialist" economic projects. They recognized, for the most part, that expropriation of the capitalists was impossible in the real world. The large capitalists, in turn, recognized the value of the welfare and regulatory state for maintaining social stability and control, and for making possible the political extraction of profits in the name of egalitarian values. The result was a devil's bargain by which the working class was guaranteed a minimum level of comfort and security, in return for which the large corporations were enabled to extract profits through the state. Of the "Progressive" intellectual, Belloc wrote:

Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent on the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.[13]

The New Class, its appetite for power satiated with petty despotisms in the departments of education and human services, was put to work on its primary mission of cartelizing the economy for the profit of the corporate ruling class. Its "populist" rhetoric was harnessed to sell state capitalism to the masses. The overeducated yahoos admirably fitted the role of useful idiots for their masters.

But whatever the "idealistic" motivations of the social engineers themselves, their program was implemented to the extent that it furthered the material interests of monopoly capital. Kolko used the term "political capitalism" to describe the general objectives big business pursued through the "Progressive" legislative agenda:

Political capitalism is the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security - to attain rationalization - in the economy. Stability is the elimination of internecine competition and erratic fluctuations in the economy. Predictability is the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable expectations. By security I mean protection from the political attacks latent in any formally democratic political structure. I do not give to rationalization its frequent definition as the improvement of efficiency, output, or internal organization of a company; I mean by the term, rather, the organization of the economy and the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run.[14]

From the turn of the twentieth century on, there was a series of attempts by corporate leaders to create some institutional structure by which price competition could be regulated and their respective market shares stabilized. "It was then," Paul Sweezy wrote,

that U.S. businessmen learned the self-defeating nature of price-cutting as a competitive weapon and started the process of banning it through a complex network of laws (corporate and regulatory), institutions (e.g., trade associations), and conventions (e.g., price leadership) from normal business practice.[15]

But merely private attempts at cartelization before the Progressive Era--namely the so-called "trusts" - were miserable failures, according to Kolko. The dominant trend at the turn of the century - despite the effects of tariffs, patents, railroad subsidies, and other existing forms of statism - was competition. The trust movement was an attempt to cartelize the economy through such voluntary and private means as mergers, acquisitions, and price collusion. But the over-leveraged and over-capitalized trusts were even less efficient than before, and steadily lost market share at the hands of their smaller, more efficient competitors. Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, immediately after their formation, began a process of eroding market share. In the face of this resounding failure, big business acted through the state to cartelize itself--hence, the Progressive regulatory agenda. "Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it."[16]

The FTC and Clayton Acts reversed this long trend toward competition and loss of market share and made stability possible.

The provisions of the new laws attacking unfair competitors and price discrimination meant that the government would now make it possible for many trade associations to stabilize, for the first time, prices within their industries, and to make effective oligopoly a new phase of the economy.[17]

The Federal Trade Commission created a hospitable atmosphere for trade associations and their efforts to prevent price cutting.[18] The two pieces of legislation accomplished what the trusts had been unable to: it enabled a handful of firms in each industry to stabilize their market share and to maintain an oligopoly structure between them. This oligopoly pattern has remained stable ever since.

It was during the war [i.e. WWI] that effective, working oligopoly and price and market agreements became operational in the dominant sectors of the American economy. The rapid diffusion of power in the economy and relatively easy entry [i.e., the conditions the trust movement failed to suppress] virtually ceased. Despite the cessation of important new legislative enactments, the unity of business and the federal government continued throughout the 1920s and thereafter, using the foundations laid in the Progressive Era to stabilize and consolidate conditions within various industries. And, on the same progressive foundations and exploiting the experience with the war agencies, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt later formulated programs for saving American capitalism. The principle of utilizing the federal government to stabilize the economy, established in the context of modern industrialism during the Progressive Era, became the basis of political capitalism in its many later ramifications.[19]

In addition, the various safety and quality regulations introduced during this period also had the effect of cartelizing the market. They served essentially the same purpose as the later attempts in the Wilson war economy to reduce the variety of styles and features available in product lines, in the name of "efficiency." Any action by the state to impose a uniform standard of quality (e.g. safety), across the board, necessarily eliminates safety as a competitive issue between firms. Thus, the industry is partially cartelized, to the very same extent that would have happened had all the firms in it adopted a uniform level of quality standards, and agreed to stop competing in that area. A regulation, in essence, is a state-enforced cartel in which the members agree to cease competing in a particular area of quality or safety, and instead agree on a uniform standard. And unlike non-state-enforced cartels, no member can seek an advantage by defecting. Similarly, the provision of services by the state (R&D funding, for example) removes them as components of price in cost competition between firms, and places them in the realm of guaranteed income to all firms in a market alike. Whether through regulations or direct state subsidies to various forms of accumulation, the corporations act through the state to carry out some activities jointly, and to restrict competition to selected areas.

And Kolko provided abundant evidence that the main force behind this entire legislative agenda was big business. The Meat Inspection Act, for instance, was passed primarily at the behest of the big meat packers. In the 1880s, repeated scandals involving tainted meat resulted in U.S. firms being shut out of several European markets. The big packers turned to the U.S. government to conduct inspections on exported meat. By carrying out this function jointly, through the state, they removed quality inspection as a competitive issue between them, and the U.S. government provided a seal of approval in much the same way a trade association would--but at public expense. The problem with this early inspection regime was that only the largest packers were involved in the export trade; mandatory inspections therefore gave a competitive advantage to the small firms that supplied only the domestic market. The main motive behind Roosevelt's Meat Inspection Act was to bring the small packers into the inspection regime, and thereby end the competitive disability it imposed on large firms. Upton Sinclair simply served as an unwitting shill for the meat-packing industry.[20] This pattern was repeated, in its essential form, in virtually every component of the "Progressive" agenda.

The same leitmotif reappears in the New Deal. The core of business support for the New Deal was, as Ronald Radosh described it, "leading moderate big businessmen and liberal-minded lawyers from large corporate enterprises."[21] Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers described them more specifically as "a new power bloc of capital-intensive industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented commercial banks."[22]

Labor was a relatively minor part of the total cost package of such businesses; at the same time, capital-intensive industry, as Galbraith pointed out in his analysis of the "technostructure," depended on long-term stability and predictability for planning high-tech production. Therefore, this segment of big business was willing to trade higher wages for social peace in the workplace.[23] The roots of this faction can be traced to the relatively "progressive" employers described by James Weinstein in his account of the National Civic Federation at the turn of the century, who were willing to engage in collective bargaining over wages and working conditions in return for uncontested management control of the workplace.[24]

This attitude was at the root of the Taylorist/Fordist system, in which the labor bureaucrats agreed to let management manage, so long as labor got an adequate share of the pie.[25] Such a social contract was most emphatically in the interests of large corporations. The sitdown movement in the auto industry and the organizing strikes among West coast longshoremen were virtual revolutions among rank and file workers on the shop floor. In many cases, they were turning into regional general strikes. The Wagner Act domesticated this revolution and brought it under the control of professional labor bureaucrats.

Industrial unionism, from the employer's viewpoint, had the advantage over craft unionism of providing a single bargaining agent with which management could deal. One of the reasons for the popularity of "company unions" among large corporations, besides the obvious advantages in pliability, was the fact that they were an alternative to the host of separate craft unions of the AFL. Even in terms of pliability, the industrial unions of the Thirties had some of the advantages of company unions. By bringing collective bargaining under the aegis of federal labor law, corporate management was able to use union leadership to discipline their own rank and file, and to use the federal courts as a mechanism of enforcement.

The New Dealers devised... a means to integrate big labor into the corporate state. But only unions that were industrially organized, and which paralleled in their structure the organization of industry itself, could play the appropriate role. A successful corporate state required a safe industrial-union movement to work. It also required a union leadership that shared the desire to operate the economy from the top in formal conferences with the leaders of the other functional economic groups, particularly the corporate leaders. The CIO unions... provided such a union leadership.[26]

And moderate members of the corporate elite also gained reassurance from the earlier British experience in accepting collective bargaining. Collective bargaining did not affect the distribution of wealth, for one thing: "Labor gains were made due to the general growth in wealth and at the expense of the consumer, which would mean small businessmen, pensioners, farmers, and nonunionized white collar employees." (Not to mention a large contingent of unskilled laborers and lumpenproles without bargaining leverage against the employing classes). And the British found that firms in a position of oligopoly, with a relatively inelastic demand, were able to pass increased labor costs on to the consumer at virtually no cost to themselves.[27]

The Wagner Act served the central purposes of the corporate elite. To some extent it was a response to mass pressure from below. But the decision on whether and how to respond, and the form of the response, and the implementation of the response, were all firmly in the hands of the corporate elite. According to Domhoff (writing in The Higher Circles), "The benefits to capital were several: greater efficiency and productivity from labor, less labor turnover, the disciplining of the labor force by labor unions, the possibility of planning labor costs over the long run, and the dampening of radical doctrines."[28] James O'Connor described it this way: "From the standpoint of monopoly capital the main function of unions was... to inhibit disruptive, spontaneous rank-and-file activity (e.g., wildcat strikes and slowdowns) and to maintain labor discipline in general. In other words, unions were... the guarantors of 'managerial prerogatives.'"[29] The objectives of stability and productivity were more likely to be met by such a limited Taylorist social compact than by a return to the labor violence and state repression of the late nineteenth century.

In The Power Elite and the State, Domhoff retreated to a slightly more nuanced position.[30] It was true, he admitted, that a majority of large corporations opposed the Wagner Act as it was actually presented. But the basic principles of collective bargaining embodied in it had been the outcome of decades of corporate liberal theory and practice, worked out through policy networks in which "progressive" large corporations had played a leading role; the National Civic Federation, as Weinstein described its career, was a typical example of such networks. The motives of those in the Roosevelt administration who framed the Wagner Act were very much in the mainstream of corporate liberalism. Although they may have been ambivalent about the specific form of FDR's labor legislation, Swope and his corporate fellow travelers had played the major role in formulating the principles behind it. Whatever individual business leaders thought of Wagner, it was drafted by mainstream corporate lawyers who were products of the ideological climate created by those same business leaders; and it was drafted with a view to their interests. Although it was not accepted by big business as a whole, it was largely the creation of representatives of big business interests whose understanding of the act's purpose was largely the same as those outlined in Domhoff's quote above from The Higher Circles. And although it was designed to contain the threat of working class power, it benefited by large-scale working class support as the best deal they were likely to get. Finally, the southern segment of the ruling class was willing to go along with it because it specifically exempted agricultural laborers.

Among the other benefits of labor legislation, corporate interests are able to rely on the state's police powers to impose an authoritarian character on labor relations. In the increasingly statist system, Bukharin pointed out in his analysis of state capitalism almost a century ago,

workers [become] formally bonded to the imperialist state. In point of fact, employees of state enterprises even before the war were deprived of a number of most elementary rights, like the right to organise, to strike, etc.... With state capitalism making nearly every line of production important for the state, with nearly all branches of production directly serving the interests of war, prohibitive legislation is extended to the entire field of economic activities. The workers are deprived of the right to move, the right to strike, the right to belong to the so-called "subversive" parties, the right to choose an enterprise, etc. They are transformed into bondsmen attached, not to the land, but to the plant.[31]

The relevance of this line of analysis to America can be seen with a cursory look at Cleveland's response to the Pullman strike, the Railway Labor Relations Act and Taft-Hartley, and Truman's and Bush's threats to use soldiers as scabs in, respectively, the steelworkers' and longshoremen's strikes.

The Social Security Act was the other major part of the New Deal agenda. In The Higher Circles, Domhoff described its functioning in language much like his characterization of the Wagner Act. Its most important result

from the point of view of the power elite was a restabilization of the system. It put a floor under consumer demand, raised people's expectations for the future and directed political energies back into conventional channels.... The wealth distribution did not change, decision-making power remained in the hands of upper-class leaders, and the basic principles that encased the conflict were set forth by moderate members of the power elite.[32]

In his later work The Power Elite and the State, Domhoff undertook a much more thorough analysis, with a literature review of his structuralist Marxists critics, that essentially verified his earlier position.[33]

The New Deal and Great Society welfare state, according to Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, served a similar function to that of Social Security. It blunted the danger of mass political radicalism resulting from widespread homelessness and starvation. It provided social control by bringing the underclass under the supervision of an army of intrusive, paternalistic social workers and welfare case workers.[34] And like Social Security, it put a floor on aggregate demand.

To the extent that the welfare and labor provisions of FDR's New Deal have benefitted average people, the situation resembles a fable of Tolstoy's, in which a humane farmer, at great expense to himself, made endless efforts to render the lot of his cattle more pleasant. A perplexed witness to his bovine welfare state asked him, "Instead of spending all this time and effort on enlarging the pen, piping in music, and so forth, why don't you just tear down the fence?" The farmer replied, "Because then I couldn't milk them!" The capitalist supporters of the welfare state are like an enlightened farmer who understands that his livestock will produce more for him, in the long run, if they are well treated.

Hilaire Belloc speculated that the industrial serfdom in his Servile State would only be stable if the State subjected the unemployable underclass to "corrective" treatment in forced labor camps, and forced everyone even marginally employable into a job, as a deterrent to deliberate parasitism or malingering. Society would "find itself" under the "necessity,"

when once the principle of the minimum wage is conceded, coupled with the principle of sufficiency and security, to control those whom the minimum wage excludes from the area of normal employment.[35]

This society would be organized on the pattern of Anthony Burgess' decaying welfare state, in which "everyone not a child, or with child, must be employed." But Belloc's speculation was not idle; since Fabians like the Webbs and H.G. Wells had proposed just such labor camps for the underclass in their paternalistic utopia.[36]

Although we are still far from a formal requirement to be either employed or subjected to remedial labor by the State, a number of intersecting State policies have that tendency. For example, the imposition of compulsory unemployment insurance, with the State as arbiter of when one qualifies to collect:

A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such sums shall be used. They are not in his possession.... They are in the hands of a government official. "Here is work offered you at twenty-five shillings a week. If you do not take it, you certainly shall not have a right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take it the sum shall still stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labor, I will permit you to have some of your money: not otherwise."[37]

Still another measure with this tendency is "workfare," coupled with subsidies to employers who hire the underclass as peon labor. Vagrancy laws and legal restrictions on jitney services, self-built temporary shelters, etc., serve to reduce the range of options for independent subsistence. And finally, the prison-industrial complex, as "employer" for the nearly half of its "clients" guilty of only consensual market transactions, is in effect a forced labor camp absorbing a major segment of the underclass.

The culmination of FDR's state capitalism (of course) was the military-industrial complex which arose from World War II, and has continued ever since. It has since been described as "military Keynesianism," or a "perpetual war economy." A first step in realizing the monumental scale of the war economy's effect is to consider that the total value of plant and equipment in the United States increased by about two-thirds (from $40 to $66 billion) between 1939 and 1945, most of it a taxpayer "gift" of forced investment funds provided to the country's largest corporations.[38] Profit was virtually guaranteed on war production through "cost-plus" contracts.[39]

Demobilization of the war economy after 1945 very nearly threw the overbuilt and government-dependent industrial sector into a renewed depression. For example, in Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948, Frank Kofsky described the aircraft industry as spiraling into red ink after the end of the war, and on the verge of bankruptcy when it was rescued by Truman's new bout of Cold War spending on heavy bombers.[40]

The Cold War restored the corporate economy's heavy reliance on the state as a source of guaranteed sales. Charles Nathanson argued that "one conclusion is inescapable: major firms with huge aggregations of corporate capital owe their survival after World War II to the Cold War...."[41] For example, David Noble pointed out that civilian jumbo jets would never have existed without the government's heavy bomber contracts. The production runs for the civilian market alone were too small to pay for the complex and expensive machine tools. The 747 is essentially a spinoff of military production.[42]

The heavy industrial and high tech sectors were given a virtually guaranteed outlet, not only by U.S. military procurement, but by grants and loan guarantees for foreign military sales under the Military Assistance Program. Although apologists for the military-industrial complex have tried to stress the relatively small fraction of total production occupied by military goods, it makes more sense to compare the volume of military procurement to the amount of idle capacity. Military production runs amounting to a minor percentage of total production might absorb a major part of total excess production capacity, and have a huge effect on reducing unit costs. And the rate of profit on military contracts tends to be quite a bit higher, given the fact that military goods have no "standard" market price, and the fact that prices are set by political means (as periodic Pentagon budget scandals should tell us).[43]

But the importance of the state as a purchaser was eclipsed by its relationship to the producers themselves, as Charles Nathanson pointed out. The research and development process was heavily militarized by the Cold War "military-R&D complex." Military R&D often results in basic, general use technologies with broad civilian applications. Technologies originally developed for the Pentagon have often become the basis for entire categories of consumer goods. (44) The general effect has been to "substantially [eliminate] the major risk area of capitalism: the development of and experimentation with new processes of production and new products."[45]

This is the case in electronics especially, where many products originally developed by military R&D "have become the new commercial growth areas of the economy."[46] Transistors and other forms of miniaturized circuitry were developed primarily with Pentagon research money. The federal government was the primary market for large mainframe computers in the early days of the industry; without government contracts, the industry might never have had sufficient production runs to adopt mass production and reduce unit costs low enough to enter the private market. And the infrastructure for the worldwide web itself was created by the Pentagon's DARPA, originally as a redundant global communications system that could survive a nuclear war. Any implied commentary on the career of Bill Gates is, of course, unintended.

Overall, Nathanson estimated, industry depended on military funding for around 60% of its research and development spending; but this figure is considerably understated by the fact that a significant part of nominally civilian R&D spending is aimed at developing civilian applications for military technology.[47] It is also understated by the fact that military R&D is often used for developing production technologies (like automated control systems in the machine tool industry) that become the basis for production methods throughout the civilian sector.

Seymour Melman described the "permanent war economy" as a privately-owned, centrally-planned economy that included most heavy manufacturing and high tech industry. This "state-controlled economy" was based on the principles of "maximization of costs and of government subsidies."[48]

It can draw on the federal budget for virtually unlimited capital. It operates in an insulated, monopoly market that makes the state-capitalist firms, singly and jointly, impervious to inflation, to poor productivity performance, to poor product design and poor production managing. The subsidy pattern has made the state-capitalist firms failure-proof. That is the state-capitalist replacement for the classic self-correcting mechanisms of the competitive, cost-minimizing, profit-maximizing firm.[49]

The state capitalism of the twentieth century differed fundamentally from the misnamed "laissez-faire" capitalism of the nineteenth century in two regards: 1) the growth of direct organizational ties between corporations and the state, and the circulation of managerial personnel between them; and 2) the eclipse of surplus value extraction from the worker through the production process (as described by classical Marxism), by the extraction of "super-profits" a) from the consumer through the exchange process and b) from the taxpayer through the fiscal process.

Although microeconomics texts generally describe the functioning of supply and demand curves as though the nature of the market actors were unchanged since Adam Smith's day, in fact the rise of the large corporation as the dominant type of economic actor has been a revolution as profound as any in history. It occurred parallel to the rise of the "positive" state (i.e., the omnicompetent, centralized regulatory state) in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And, vitally important to remember, the two phenomena were mutually reinforcing. The state's subsidies, privileges and other interventions in the market were the major force behind the centralization of the economy and the concentration of productive power. And in turn, the corporate economy's need for stability and rationality, and for state-guaranteed profits, has been the central force behind the continuing growth of the leviathan state.

And the rise of the centralized state and the centralized corporation has created a system in which the two are organizationally connected, and run by essentially the same recirculating elites (a study of the careers of David Rockefeller, Averell Harriman, or Robert McNamara should be instructive on the last point). This phenomenon has been most ably described by the "power elite" school of sociologists, particularly C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff.

According to Mills, the capitalist class was not supplanted by a "managerial revolution," as James Burnham had claimed; but the elite's structure was still most profoundly affected by the corporate revolution. The plutocracy ceased to be a social "class" in the sense described by Marx: an autonomous social formation perpetuated largely through family lines of transmission and informal social ties, with its organizational links of firm ownership clearly secondary to its existence in the "social" realm. The plutocracy were no longer just a few hundred rich families who happened to invest their old money in one firm or another. Rather, Mills described it as "the managerial reorganization of the propertied classes into the more or less unified stratum of the corporate rich."[50] Rather than an amorphous collection of wealthy families, in which legal claims to an income from property were the defining characteristic, the ruling class came to be defined by the organizational structure through which it gained its wealth. It was because of this new importance of the institutional forms of the power structure that Mills preferred the term "power elite" to "ruling class": "'Class' is an economic term; 'rule' a political one. The phrase, 'ruling class,' thus contains the theory that an economic class rules politically.”[51]

Domhoff, who retained more of the traditional Marxist idea of class than did Mill, described the situation in this way:

The upper class as a whole does not do the ruling. Instead, class rule is manifested through the activities of a wide variety of organizations and institutions. These organizations and institutions are financed and directed by those members of the upper class who have the interest and ability to involve themselves in protecting and enhancing the privileged social position of their class. Leaders within the upper class join with high-level employees in the organizations they control to make up what will be called the power elite. This power elite is the leadership group of the upper class as a whole, but it is not the same thing as the upper class, for not all members of the upper class are members of the power elite and not all members of the power elite are part of the upper class. It is members of the power elite who take part in the processes that maintain the class structure.[52]

Because of this corporate reorganization, senior corporate management has been incorporated as junior partners in the power elite. Contrary to theories of the "managerial revolution," senior management is kept firmly subordinated, through informal social ties and the corporate socialization process, to the goals of the owners. Even a Welch or Eisner understands that his career depends on being a "team player," and the team's objectives are set by the Rockefellers and DuPonts.[53] The corporate reorganization of the economy has led to permanent organizational links between large corporations, government agencies, research institutions, and foundation money, and resulted in the plutocracy functioning organizationally on a class-wide basis.[54]

Bukharin anticipated the power elite theory of Mills and Domhoff, in which the ruling class ceased to be an "amorphous mass" of wealthy families, and was itself (in C. Wright Mills' words) "reorganized along corporate lines." He wrote of interlocking elites in language that prefigured Mills:

With the growth of the importance of state power, its inner structure also changes. The state becomes more than ever before an "executive committee of the ruling classes." It is true that state power always reflected the interests of the "upper strata," but inasmuch as the top layer itself was a more or less amorphous mass, the organized state apparatus faced an unorganized class (or classes) whose interests it embodied. Matters are totally different now. The state apparatus not only embodies the interests of the ruling classes in general, but also their collectively expressed will. It faces no more atomized members of the ruling classes, but their organizations. Thus the government is de facto transformed into a "committee" elected by the representatives of entrepreneurs' organizations, and it becomes the highest guiding force of the state capitalist trust.[55]

In a passage that could have been written by Mills, Bukharin described the rotation of personnel between "private" and "public" offices in the interlocking directorate of state and capitalist bureaucracies:

The bourgeoisie loses nothing from shifting production from one of its hands into another, since present-day state power is nothing but an entrepreneurs' company of tremendous power, headed even by the same persons that occupy the leading positions in the banking and syndicate offices.[56]

It is the common class background of the state and corporate elites, and the constant circulation of them between institutions, that underscores the utter ridiculousness of controlling corporate power through such nostrums as "clean election" reforms. The promotion of corporate aims by high-level policy makers is the result mainly, not of soft money and other forms of cartoonishly corrupt villainy, but of the policy makers' cultural background and world view. Mills commented ironically on the "pitiful hearings" on confirmation of corporate leaders appointed to government office:

The revealing point... is not the cynicism toward the law and toward the lawmakers on the middle levels of power which they display, nor their reluctance to dispose of their personal stock. The interesting point is how impossible it is for such men to divest themselves of their engagement with the corporate world in general and with their own corporations in particular. Not only their money, but their friends, their interests, their training -their lives in short - are deeply involved in this world.... The point is not so much financial or personal interests in a given corporation, but identification with the corporate world.[57]

Although the structuralist Marxists have created an artificial dichotomy between their position and that of institutional elitists like Mill and Domhoff,[58] they are entirely correct in pointing out that the political leadership does not have to be subject, in any crude way, to corporate control. Instead, the very structure of the corporate economy and the situations it creates compel the leadership to promote corporate interests out of perceived "objective necessity." Given not just the background and assumptions of the policy elite, but the dependence of political on economic stability, policies that stabilize the corporate economy and guarantee steady output and profits are the only imaginable alternatives. And regardless of how "progressive" the regulatory state's ostensible aims, the organizational imperative will make the corporate economy's managers and directors the main source of the processed data and technical expertise on which policy makers depend.

The public's control over the system's overall structure, besides, is severely constrained by the fact that people who work inside the corporate and state apparatus inevitably have an advantage in time, information, attention span, and agenda control over the theoretically "sovereign" outsiders in whose name they act. The very organs of cultural reproduction - the statist school system, the corporate press, etc. - shape the public's "common sense" understanding of what is possible, and what is to be relegated to the outer darkness of "extremism." So long as wire service and network news foreign correspondents write their copy in hotel rooms from government handouts, and half the column inches in newspapers are generated by government and corporate public relations departments, the "moderate" understanding will always be conditioned by institutional culture.

In making use of the "Power Elite" model of Mills and Domhoff, one must be prepared to counter the inevitable "tinfoil hat" charges from certain quarters. Power Elite theory, despite a superficial resemblance to some right-wing conspiracy theories, has key differences from them. The latter take, as the primary motive force of history, personal cabals united by some esoteric or gratuitously evil ideology. Now, the concentration of political and economic power in the control of small, interlocking elites, is indeed likely to result in informal personal ties, and therefore to have as its side-effect sporadic conspiracies (Stinnett's Day of Deceit theory of Pearl Harbor is a leading example). But such conspiracy is not necessary to the working of the system--it simply occurs as a secondary phenomenon, and occasionally speeds up or intensifies processes that happen for the most part automatically. Although the CFR is an excellent proxy for the foreign policy elite, and some informal networking and coordination of policy no doubt get done through it, it is essentially a secondary organization, whose membership are ex officio representatives of the major institutions regulating national life. The primary phenomenon is the institutional concentration of power that brings such people into contact with each other in their official capacities.

In the "monopoly capitalism" model of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, the central figures in the Monthly Review group, the corporate system can maintain stable profit levels by passing its costs on to the consumer. The increased labor costs of unionized heavy manufacturing are paid, ultimately, by the non-cartelized sectors of the economy (the same is true of the corporate income tax and the rest of the burden of "progressive" taxation, although the authors do not mention it in this context). Capitalism is no longer predominantly, as Marx had assumed in the nineteenth century, a system of competition. As a result, the large corporate sector of the economy becomes immune to Marx's law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit.[59]

The crucial difference between [competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism] is well known and can be summed up in the proposition that under competitive capitalism the individual enterprise is a "price taker," while under monopoly capitalism the big corporation is a "price maker."[60]

Direct collusion between the firms in an oligopoly market, whether open or hidden, is not required. "Price leadership," although the most common means by which corporations informally agree on price, is only one of several.

Price leadership... is only the leading species of a much larger genus.... So long as some fairly regular pattern is maintained such cases may be described as modified forms of price leadership. But there are many other situations in which no such regularity is discernible: which firm initiates price changes seems to be arbitrary. This does not mean that the essential ingredient of tacit collusion is absent. The initiating firm may simply be announcing to the rest of the industry, "We think the time has come to raise (or lower) the price in the interest of all of us." If the others agree, they will follow. If they do not, they will stand pat, and the firm that made the first move will rescind its initial price change. It is this willingness to rescind if an initial change is not followed which distinguishes the tacit collusion situation from a price-war situation. So long as firms accept this convention... it becomes relatively easy for the group as a whole to feel its way toward the price which maximizes the industry's profit.... If these conditions are satisfied, we can safely assume that the price established at any time is a reasonable approximation of the theoretical monopoly price."[61]

In this way, the firms in an oligopoly market can jointly determine their price very much as would a single monopoly firm. The resulting price surcharge passed on to the consumer is quite significant. According to an FTC study in the 1960s, "if highly concentrated industries were deconcentrated to the point where the four largest firms control 40% or less of an industry's sales, prices would fall by 25% or more. "[62]

This form of tacit collusion is not by any means free from breakdowns. When one firm develops a commanding lead in some new process or technology, or acquires a large enough market share or a low enough cost of production to be immune from retribution, it may well initiate a war of conquest on its industry.[63] Such suspensions of the rules of the game are identified, for example, with revolutionary changes like Wal-Mart's blitz of the retail market. But in between such disruptions, oligopoly markets can often function for years without serious price competition. As mentioned above, the Clayton Act's "unfair competition" provisions were designed to prevent the kind of catastrophic price wars that could destabilize oligopoly markets.

The "monopoly capital" theorists introduced a major innovation over classical Marxism by treating monopoly profit as a surplus extracted from the consumer in the exchange process, rather than from the laborer in the production process. This innovation was anticipated by the Austro-Marxist Hilferding in his description of the super profits resulting from the tariff:

The productive tariff thus provides the cartel with an extra profit over and above that which results from the cartelization itself, and gives it the power to levy an indirect tax on the domestic population. This extra profit no longer originates in the surplus value produced by the workers employed in cartels; nor is it a deduction from the profit of the other non-cartelized industries. It is a tribute exacted from the entire body of domestic consumers.[64]

Baran and Sweezy were quite explicit in recognizing the central organizing role of the state in monopoly capitalism. They described the political function of the regulatory state in ways quite similar to Kolko:

Now under monopoly capitalism it is as true as it was in Marx's day that the "executive power of the... state is simply a committee for managing the common affairs of the entire bourgeois class." And the common affairs of the entire bourgeois class include a concern that no industries which play an important role in the economy and in which large property interests are involved should be either too profitable or to unprofitable. Extra large profits are gained not only at the expense of consumers but also of other capitalists (electric power and telephone service, for example, are basic costs of all industries), and in addition they may, and at times of political instability do, provoke demands for genuinely effective antimonopoly action [They go on to point out agriculture and the extractive industries as examples of the opposite case, in which special state intervention is required to increase the low profits of a centrally important industry].... It therefore becomes a state responsibility under monopoly capitalism to insure, as far as possible, that prices and profit margins in the deviant industries are brought within the general run of great corporations.

This is the background and explanation of the innumberable regulatory schemes and mechanisms which characterize the American economy today.... In each case of course some worthy purpose is supposed to be served--to protect consumers, to conserve natural resources, to save the family-size farm--but only the naive believe that these fine sounding aims have any more to do with the case than the flowers that bloom in the spring.... All of this is fully understandable once the basic principle is grasped that under monopoly capitalism the function of the state is to serve the interests of monopoly capital....

Consequently the effect of government intervention into the market mechanism of the economy, whatever its ostensible purpose, is to make the system work more, not less, like one made up exclusively of giant corporations acting and interacting [according to a monopoly price system]....[65]

It is interesting, in this regard, to compare the effect of antitrust legislation in the U.S. to that of nationalization in European "social democracies." In most cases, the firms affected by both policies involve centrally important infrastructures or resources, on which the corporate economy as a whole is dependent. Nationalization in the Old World is used primarily in the case of energy, transportation and communication. In the U.S., the most famous antitrust cases have been against Standard Oil, AT&T, and Microsoft: all cases in which excessive prices in one firm could harm the interests of monopoly capital as a whole. And recent "deregulation," as it has been applied to the trucking and airline industries, has likewise been in the service of those general corporate interests harmed by monopoly transportation prices. In all these cases, the state has on occasion acted as an executive committee on behalf of the entire corporate economy, despite thwarting the mendacity of a few powerful corporations.

The common thread in all these lines of analysis is that an ever-growing portion of the functions of the capitalist economy have been carried out through the state. According to James O'Connor, state expenditures under monopoly capitalism can be divided into "social capital" and "social expenses."

Social capital is expenditures required for profitable private accumulation; it is indirectly productive (in Marxist terms, social capital indirectly expands surplus value). There are two kinds of social capital: social investment and social consumption (in Marxist terms, social constant capital and social variable capital).... Social investment consist of projects and services that increase the productivity of a given amount of laborpower and, other factors being equal, increase the rate of profit.... Social consumption consists of projects and services that lower the reproduction costs of labor and, other factors being equal, increase the rate of profit. An example of this is social insurance, which expands the productive powers of the work force while simultaneously lowering labor costs. The second category, social expenses, consists of projects and services which are required to maintain social harmony - to fulfill the state's "legitimization" function.... The best example is the welfare system, which is designed chiefly to keep social peace among unemployed workers.[66]

According to O'Connor, such state expenditures counteract the falling general rate of profit that Marx predicted. Monopoly capital is able to externalize many of its operating expenses on the state; and since the state's expenditures indirectly increase the productivity of labor and capital at taxpayer expense, the apparent rate of profit is increased.

Unquestionably, monopoly sector growth depends on the continuous expansion of social investment and social consumption projects that in part or in whole indirectly increase productivity from the standpoint of monopoly capital. In short, monopoly capital socializes more and more costs of production.[67]

O'Connor listed several of the main ways in which monopoly capital externalizes its operating costs on the political system:

Capitalist production has become more interdependent--more dependent on science and technology, labor functions more specialized, and the division of labor more extensive. Consequently, the monopoly sector (and to a much lesser degree the competitive sector) requires increasing numbers of technical and administrative workers. It also requires increasing amounts of infrastructure (physical overhead capital) - transportation, communication, R&D, education, and other facilities. In short, the monopoly sector requires more and more social investment in relation to private capital.... The costs of social investment (or social constant capital) are not borne by monopoly capital but rather are socialized and fall on the state.[68]

We should briefly recall here our examination above of how such socialization of expenditures serves to cartelize industry. By externalizing such costs on the state, through the general tax system, monopoly capital removes these expenditures as an issue of competition between individual firms. It is as if all the firms in an industry formed a cartel to administer these costs in common, and agreed not to include them in their price competition. The costs and benefits are applied uniformly to the entire industry, removing it as a competitive disadvantage for some firms.

Although it flies in the face of "progressive" myth, big business is by no means uniformly opposed to national health insurance and other forms of social insurance. Currently, giant corporations in the monopoly capital sector are the most likely to provide private insurance to their employees; and such insurance is one of the fastest-rising components of labor costs. Consequently, firms that are already providing this service at their own expense are the logical beneficiaries of a nationalized system. The effect of such a national health system would be to remove the cost of this benefit as a competitive disadvantage for the companies that provided it. Even if the state requires only large corporations in the monopoly sector to provide health insurance, it is an improvement of the current situation, from the monopoly capital point of view: health insurance ceases to be a component of price competition among the largest firms. A national health system provides a competitive advantage to a nation's firms at the expense of their foreign competitors, who have to fund their own employee health benefits - hence, American capital's hostility to the Canadian national health, and its repeated attempts to combat it through the WTO. The cartelizing effects of socializing the costs of social insurance, likewise, was one reason a significant segment of monopoly capital supported FDR's Social Security agenda.

Daniel Gross, although erroneously treating it as a departure from the mythical traditional big business hostility to the welfare state, has made the same point about more recent big business support of government health insurance.[69] Large American corporations, by shouldering the burden of health insurance and other employee benefits borne by the state in Europe and Japan, is at a competitive disadvantage both against companies there and against smaller firms here.

Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephart, or rather his spokesman Jim English, admitted to a corporate liberal motivation for state-funded health insurance in his 2003 Labor Day address. Gephart's proposed mandatory employer coverage, with a 60% tax credit for the cost, would eliminate competition from companies that don't currently provide health insurance as an employee benefit. It would also reduce competition from firms in countries with a single-payer system.[70]

The level of technical training necessary to keep the existing corporate system running, the current level of capital intensiveness of production, and the current level of R&D efforts on which it depends, would none of them pay for themselves on a free market. The state's education system provides a technical labor force at public expense, and whenever possible overproduces technical specialists on the level needed to ensure that technical workers are willing to take work on the employers' terms. On this count, O'Connor quoted Veblen: the state answers capital's "need of a free supply of trained subordinates at reasonable wages..."[71]

The state's cartelization and socialization of the cost of reproducing a technically sophisticated labor force makes possible a far higher technical level of production than would support itself in a free market. The G.I. Bill was an integral part of the unprecedentedly high scale of state capitalism created during and after WWII.

Technical-administrative knowledge and skills, unlike other forms of capital over which private capitalists claim ownership, cannot be monopolized by any one or a few industrial-finance interests. The discoveries of science and technology spill over the boundaries of particular corporations and industries, especially in the epoch of mass communications, electronic information processing, and international labor mobility. Capital in the form of knowledge resides in the specialized skills and abilities of the working class itself. In the context of a free market for laborpower... no one corporation or industry or industrial-finance interest group can afford to train its own labor force or channel profits into the requisite amount of R&D. Patents afford some protection, but there is no guarantee that a particular corporation's key employees will not seek positions with other corporations or industries. The cost of losing trained laborpower is especially high in companies that employ technical workers whose skills are specific to particular industrial process--skills paid for by the company in question. Thus, on-the-job training (OJT) is little used not because it is technically inefficient... but because it does not pay.

Nor can any one corporation or industrial-finance interest afford to develop its own R&D or train the administrative personnel increasingly needed to plan, coordinate, and control the production and distribution process. In the last analysis, the state is required to coordinate R&D because of the high costs and uncertainty of getting utilizable results.[72]

At best, from the point of view of the employer, the state creates a "reserve army" of scientific and technical labor. At worst, when there is a shortage of such labor, the state at least absorbs the cost of producing it and removes it as a component of private industry's production costs. In either case, "the greater the socialization of the costs of variable capital, the lower will be the level of money wages, and... the higher the rate of profit in the monopoly sector."[73] And since the monopoly capital sector is able to pass its taxes onto the consumer or to the competitive capital sector, the effect is that "the costs of training technical laborpower are met by taxes paid by competitive sector capital and labor."[74]

The "public" schools' curriculum can be described as "servile education." Its objective is a human product which is capable of fulfilling the technical needs of corporate capital and the state, but at the same time docile and compliant, and incapable of any critical analysis of the system of power it serves. The public educationist movement and the creation of the first state school systems, remember, coincided with the rising factory system's need for a work force that was trained in obedience, punctuality, and regular habits. Technical competence and a "good attitude" toward authority, combined with twelve years of conditioning in not standing out or making waves, were the goal of the public educationists.

Even welfare expenses, although O'Connor classed them as a completely unproductive expenditure, are in fact another example of the state underwriting variable capital costs. Some socialists love to speculate that, if it were possible, capitalists would lower the prevailing rate of subsistence pay to that required to keep workers alive only when they were employed. But since that would entail starvation during periods of unemployment, the prevailing wage must cover contingencies of unemployment; otherwise, wages would be less than the minimum cost of reproducing labor. Under the welfare state, however, the state itself absorbs the cost of providing for such contingencies of unemployment, so that the uncertainty premium is removed as a component of wages in the "higgling of the market."

And leaving this aside, even as a pure "social expense," the welfare system acts primarily (in O'Connor's words) to "control the surplus population politically."[75] The state's subsidies to the accumulation of constant capital and to the reproduction of scientific-technical labor provide an incentive for much more capital-intensive forms of production than would have come about in a free market, and thus contribute to the growth of a permanent underclass of surplus labor;[76] the state steps in and undertakes the minimum cost necessary to prevent large-scale homelessness and starvation, which would destabilize the system, and to maintain close supervision of the underclass through the human services bureaucracy.[77]

The general effect of the state's intervention in the economy, then, is to remove ever increasing spheres of economic activity from the realm of competition in price or quality, and to organize them collectively through organized capital as a whole. State socialism/state capitalism very much resembles the servile state prophesied by Hilaire Belloc. Sold to the general population as a "progressive" agenda on behalf of workers and consumers, it is in fact a system of industrial serfdom in which politically connected capitalist interests exploit workers and consumers through the agency of the state.

THE DRIVE FOR FOREIGN MARKETS

William Appleman Williams summarized the lesson of the 1890s in this way: "Because of its dramatic and extensive nature, the Crisis of the 1890's raised in many sections of American society the specter of chaos and revolution."[78] American economic elites saw it as the result of overproduction and surplus capital, and believed it could be resolved only through access to a "new frontier." Without state-guaranteed access to foreign markets, output would be too far below capacity, unit costs would be driven up, and unemployment would reach dangerous levels.

The seriousness of the last threat was underscored by the radicalism of the Nineties. The Pullman Strike, Homestead, and the formation of the Western Federation of Miners (precursor to the IWW) were signs of dangerous levels of labor unrest and class consciousness. Coxey's Army marched on Washington, a small foretaste of the kinds of radicalism that could be produced by unemployment. The anarchist movement had a growing foreign component, more radical than the older native faction, and the People's Party seemed to have a serious chance of winning national elections. At one point Jay Gould, the mouthpiece of the robber barons, was threatening a capital strike (much like those in Venezuela recently) if the populists came to power. In 1894 businessman F. L. Stetson warned, "We are on the edge of a very dark night, unless a return of commercial prosperity relieves popular discontent."[79]

Both business and government resounded with claims that U.S. productive capacity had outstripped the domestic market's ability to consume, and that the government had to take active measures to obtain outlets. In 1897 NAM president Theodore C. Search said, "Many of our manufacturers have outgrown or are outgrowing their home markets, and the expansion of our foreign trade is our only promise of relief."[80] In the same year, Albert J. Beveridge proclaimed: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."[81] As the State Department's Bureau of Foreign Commerce put it in 1898,

It seems to be conceded that every year we shall be confronted with an increasing surplus of manufactured goods for sale in foreign markets if American operatives and artisans are to be kept employed the year around. The enlargement of foreign consumption of the products of our mills and workshops has, therefore, become a serious problem of statesmanship as well as of commerce.[82]

In 1900, former Secretary of State John W. Foster wrote, "it has come to be a necessity to find new and enlarged markets for our agricultural and manufactured products. We cannot maintain our present industrial prosperity without them."[83]

Ohio governor McKinley emerged as spokesman for this new American consensus, proposing a combination of protective tariffs and reciprocity treaties to open foreign markets to American surplus output with help from the state.[84] As keynote speaker at an organizational meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers in 1895, he said:

We want our own markets for our manufactures and agricultural products.... [W]e want a foreign market for our surplus products.... We want a reciprocity which will give us foreign markets for our surplus products, and in turn that will open our markets to foreigners for those products which they produce and we do not.[85]

The imperialism of McKinley and Roosevelt, and the resulting Spanish-American War, were outgrowths of this orientation. They were not, however, the only or obvious form of state policy for securing foreign markets. Much more typical of U.S. policy, in the coming years, was the orientation outlined in John Hay's Open Door Notes (the first was written in 1899), which Williams called "Open Door Empire."

Open Door imperialism consisted of using U.S. political power to guarantee access to foreign markets and resources on terms favorable to American corporate interests, without relying on direct political rule. Its central goal was to obtain for U.S. merchandise, in each national market, treatment equal to that afforded any other industrial nation. Most importantly, this entailed active engagement by the U.S. government in breaking down the imperial powers' existing spheres of economic influence or preference. The result, in most cases, was to treat as hostile to U.S. security interests any large-scale attempt at autarky, or any other policy whose effect was to withdraw a major area from the disposal of U.S. corporations. When the power attempting such policies was an equal, like the British Empire, the U.S. reaction was merely one of measured coolness. When it was perceived as an inferior, like Japan, the U.S. resorted to more forceful measures, as events of the late 1930s indicate. And whatever the degree of equality between advanced nations in their access to Third World markets, it was clear that Third World nations were still to be subordinated to the industrialized West in a collective sense.

This Open Door system was the direct ancestor of today's neoliberal system, which is called "free trade" by its ideological apologists but is in fact far closer to mercantilism. It depended on active management of the world economy by dominant states, and continuing intervention to police the international economic order and enforce sanctions against states which did not cooperate. Woodrow Wilson, in a 1907 lecture at Columbia University, said:

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down.... Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused. Peace itself becomes a matter of conference and international combinations.[86]

Wilson warned during the 1912 election that "Our industries have expanded to such a point that they will burst their jackets if they cannot find a free [i.e., guaranteed by the state] outlet to the markets of the world."[87]

In a 1914 address to the National Foreign Trade Convention, Secretary of Commerce Redfield followed very nearly the same theme:

...we have learned the lesson now, that our factories are so large that their output at full time is greater than America's market can continuously absorb [which, by he way, is the very definition of "over-accumulation"]. We know now that if we will run full time all the time, we must do it by reason of the orders we take from lands beyond the sea. To do less than that means homes in America in which the husbands are without work; to do that means factories that are shut down part of the time.[88]

Under the Open Door system, the state and its loans were to play a central role in the export of capital. The primary purpose of foreign loans, historically, has been to finance the infrastructure which is a prerequisite for the establishment of enterprises in foreign countries. As Edward E. Pratt, chief of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, said in 1914:

...we can never hope to realize the really big prizes in foreign trade until we are prepared to loan capital to foreign nations and to foreign enterprise. The big prizes... are the public and private developments of large proportions, ...the building of railroads, the construction of public-service plants, the improvement of harbors and docks, ...and many others which demand capital in large amounts.... It is commonly said that trade follows the flag. It is much more truly said that trade follows the investment or the loan.[89]

It was, however, beyond the resources of individual firms or venture capitalists, or of the decentralized banking system, to raise the sums necessary for these tasks. One purpose of creating a central banking system (the Federal Reserve Act, 1914) was to make possible the large-scale mobilization of investment capital for overseas ventures. Under the New Deal, the mobilization began to take the form of direct state loans.[90] The state's financial policies, besides promoting the accumulation of capital for foreign investment, also underwrite foreign consumption of U.S. produce. As John Foster Dulles said in 1928, "We must finance our exports by loaning foreigners the where-with-all to pay for them...."[91] These two functions were perfected in the Bretton Woods system after WWII.

The second Roosevelt's administration saw the guarantee of American access to foreign markets as vital to ending the Depression and the threat of internal upheaval that went along with it. Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre, chairman of Roosevelt's Executive Committee on Commercial Policy, warned: "Unless we can export and sell abroad our surplus production, we must face a violent dislocation of our whole domestic economy."[92] FDR's ongoing policy of Open Door Empire, faced with the withdrawal of major areas from the world market by the autarkic policies of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and Fortress Europe, led to American entry into World War II, and culminated in the postwar establishment of what Samuel Huntington called a "system of world order" guaranteed both by global institutions of economic governance like the IMF, and by a hegemonic political and military superpower.

In 1935, a War Department memorandum described the emerging Japanese threat in primarily economic terms. Japanese hegemony over Asia, it warned, would have "a direct influence on those people of Europe and America who depend on trade and commerce with this area for their livelihood." Germany, likewise, was defined as an "aggressor" because of its trade policies in Latin America.[93]

After the fall of western Europe in the spring of 1940, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long warned that "every commercial order will be routed to Berlin and filled under its orders somewhere in Europe rather than in the United States," resulting in "falling prices and declining profits here and a lowering of our standard of living with the consequent social and political disturbances."[94]

Beginning in the Summer of 1940, the CFR and State Department undertook a joint study to determine the minimum portion of the world the U.S. would have to integrate with its own economy, to provide sufficient resources and markets for economic stability; it also explored policy options for reconstructing the postwar world.[95] Germany's continental system was far more self-sufficient in resources, and more capable of autarky, than was the United States. The study group also found that the U.S. economy could not survive in its existing form without access to the resources and markets of not only the Western Hemisphere, but also the British Empire and Far East (called the Grand Area). But the latter region was rapidly being incorporated into Japan's economic sphere of influence. FDR made the political decision to contest Japanese power in the Far East, and if necessary to initiate war. In the end, however, he successfully maneuvered Japan into firing the first shot.[96] The American policy that emerged from these struggles, to secure control over the markets and resources of the global "Grand Area" through institutions of global economic governance, resulted in the Bretton Woods system after the war.

The problem of access to foreign markets and resources was central to U.S. policy planning for a postwar world. Given the structural imperatives of "export dependent monopoly capitalism," the fear of a postwar depression was a real one. The original drive toward foreign expansion at the end of the nineteenth century reflected the fact that industry, with state capitalist encouragement, had expanded far beyond the ability of the domestic market to consume its output. Even before World War II, the state capitalist economy had serious trouble operating at the level of output needed for full utilization of capacity and cost control. Military-industrial policy during the war increased the value of plant and equipment by two-thirds. The end of the war, if followed by the traditional pattern of demobilization, would result in a drastic reduction in orders to this overbuilt industry at the same time that over ten million workers were dumped back into the civilian labor force. And four years of forced restraints on consumption had created a vast backlog of savings with no outlet in the already overbuilt domestic economy.

In November 1944, Dean Acheson addressed the Congressional committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning. He stressed the consequences if the war were be followed by a slide back into depression: "it seems clear that we are in for a very bad time, so far as the economic and social position of the country is concerned. We cannot go through another ten years like the ten years at the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties, without having the most far-reaching consequences upon our economic and social system." The problem, he said, was markets, not production. "You don't have a problem of production.... The important thing is markets. We have got to see that what the country produces is used and is sold under financial arrangements which make its production possible." Short of the introduction of a command economy, with controls over income and distribution to ensure the domestic consumption of all that was produced, Acheson said, the only way to achieve full output and full employment was through access to foreign markets.[97]

A central facet of postwar economic policy, as reflected in the Bretton Woods agencies, was state intervention to guarantee markets for the full output of U.S. industry. The World Bank was designed to subsidize the export of capital to the Third World, by financing the infrastructure without which Western-owned production facilities could not be established there. The International Monetary Fund was created to facilitate the purchase of American goods abroad, by preventing temporary lapses in purchasing power as a result of foreign exchange shortages. It was "a very large international currency exchange and credit-granting institution that could be drawn upon relatively easily by any country that was temporarily short of any given foreign currency due to trade imbalances."[98]

The Bretton Woods system by itself, however, was not nearly sufficient to ensure the levels of output needed to keep production facilities running at full capacity. First the Marshall Plan, and then the permanent war economy of the Cold War, came to the rescue.

The Marshall Plan was devised in reaction to the impending economic slump predicted by the Council of Economic advisers in early 1947 and the failure of Western Europe "to recover from the war and take its place in the American scheme of things." Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Clayton declared that the central problem confronting the United States was the disposal of its "great surplus."[99] Dean Acheson defended the Marshall Plan in a May 1947 address:

The extreme need of foreign countries for American products is likely... to continue undiminished in 1948, while the capacity of foreign countries to pay in commodities will be only slightly increased.... What do these facts of international life mean for the United States and for United States foreign policy? ...the United States is going to have to undertake further emergency financing of foreign purchases if foreign countries are to continue to buy in 1948 and 1949 the commodities which they need to sustain life and at the same time rebuild their economies....[100]

One New Deal partisan implicitly compared foreign economic expansion to domestic state capitalism as analogous forms of surplus disposal: "it is as if we were building a TVA every Tuesday."[101]

Besides facilitating the export of capital, the Bretton Woods agencies play a central role in the discipline of recalcitrant regimes. There is a considerable body of radical literature on the Left on the use of debt as a political weapon to impose pro-corporate policies on Third World governments, analogous to the historic function of debt in keeping miners and sharecroppers in their place.[102] But one of the most apt statements of the process was by a Rothbardian, Sean Corrigan:

Does he not know that the whole IMF-Treasury carpet-bagging strategy of full-spectrum dominance is based on promoting unproductive government-led indebtedness abroad, at increasingly usurious rates of interest, and then - either before or, more often these days, after, the point of default - bailing out the Western banks who have been the agents provocateurs of this financial Operation Overlord, with newly-minted dollars, to the detriment of the citizenry at home?

Is he not aware that, subsequent to the collapse, these latter-day Reconstructionists must be allowed to swoop and to buy controlling ownership stakes in resources and productive capital made ludicrously cheap by devaluation, or outright monetary collapse?

Does he not understand that he must simultaneously coerce the target nation into sweating its people to churn out export goods in order to service the newly refinanced debt, in addition to piling up excess dollar reserves as a supposed bulwark against future speculative attacks (usually financed by the same Western banks' lending to their Special Forces colleagues at the macro hedge funds) - thus ensuring the reverse mercantilism of Rubinomics is maintained?[103]

The American economy could have had access to the resources it was willing to buy on mutually satisfactory terms, and marketed its own surplus to those countries willing to buy it, without the apparatus of transnational corporate mercantilism. Such a state of affairs would have been genuine free trade. What the American elite really wanted, however, has been ably stated by Thomas Friedman in one of his lapses into frankness:

For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower it is.... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.[104]

It was not true that the American corporate economy was ever in any real danger of losing access to the raw materials it needed, in the absence of an activist foreign policy to secure access to those resources. As many free market advocates point out, countries with disproportionate mineral wealth - say, large oil reserves - are forced to center a large part of their economic activity on the extraction and sale of those resources. And once they sell them, the commodities enter a world market in which it is virtually impossible to control who eventually buys them. The real issue, according to Baran and Sweezy, is that the American corporate economy depended on access to Third World resources on favorable terms set by the United States, and those favorable terms depended on the survival of pliable regimes.

But this [genuine free trade in resources with the Third World on mutually acceptable terms] is not what really interests the giant multinational corporations which dominate American policy. What they want is monopolistic control over foreign sources of supply and foreign markets, enabling them to buy and sell on specially privileged terms, to shift orders from one subsidiary to another, to favor this country or that depending on which has the most advantageous tax, labor, and other policies--in a word, they want to do business on their own terms and wherever they choose. And for this what they need is not trading partners but "allies" and clients willing to adjust their laws and policies to the requirements of American Big Business.[105]

The "system of world order" enforced by the U.S. since World War II, and lauded in Friedman's remarks about the "visible hand," is nearly the reverse of the classical liberal notion of free trade. This new version of "free trade" is aptly characterized in this passage by Layne and Schwarz:

The view that economic interdependence compels American global strategic engagement puts an ironic twist on liberal internationalist arguments about the virtues of free trade, which held that removing the state from international transactions would be an antidote to war and imperialism....

....Instead of subscribing to the classical liberal view that free trade leads to peace, the foreign policy community looks to American military power to impose harmony so that free trade can take place. Thus, U.S. security commitments are viewed as the indispensable precondition for economic interdependence.[106]

Oliver MacDonagh pointed out that the modern neoliberal conception, far from agreeing with Cobden's idea of free trade, resembled the "Palmerstonian system" that the Cobdenites so despised. Cobden objected, among other things, to the "dispatch of a fleet 'to protect British interests' in Portugal," to the "loan-mongering and debt-collecting operations in which our Government engaged either as principal or agent," and generally, all "intervention on behalf of British creditors overseas." Cobden favored the "natural" growth of free trade, as opposed to the forcible opening of markets. Genuine free traders, in MacDonagh's words, "hunted down confusions of 'free trade' with mere increases of commerce or with the forcible 'opening up' of markets."[107]

I can't resist quoting Joseph Stromberg's only half tongue-in-cheek prescription "How to Have Free Trade":

For many in the US political and foreign policy Establishment, the formula for having free trade would go something like this: 1) Find yourself a global superpower; 2) have this superpower knock together the heads of all opponents and skeptics until everyone is playing by the same rules; 3) refer to this new imperial order as "free trade;" 4) talk quite a bit about "democracy." This is the end of the story except for such possible corollaries as 1) never allow rival claimants to arise which might aspire to co-manage the system of "free trade"; 2) the global superpower rightfully in charge of world order must also control the world monetary system....

The formula outlined above was decidedly not the 18th and 19th-century liberal view of free trade. Free traders like Richard Cobden, John Bright, Frederic Bastiat, and Condy Raguet believed that free trade is the absence of barriers to goods crossing borders, most particularly the absence of special taxes - tariffs - which made imported goods artificially dear, often for the benefit of special interests wrapped in the flag under slogans of economic nationalism....

Classical free traders never thought it necessary to draw up thousands of pages of detailed regulations to implement free trade. They saw no need to fine-tune a sort of Gleichschaltung (co-ordination) of different nations labor laws, environmental regulations, and the host of other such issues dealt with by NAFTA, GATT, and so on. Clearly, there is a difference between free trade, considered as the repeal, by treaty or even unilaterally, of existing barriers to trade, and modern "free trade" which seems to require truckloads of regulations pondered over by legions of bureaucrats.

This sea-change in the accepted meaning of free trade neatly parallels other characteristically 20th-century re-definitions of concepts like "war," "peace," "freedom," and "democracy," to name just a few. In the case of free trade I think we can deduce that when, from 1932 on, the Democratic Party - with its traditional rhetoric about free trade in the older sense - took over the Republicans project of neo-mercantilism and economic empire, it was natural for them to carry it forward under the "free trade" slogan. They were not wedded to tariffs, which, in their view, got in the way of implementing Open Door Empire. Like an 18th-century Spanish Bourbon government, they stood for freer trade within an existing or projected mercantilist system. They would have agreed, as well, with Lord Palmerston, who said in 1841, "It is the business of Government to open and secure the roads of the merchant." ....

Here, John A. Hobson... was directly in the line of real free-trade thought. Hobson wrote that businessmen ought to take their own risks in investing overseas. They had no right to call on their home governments to "open and secure" their markets.[108]

And by the way, it's doubtful superpower competition with the Soviets had much to do with the role of the U.S. in shaping the postwar "system of world order," or in acting as "hegemonic power" in maintaining that system of order. Layne and Schwarz cited NSC-68 to the effect that the policy of "attempting to develop a healthy international community" was "a policy which we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat."

Underpinning U.S. world order strategy is the belief that America must maintain what is in essence a military protectorate in economically critical regions to ensure that America's vital trade and financial relations will not be disrupted by political upheaval. This kind of economically determined strategy articulated by the foreign policy elite ironically (perhaps unwittingly) embraces a quasi-Marxist or, more correctly, a Leninist interpretation of American foreign relations.[109]

It is worth bearing in mind that the policy planners who designed the Bretton Woods system and the rest of the postwar framework of world order paid little or no mind to the issue of Soviet Russia's prospective role in the world. The record that appears, rather, in Shoup and Minter's heavily documented account, is full of references to the U.S. as a successor to Great Britain as guarantor of a global political and economic order, and to U.S. global hegemony as a war aim (even before the U.S. entered the war). As early as 1942, when Soviet Russia's continued existence was very much in doubt, U.S. policy makers were referring to "domination after the war," "Pax Americana," and "world control." To quote G. William Domhoff, "the definition of the national interest that led to these interventions was conceived in the years 1940-42 by corporate planners in terms of what they saw as the needs of the American capitalist system, well before communism was their primary concern."[110]

Considering the continuity in the pattern of U.S. Third World intervention during the Cold War with its gunboat diplomacy of the 20s and 30s, or with its actions as the world's sole superpower since the fall of communism, should also be instructive. Indeed, since the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. has been frantically scrambling to find (or create) another enemy sufficient to justify continuing its role as world policeman.

If anything, the Cold War with the Soviet Union appears almost as an afterthought to American planning for a postwar order. Far from being the cause of the U.S. role as guarantor of a system of world order, the Soviet Empire acted as a spoiler to U.S. plans for acting as a sole global superpower. Any rival power which has refused to be incorporated into the Grand Area, or which has encouraged other countries (by "defection from within") to withdraw from the Grand Area, historically, has been viewed as an "aggressor." Quoting Domhoff once again,

....I believe that anticommunism became a key aspect of foreign policy only after the Soviet Union, China, and their Communist party allies became the challengers to the Grand Area conception of the national interest. In a certain sense..., they merely replaced the fascists of Germany and Japan as the enemies of the international economic and political system regarded as essential by American leaders.[111]

Likewise, as Domhoff's last sentence in the above quote suggests, any country which has interfered with U.S. attempts to integrate the markets and resources of any region of the world into its international economic order has been viewed as a "threat." The Economic and Financial Group of the CFR/State Department postwar planning project, produced, on July 24, 1941, a document (E-B34), warning of the need for the United States to "defend the Grand Area," not only against external attack by Germany, but against "defection from within," particularly against countries like Japan (which, along with the rest of east Asia, was regarded as part of the Grand Area) bent on "destroying the area for its own political reasons."[112]

"EXPORT-DEPENDENT MONOPOLY CAPITALISM"
(With a Brief Digression on Economy of Scale)

According to Stromberg and the Austrians, this chronic problem of surplus output was not a natural result of the free market, but rather of a cartelized economy. J.A. Hobson argued that "over-saving" was caused by "rents, monopoly profits, and other unearned excessive profits", and called, in proto-Keynesian fashion, for the state to step in and remedy the problem of "mal-distribution of consuming power." (113) Such arguments are commonly dismissed, on the libertarian right, as violations of Say's Law.

But Say's Law applies only to a free market. As Stromberg points out, a genuine maldistribution of consuming power results from the state's intervention to transfer wealth from its real producers to a politically connected ruling class. And neo-Marxists' work on over-accumulation has shown us that the evils that Keynesianism was designed to remedy, in a state capitalist economy, are quite real. The State promotes the accumulation of capital on a scale beyond which its output can be absorbed (at its cartelized prices) by private demand; and therefore capital relies on the State to dispose of this surplus.

One of the earliest to describe the the several aspects of the phenomenon was Hilferding, in Finance Capital:

The curtailment of production means the cessation of all new capital investment, and the maintenance of high prices makes the effects of the crisis more severe for all those industries which are not cartelized, or not fully cartelized. Their profits will fall more sharply, or their losses will be greater, than is the case in the cartelized industries, and in consequence they will be obliged to make greater cuts in production. As a result, disproportionality will increase, he sales of cartelized industry will suffer more, and it becomes evident that in spite of the severe curtailment of production, "overproduction" persists and has even increased. Any further limitation of production means that more capital will be idle, while overheads remain the same, so that the cost per unit will rise, thus reducing profits still more despite the maintenance of high prices.[114]

All the elements are here, in rough form: the expansion of production facilities to a scale beyond what the market will support; the need to restrict output to keep up prices, conflicting with the simultaneous need to keep output high enough to utilize full capacity and keep unit costs down; the inability of the economy to absorb the full output of cartelized industry at monopoly prices.

But as Hilferding pointed out in the same passage, the natural tendency in such a situation, in the absence of entry barriers, would be for competitors to enter the market and drive down the monopoly price: "The high prices attract outsiders, who can count on low capital and labor costs, since all other prices have fallen; thus they establish a strong competitive position and begin to undersell the cartel." (115) This, Rothbard argued, is what normally happens when cartelizing ventures are not backed up by the state: they are broken either by internal defection or by new entrants. That is, in fact, what Gabriel Kolko described as actually happening to the trust movement at the turn of the century. Therefore, organized capital depends on the state to enforce an artificial monopoly on the domestic market.

By restricting production quotas for domestic consumption the cartel eliminates competition on the domestic market. The suppression of competition sustains the effect of a protective tariff in raising prices even at a stage when production has long since outstripped demand. Thus it becomes a prime interest of cartelized industry to make the protective tariff a permanent institution, which in the first place assures continued existence of the cartel, and second, enables the cartel to sell its product on the domestic market at an extra profit.[116]

And, Hilferding continued, cartelized industry is forced to dispose of the surplus product, which will not sell domestically at the monopoly price, by dumping it on foreign markets.

The increase in prices on the domestic market... tends to reduce the sales of cartelized products, and thus conflicts with the trend towards lowering costs by expanding the scale of production.... But if a cartel is already well established, it will try to compensate for the decline of the domestic market by increasing its exports, in order to continue production as before and if possible on an even larger scale. If the cartel is efficient and capable of exporting... its real price of production... will correspond with the world market price. But a cartel is also in a position to sell below its production price, because it has obtained an extra profit, determined by the level of the protective tariff, from its sales on the domestic market. It is therefore able to use a part of this extra profit to expand its sales abroad by underselling its competitors. If it is successful it can then increase its output, reduce its costs, and thereby, since domestic prices remain unchanged, gain further extra profit.[117]

Further, anticipating the various Marxist theories of imperialism, Hilferding argued that this imperative of disposing of surplus product abroad requires the activist state to seek foreign markets on favorable terms for domestic capital. One such state policy is the promotion or granting of loans abroad, either by direct state loans, or by banking policies that centralize the banking system and thus facilitate the accumulation of large sums of capital for foreign loans. Such loans could be used to increase a country's purchasing power and increase its imports; but more importantly, they could be used for building transportation and power infrastructure that Western capital requires for building production facilities in an underdeveloped country.[118] Of course, such direct foreign capital investment in a country, unlike mere trade, required more direct political influence over the country's internal affairs to protect the investments from expropriation and labor unrest.[119]

The state could also intervene to create a wage-labor force in backward countries by expropriating land, thus recreating the process of primitive accumulation in the West. In addition, heavy taxation could be used to force a peasantry into the money economy, by making them work (or work more) in the capitalist job market to raise tax-money. This was a common pattern, Hilferding wrote: in the Third World as in the West earlier, "when capital's need for expansion meets obstacles that could only be overcome much too slowly and gradually by purely economic means, it has recourse to the power of the state and uses it for forcible expropriation in order to create the required free wage proletariat."[120]

Generally speaking, Third World countries provide numerous advantages for capital seeking a higher rate of return:

The state ensures that human labour in the colonies is available on terms which make possible extra profits.... The natural wealth of the colonies likewise becomes a source of extra profits by lowering the price of raw materials.... The expulsion or annihilation of the native population, or in the most favourable case their transformation from shepherds or hunters into indentured slaves, or their confinement to small, restricted areas as peasant farmers, creates at one stroke free land which has only a nominal price.[121]

In Imperialism, Bukharin returned repeatedly to the theme of government policy in promoting monopoly, thorough such devices as tariffs, state loans, etc. In a passage on the effects of foreign loans, Bukharin anticipated today's use of foreign aid and World Bank/IMF credit as coercive weapons on behalf of American corporations:

The transaction is usually accompanied by a number of stipulations, in the first place that which imposes upon the borrowing country the duty to place orders with the creditor country (purchase of arms, ammunition, dreadnaughts, railroad equipment, etc), and the duty to grant concessions for the construction of railways, tramways, telegraph and telephone lines, harbours, exploitation of mines, timberlands, etc.[122]

As Kwame Nkrumah jibed, so-called "foreign aid" under neocolonialism would have been called foreign investment in the days of old-style colonialism.[123]

Schumpeter, the theorist upon whom Stromberg relies most heavily, described the system as "export-dependent monopoly capitalism":

Union in a cartel or trust confers various benefits on the entrepreneur - a saving in costs, a stronger position as against the workers - but none of these compares with this one advantage: a monopolistic price policy, possible to any considerable degree only behind an adequate protective tariff. Now the price that brings the maximum monopoly profit is generally far above the price that would be fixed by fluctuating competitive costs, and the volume that can be marketed at that maximum price is generally far below the output that would be technically and economically feasible. Under free competition that output would be produced and offered, but a trust cannot offer it, for it could be sold only at a competitive price. Yet the trust must produce it - or approximately as much - otherwise the advantages of large-scale enterprise remain unexploited and unit costs are likely to be uneconomically high.... [The trust] extricates itself from this dilemma by producing the full output that is economically feasible, thus securing low costs, and offering in the protected domestic market only the quantity corresponding to the monopoly price - insofar as the tariff permits; while the rest is sold, or "dumped," abroad at a lower price....[124]

In describing the advantages of colonies for monopoly capitalism, Schumpeter essentially refuted his own Comtean argument (discussed below in this article) for imperialism's "alien" status in relation to capitalism.

In such a struggle among "dumped" products and capitals, it is no longer a matter of indifference who builds a given railroad, who owns a mine or a colony. Now that the law of costs is no longer operative, it becomes necessary to fight over such properties with desperate effort and with every available means, including those that are not economic in character, such as diplomacy....

....In this context, the conquest of colonies takes on an altogether different significance. Non-monopolist countries, especially those adhering to free trade, reap little profit from such a policy. But it is a different matter with countries that function in a monopolistic role vis-a-vis their colonies. There being no competition, they can use cheap native labor without its ceasing to be cheap; they can market their products, even in the colonies, at monopoly prices; they can, finally, invest capital that would only depress the profit rate at home....[125]

Stromberg explained: "For American manufacturers to achieve available economies of scale, they had to produce far more of their products than could be sold in the U.S."[126] One point Stromberg does not adequately address here is that economy of scale, at least in terms of internal production costs, requires only thorough utilization of existing facilities. But the size of the facilities was in itself the result of state capitalist policies. The fact that domestic demand was not enough to support the output needed to reach such economies of scale reflects the fact that the scale of production was too large. And this, in turn, was the result of state policies that encouraged gigantism and overinvestment.

Productive economy of scale is "unlimited" only when the state absorbs the diseconomies of large scale production. Overall economies of scale reflect a package of costs. And those costs are themselves influenced by direct and indirect subsidies that distort price as an accurate signal of the actual cost of providing a service. If the state had not allowed big business to externalize many of its operating costs (especially long-distance shipping) on the public through subsidies (especially subsidized transportation), economy of scale would have been reached at a much lower level of production. The state's subsidies have the effect of artificially shifting the economy of scale upward to higher levels of output than a free market can support. State capitalism enables corporate interests to control elements of the total cost package through political means; but the result is new imbalances, which in turn require further state intervention.

In fairness, Schumpeter touched on this issue in passing, as did Stromberg in quoting him: "a firm which could not survive in the absence of empire was 'expanded beyond economically justifiable limits'."[127] As this quote indicates, Schumpeter dealt, though inadequately, with the extent to which corporate size was the effect of state intervention. He agreed with Rothbard that cartelization or monopoly, as such, could not exist without the state.

Export monopolism does not grow from the inherent laws of capitalist development. The character of capitalism leads to large-scale production, but with few exceptions large-scale production does not lead to the kind of unlimited concentration that would leave but one or only a few firms in each industry. On the contrary, any plant runs up against limits to its growth in a given location; and the growth of combinations which would make sense under a system of free trade encounters limits of organizational efficiency. Beyond these limits there is no tendency toward combination in the competitive system.[128]

Still, Stromberg greatly overestimates the advantages of large-scale production in a free market. In all but a few forms of production, peak economy of scale is reached at relatively low levels of output. In agriculture, for instance, a USDA study found in 1973 that economy of scale was maximized on a fully-mechanized one-man farm.[129]

Walter Adams and James Brock, two specialists in economy of scale, cited a number of studies showing that "optimum plant sizes tend to be quite small relative to the national market." According to one study, even taking into account the efficiencies of firm size, market shares of the top three firms in nine of twelve industries exceeded maximum efficiency by a factor of anywhere from two to ten. But productive economy of scale was a function primarily of plant size, not the size of multi-plant firms. Any efficiencies of bargaining power provided by large firm size were offset by increased administrative and control costs, and other diseconomies.[130] In fact, Seymor Melman argued that the increased administrative costs of multi-unit and multi-product firms are astronomical. They are prone to many of the same inefficiencies - falsified data from below, and "elaborate, formal systems of control, with accompanying police systems - as state-run industry in the communist countries.[131]

Describing the inefficiencies of large firms, Kenneth Boulding wrote:

There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.[132]

In the most capital-intensive industry, automobiles, peak economy of scale was achieved at a level of production equivalent to 3-6% of market share.[133] And even this level of output is required only because annual model changes (which arguably wouldn't pay for themselves without state capitalist subsidies) require an auto plant to wear out the dies for a run of production in a single year. Otherwise, peak economy of scale would be reached in a plant with an output of only 60,000 per year.[134]

In any case, these figures relate only to productive economy of scale. Increased distribution costs begin to offset increased economies of production, according to Borsodi's law, long before peak productive economy of scale is reached. According to an F.M. Scherer study cited by Adams and Brock, a plant producing at one-third the maximum efficiency level of output would experience only a 5% increase in unit costs.[135] This is more than offset by reduced shipping costs for a smaller market.

The point of this digression is that the size of existing firms reflects the role of the state in subsidizing increased size by underwriting the inefficiencies of corporate gigantism - as Rothbard pointed out, the ways "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs."[136] A genuine free market economy would be vastly less centralized, with production primarily for local markets.

Besides the problem of surplus output, the state capitalist economy produces a second problem: that of surplus capital. Not only does monopoly pricing limit domestic demand, and thus restrain the opportunities for expansion at home; but non-cartelized industry is seriously disadvantaged as a source of returns on capital, and therefore opportunities for profitable investment are limited outside the cartelized sectors.

According to Hilferding, "while the drive to increase production is very strong in the cartelized industries, high cartel prices preclude any growth of the domestic market, so that expansion abroad offers the best chance of meeting the need to increase output."[137] Bukharin later described the capital surplus as a direct result of cartelization, in quite similar language. In Chapter VII of Imperialism and World Economy, he wrote:

The volumes of capital that seek employment have reached unheard of dimensions. On the other hand, the cartels and trusts, as the modern organisation of capital, tend to put certain limits to the employment of capital by fixing the volume of production. As to the non-trustified sections of industry, it becomes ever more unprofitable to invest capital in them. For monopoly organisations can overcome the tendency towards lowering the rate of profit by receiving monopoly superprofits at the expense of the non-trustified industries. Out of the surplus value created every year, one portion, that which has been created in the nontrustified branches of industry, is being transferred to the co-owners of capitalist monopolies, whereas the share of the outsiders continually decreases. Thus the entire process drives capital beyond the frontiers of the country.[138]

Monopoly capital theorists have made worthwhile contributions to the issue of capital and output surpluses. For example, the surplus product of cartelized industry drastically increases the importance of the "sales effort" - what Galbraith called "specific demand management" to dispose of the product.[139] This underscores the importance of the state in the problem of surplus disposal: without state intervention to create the national infrastructure of mass media and its attendant mass advertising markets, specific demand management would have been impossible.

One issue Stromberg neglects is the internal role of the state in directly disposing of the surplus. The role of the State's purchases in absorbing surplus output, through both military and domestic spending, was a key part of Baran and Sweezy's "monopoly capitalism" model. Its large "defense" and other expenditures provide a guaranteed internal market for surplus output analogous to that provided by state-guaranteed foreign markets. By providing such an internal market, the state increases the percentage of production capacity that can be used on a consistent basis.[140] This is reminiscent of Immanuel Goldstein's description in 1984 of the function of continuous warfare in eating up potentially destabilizing surpluses.

Paul Mattick elaborated on this theme in a 1956 article. The overbuilt corporate economy, he wrote, ran up against the problem that "[p]rivate capital formation... finds its limitation in diminishing market-demand." The State had to absorb part of the surplus output; but it had to do so without competing with corporations in the private market. Instead, "[g]overnment-induced production is channelled into non-market fields - the production of non-competitive public-works, armaments, superfluities and waste.”[141] As a necessary result of this state of affairs,

so long as the principle of competitive capital production prevails, steadily growing production will in increasing measure be a "production for the sake of production," benefiting neither private capital nor the population at large.

This process is somewhat obscured, it is true, by the apparent profitability of capital and the lack of large-scale unemployment. Like the state of prosperity, profitability, too, is now largely government manipulated. Government spending and taxation are managed so as to strengthen big business at the expense of the economy as a whole....

In order to increase the scale of production and to accummulate [sic] capital, government creates "demand" by ordering the production of non-marketable goods, financed by government borrowings. This means that the government avails itself of productive resources belonging to private capital which would otherwise be idle.[142]

Such consumption of output, while not always directly profitable to private industry, serves a function analogous to foreign "dumping" below cost, in enabling the corporate economy to achieve economies of large-scale production at levels of output beyond the ability of private consumers to absorb.

It's interesting to consider how many segments of the economy have a guaranteed market for their output, or a "captive clientele" in place of willing consumers. The "military-industrial complex" is well known. But how about the state's education and penal systems? How about the automobile-trucking-highway complex, or the civil aviation complex? Foreign surplus disposal ("export dependant monopoly capitalism") and domestic surplus disposal (government purchases) are different forms of the same phenomenon.

Marx described major new forms of industry as countervailing influences against the falling rate of profit. Baran and Sweezy, likewise, considered "epoch-making inventions" as partial counterbalances to the ever-increasing surplus. Their chief example of such a phenomenon was the rise of the automobile industry in the 1920s, which (along with the highway program) was to define the American economy for most of the mid-20th century.[143] The high tech boom of the 1990s was a similarly revolutionary event. It is revealing to consider the extent to which both the automobile and computer industries, far more than average, were direct products of state capitalism. More recently, in the Bush administration, to consider only one industry (pharmaceuticals), two major policy initiatives benefit it by providing state-funded outlets for its production: the so-called "prescription drug benefit," and the provision of AIDS drugs to destitute African countries. In another industry, Bush's R&D funding for hydrogen fuel engines is enabling the automobile companies to develop the successor technology to the gasoline engine (with patents included) at public expense; this not only subsidizes their transition to viability in a post-fossil fuel world, but gives them monopoly control over the successor technology. "Creative destruction" is our middle name.

A MUTUALIST READING OF STROMBERG'S ARGUMENT
(With a Brief Digression on Value Theory)

In his survey of literature on the theory of imperialism, Stromberg takes issue with Joseph Schumpeter on the nature of "actually existing capitalism" (not his phrase). An examination of this dispute will lead us into our central discussion of how the mutualist analysis of state capitalism differs from that of the Austrians.

In the passage leading up to his incisive description of "export oriented monopoly capitalism," Schumpeter dismissed imperialism as "atavistic," reflecting "past rather than present relations of production."[144] According to Schumpeter, "a purely capitalistic world... [could] offer no fertile soil to imperialist impulses."[145] Any imperialistic tendencies under modern capitalism were the result of "alien elements, carried into the world of capitalism from outside, supported by non-capitalist factors in modern life."[146] Taking this assertion still further, he treated as "beyond controversy"

that where free trade prevails no class has an interest in forcible expansion as such. For in such a case the citizens and goods of every nation can move in foreign countries as freely as though those countries were politically their own - free trade implying far more than mere freedom from tariffs. In a genuine state of free trade, foreign raw materials and foodstuffs are as accessible to each nation as though they were within its own territory.[147]

This avoids the issue of whether politically connected capitalists can have the same monopoly position under free trade as they would have when backed up by the state's power overseas.

Schumpeter's dismissal of imperialism as atavistic, on the basis of the non-martial culture arising from industrial capitalism, was a non sequitur of massive proportions. It was, however, consistent with his sociological approach to imperialism, treating it as the natural outgrowth of the "mode of life" or situation of society on a broad scale. But Schumpeter failed to show why it would be any less "natural" for ruling elites under corporate capitalism, than for those under feudalism or any other class system, to take advantage of the exploitative opportunities available by acting through the coercive power of the state. The very existence of the state, as a mechanism of expropriating the labor of productive classes through political means, serves the dominant classes as an instrument of exploitation in any society. State policy is in fact the rational outcome of ruling class interest, rather than a reflection of culture or "mode of life."

Schumpeter later qualified what he meant in describing "imperialist attitudes" as in conflict with the "mode of life of the capitalist world." Protectionism and imperialism were not natural outgrowths of capitalism, but were "the fruits of political action - a type of action that by no means reflects the objective interests of all those concerned but that, on the contrary, becomes impossible as soon as the majority of those whose consent is necessary realize their true interests."[148]

Schumpeter seriously overestimated the importance of formal democracy, along with the likelihood that the policies of a formally democratic state would reflect the real interests of a majority. And he underestimated the potential of a ruling class, through ideological hegemony, to shape the very conceptual framework through which the ruled make judgments of "general welfare." A given structure of economic and political power tends to reproduce the kinds of "human resources" it needs to keep going.

Under a "pure" capitalist system, according to Schumpeter, the cultural attitudes of the bourgeoisie were quite unwarlike. In this, he restated a theory that had been articulated by Comte and his followers, and that has found more recent expression in the thought of Francis Fukuyama and other neoconservatives. But the triumph of global capitalism, in its "actually existing" form, did not preclude the existence of a massive national security state, or of a standing military with a highly jingoistic internal culture. And the same neoconservative movement that produced Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis has also produced a rabidly hawkish contingent that includes David Horowitz and Charles Krauthammer. The same ideologues who praise the post-Soviet triumph of "democratic capitalism" on a global scale, also speak of the need for some global system of order enforced by a hegemonic power. The free market is not a spontaneous phenomenon, but depends on institutions of "civil society" which in turn are created by the state.

Actual history belies Schumpeter's alleged "pacific" bourgeois culture. If we look at American history, it becomes painfully obvious that, when militarism and imperialism are in the material interests of the dominant segment of corporate capital, it is quite effective at creating the required ideological infrastructure to legitimate itself. In the United States, one of the world's most isolationist and anti-militarist societies, the legitimation needs of monopoly capitalism were met from the 1890s on by the cult of Old Glory and the American Legion ideology of "100% Americanism." There is today a whole generation of self-described "conservatives," as any listener of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter or Laura Ingraham can testify, who have no idea that conservatism ever meant anything besides cheerleading for the state and its wars.

Immediately following his dismissive treatment of imperialism, Schumpeter qualified it with the admission that protectionism "[did] facilitate the formation of cartels and trusts," and that "this circumstance thoroughly alters the alignment of interests."[149] With this statement he segued into his analysis of "export oriented monopoly capitalism," and in so doing obviated his entire line of argument up to that point on the "atavistic" nature of imperialism. His argument, taken as a whole, seems to be that imperialism and monopoly were alien to some pure or ideal form of capitalism, but were quite useful to capitalist elites under "actually existing capitalism."

For Stromberg state capitalism is not a survival of corrupting pre-capitalist influences, but capitalism's natural course of evolution in a state system, in which politically powerful capitalists can act through the political regime to enrich themselves.

We may agree that export monopolism and imperialism are indeed partly pre-capitalist phenomena: they are intimately connected with institutions and ideas associated with feudalism and mercantilism, e.g., tariffs, eminent domain, patents, property taxes (a single feudal rent), and - to be thorough - the state apparatus itself. But, to argue, as Schumpeter seems to, that neo-mercantilist and imperialist policies undertaken under modern capitalist conditions are essentially pre- or anti-capitalist is to substitute for historical capitalism an ideal free market (to which we all might aspire).... Thus, Schumpeter weakened and obscured his analysis with... an a-historical use of concepts....[150]

But Stromberg himself is also guilty of an "a-historic use of concepts," albeit to a lesser degree than Schumpeter. He admits that the picture of an earlier "laissez-faire" economy was only "partly true," and even tips his hat to the individualist anarchist critique of that so-called laissez-faire (citing Martin's Men Against the State); nevertheless Stromberg still treats the state capitalist system that emerged in the U.S. during and after the Civil War, and especially from the "Progressive" Era on, as a deviation from a largely "laissez faire" capitalism that existed through the mid-nineteenth century.

The main difference between Stromberg's position and that of the nineteenth century mutualists (Benjamin Tucker chief among them) is the extent to which they portray the nineteenth century system as "largely laissez faire." In Tucker's view, capitalism was statist by its very nature. The existence of non-labor derived income depended on the existence of privileges guaranteed by the state.

The mutualist understanding that statism is at the root of the profit system requires a brief digression on value theory, before we can pursue this line of inquiry any further. As quaint or atavistic as it may seem to followers of Neoclassical and Austrian economics, I adhere to a heavily modified version of the labor theory of value. I share the assumption of Ricardo and the other classical economists, that for any good with an elastic supply, the equilibrium price will be its cost of production. Cost of production itself is reducible either to labor cost or to some form of monopoly income, since the abolition of statist guarantees to absentee landlordism and monopoly controls on the issuance of credit would lower the price of land and credit to the labor cost of providing them. The output of any particular good will tend toward the number the consumer is willing to buy at its cost of production. This necessarily oversimplifies by ignoring the problem of scarcity rents for goods in inelastic supply, and when supply is in the process of adjusting to increased demand. But we can still generalize that the equilibrium price of a good whose supply is elastic will be the cost of production, and that scarcity rents are a second-order deviation from this general law.

Rather than Ricardo's (and Marx's) embodied labor-time theory, I revert to Smith's subjective cost understanding of embodied labor. Labor is measured by the worker's subjective feeling of toil and trouble, or of "disutility," as the neoclassicists put it. As even the marginalists admit, labor is unique among the "factors of production" in possessing a disutility. The reason that labor creates exchange value, but free natural goods do not, is that a lump of coal does not have to be persuaded to surrender its energy; but a human being does have to be offered a price to make it worthwhile to undergo the disutility of labor. The consumer can be charged for that which does not cost the producer, only when natural inelasticity, market entry barriers, or other forms of scarcity put the producer in a monopoly position.

In a totally free market, with producers exchanging the value of their labor in the total absence of privilege or monopoly, the product will be distributed among workers according to their perceived disutility, as a result of the "voluntary higgling of the market." The net disutilities in competing lines of work, taking into account the utilities and disutilities peculiar to each, will be equalized by competition. When market entry is unrestricted, so long as a provider sells at a price more than sufficient to compensate his own subjective effort, other providers will enter the market to undersell him until price equals subjective effort. When absentee landlord rents are not enforced, therefore, the price of land will fall to the level needed to compensate the efforts embodied in improvements, buildings, and so forth. When market entry barriers and prohibitions against mutual banks are eliminated, the cost of credit will fall to the overhead cost of administration.

As for time preference, its steepness is heavily dependent on the distribution of property and savings among the classes of society, and on the relative dependence of one class on another for access to the means of production. But to the extent that some degree of time preference would exist even in a society of distributive property ownership, I follow Maurice Dobb's suggestion that it be factored in as a scarcity rent for present as against future labor; that is, another form of disutility in the "higgling of the market."

So to sum it up, a free market, as mutualists understand it, tends toward an equilibrium price which does not include payment for anything that did not cost an effort on the part of the provider. The term "equilibrium price" makes allowances for short-term quasi rents resulting from temporary bottlenecks in production, as demand shifts. And these principles only hold true in cases where supply is elastic. In other cases, such as land with productivity or site advantages, above average innate skills, rare works of art, etc., permanent quasi-rents will result from the inelasticity of supply. End of digression.

Stromberg's argument that the problem of surplus output in a state capitalist economy does not violate Say's Law, because Say's Law applies only in a free market, can be taken a step further with mutualist analysis. J.A. Hobson argued that widespread monopoly profits and other unearned income,

[h]aving no natural relation to effort of production, ...impel their recipients to no corresponding satisfaction of consumption: they form a surplus wealth, which, having no proper place in the normal economy of production and consumption, tends to accumulate as excessive savings.[151]

In a truly free market, as mutualists understand it, labor's pay will equal the value it produces; and the "higgling of the market" will tie the amount of disutility laborers are willing to undergo producing value to their perceived consumption needs. Thus, purchasing power will be related directly to the amount of output. In a statist economy, on the other hand, various forms of statist privilege reduce the purchasing power of those who produce wealth and transfer it to those who have no subjective sense of the effort entailed in production.

For Tucker, the fundamental difference between nineteenth century capitalism and a real free market lay in the four privileges or monopolies by which the state robbed the laborer of the proper market returns on his labor: the money monopoly, by which the state limited free entry into the money and credit markets, and thus enabled the suppliers of credit to charge a monopoly price; the land monopoly, by which the state enforced absentee "property" claims not founded on occupancy and cultivation; the tariff monopoly; and the patent monopoly. The abolition of the money monopoly (capitalization requirements, licensing, legal tender laws, and other regulations on the private issuance of currency) would result in free market entry into the banking market until the price of credit fell to the labor cost of administering loans. Abolition of the landlord monopoly would cause the price of land to fall to the labor value of improvements (making allowance for economic rent). The effect of removing all four monopolies would be to lower the rate of profit, as such, to zero.[152]

The first two monopolies are an issue of dispute among right-libertarians. As to the money monopoly, there is room for legitimate disagreement over how much of existing interest rates is due to monopoly, and how much to risk premium or time-preference, and to how much they would be reduced by free banking. The mainstream libertarian right is predominantly Lockean on the land issue, although the followers of George, Spencer and Nock comprise a large undercurrent of honorable exceptions. But the illegitimacy of tariffs and patents is a matter of agreement for the great majority of libertarians. Hilferding, Schumpeter and Mises viewed the tariff as the largest single enabling factor for cartelization of the domestic economy.

As for patents, their effect has been almost beyond comprehension. Tucker focused on their function of giving monopoly privileges to the individual inventor, while ignoring their effect on the institutional structure of corporate capitalism. Patents are a mighty weapon for cartelizing an industry in under the control of a handful of producers. According to David Noble, patent control is one of the chief means by which manufacturing corporations have maintained their market share. And the leading firms in an industry may cartelize it by exchanging their patents and jointly using their shared patents to close the market to the entry of new competition. For example, General Electric and Westinghouse effectively cartelized the electrical appliance industry by a large-scale exchange of patents. The American chemical industry was created almost from nothing during World War I, when the U.S. Justice Department seized the German chemical patents and then gave them away free to fledgling American companies.[153] The expansion of international patent law through the GATT regime has served to cartelize industry on a global scale. Patents on general-use technologies, especially, lock western TNCs into permanent control of modern productive technologies and protect them from the emergence of native competition in the Third World.[154]

Tucker himself neglected two major forms of state intervention, which had long been or were currently becoming decisive in his time: primitive accumulation and transportation subsidies. Without the state's role in robbing the peasantry of rights of copyhold, commons, and other traditional rights in the land, and turning them into tenants at-will in the modern sense, there would have been no majority of propertyless laborers forced to "sell their lives in order to live." Without the system of social control imposed by the state, the working class would have been a lot harder to manage. In England, for example, the Poor Laws and Vagrancy Laws amounted to a Stalinesque internal passport system; the Combination Act, and various police measures by Pitt like the Riot Act and suspension of habeas corpus, together placed everyone below the small middle class beyond the protection of so-called rights of Englishmen. The creation of the so-called "world market" was brought about by the brutal and heavy-handed mercantilist policies of Great Britain.

As for transportation subsidies, every wave of concentration of capital in the past 150 years has followed some centralized transportation or communications infrastructure whose creation was initiated by the state. The heavily state-subsidized railroads led, in the United States, to the first manufacturing corporations on a continental scale. Federal subsidies to the numbered state highways in the 1920s, followed by the interstates of the 1950s had a massive effect on the concentration of retailing and agriculture; the civil aviation system (and especially the postwar jumbo jets--see above) was almost entirely a creation of the state. And the ability of TNCs to direct operations around the world in realtime, from a single headquarters, was made possible by the state-initiated telecommunications infrastructure (especially the worldwide web, in whose creation the Pentagon's DARPA played a major role).

"Actually existing capitalism," even in the supposedly "laissez faire" nineteenth century, would not be capitalism without its state capitalist features. Capitalism was defined by state capitalist features from its very beginnings. As early radicals like Paine and Cobbett, and market-oriented Ricardian socialists like Hodgskin understood it, the statist features of capitalism were analogous to the use of the state by landed interests under the Old Regime. It is a useful exercise for anyone who views the nineteenth century as "largely laissez-faire" to consider the effects, severally, of patents, tariffs, and railroad subsidies, and then try to mentally encompass the synergistic effect of all of them together.

So a mutualist treatment of Marx's "declining rate of profit" would characterize it as a continuing increase in the rate of state intervention necessary for profits to exist at all. In the nineteenth century, it required only the kinds of legal privileges Tucker described, which were largely embedded in the general legal system, and thus disguised as a "neutral" framework governing a free society.

The larger-scale state capitalist intervention, generally identified with Whigs and Republicans in the mid-nineteenth century, led to a centralization of the economy in the hands of large producers. This system was inherently unstable, and required still further state intervention to solve its contradictions. The result was the full-blown state capitalism of the twentieth century, in which the state played a direct role in subsidizing and cartelizing the corporate economy. As regulatory cartelization advanced from the "Progressive" era on, the problems of overproduction and surplus capital were further intensified by the forces described by Stromberg, with the state resorting to ever greater, snowballing foreign expansionism and domestic corporatism to solve them. They eventually led to New Deal corporate state, to a world war in which the U.S. was established as "hegemonic power in a system of world order" (Huntington), and an almost totally militarized high tech economy.

A positive rate of profit, under twentieth century state capitalism, was possible only because the state underwrote so much of the cost of reproduction of constant and variable capital, and undertook "social investment" which increased the efficiency of labor and capital and consequently the rate of profit on capital.[155] And monopoly capital's demands on the state are not stable over time, but steadily increase:

...the socialization of the costs of social investment and social consumption capital increases over time and increasingly is needed for profitable accumulation by monopoly capital. The general reason is that the increase in the social character of production (specialization, division of labor, interdependency, the growth of new social forms of capital such as education, etc.) either prohibits or renders unprofitable the private accumulation of constant and variable capital.[156]

O'Connor did not adequately deal with a primary reason for the fiscal crisis: the increasing role of the state in performing functions of capital reproduction removes an ever-growing segment of the economy from the market price system. The removal of the price feedback system, which in a free market ties quantity demanded to quantity supplied, leads to ever-increasing demands on state services. When the consumption of some factor is subsidized by the state, the consumer is protected from the real cost of providing it, and unable to make a rational decision about how much to use. So the state capitalist sector tends to add factor inputs extensively, rather than intensively; that is, it uses the factors in larger amounts, rather than using existing amounts more efficiently. The state capitalist system generates demands for new inputs from the state geometrically, while the state's ability to provide new inputs increases only arithmetically. The result is a process of snowballing irrationality, in which the state's interventions further destabilize the system, requiring yet further state intervention, until the system's requirements for stabilizing inputs exceed the state's resources. At that point, the state capitalist system reaches a breaking point.

Probably the best example of this phenomenon is the transportation system. State subsidies to highways, airports, and railroads, by distorting the cost feedback to users, destroy the link between the amount provided and the amount demanded. The result, among other things, is an interstate highway system that generates congestion faster than it can build or expand the system to accommodate congestion. The cost of repairing the most urgent deteriorating roadbeds and bridges is several times greater than the amount appropriated for that purpose. In civil aviation, at least before the September 11 attacks, the result was planes stacked up six high over O'Hare airport. There is simply no way to solve these crises by building more highways or airports. The only solution is to fund transportation with cost-based user fees, so that the user perceives the true cost of providing the services he consumes. But this solution would entail the destruction of the existing centralized corporate economy.

The same law of excess consumption and shortages manifests itself in the case of energy. When the state subsidizes the consumption of resources like fossil fuels, business tends to add inputs extensively, instead of using existing inputs more intensively. Since the incentives for conservation and economy are artificially distorted, demand outstrips supply. But the energy problem is further complicated by finite reserves of fossil fuels. According to an article in the Oil and Gas Journal last year,

....The world is drawing down its oil reserves at an unprecedented rate, with supplies likely to be constrained by global production capacity by 2010, "even assuming no growth in demand," said analysts at Douglas-Westwood Ltd., an energy industry consulting firm based in Canterbury, England.

"Oil will permanently cease to be abundant," said Douglas-Westwood analysts in the World Oil Supply Report issued earlier this month. "Supply and demand will be forced to balance-but at a price."

The resulting economic shocks will rival those of the 1970s, as oil prices "could double and treble within 2 or 3 years as the world changes from oil abundance to oil scarcity. The world is facing a future of major oil price increases, which will occur sooner than many people believe," that report concluded.

"The world's known and estimated 'yet to find' reserves cannot satisfy even the present level of production of some 74 million b/d beyond 2022. Any growth in global economic activity only serves to increase demand and bring forward the peak year," the report said.

A 1% annual growth in world demand for oil could cause global crude production to peak at 83 million b/d in 2016, said Douglas-Westwood analysts. A 2% growth in demand could trigger a production peak of 87 million b/d by 2011, while 3% growth would move that production peak to as early as 2006, they said.

Zero demand growth would delay the world's oil production peak only until 2022, said the Douglas-Westwood report.

However, the International Energy Agency recently forecast that world oil demand would reach 119 million b/d by 2020.[157]

During the shortages of the late '70s, Warren Johnson predicted that a prolonged energy crisis would lead, through market forces, to a radical decentralization of the economy and a return to localism. (158) Like every other kind of state intervention, subsidies to transportation and energy lead to ever greater irrationality, culminating in collapse.

Other centralized offshoots of the state capitalist system produce similar results. Corporate agribusiness, for example, requires several times as much synthetic pesticide application per acre to produce the same results as in 1950 - partly because of insect resistance, and partly because pesticides kill not only insect pests but their natural enemies up the food chain. At the same time, giant monoculture plantations typical of the agribusiness system are especially prone to insects and blights which specialize in particular crops. The use of chemical fertilizers, at least the most common simple N-P-K varieties, strips the soil of trace elements - a phenomenon noted long ago by Max Gerson. The chemical fillers in these fertilizers, as they accumulate, alter the osmotic quality of the soil - or even render it toxic. Reliance on such fertilizers instead of traditional green manures and composts severely degrades the quality of the soil as a living biological system: for example, the depletion of mycorrhizae which function symbiotically with root systems to aid absorption of nutrients. The cumulative effect of all these practices is to push soil to the point of biological collapse. The hardpan clay on many agribusiness plantations is virtually sterile biologically, often with less than a single earthworm per cubic yard of soil. The result, as with chemical pesticides, is ever increasing inputs of fertilizer to produce diminishing results.

In every case, the basic rule is that, whenever the economy deviates from market price as an allocating principle, it deviates to that extent from rationality. In a long series of indices, the state capitalist economy uses resources or factors much more intensively than would be possible if large corporations were paying the cost themselves. The economy is much more transportation-intensive than a free market could support, as we have seen. It is likewise more capital-intensive, and more intensively dependent on scientific-technical labor, than would be economical if all costs were borne by the beneficiaries. The economy is far more centralized, capital intensive, and high-tech than it would otherwise be. Had large corporate firms paid for these inputs themselves, they would have reached the point of zero marginal utility from additional inputs much earlier.

At the same time as the demand for state economic inputs increases, state capitalism also produces all kinds of social pathologies that require "social expenditures" to contain or correct. By subsidizing the most capital-intensive forms of production, it promotes unemployment and the growth of an underclass. But just as important, it undermines the very social structures - family, church, neighborhood, etc. - on which it depends for the reproduction of a healthy social order.

Those who believe the market and commodity production as such inevitably suck all social relations into the "cash nexus," and undermine the stability of autonomous social institutions, are wrong. But this critique, while not valid for the market as such, is valid for state capitalism, where the state is driven into ever new realms in order to stabilize the corporate system. State intervention in the process of reproducing human capital (i.e., public education and tax-supported vocational-technical education), and state aid to forms of economic centralization that atomize society, result in the destruction of civil society and the replacement by direct state intervention of activities previously carried out by autonomous institutions. The destruction of civil society, in turn, leads to still further state intervention to deal with the resulting social pathologies.

The free market criticism of these phenomena closely parallels that of Ivan Illich in Tools For Conviviality.[159] Illich argued that the adoption of technologies followed a pattern characterized by two thresholds (or "watersheds"). The first threshold was one of high marginal utility for added increments of the new technology, with large increases in overall quality of life as it was introduced. But eventually a second threshold was reached, at which further increments produced disutilities. Technologies continued to be adopted beyond the level at which they positively harmed society; entire areas of life were subject to increased specialization, professionalization, and bureaucratic control; and older forms of technology that permitted more autonomous, local and individual control, were actively stamped out. In all these areas of life, the effect was to destroy human-scale institutions and ways of doing things, amenable to control by the average person.

In medicine, the first threshold was identified with the introduction of septic techniques, antibiotics, and other elementary technologies that drastically reduced the death rates. The second was identified with intensive reliance on extremely expensive medications and procedures with only marginally beneficial results (not to mention iatrogenic diseases), the transformation of medicine into a priesthood governed by "professional" bureaucracies, and the loss by ordinary people of control over their own health. The automobile reached the second threshold when it became impossible for most people to work or shop within walking or bicycle distance of where they lived. The car ceased to be a luxury, and became a necessity for most people; a lifestyle independent of it was no longer an option.

Those who criticize such aspects of our society, or express sympathies for the older, smaller-scale ways of life, are commonly dismissed as nostalgic, romantic--even luddites. And such critiques are indeed, more often than not, coupled with calls for government regulation of some kind to protect quality of life, by restraining the introduction of disruptive technologies. The worst such critics idealize the "Native American" practice of considering the effects of a technology for "six generations" before allowing it to be adopted. Illich himself fell into this general category, considering these issues to be a proper matter for grass-roots political control ("convivial reconstruction").

But in fact, it is quite possible to lament the loss of human scale society ("Norman Rockwell's America"), and to resent the triumph of professionalization and the automobile, all the while adhering to strictly free market principles. For government, far from being the solution to these evils, has been their cause. Illich went wrong in treating the first and second thresholds, respectively, as watersheds of social utility and disutility, without considering the mechanism of coercion that is necessary for social disutility to exist at all. In a society where all transactions are voluntary, no such thing as "social disutility" is possible. Net social disutility can only occur when those who personally benefit from the introduction of new technologies beyond the second threshold, are able to force others to bear the disutilities. As we have already seen in our citations of O'Connor's analysis, this is the case in regard to a great deal of technology. The profit is privatized, while the cost is socialized. Were those who benefited from greater reliance on the car, for example, for example, forced to internalize all the costs, the car would not be introduced beyond the point where overall disutilities equaled overall utilities. As Kaveh Pourvand elegantly put it in a private communication recently, the state's intervention promotes the adoption of certain technologies beyond Pareto optimality.[160] Coercion, or use of the "political means," is the only way in which one person can impose disutility on another.

The state capitalist system thus demands ever greater state inputs in the form of subsidies to accumulation, and ever greater intervention to contain the ill social effects of state capitalism. Coupled with political pressures to restrain the growth of taxation, these demands lead to (as O'Connor's title indicates) a "fiscal crisis of the state," or "a tendency for state expenditures to increase faster than the means of financing them." (161) The "'structural gap' ...between state expenditures and state revenue" is met by chronic deficit finance, with the inevitable inflationary results. Under state capitalism "crisis tendencies shift, of course, from the economic into the administrative system..." This displaced crisis is expressed through "inflation and a permanent crisis in public finance."[162]

The problem is intensified by the disproportionate financing of State expenditures by taxes on the competitive sector (including the taxes on the monopoly capital sector which are passed on to the competitive sector), and the promotion of monopoly capital profits at the expense of the competitive sector. This depression of the competitive sector simultaneously reduces its purchasing power and its strength as a tax base, and exacerbates the crises of both state finance and demand shortfall.

Parallel to the fiscal crisis of the state, state capitalism likewise moves towards what Habermas called a "legitimation crisis." State capitalism involves "[r]e-coupling the economic system to the political.... The state apparatus no longer, as in liberal capitalism, merely secures the general conditions of production..., but is now actively engaged in it."[163] That is, capitalism abandons the "laissez-faire" model of state involvement mainly through the enforcement of a general legal framework, and resorts instead to direct organizational links and direct state inputs into the private sector.

To the extent that the class relationship has itself been repoliticized and the state has taken over market replacing as well as market supplementing tasks..., class domination can no longer take the anonymous form of the law of value. Instead, it now depends on factual constellations of power whether, and how, production of surplus value can be guaranteed through the public sector, and how the terms of the class compromise look.[164]

The direct intervention of the state on behalf of corporate elites becomes ever greater, and impossible to conceal. This fundamentally contradicts the official ideology of "free market capitalism," in which the state simply acts as a neutral guarantor of a social order in which the most deserving win by their own efforts. Therefore, it undermines the ideological basis on which its popular legitimacy depends.

According to bourgeois conceptions that have remained constant from the beginnings of modern natural law to contemporary election speeches, social rewards should be distributed on the basis of individual achievement.... Since it has been recognized, even among the population at large, that social force is exercised in the forms of economic exchange, the market has lost its credibility as a fair... mechanism for the distribution of life opportunities conforming to the system.[165]

When the state capitalist system finally reaches its limits, the state becomes incapable of further increasing the inputs on which the system depends. The fundamental contradictions of the system, displaced from the political/administrative realm, return with a vengeance in the form of economic crisis. The state capitalist system will reach its breaking point. When that day comes, a "nunc dimittis" might be in order.

A NOTE ON MARXIST SHORTCOMINGS: THE ROLE OF THE STATE

Although this article has focused on mutualism's differences with the mainstream libertarian Right, the Marxists have their own ideological blinders. They largely ignore the primary issue of whether the social and economic power of the capitalist arise primarily from autonomous forces, or whether the state's intervention is necessary. Marxists tend to treat concentration and centralization of capital as natural outgrowths of competition. The need for ever-larger firms to achieve economies of scale, coupled with the credit system, make possible intense concentration of production in the hands of a few firms. This shows a common tendency among Marxists, to believe that the virtues of economy of scale are virtually unlimited, and to see every step toward cartelization and monopoly as a "progressive" step toward a fully "socialized" economy. In fact, as economists like Walter Adams have shown, economies of scale level off at relatively low levels of production; firms above this leveling point are less efficient than those at optimal economy of scale, and can only survive with the help of the state. As Stromberg said, most of the Marxist literature "relies on the unproven assumption of an inherent tendency toward monopoly endogenous to the market economy."[166]

Marx at times, especially in his treatment of primitive accumulation, approached the truth - that the growth of capitalism was not an inevitable outcome of the free market as such. But he always skirted by without fully embracing the implications. And there was a tension between his earlier argument, in The German Ideology, that capitalism and the wage system arose mainly from the concentration of property by purely market forces, and his later analysis of state-imposed primitive accumulation in the first volume of Capital. In the Grundrisse, where most of the material for Capital was tentatively worked out, Marx shifted ambivalently between the two positions. Engels, in his polemics against Duhring and the anarchists, took the first alternative to the point of denying that the state had ever been necessary in the rise of capitalism and exploitation.

....even if we excluse all possibility of robbery, force and fraud, even if we assume that all private property was originally based on the owner's own labor, and that throughout the whole process there was only exchange of equal values for equal values, the progressive development of production and exchange nevertheless brings us of necessity to the present capitalist mode of production.... The whole process can be explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state or political interference of any kind necessary.[167]

In taking things this far, he consigned Marx's eloquent account of the early modern process of expropriation and enslavement, "written in letters of blood and fire," to irrelevancy.

Engels made it clear that capital took priority over the state in the sequence of cause and effect, and drew the dividing line between Marxists and anarchists on this issue. In a letter of 4 September 1867, Engels aptly summed up the difference between anarchists and state socialists: "They say 'abolish the state and capital will go to the devil.' We propose the reverse."[168] Engels was quite right in drawing the line where he did. Like the classical liberals, libertarian socialists (including both laissez-fairists like Benjamin Tucker and collectivists like Bakunin) saw exploitation as impossible without the state's power to coerce. Ruling classes could function only through the state.

A second failing of Marxism (or at least the vulgar variety) was to treat the evolution of particular social and political forms as natural outgrowths of a given technical mode of production.

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.[169]

For the Marxists, a "higher" or more progressive form of society could only come about when productive forces under the existing form of society had reached their fullest possible development under that society. To attempt to create a free and non-exploitative society before its technical and productive prerequisites had been achieved would be folly. The proper anarchist position, in contrast, is that exploitation and class rule are not inevitable at any time; they depend upon intervention by the state, which is not at all necessary. Just social and economic relations are compatible with any level of technology; technical progress can be achieved and new technology integrated into production in any society, through free work and voluntary cooperation. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, all the technical prerequisites for steam engines had been achieved by the skilled craftsmen of the High Middle Ages. Had not the expropriation of the peasantry and the crushing of the free cities taken place, a steam powered industrial revolution would still have taken place - but the main source of capital for industrializing would have been in the hands of the democratic craft guilds. The market system would have developed on the basis of producer ownership of the means of production. Had not Mesopotamian and Egyptian elites figured out six thousand years ago that the peasantry produced a surplus and could be milked like cattle, free people would still have exchanged their labor and devised ways, through voluntary cooperation, to make their work easier and more productive. Parasitism is not necessary for progress.

Third, Marxists view the exploitation of labor not as the result of coercive relations (direct or indirect) between capital and labor, but as the spontaneous outcome of the difference between the market value of labor power and the value of the worker's product. Surplus value is not the result of unequal bargaining power, but is inherent in wage labor itself. Mutualists, on the other hand, believe state intervention in the market is necessary for exploitation to take place. Otherwise, "the natural wage of labor is its product." The elimination of privilege and the resulting shift in the balance of bargaining power, in themselves, will be sufficient to turn a nominal wage system into de facto worker control.[170]

From Engels on, the Marxist treatment of the state's role in the creation of monopoly capitalism and imperialism was uneven. Marxist theorists of imperialism - Kautsky, Bukharin, Luxembourg, and even Lenin - sometimes referred to particular forms of state intervention on behalf of monopoly capital. Some, like Bukharin and Luxembourg, brilliantly described certain categories of state intervention - foreign loans, infrastructure, conquest, and (especially Luxembourg) the permanent war economy. But they seldom or never explicitly treated the question of how essential the state was to the system of monopoly capital and imperialism. For the most part, they apparently did not even recognize that it was a question. When they did acknowledge the question, they tended to treat state intervention as merely accelerating a process that was already occurring, as a natural byproduct of the concentration of capital in market competition.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ANTISTATE MOVEMENT

The views of the present system as essentially exploitative, and of the state as the foundation for its exploitative features, are held both at the same time by only a very small segment of either the libertarian Left or Right. Despite occasional lip service to the state capitalist nature of the corporate system, collectivist-oriented libertarian socialists like Chomsky argue for increased state intervention against "private concentrations of power," and seem to be motivated by a largely aesthetic revulsion to markets.

Perhaps most annoyingly, they play into the hands of the state capitalists by using the terms "free market" and "free trade" as they have been defined by neoliberal politicians and intellectuals, and in the corporate press. In so doing, they concede the definition of "free market" to our class enemies.

The editors of In These Times, in the magazine's mission statement, speak of the need to replace "market values" with "human values" - forgetting that a market, as such, is simply a realm where all human relationships and transactions are based on consent and voluntary cooperation rather than coercion. There is as much - indeed more - room in a genuine free market for the values of Kropotkin, of Colin Ward and Paul Goodman, as there is for those of Milton Friedman and Leonard Peikoff. As Tucker argued, in a genuine market all transactions are exchanges of labor between producers.

Mainstream right libertarians, in turn, seem to have largely abandoned the "petty bourgeois" economic populism of the early classical liberal period; in most cases they minimize the statism of the present corporate system, and treat big business (for aesthetic reasons of their own) as the victim rather than the beneficiary of the regulatory state. The early classical liberalism and Enlightenment radicalism of Godwin, Paine, Cobbett, and Hodgskin was decidedly left-wing in spirit. It was motivated by a populist reaction against quasi-feudal landlordism and mercantilism, both of which were forms of exploitation which depended on the use of the state by plutocratic interests against the producing classes. It was unambiguously on the side of the "little guy." And there is a great deal of continuity between classical liberalism and the later populist radicalism of Hodgskin, George, and Nock. To the extent that Hodgskin - the best of the Ricardian socialists - criticized industrial capitalism as exploitative, it was because of the features of statism and privilege that it shared with the older mercantilist system. But from a revolutionary ideology aimed at breaking down the powers of feudal and mercantilist ruling classes, mainstream libertarianism has evolved into a reflexive apology for the institutions today most nearly resembling a feudal ruling class: the giant corporations. To the extent it affects a populist veneer, it is akin to the populism mocked by Cool Hand Luke: "Yeah, them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get."

A great deal of right-libertarian boilerplate is written on the theme of Bill Gates as John Galt, when he is in fact James Taggart. All too often, the real modus operandi is to use libertarian rhetoric in defense of a predetermined set of "good guys," defined by standing the Left's list of god-figures and devil-figures on its head: "Two legs good, four legs baaaaad." In some cases, the motivation seems to be a visceral affinity for big business as "our sort." In others, it seems to reflect an almost Stalinist level of cynicism in treating big business as an "objective ally" to be defended regardless of the truth. In both cases, the corporate liberal views of Art Schlesinger are simply mirror-imaged. The real fault line between genuine libertarians and "vulgar libertarian" apologists for big business seems to be defined by how closely they view the present system as an approximation of a free market.

But if both facets of our understanding of the present system (that corporate capitalism is exploitative; and that its exploitation depends solely on the state) were sincerely held by libertarians of left and right, it could serve as the basis for an alliance against state capitalism. The Left must be made to understand that their proper grievance is not against private property (properly understood), or markets (in the sense of free exchange between equal, unprivileged producers), but with the state. The Right must be made to understand the extent to which Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and GM are parasitic outgrowths of the state, and not products of "good old American know-how" or "elbow grease." If both sides are sincerely motivated primarily by an oppostion to statist coercion, rather than a reflexive sympathy for big business or aversion to market exchange, the potential exists for coexistence on the basis of something like Voltairine de Cleyre's "anarchism without adjectives."

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[1] Joseph R. Stromberg, "The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire," Journal of Libertarian Studies Volume 15, no. 3 (Summer 2001), pp. 57-93. Available online at http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_3/15_3_3.pdf

[2] Ibid. p. 64.

[3] Murray Rothbard, "War Collectivism in World War I," in Murray Rothbard and Ronald Radosh, eds., A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972), pp. 66-67.

[4] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, The Age of Jackson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1946), p. 505.

[5] "Why Business Always Loses," quoted in Domhoff, Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), p. 157.

[6] Robert Rives La Monte, "You and Your Vote," International Socialist Review XIII, No. 2 (August 1912); "Editorial," International Socialist Review XIII, No. 6 (December 1912).

[7] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring. Marx and Engels, Collected Works vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975-), p. 265

[8] James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

[9] George Orwell, 1984. Signet Classics reprint (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949, 1981), p. 169.

[10] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1970), pp. 1-3. Online edition http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/deschool/intro.html

[11] William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1961), p. 382.

[12] There is a large body of historical and industrial engineering work on this theme. E.g.: Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998); William Lazonick, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Steven A. Marglin, "What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production--Part I" Review of Radical Political Economics 6:2 (Summer 1974); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Montgomery, Workers Control in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).

[13] Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1913, 1977), pp. 146-147.

[14] Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900-1916 (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), p. 3.

[15] Paul M. Sweezy, "Competition and Monopoly," Monthly Review 33:1 (May 1981), pp. 1-16.

[16] Kolko, op. cit., p. 5.

[17] Ibid. p. 268.

[18] Ibid. p. 275.

[19] Ibid. p. 287.

[20] Ibid. p. 98-108.

[21] Ronald Radosh, "Myth of the New Deal," in Murray Rothbard and Ronald Radosh, eds. A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972), pp. 154-155.

[22] Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers. Right Turn (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 46; this line of analysis is pursued more intensively in Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

[23] Ferguson, Golden Rule p. 117 et seq. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: Signet Books, 1967), pp. 25-37, 258-59, 274, 287-89.

[24] Weinstein, Corporate Ideal, op. cit., especially the first two chapters.

[25] David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 49-57.

[26] Radosh, "The Myth of the New Deal," op. cit., pp. 178-79, 181.

[27] Domhoff, Higher Circles, p. 223.

[28] Ibid., p. 225.

[29] James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 23.

[30] G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990) pp. 65-105.

[31] Nikolai Bukharin. Imperialism and World Economy, Chapter XIII, online edition http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/imperial/

[32] Domhoff, Higher Circles, op. cit., p. 218.

[33] Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State pp. 44-64.

[34] Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1971, 1993).

[35] Hilaire Belloc, Servile State, op. cit., p. 189.

[36] John P. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978), Chapter 6.

[37] Belloc, Servile State, op. cit., pp. 190-91.

[38] C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 (1956)), p. 101.

[39] David W. Eakins, "Business Planners and America's Postwar Expansion," in David Horowitz, ed., Corporations and the Cold War (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1969), p. 148.

[40] Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).

[41] Charles E. Nathanson. "The Militarization of the American Economy" In Horowitz, ed., Corporations and the Cold War, op. cit., p. 214.

[42] David F. Noble, America by Design pp. 6-7.

[43] Nathanson, "The Militarization of the American Economy," p. 208.

[45] Ibid., p. 230.

[46] Ibid., p. 230.

[47] Ibid., pp. 222-25.

[48] Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy, op. cit., p. 11.

[49] Ibid., p. 21.

[50] Mills, Power Elite, op. cit., p. 147.

[51] Ibid., p. 277n.

[52] G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America Now? (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1983, 1997), p. 2.

[53] Mills, Power Elite, op. cit., pp. 118-146; see also material on corporate socialization in William M. Dugger, Corporate Hegemony (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989).

[54] Mills, Power Elite, op. cit., pp. 147-170.

[55] Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, op. cit., Chapter XI.

[56] Ibid. Chapter XIII.

[57] Mills, Power Elite, op. cit., p. 285.

[58] For an excellent summary of the structuralists' differences with corporate liberals and elite theorists, see G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State, op. cit., pp. 1-44. The rest of the book is a series of case studies, with literature reviews of structuralist and state autonomist interpretations, of the major regulatory initiatives of the twentieth century.

[59] Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capitalism: An Essay in the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), pp. 72, 77.

[60] Ibid. pp. 53-54.

[61] Ibid. pp. 61-62.

[62] Mark J. Green, et al., eds., The Closed Enterprise System. Ralph Nader's Study Group Report on Antitrust Enforcement (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972), p. 14.

[63] Baran and Sweezy, op. cit., pp. 63, 68-69.

[64] Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital. Edited and translated by Tom Bottomore (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1910 (1981)), p. 308.

[65] Baran and Sweezy, op. cit. p. 64-66.

[66] O'Connor, op. cit., pp. 6-7.

[67] Ibid. p. 24.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Daniel Gross, "Socialism, American Style: Why American CEOs covet a massive European-style social-welfare state" Slate Aug. 1, 2003 http://slate.msn.com/id/2086511/

[70] C-SPAN Sept. 1, 2003.

[71] O'Connor, op. cit. p. 111.

[72] Ibid. p. 112.

[73] Ibid. p. 124.

[74] Ibid. p. 160.

[75] Ibid. p. 69.

[76] Ibid. p. 161.

[77] Piven and Cloward, op. cit.

[78] William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1959, 1962), pp. 21-22.

[79] Ibid. p. 26.

[80] Ibid. p. 27.

[81] Ibid. p. 17.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Williams, Contours, op. cit., p. 368.

[84] Stromberg, "Role of State Monopoly Capitalism," op. cit., pp. 61-63.

[85] Williams, Contours, op. cit., pp. 363-64.

[86] Williams, Tragedy, op. cit., p. 66.

[87] Martin J. Sklar, "Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism," In Rothbard and Radosh, eds., op. cit., p. 27.

[88] Ibid. p. 40.

[89] Ibid. p. 62n.

[90] Williams, Tragedy, op. cit., p. 179.

[91] Ibid. p. 123.

[92] Ibid. p. 170.

[93] Robert Freeman Smith, "American Foreign Relations, 1920-1942," in Barton J. Bledstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Vintage Books, 1967, 1968), p. 247.

[94] Ibid.

[95] The rest of this paragraph, unless otherwise noted, is based on Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, "Shaping a New World Order: The Council on Foreign Relations' Blueprint for World Hegemony, 1939-1945," in Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980) pp. 135-156.

[96] Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 1999).

[97] Williams, Tragedy, op. cit., pp. 235-36.

[98] Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State, op. cit., p. 166.

[99] Ibid. p. 271.

[100] Leonard P. Liggio, "American Foreign Policy and National Security Management," in Rothbard and Radosh, eds., op. cit., p. 249.

[101] Williams, Tragedy, op. cit. p. 272.

[102] Cheryl Payer, The Debt Trap: The International Monetary Fund and the Third World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Walden Bello, "Structural Adjustment Programs: 'Success' for Whom?" in Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996) ; Bruce Franklin. "Debt Peonage: The Highest Form of Imperialism?" Monthly Review 33:10 (March 1982) pp. 15-31.

[103] Sean Corrigan, "You Can't Say That!" August 6, 2002. http://www.lewrockwell.com/corrigan/corrigan13.html

[104] Thomas Friedman, "What the World Needs Now," New York Times, March 28, 1999.

[105] Baran and Sweezy, op. cit., p. 201.

[106] Christopher Layne and Benjamin Shwartz, "American Hegemony Without an Enemy," Foreign Policy 92 (Fall 1993), pp. 12-13.

[107] Oliver MacDonagh, "The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade," The Economic History Review Second Series, vol. XIV, No. 3 (1962).

[108] Joseph R. Stromberg, "Free Trade, Mercantilism and Empire" February 28, 2000. At http://www.antiwar.com/stromberg/s022800.html

[109] Layne and Shwartz, op. cit., pp. 5, 12.

[110] Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State, op. cit., p. 113.

[111] Ibid. p. 145.

[112] Ibid. pp. 160-61.

[114] Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital. Edited and translated by Tom Bottomore (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1910 (1981)), p. 297.

[116] Ibid. p. 308.

[117] Ibid. p. 309.

[118] Ibid. pp. 317-18.

[119] Ibid. p. 321.

[120] Ibid. pp. 319-20.

[121] Ibid. p. 328.

[122] Bukharin, op. cit., Chapter VII.

[123] Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 51.

[124] Joseph Schumpeter, "Imperialism," in Imperialism, Social Classes: Two Essays by Joseph Schumpeter. Translated by Heinz Norden. Introduction by Hert Hoselitz (New York: Meridian Books, 1955),pp. 79-80.

[125] Ibid. pp. 82-83.

[126] Stromberg, "Role of State Monopoly Capitalism," op. cit., p. 65.

[127] Ibid. p. 71.

[128] Schumpeter, "Imperialism," op. cit., p. 88.

[129] W. R. Bailey, The One-Man Farm, quoted in L. S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976), p. 38.

[130] Walter Adams and James Brock, The Bigness Complex (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 33-34, 45-46.

[131] Seymour Melman, Profits without Production (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 80.

[132] Barry Stein, Size, Efficiency, and Community Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Community Economic Development, 1974), p. 5.

[133] Adams and Brock, op. cit. pp. 38-39.

[134] Green et al., op. cit., pp. 243-44.

[135] Adams and Brock, op. cit., pp. 45-46.

[136] Murray Rothbard, "Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal," in Henry J. Silverman, ed., American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1970), p. 305.

[137] Hilferding, op. cit., p. 325.

[138] Bukharin, op. cit., Chapter VII.

[139] Baran and Sweezy, op. cit., pp. 112-141.

[140] Ibid. pp. 112, 142-177, 207-217.

[141] Paul Mattick, "The Economics of War and Peace," Dissent 111:4 (Fall 1956), p. 377.

[142] Ibid. pp. 378-79.

[143] Baran and Sweezy, op. cit. p. 220.

[144] Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 65.

[145] Ibid. p. 69.

[146] Ibid. p. 73.

[147] Ibid. p. 75.

[148] Ibid. p. 89.

[149] Ibid. p. 79.

[150] Stromberg, Role of "State Monopoly Capitalism," op. cit., pp. 71-72.

[151] Hobson, op. cit., pp. 75-76.

[152] For an excellent statement of the nature and effects of these four monopolies, see Tucker's "State Socialism and Anarchism," in Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One Gordon Press facsimile of second edition (New York: 1897/1973), pp. 3-18. Online text available at http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/tucker2.html

[153] David Noble, America by Design, op. cit., pp. 10, 16, 84-109.

[154] Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization: GATT, the Uruguay Round & the Third World (Penang, Malaysis: Third World Network, 1990), pp. 119-120.

[155] See references to O'Connor op. cit., above, notes 66-68.

[156] O'Connor, op. cit., p. 8.

[157] "World Oil Supplies Running Out Faster than Expected," Oil and Gas Journal, August 12, 2002.

[159] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

[160] Kaveh Pourvand, private email, Oct. 29, 2003.

[162] Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1973, 1976), pp. 61, 68.

[163] Ibid., p. 36.

[164] Ibid., p. 68.

[165] Ibid., p. 81.

[166] Stromberg, "Role of State Monopoly Capitalism," op. cit., p. 74.

[167] Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Duhring) (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 151.

[168] Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence 1846-95 (New YOrk, 1942), cited in Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 18.

[169] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 21.

[170] Gary Elkin, "Benjamin Tucker--Anarchist or Capitalist?" http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/an_or_cap.html

The True Authors of Communism & Socialism: The Jesuits

This is without a doubt the clearest explanation I have ever come across about the historical origin of Communism and Socialism, and who formulated its ideology.

To understand the Hegalian character of Jesuitical deception, (Hegalian dialectic, a very old Jesuit principle explained in the picture below) we must consider that the doctrines of Communism were designed by the Jesuits through what were known as their Reductions in Paraguay in the 17th and 18th centuries, which were a series of communes in which Jesuit priest exercised authority over the natives there. In that environment, the Jesuit Order maintained control over a group of South American Guarani Indians, who they educated and trained to work on their behalf, generating goods that were later sold in the markets of Europe. From a 1933 book titled, “The Revolutionary Movement” by J. Findlater, we read the following:

“…the Jesuits had established twenty strong Mission centres, called Reductions, with many thousands of the Guaranis enrolled as their members….The Jesuits aimed to set up there a completely communistic system, in the sense that no individual rights were recognized and there was no private property. Everything belonged to the State, and was supposed to be shared in common. But in reality much the greater part of the proceeds of goods sold was always remitted to the Camarilla (Jesuit superiors) in Europe; and the Guaranis got only the bare necessities of life in return for their toil and sweat.”

The Jesuit leaders provided the necessary food, clothing, and health care the Indians needed, while using them as “worker bees” to generate income for the order. Just as the Soviet Union would do in the 20th century, the Jesuits maintained strict control over the activities of their subjects:

“…neither would they allow any Guarani to learn Spanish, nor would they tolerate and intercourse between the Guaranis and the peoples of the surrounding Spanish Colonies–a prohibition maintained at the sword’s point.”

They perfected their system of totalitarian control, all the while telling the world that their oppression over other people was, in fact, “Utopia,” a deluded fantasy maintained by some Catholic historians to this day. Perhaps worst of all is that the Jesuit did not present any form of the Gospel or what might be called the Christian faith to these poor Indians.

“There is no evidence that any effort was ever made by the Jesuits to impart the truths, properly so called, of the Christian religion….When the Jesuits were expelled, the Guaranis, having had no moral or religious training to fit them to continue in the Christian Faith, in a few years….became as if no religious teachers had ever lived and worked among them….”

The ideas the Jesuits developed in Paraguay over a period of 158 years, were then communicated to Karl Marx in the nineteenth century:

“For five years Karl Marx went to the Jesuit school in Trier, which during the Prussian period was known as the Friederich-Wilhem Gymnasium.”

Along with Karl Marx, other leading Communists like Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro were also trained by the Jesuits. In fact, the former Jesuit General, Pedro Arrupe (1965-1983) once boasted:

“And what makes you think we are not proud of Fidel Castro?”

While it is true that the Popes are known for condemning Communism, this on their part seems to be more political manipulation than anything else, since Rome has repeatedly supported the principles of Communist thought. “The Communist Manifesto” was first published in 1848, and within less than fifty years we find the Vatican publishing declarations in agreement with it. In his book, “Ecclesiastical Megalomania,” author John W. Robbins notes the following:

“One of the Roman Church-State’s most influential statements on economic matters is the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, On the the Condition of the working Classes. In this encyclical the Roman Church-State allied herself with the proletariat, which in Marxism is the great and final enemy of the capitalist order. The encyclical’s Marxism is so blatant that one Roman Catholic writer declared that ‘much of encyclical (Rerum Novarum) appeared only to repeat in more orthodox language what Marx had said ten years before’….Indeed, there are paragraphs, if not pages, in The Communist Manifesto that might have been written by the pope…”

Then, incredibly, after about a hundred years of various Papal diatribes against Communism in all its forms, the Sunday Times of London reported that:

“Karl Marx, who famously described religion as ‘the opium of the people’, has joined Galileo, Charles Darwin and Oscar Wilde on growing list of historical figures to have undergone an unlikely reappraisal by the Roman Catholic Church.”

The article goes on to quote Georg Sans, a professor at the Vatican’s Gregorian University, who, with the utmost subtlety, speaks about Marxism in a way that seems carefully designed to undermine capitalism and promote the communist principles that Rome has always aligned herself with. Any study of the Papal influence in world governments–will prove that Capitalism, which is the promotion of free enterprise, is the very antithesis of official Roman Catholic dogma.

Because of these things, we cannot help but consider the possibility that the real purpose of the McCarthy era was to manipulate the American mentality with Hegelian tactics, intended to take the anti-Communist fury to such an extreme that it would become offensive to the American people. McCarthy’s methods were so unreasonable that the idea of condemning someone for being a Communist was collectively shunned. If we consider the growing influence of Communism today, we can only wonder if McCarthyism had been part of the Jesuits’ greater plan all along: condition the people to despise anti-Communist “witch-hunting,” then use their desire for toleration as an open door to usher in a more moderate version of it (i.e. Socialism) later on. Such tactics would be impossible to believe, except for the fact that we find Rome on both sides of the issue.

(End of article)
This article is an excerpt from my friend Walt Stickel’s website: The Root of Communism “The Jesuits” Please read the rest of it.

THE FOLLOWING IS TAKEN FROM THE BOOK ENTITLED PAWNS IN THE GAME BY WILLIAM GUY CARR CHAPTER 3 (READ THE FULL BOOK HERE)

 

The Men Who Caused the French Revolution 1789

In the previous chapter evidence was given to prove how a small group of foreign money-lenders, operating through their English agents, remained anonymous while they secured control of that nation’s economy for the modest sum of £1,250,000.  Evidence will now be produced to identify some of these International Jewish money-lenders and prove they, or their successors, plotted and planned, and helped finance, the Great French Revolution of 1789, exactly the same way as they had plotted and planned and financed the English Revolution of 1640-1649.  In succeeding chapters evidence will be produced to prove that the descendants of these same International Jewish Financiers have been The Secret Power behind every war and revolution from 1789 onwards.

The Jewish Encyclopedia says Edom is in modern Jewry.  This is a very important admission, because the word Edom means Red.  History reveals that a Jewish Goldsmith, Amschel Moses Bauer, tired of his wandering in Eastern Europe, decided in 1750 to settle down in Frankfort-on-the-Main in Germany.  He opened a shop, or Counting House, in the Jundenstrasse district.  Over the door of his shop he placed as his sign of business A RED SHIELD.  It is of the greatest importance to remember that the Jews in Eastern Europe, who belonged to the revolutionary movement based on terrorism, had also adopted The Red Flag as their emblem because it represented Blood.

Amschel Moses Bauer had a son born in 1743 and he named him Amschel Mayer Bauer.  The father died in 1754 when his son was only eleven years of age.  The boy had shown great ability, and extraordinary intelligence, and his father had taught him everything possible about the rudimentary principles of the money-lending business.  It had been the father’s intention to have his son trained as a Rabbi but death intervened.

A few years after his father’s death Amschel Mayer Bauer was employed by the Oppenheimer Bank as a clerk.  He soon proved his natural ability for the banking business and was rewarded with a junior partnership.  Later he returned to Frankfort where he secured control and ownership of the business which had been established by his father in 1750.  The Red Shield was still proudly displayed over the door.  Knowing the secret significance of the Red Shield Amschel Mayer Bauer decided to adopt it as the new family name.  Red Shield in German is Roth Schild and thus The House of Rothschild came into being.

Amschel Mayer Bauer lived until 1812.  He had five sons.  All of them were specially-trained to become Captains of High Finance.  Nathan, one of the sons, showed exceptional ability and, at the age of twenty-one, went to England with the definite purpose of securing control of the Bank of England.  The purpose was to use this control to work in conjunction with his father and other brothers to set up, and consolidate, an International Banking Monopoly in Europe.  The combined wealth of the International Banking Pool could then be used to further the secret ambitions his father had made known to all his sons.  To prove his ability, Nathan Rothschild turned £20,000, with which he had been entrusted, into £60,000 in three years.

In studying the World Revolutionary Movement it is important to remember that The Red Flag was the symbol of the French Revolution and every revolution since.  More significant still is the fact that when Lenin, financed by International Bankers, overthrew the Russian Government and established the first Totalitarian Dictatorship in 1917, the design of the flag was a Red Flag, with a Hammer and Sickle, and THE STAR OF JUDEA imposed.

In 1773, when Mayer Rothschild was only thirty years of age, he invited twelve other wealthy and influential men to meet him in Frankfort.  His purpose was to convince them that if they agreed to pool their resources they could then finance and control the World Revolutionary Movement and use it as their Manual of Action to win ultimate control of the wealth, natural resources, and man-power of the entire world.

Rothschild revealed how the English Revolution had been organized.  He pointed out the mistakes and errors that had been made.  The revolutionary period had been too long.  The elimination of reactionaries had not been accomplished with sufficient speed and ruthlessness.  The planned reign of terror, by which the subjugation of the masses was to be accomplished speedily, had not been put into effective operation.  Even after all these mistakes had been made the initial purpose of the revolution had been achieved.  The bankers who instigated the revolution had established control of the national economy and consolidated the national debt.  By means of intrigue carried out on an international scale they had increased the national debt steadily by loaning the money to fight the wars and rebellions they had fomented since 1694.

Basing his arguments on logic and sound reasoning, Mayer Rothschild pointed out that the financial results obtained as the result of the English Revolution would be as nothing when compared to the financial rewards to be obtained by a French Revolution provided those present agreed to unity of purpose and put into effect his carefully thought out and revised revolutionary plan.  The project would be backed by all the power that could be purchased with their pooled resources.  This agreement reached, Mayer Rothschild unfolded his revolutionary plan.  By clever manipulation of their combined wealth it would be possible to create such adverse economic conditions that the masses would be reduced to a state bordering on starvation by unemployment.  By use of cleverly conceived propaganda it would be easy to place the blame for the adverse economic conditions on the King, His Court, the Nobles, the Church, Industrialists, and the employers of labour.  Their paid propagandists would arouse feelings of hatred and revenge against the ruling classes by exposing all real and alleged cases of extravagance, licentious conduct, injustice, oppression, and persecution.  They, would also invent infamies to bring into disrepute others who might, if left alone, interfere with their over-all plans.^[1]

After the general introduction to build up an enthusiastic reception for the plot he was about to unfold, Rothschild turned to a manuscript and proceeded to read a carefully prepared plan of action.  The following is what I have been assured *// By whom, and based on what ? is a condensed version of the plot by which the conspirators hoped to obtain ultimate undisputed control of the wealth, natural resources, and man-power of the entire world.

1.  The speaker started to unfold the plot by saying that because the majority of men were inclined to evil rather than to good the best results in governing them could be obtained by using violence and terrorism and not by academic discussions.  The speaker reasoned that in the beginning human society had been subject to brutal and blind force which was afterwards changed to LAW.  He argued that LAW was FORCE only in disguise.  He reasoned it was logical to conclude that “By the laws of nature right lies in force”.

2.  He next asserted that political freedom is an idea and not a fact.  He stated that in order to usurp political power all that was necessary was to preach ‘Liberalism’ so that the electorate, for the sake of an idea, would yield some of their power and prerogatives which the plotters could then gather together into their own hands.

3.  The speaker asserted that the Power of Gold had usurped the power of liberal rulers even then, i.e. 1773.  He reminded his audience that there had been a time when FAITH had ruled but stated that once FREEDOM had been substituted for FAITH the people did not know how to use it in moderation.  He argued that because of this fact it was logical to assume that they could use the idea of FREEDOM to bring about “CLASS WARS”.  He pointed out that it was immaterial to the success of HIS plan whether the established governments were destroyed by internal or external foes because the victor had of necessity to seek the aid of ‘Capital’ which “Is entirely in our hands.” ^[2]

4.  He argued that the use of any and all means to reach their final goal was justified on the grounds that the ruler who governed by the moral code was not a skilled politician because he left himself vulnerable and in an unstable position on his throne.  He said “Those who wish to rule must have recourse to cunning and to make-believe because great national qualities like frankness and honesty, are vices in politics”^[3]

5.  He asserted “Our right lies in force.  The word RIGHT is an abstract thought and proves nothing.  I find a new RIGHT ... to attack by the RIGHT of the strong, and to scatter to the winds all existing forces of order and regulation, to reconstruct all existing institutions, and to become the sovereign Lord of all those who left to us the RIGHTS to their powers by laying them down voluntarily in their ‘Liberalism’.”

6.  He then admonished his listeners with these words “The power of our resources must remain invisible until the very moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning or force can undermine it.”  He warned them that any deviation from the Line of the strategical plan he was making known to them would risk bringing to naught “THE LABOURS OF CENTURIES”.

7.  He next advocated the use of ‘Mob Psychology’ to obtain control of the masses.  He reasoned that the might of the Mob is blind, senseless, and unreasoning and ever at the mercy of suggestion from any side.  He stated “Only a despotic ruler can rule the Mob efficiently because without absolute despotism there can be no existence for civilization which was carried out NOT by the masses, but by their guide, whosoever that person might be.”  He warned “The moment the Mob seizes FREEDOM in its hands it quickly turns to anarchy.”

8.  He next advocated that the use of alcoholic liquors, drugs, moral corruption, and all forms of vice, be used systematically by their “Agenturs”^[4] to corrupt the morals of the youth of the nations.  He recommended that the special ‘agenturs’ should be trained as tutors, lackeys, governesses, clerks and by our women in the places of dissipation frequented by the Goyim.^[5]  He added “In the number of these last I count also the so-called society ladies who become voluntary followers of the others in corruption and luxury.  We must not stop at bribery, deceit, and treachery when they should serve towards the attainment of our end.”

9.  Turning to politics he claimed they had the RIGHT to seize property by any means, and without hesitation, if by doing so they secured submission, and sovereignty.  He pronounced “Our STATE marching along the path of peaceful conquest has the RIGHT to replace the horrors of wars by less noticeable and more satisfactory sentences of death necessary to maintain the ‘terror’ which tends to produce blind submission.”

10.  Dealing with the use of slogans he said “In ancient times we were the first to put the words ‘Liberty’, ‘Equality’ and ‘Fraternity’ into the mouths of the masses ... words repeated to this day by stupid pollparrots;  words which the would-be wise men of the Goyim could make nothing of in their abstractness, and did not note the contradiction of their meaning and inter-relation.”  He claimed the words brought under their directions and control ‘legions’ “Who bore our banners with enthusiasm.”  He reasoned that there is no place in nature for ‘Equality’, ‘Liberty’ or ‘Fraternity’.  He said “On the ruins of the natural and genealogical aristocracy of the Goyim we have set up the aristocracy of MONEY.  The qualification for this aristocracy is WEALTH which is dependent upon us.”

11.  He next expounded his theories regarding war.  In 1773 he set down a principle which the governments of Britain and the United States publicly announced as their joint policy in 1939.  He said it should be the policy of those present to foment wars but to direct the peace conferences so that neither of the combatants obtained territorial gains.  He said the wars should be directed so that the nations engaged on both sides would be placed further in their debt, and in the power of ‘Our’ Agenturs.

12.  He next dealt with administration.  He told those present that they must use their wealth to have candidates chosen for public office who would be “servile and obedient to our commands, so they may readily be used as Pawns in our game by the learned and genious men we will appoint to operate behind the scenes of government as official advisers.”  He added “The men we appoint as ‘Advisers’ will have been bred, reared, and trained from childhood in accordance with our ideas to rule the affairs of the whole world.”

13.  He dealt with propaganda, and explained how their combined wealth could control all outlets of public information while they remained in the shade and clear of blame regardless of what the repercussions might be due to the publication of libels, slanders, or untruths.  The speaker said “Thanks to the Press we have got gold in our hands notwithstanding the fact that we had to gather it out of the oceans of blood and tears...  But it has paid us even though we have sacrificed many of our own people.  Each victim on our side is worth a thousand Goyim.”

14.  He next explained the necessity of having their ‘Agentur’ always come out into the open, and appear on the scene, when conditions had reached their lowest ebb, and the masses had been subjugated by means of want and terror.  He pointed out that when it was time to restore order they should do it in such a way that the victims would believe they had been the prey of criminals and irresponsibles.  He said “By executing the criminals and lunatics after they have carried out our preconceived ‘reign of terror’, we can make ourselves appear as the saviours of the oppressed, and the champions of the workers.”  The speaker then added “We are interested in just the opposite ... in the diminution, the killing out of the Goyim.”

15.  He next explained how industrial depressions and financial panics could be brought about and used to serve their purpose saying “Enforced unemployment and hunger, imposed on the masses because of the power we have to create shortages of food, will create the right of Capital to rule more surely than it was given to the real aristocracy, and by the legal authority of Kings.”  He claimed that by having their agentur control the ‘Mob’, the ‘Mob’ could then be used to wipe out all who dared to stand in their way.

16.  The infiltration into continental Freemasonry was next discussed extensively.  The speaker stated that their purpose would be to take advantage of the facilities and secrecy Freemasonry had to offer.  He pointed out that they could organize their own Grand Orient Lodges within Blue Freemasonry in order to carry on their subversive activities and hide the true nature of their work under the cloak of philanthropy.  He stated that all members initiated into their Grand Orient Lodges should be used for proselytizing purposes and for spreading their atheistic-materialistic ideology amongst the Goyim.  He ended this phase of the discussion with the words.  “When the hour strikes for our sovereign Lord of all the World to be crowned these same hands will sweep away everything that might stand in his way.”

17.  He next expounded the value of systematic deceptions, pointing out that their agentur should be trained in the use of high sounding phrases, and the use of popular slogans.  They should make the masses the most lavish of promises.  He observed “The opposite of what has been promised can always be done afterwards ... that is of no consequence.”  He reasoned that by using such words as Freedom and Liberty, the Goyim could be stirred up to such a pitch of patriotic fervour that they could be made to fight even against the laws of God, and Nature.  He added “And for this reason after we obtain control the very NAME OF GOD will be erased from the ‘Lexicon of life’.”^[6]

18.  He then detailed the plans for revolutionary war;  the art of street fighting;  and outlined the pattern for the ‘Reign of Terror’ which he insisted must accompany every revolutionary effort “Because it is the most economical way to bring the population to speedy subjection.”

19.  Diplomacy was next discussed.  After all wars secret diplomacy must be insisted upon “in order that our agentur, masquerading as ‘poltitical’, ‘Financial’, and ‘Economic’ advisers, can carry out our mandates without fear of exposing who are ‘The Secret Power’ behind national and international affairs.”  The speaker then told those present that by secret diplomacy they must obtain such control “that the nations cannot come to even an inconsiderable private agreement without our secret agents having a hand in it.”

20.  Ultimate World Government the goal.  To reach this goal the speaker told them “It will be necessary to establish huge monopolies, reservoirs of such colossal riches, that even the largest fortunes of the Goyim will depend on us to such an extent that they will go to the bottom together with the credit of their governments ON THE DAY AFTER THE GREAT POLITICAL SMASH.”  The speaker then added “You gentlemen here present who are economists just strike an estimate of the significance of this combination.”

21.  Economic war.  Plans to rob the Goyim of their landed properties and industries were then discussed.  A combination of high taxes, and unfair competition was advocated to bring about the economic ruin of the Goyim as far as their national financial interests and investments were concerned.  In the international field he felt they could be encouraged to price themselves out of the markets.  This could be achieved by the careful control of raw materials, organized agitation amongst the workers for shorter hours and higher pay, and by subsidizing competitors.  The speaker warned his co-conspirators that they must arrange matters, and control conditions, so that “the increased wages obtained by the workers will not benefit them in any way.”

22.  Armaments.  It was suggested that the building up of armaments for the purpose of making the Goyim destroy each other should be launched on such a colossal scale that in the final analysis “there will only be the masses of the proletariat left in the world, with a few millionaires devoted to our cause ... and police, and soldiers sufficient to protect our interests.”

23.  The New Order.  The members of the One World Government would be appointed by the Dictator.  He would pick men from amongst the scientists, the economists, the financiers, the industrialists, and from the millionaires because “in substance everything will be settled by the question of figures.”

24.  Importance of youth.  The importance of capturing the interest of youth was emphasized with the admonition that “Our agenturs should infiltrate into all classes, and levels of society and government, for the purpose of fooling, bemusing, and corrupting the younger members of society by teaching them theories and principles we know to be false.”

25.  National and International Laws should not be changed but should be used as they are, to destroy the civilization of the Goyim “merely by twisting them into a contradiction of the interpretation which first masks the law and afterwards hides it altogether.  Our ultimate aim is to substitute ARBITRATION for LAW.”

The speaker then told his listeners “You may think the Goyim will rise upon us with arms, but in the WEST we have against this possibility an organization of such appalling terror that the very stoutest hearts quail ... the ‘Underground’... The Metropolitans ... The subterranean corridors ... these will be established in the capitals and cities of all countries before that danger threatens.”

The use of the word ‘WEST’ has great significance.  It makes it plain that Rothschild was addressing men who had joined the World Revolutionary Movement which was started in the Pale of Settlement in the ‘EAST’.  It must be remembered that before Amschel Moses Bauer settled down in Frankfort, Germany, he had followed his trade as a gold and silversmith, travelling extensively in the ‘East’ of Europe, where he had undoubtedly met the men his son Amschel Mayer addressed after he developed from a money-lender into a banker and established THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD in the Jundenstrasse where the above meeting is said to have taken place in 1773.

As far as can be ascertained the original plan of the conspiracy ended at the point where it terminated above.  I am satisfied that the documents which fell into the hands of Professor S. Nilus in 1901, and which he published under the title ‘The Jewish Peril’ in 1905 in Russia, were an enlargement of the original plot.  There appears to be no change in the first section but various additions disclose how the conspirators had used Darwinism, Marxism, and even Nietzche-ism.  More important still, the documents discovered in 1901 disclose how Zionism was to be used.  It must be remembered that Zionism was only organized in 1897.

This matter is referred to later, when the intrigue leading up to the abdication of King Edward VIII is explained.  The translation Mr. Victor Marsden made of The Jewish Peril, was published by The Britons Publishing Society, London, England, under the title The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion in 1921.  This book is also discussed.  It appears logical to say that the discovery of the later document confirms the existence of the earlier one.  Little, if anything is changed, but considerable material is added probably due to the rapid development of the international conspiracy.  The only point upon which there seems to be grounds for disagreement is in regard to the titles chosen by Prof. Nilus and Mr. Marsden for their books.  Mr. Marsden definitely states the contents of his book are the Protocols of the meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion whereas it would appear it was a plot presented to moneylenders, Goldsmiths, Industrialists, Economists, and others, by Amschel Mayer Rothschild who had graduated from money-lender to banker.

Once the spirit of revolt against constituted authority had been aroused within the hearts and minds of the masses, the actual revolutionary effort would be carried out under the impetus of a preconceived Reign of Terror.  The Reign of Terror would be conceived by the leaders of the Jewish Illuminati.  They in turn would have their agents infiltrate into the newly organized French Freemasonry and establish therein Lodges of Grand Orient Masonry to be used as the revolutionary underground and as their instrument for proselytizing the doctrine of atheistic dialectical and historical materialism.  Rothschild ended his discourse by pointing out that if proper precautions were taken their connection with the revolutionary movement need never be known.

The question may well be asked “How can it be proved these secret meetings were held ?” — and “If they were held how is it possible to prove what matters were discussed at such meetings ?”  The answer is simple.  The devilish plot was made known by “An Act of God”.

In 1785 a courier was galloping madly on horseback from Frankfort to Paris carrying detailed information regarding the World Revolutionary Movement in general, and instructions for the planned French Revolution in particular.  The instructions originated with the Jewish Illuminati in Germany and were addressed to Grand Master of the Grand Orient Masons in France.  The Grand Orient Lodges had been established as the revolutionary underground by the Duc D’Orleans after he, as Grand Master of French Masonry, had been initiated into the Jewish Illuminati in Frankfort by Mirabeau.  The courier was struck by lightning while passing through Ratisbon, and killed.  The documents he carried fell into the hands of the police who turned them over to the Bavarian Government.  A record of historical events told in chronological order connects the House of Rothschild with the Jewish Illuminati in Frankfort and the Illuminati within French Free Masonry known as the Grand Orient Lodges as will be shown.

It has been recorded how the Jewish Rabbis claimed the power to interpret the secret and hidden meanings of the writings of Holy Scripture by special revelation obtained through Cabala.  Claiming to have such powers was of little avail unless they had an organization, or instrument, in their hands to put the inspiration they claimed to have received into effect.  The money-lenders, certain High Priests, Directors, and Elders decided to organize a very secret society to serve their evil purpose — they named it “The Illuminati”.  The word Illuminati is derived from the word Lucifer, which means Bearer of the Light, or Being of extraordinary brilliance.  Therefore the Illuminati was Organized to carry out the inspirations given to the High Priests by Lucifer during the performance of their Cabalistic Rites.  Thus Christ is proved justified when he named them of the Synagogue of Satan.  The Supreme Council of the Jewish Illuminati numbered thirteen.  They were, and still remain, the executive body of The Council of Thirty Three.  The heads of the Jewish Illuminati claim to possess superlative knowledge in everything pertaining to religious doctrine, religious rites, and religious ceremonies.  They were the men who conceived the Atheistic-materialistic ideology which in 1848 was published as “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx.  Marx was the nephew of a Jewish Rabbi but he disassociated himself officially from the Jewish High Priesthood when designated to perform his important duties, putting into practice once again the Joint Stock Co. principle of operation.

The reason the Supreme Council numbered thirteen was to remind the members that their one and only duty was to destroy the religion founded by Christ and his twelve Apostles.^[7]  To ensure secrecy and avoid the possibility of Judas-like betrayal, every man initiated into the Illuminati was required to take an oath of Unlimited Obedience to the head of the Council of Thirty Three and to recognize no mortal as above him.  In an organization, such as the Illuminati, this meant that every member acknowledged the head of the Council of Thirty Three as his God upon this earth.  This fact explains how high level Communists, even to-day, swear on oath that they do not give allegiance to Russia.  They don’t.  They give allegiance only to the head of the directors of the World Revolutionary Movement.

The Supreme Council decided they would use the Ingoldstadt Lodge to organize a campaign by which the agents or Cells of the Illuminati would infiltrate into Continental Freemasonry and, under the cloak of social enjoyment and public philanthropy, organize their revolutionary underground.  Those who infiltrated into Continental Freemasonry were ordered to establish Lodges of the Grand Orient and use them for proselytism so they could quickly contact non-Jews of wealth, position, and influence connected with both Church and State.  Then, by using the age-old methods of bribery, corruption and graft, they could make them become willing, or unwilling, disciples of Illuminism.  They could make them preach the inversion of the Ten Commandments of God.  They could make them advocate atheistic-materialism.

Once this policy had been decided upon, agents of the Supreme Council contacted the Marquis of Mirabeau as the most likely person in France to serve their ends.  He belonged to the nobility.  He had great influence in court circles, he was an intimate friend of the Duc D’Orleans whom they had decided they would use as Front Man to lead the French Revolution.  But more important still, the Marquis of Mirabeau was devoid of morals and his licentious excesses had led him heavily into debt.

It was a simple matter for the money-lenders to have their agents contact Mirabeau, the famous French orator.  Under the guise of friends and admirers they offered to help him out of his financial difficulties.  What they actually did was lead him down the “Primrose Path” into the very depths of vice and debauchery until he was so deeply in their debt that he was forced to do their bidding.  At a meeting to consolidate his debts, Mirabeau was introduced to Moses Mendelssohn, one of the big Jewish financiers who took him in hand.  Mendelssohn in due time introduced Mirabeau to a woman, famous for her personal beauty and charm but without moral scruples.

This stunning Jewess was married to a man named Herz, but, to a man like Mirabeau, the fact that she was married only made her more desirable.  It wasn’t long before she was spending more time with Mirabeau than she was spending with her husband.  Heavily in debt to Mendelssohn, tightly ensnared by Mrs. Herz, Mirabeau was completely helpless ... He had swallowed their bait hook, line, and sinker.  But, like good fishermen, they played him gently for a time.  If they exerted too great a pressure the leader might break and their fish might get away.  Their next move was to have him initiated into Illuminism.  He was sworn to secrecy and unlimited obedience under pain of death.  The next move was to lead him into compromising situations which mysteriously became public.  This method of destroying a man’s character became known as the practice of L’Infamie.  Because of scandals and organized detraction, Mirabeau was ostracized by many of his social equals.  His resentment produced a desire for revenge and thus he embraced the revolutionary Cause.

Mirabeau’s task was to induce the Duc D’Orleans to lead the Revolutionary Movement in France.  It was implied that once the King had been forced to abdicate he would become the Democratic Ruler of France.  The real plotters of the French Revolution were careful not to let either Mirabeau or the Duc D’Orleans know they intended to murder the King and Queen, and thousands of the nobility.  They made Mirabeau and the Duc D’Orleans believe that the purpose of the revolution was to free politics and religion from superstition and despotism.  Another factor which made the men who were The Secret Power behind the revolutionary movement decide that the Duc D’Orleans should be their Front man was the fact that he was Grand Master of French Freemasonry.

Adam Weishaupt was given the task of adapting the ritual and rites of Illuminism for use of initiation into the Grand Orient Masonry.  He also lived in Frankfort, Germany.  Mirabeau introduced the Duc D’Orleans and his friend Talleyrand to Weishaupt who initiated them into the secrets of Grand Orient Masonry.  By the end of 1773 Phillipe, Duc D’Orleans had introduced the Grand Orient Ritual into French Freemasonry.  By 1788 there were more than two thousand lodges in France affiliated with Grand Orient Masonry and the number of individual adepts exceeded one hundred thousand.  Thus the Jewish Illuminati under Moses Mendelssohn was introduced into Continental Freemasonry by Weishaupt under the guise of Lodges of the Grand Orient.  The Jewish Illuminati next organized secret revolutionary committees within the lodges.  Thus the revolutionary underground directors were established throughout France.

Once Mirabeau had succeeded in having the Duc D’Orleans amalgamate the Blue or National freemasonry in France with the Grand Orient rites, he led his friend down the same “Primrose Path” which had led to his own social ostracism.  In exactly four years, the Duc D’Orleans was so heavily in debt that he was PERSUADED to engage in every form of illegal traffic and trade to recuperate his losses.  But in some mysterious manner his ventures always seemed to go wrong and he lost more and more money.

By 1780 he owed 800,000 livres.  Once again the money-lenders came forward and offered him advice in regard to his business transactions and financial aid.  They very nicely manoeuvred him into the position of signing over to them as security for their loans, his palace, his estates, his house, and the Palais Royal.  The Duc D’Orleans signed an agreement under which his Jewish financiers were authorized to manage his properties and estates so as to ensure him sufficient income to meet his financial obligations and leave him a steady and adequate income.

The Duc D’Orleans had never been too bright in regard to financial matters.  To him the agreement he signed with his Jewish Bankers appeared to be a sound financial deal.  They had offered to manage his business affairs and turn them from a dismal failure into a great financial success.  What more could he want ?  It is doubtful if the Duc D’Orleans even suspected that there was a nigger hidden deep in the wood-pile.  It is doubtful if he even suspected he had sold himself body and soul to the Agents of the Devil... But he had done so.  He was completely in their hands.^[8]

The Secret Powers directing the French Revolution appointed Choderlos de Laclos to manage the Palais Royal and the Duc D’Orleans’ estates.  De Laclos is thought to have been a Jew of Spanish origin.  When he was appointed manager of the Palais Royal he was acclaimed as the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and other pornographic works.  He publicly defended his extreme immorality on the grounds that he studied the politics of love in all its varied aspects because of his love of politics.

It matters little who Choderlos de Laclos was, it is what he did that is of importance.  He turned the Palais Royal into the greatest and most notorious house of ill-fame the world has ever known.  In the Palais Royal he established every kind of lewd entertainment, licentious conduct, shameless shows, obscene picture galleries, pornographic libraries, and staged public exhibitions of the most bestial forms of sexual depravity.  Special opportunities were provided for men and women who wished to indulge in every form of debauchery.  The Palais Royal became the centre in which details of the campaign for the systematic destruction of the French religious faith and public morals were conceived and carried out.  This was done on the Cabalistic theory that the best revolutionary is a youth devoid of morals.

Associated with de Laclos was a Jew from Palermo named Cagliostro, alias Joseph Balsamo.  He turned one of the Duc’s properties into a printing house from which he issued revolutionary pamphlets.  Balsamo organized a staff of revolutionary propagandists.  In addition to literature they organized concerts, and plays, and debates calculated to appeal to the very lowest instincts of human nature and further the revolutionary cause.  Balsamo also organized the Spy-rings which enabled the men who were The Secret Power behind the revolutionary movement to put into operation their plan of L’Infamie to be used for systematic character assassination.

Men and women, who were enticed into the Web spun by de Laclos and Balsamo, could be blackmailed into doing their bidding.  Thus it was the Duc D’Orleans’ estates were turned into the Centre of Revolutionary Politics while, under the guise of Lecture Halls, Theatres, Art Galleries, and Athletic Clubs, the gambling rooms, brothels, and wine and drug shops did a roaring trade.  In this revolutionary underworld potential leaders were first ensnared.  Their consciences were at first deadened by evil associations and then killed by indulgence in evil practices.  The estates of the Duc D’Orleans were turned into factories in which the Secret Power behind the World Revolutionary Movement manufactured the Pieces they intended to use in their game of International Chess.  Scudder, who wrote “Prince of the Blood” says of the Palais Royal :  “It gave the police more to do than all other parts of the city”.  But as far as the public was concerned, this infamous place was owned by the Duc D’Orleans, the cousin of the king.  Only a mere handful of men and women knew that the moneylenders controlled it and used it to create a revolutionary organization which was to be the instrument of their revenge and their manual of action to further their secret aims and ambitions.

After the secret documents found on the body of the Courier had been read by the police, the documents were passed on to the Bavarian Government.  The Bavarian Government ordered the police to raid the headquarters of the Illuminati.  Further evidence was obtained which exposed the wide-spread ramifications of the World Revolutionary Movement.  The Governments of France, England, Poland, Germany, Austria and Russia were informed of the International Nature of the revolutionary plot, but as has happened repeatedly since, the governments concerned took no serious action to stop the diabolical conspiracy.  Why ?  The only answer to this question is this :  The power of the men behind the world revolutionary movement is greater than the power of any elected government.  This fact will be proved time and time again as the story unfolds.

The malevolent men who plot and plan the W.R.M. have an another advantage over decent people.  The average person, who believes in God and finds pleasure and enjoyment in the beautiful things with which God has blessed us, just cannot bring himself, or herself, to believe a diabolical plan of hatred and revenge could be conceived by human beings.  Although all Christians believe most sincerely that the Grace of God enters their own souls as the result of attending their religious services, receiving the Sacraments, and saying their prayers, they cannot make themselves believe that through the ceremonies and Rites of the Illuminati, be it the Semitic Cabala or the Aryan Pagan Grand Orient type, the Devil does inoculate his evil influence and powers into the hearts and souls of the men and women who accept, as their religion, Satanism or atheism, and put the theories of their High Priests into practice.

A few illustrations will be given to show how individuals and governments have remained just as stupid and naive in regard to warnings given them concerning the evil mechanism of the real leaders of the World Revolutionary Movement.

After various governments failed to act on the information made known by the Bavarian police in 1785, the sister of Marie Antoinette wrote her personal letters warning her of the revolutionary plot;  the connection of the International Bankers;  the part Freemasonry was destined to play, and her own danger.  Marie Antoinette (1755 - 1793) was the daughter of the Emperor Francis I of Austria.  She married Louis XVI of France.  She just couldn’t bring herself to believe the terrible things her own sister told her were being plotted by the Illuminati.  To the repeated warnings sent by her sister, Marie Antoinette wrote long letters in reply.  In regard to her sister’s claim that evidence had been obtained that the Illuminati operating under the guise of Philanthropic Freemasonry planned to destroy both the Church and State in France, Marie Antoinette replied :  “I believe that as far as France is concerned, you worry too much about Freemasonry.  Here it is far from having the significance it may have elsewhere in Europe.”

How wrong she proved to be is a matter of history.  Because she refused consistently to heed her sister’s repeated warnings she and her husband died under the guillotine.

Between 1917 and 1919 the British Government was given full particulars regarding the international bankers who were at that time The Secret Power behind the W.R.M.  The information was submitted officially by British Intelligence Officers, American Intelligence Officers and confirmed by Mr. Oudendyke and Sir M. Findlay.  Mr. Oudendyke was the representative of the Netherlands Government in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) at the time.  He looked after Britain’s interests after The Mob had wrecked the British Embassy, and killed Commander E.N. Cromie.  This aspect of the W.R.M. is dealt with in detail in subsequent chapters on Russia.

The majority of students of history believe Marie Antoinette was a woman who entered fully into the spirit and gaiety of the French Court.  It is generally accepted as a fact that she engaged in many affairs d’amour with her husband’s close friends, and indulged in reckless extravagances.  That is the picture Balsamo and his propagandists painted of her.  The fact that they made their L’Infamie stick enabled them to have the mob demand her life.  But their version of the conduct of Marie Antoinette is a pack of lies, as historians have proved.  The fortitude with which she bore the sufferings inflicted upon her by her enemies, the dignity with which she met her fate, and the resignation and courage with which she offered up her life on the scaffold, cannot be reconciled with the characteristics of a wanton woman.

In order to defame Marie Antoinette, Weishaupt and Mendelssohn thought up the idea of the Diamond Necklace.  At the time, the financial resources of France were at their lowest ebb and the government of France was begging the International Money-Barons to grant them further credit.  A secret agent of the arch-conspirators ordered a fabulous diamond necklace to be made by the Court Jewellers.  The order for this necklace, the estimated value of which was a quarter of a million livres, was placed in the name of the Queen.  When the Court Jewellers brought the Diamond Necklace to the Queen for her acceptance she refused to have anything to do with it.  She disclaimed all knowledge of the transaction.  But the news of the fabulous necklace leaked out as the plotters intended it should.  Balsamo put his propaganda machine into operation.  Marie Antoinette was deluged with criticism;  her character was smeared;  her reputation dragged in the mire by a whispering campaign of character assassination.  And, as usual, nobody could ever put a finger on the person or persons who started the slanders.  After this build-up, Balsamo uncorked his own special master-piece.  His printing presses turned out thousands upon thousands of pamphlets which claimed a secret lover of the Queen’s had sent the necklace as a mark of appreciation for her favours.

But those who operated L’Infamie thought up even more diabolical slanders to circulate regarding the Queen.  They wrote a letter to Cardinal Prince de Rohan to which they forged the signature of the Queen.  In the letter he was asked to meet her at the Palais Royal about midnight to discuss the matter of the diamond necklace.  A prostitute from the Palais Royal was engaged to disguise herself as the Queen, and involve the Cardinal.  The incident was played up in newspapers and pamphlets and the foulest innuendoes were circulated involving two of the highest personages of both Church and State.

History records that after the diamond necklace had served its foul purpose it was taken over to England and taken apart.  A Jew named Eliason is said to have retained the majority of the valuable diamonds used in its original composition.

Another piece of evidence which connects the English Jewish moneylenders with the plot to bring about the French Revolution was unearthed by Lady Queensborough, author of “Occult Theocrasy”.  While doing some research work she read a copy of “L’Anti-Semitisme” written by a Jew named Bernard Lazare and published in 1849.  With the leads obtained from this book Lady Queensborough claims Benjamin Goldsmid, his brother Abraham, and their partner Moses Mecatta, and his nephew Sir Moses Montifiore, were Jewish financiers in England who were definitely affiliated with their continental Jewish brethren in the plot to bring about the revolution in France.  Further evidence was found to tie Daniel Itsig of Berlin, and his son-in-law David Friedlander, and Herz Gergbeer of Alsace in with the Rothschilds and the plot.  Thus are revealed the men who at that time constituted the Secret Power behind the World Revolutionary Movement.

Knowledge of the methods these men used to manoeuvre the French Government into financial difficulty is of importance, because it set the pattern they followed in America, Russia, Spain and other countries afterwards.

Sir Walter Scott in Vol. two of The Life of Napoleon, gives a clear story of the initial moves.  He then sums up the situation with these words — “These financiers used the Government (French) as bankrupt prodigals are treated by usurious money-lenders who, feeding the extravagance with one hand, with the other wring out of their ruined fortunes the most unreasonable recompenses for their advances.  By a long succession of these ruinous loans, and various rights granted to guarantee them, the whole finances of France were brought to a total confusion”.^[9]

After the Government of France was forced into the position of seeking huge loans because of debts incurred in fighting wars to further the secret ambitions of the International Conspirators, they very kindly offered to supply the money providing they could write the terms of the agreement.  On the surface their terms were most lenient.  But again they had placed a nigger in the wood-pile in the person of one M. Necker.  He was to be appointed to the French King’s Council as his Chief Minister of Financial Affairs.  The Jewish financiers pointed out that this financial wizard would pull France out of her monetary troubles in less than no time at all.  What he actually did during the next four years was to involve the French Government so badly with the Jewish financiers that the National Debt increased to £170,000,000.

Captain A.H.M. Ramsay sums up the situation aptly in The Nameless War.  He says :  “Revolution is a blow struck at a paralytic. ... When the debt-grip has been firmly established, control of every form of publicity and political activity soon follows, together with a full grip on industrialists, [both management and labour].  The stage is then set for the revolutionary blow.  The grip of the right hand of finance establishes the paralysis;  while the revolutionary left hand that holds the dagger and deals the fatal blow.  Moral corruption facilitates the whole process.”

While Balsamo’s propaganda sheets damned the higher officials of both Church and State, special agents of the Illuminati organized the men who were to be used as leaders in the Reign of Terror planned to accompany the revolutionary effort.  Among these leaders were Robespierre, Danton, and Marat.  To conceal their real purpose, the men who were to release the prisoners and lunatics to create the necessary atmosphere for instituting the preconceived Reign of Terror, met in the Jacobean Convent.  Within the walls of the sacred edifice the details of the bloody plan were worked out.  The lists of reactionaries marked down for liquidation were compiled.  It was explained that while the criminals and lunatics ran wild terrorizing the population by committing mass murders and publicly performing rapes, the organized underground workers, under direction of Manuel, Procurer of the Commune, would round up all the important political figures, heads of the clergy, and military officers known to be loyal to the King.^[10]  The men who were to emerge from the Jewish organized underground were formed into Jacobin Clubs.  Under leaders, who were well versed in the duties required of them to direct the “Reign of Terror”, they conducted the mass atrocities so they would serve the purpose of their hidden masters, and move them further towards their ultimate goal.

---

1 These were the original theories on which Class War was ultimately organized.

2 This statement in the original documents [What original documents?] should convince all but the biased that the speaker was not a Rabbi or Elder of the Jews nor was he addressing Elders and Rabbis because it was the Goldsmiths, the money-lenders and their affiliates in commerce and industry who in 1773 had the wealth of the world in their hands as they have it still in their hands in the 20th Century.

3 The Red Fog explains how this theory has been put into effect in America since 1900.

4 The word “agentur” means the complete organized body of agents ... spies, counter-spies, blackmailers, saboteurs, underworld characters, and everything and every body outside the LAW which enables the international conspirators to further their secret plans and ambitions.

5 The word “Goyim” means all others than their own group.  The unimportant people.

6 The “Lexicon of Life” he referred to, was Almighty God’s plan of creation.

7 There were also thirteen tribes of Israel which could have some bearing on the matter of numbers.

8 The same Evil Geniuses used their agents to involve William Pitt in debt and forced him to resign as Prime Minister of England because during the early part of his ministry he obstinately refused to allow England to become involved in wars they planned to further their own secret plans and ambitions.  Pitt had learned a great deal regarding the part the International Money-Barons played in International Affairs when Chancellor of the Exchequer — 1785.

9 Because of his alleged anti-Semitic utterances Sir Walter Scott’s important works consisting of a total of nine volumes dealing with many phases of the French Revolution have been given the silent treatment by those who control the publishing houses as well as the biggest portion of the press.  They are almost unattainable except in Museum Libraries and are never listed with his other works.

10 Sir Walter Scott — “Life of Napoleon”, Vol. 2, P. 30 says “The demand of the Communauté de Paris, now the Sanhedrin of the Jacobin, was of course, for blood.”

COMMUNISM CREATED BY WEALTHY CAPITALISTS TO DECEIVE YOU!

WATCH THIS GROUNDBREAKING INTERVIEW WITH THE LATE PROFESSOR ANTHONY C. SUTTON WHO EXPOSED WALLSTREET'S ROLE IN THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION!

COMMUNISM A JUDEO-MASONIC PLOT TO CONSOLIDATE POWER

“Himself a Jew, Marx has around him, in London and France, but especially in Germany, a multitude of more or less clever, intriguing, mobile, speculating Jews, such as Jews are everywhere: commercial or banking agents, writers, politicians, correspondents for newspapers of all shades, with one foot in the bank, the other in the socialist movement, and with their behinds sitting on the German daily press — they have taken possession of all the newspapers — and you can imagine what kind of sickening literature they produce. Now, this entire Jewish world, which forms a single profiteering sect, a people of bloodsuckers, a single gluttonous parasite, closely and intimately united not only across national borders but across all differences of political opinion — this Jewish world today stands for the most part at the disposal of Marx and at the same time at the disposal of Rothschild. I am certain that Rothschild for his part greatly values the merits of Marx, and that Marx for his part feels instinctive attraction and great respect for Rothschild.

This may seem strange. What can there be in common between Communism and the large banks? Oh! The Communism of Marx seeks enormous centralization in the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which. speculates on the work of the people, will always find a way to prevail ....”

Source: Michael Bakunin, 1871, Personliche Beziehungen zu Marx. In: Gesammelte Werke. Band 3. Berlin 1924. P. 204-216. [My translation - UD].

The Following are select excerpts from the article: Socialism, Revolution and Capitalist Dialectics (Taken from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

 

 

“Big business is by no means antipathetic to Communism. The larger big business grows the more it approximates to Collectivism. It is the upper road of the few instead of the lower road of the masses to Collectivism.”—H. G. Wells.

 

"Marxism is widely known as including as a primary ideological premise the concept of dialectics, or “dialectical materialism” as the Marxists term their variation of the Hegelian theory. The Marxian dialectic is outlined in The Communist Manifesto; history is described as a progression of economic struggle for class primacy that goes through phases including those of primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and ultimately communism.[2] Capitalism thus is an essential phase in the Marxist dialectic of historical progression towards communism. Where capitalism does not at first exist, this is seen as a hindrance rather than as a benefit to the development of socialism. The Marxist premise was that socialism must proceed from a capitalist economy.

Hence Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the modern of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish faster.[3]

Marx further stated:

Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities, and renders the contrasts between workers and middle class more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade.[4]

In Marx’s own day, he saw the then dominant and newly emerging Free Trade School as part of a necessary dialectical process of history that makes more acute the antagonism between the classes, internationalizes the proletariat and indeed as “precipitating the social revolution.”

 

Capitalism and Dialectics

What is not generally recognized is that capitalism also has a dialectical approach to history. In this dialectical capitalism, the synthesis that is supposed to emerge is a “Brave New World” centralized world economy controlled not by commissars and a politburo but by technocrats and boards of directors. A strategy of dialectics means backing movements in the short term to achieve quite different, even opposite goals, in the long term. Hence the rationale behind capitalists supporting socialist and even communist movements, as will be shown. As stated above H. G. Wells opined—approvingly—at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution that Big Business and communism are both paths to the same end—”Collectivism.” The “socialistic” orientation of certain capitalists at the apex of the world economy is exemplified by a statement by the late Nelson Rockefeller of the famous capitalist dynasty: “I’m a great believer in planning. Economic, social, political, military, total world planning.”[7]

In terms of having backed socialism and other forms of social revolution or revolt, the dialectics of capitalism considers that a capitalist society cannot be achieved until a rural or economically anachronistic society has gone from its peasant stage into an industrial phase. In order to achieve this sudden and enforced industrialization of a peasant or rural society, certain capitalist interests have used socialism.

 

The capitalist dialectic in simple terms can be seen as the mirror image of the Marxist dialectic: Marxism states that socialism cannot be achieved from a rural society until it has become industrialized by capitalism; the capitalist dialectic postulates that capitalism can be more effectively achieved if a rural society is first industrialized by the dictatorial methods of socialism.

History has shown that the capitalist dialectic has been successful: certain business interests backed or at least welcomed socialist revolutions in Russia and China to overthrow traditional peasant societies. Once socialism had been used to achieve the industrialization of those societies, the next phase of the dialectic has been to introduce privatization and globalization to the economies of the former Eastern bloc; the present phase of the dialectic, while China’s economy seems to be proceeding along desired paths as part of the world economic system.

This theory is not as fanciful as might at first be assumed, when one considers that Marxist academics have long taught that fascism is part of a capitalist dialectic, having described fascism as nothing more than the “last defense of capitalism.”[8] The capitalist dialectic I am proposing here is somewhat similar; except that it is socialism, including Marxism, that has been the focus of a capitalist dialectic, and this dialectic is more readily observable in practice than the largely theoretical Marxist interpretation of a fascist-capitalist dialectic. The contention here is that socialism and other revolutionary movements have been used as a means of subverting traditional religious, rural societies to bring them suddenly and forcefully into a modern economy from which capitalism can proceed. Marxism has in such instances served capitalism in destroying not only those institutions that are obstacles to the development of the capitalism, but also the attitudes that plutocrats and technocrats regard as anachronisms and obstacles to the formation of a production and consumption mass society. In short, socialism has been a means of destroying what capitalism regards as anachronistic.

 

Between Two Worlds

Is there any evidence for such a dialectical outlook serving as the basis for corporate planners? I believe there is, and it has been particularly cogently expressed by a then up-and-coming young academic named Zbigniew Brzezinksi, who was to carve a name for himself in the highest echelons of political administration and within international business think tanks.

Brzezinski, who served as President Carter’s National Security adviser, and is a foreign policy adviser to President Obama, has been the North American director of the Rockefeller think tank the Trilateral Commission,[9] is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,[10] and a participant at the international conferences of The Bilderberg Group, wrote his Between Two Ages as a dialectical treatise on the process of internationalization, or globalization as it is now called. While he sees Marxian dialectics as too simplistic his own approach is nonetheless dialectical. Brzezniski considers – approvingly – the technocratic age as progressively destroying the nation-state and undermining traditional loyalties, out of which a global oligarchy would emerge. He wrote:

Today we are again witnessing the emergence of transnational elites, but now they are composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men, and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries, their perspectives are not confined by national traditions, and their interests are more functional than national. These global communities are gaining in strength and as was true in the Middle Ages, it is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook.[11]

Capitalism and Revolution

The assumption that Big Business would universally look with horror and dread upon the triumph of socialism is incorrect. As indicated by the opening quotation from H. G. Wells, certain capitalists saw in socialism and even Bolshevism a means of creating a more ordered environment in which to do business. Wells was referring at the time to the presence in Russia of Frank A. Vanderlip, chairman of the National City Bank, New York, representing a US business consortium.[15]

A similar view was more recently expressed by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, who in their study of the multinational corporations, based on interviews with corporate executives, stated: “…Indeed, as one corporate strategist told us, socialism, far from being ‘the end of the world’, is a ‘big help’ because it ensures ‘stability’ over large areas of the world.”[16] To be sure, this is not the view of all corporate strategists, but there is a certain faction of international capitalism that sees socialism as a control mechanism, among other factors.[17]

As for specific examples, the obvious place to first consider would be with the most tumultuous of the modern revolutions, those that took place in Russia. Big Business would with good reason regarded Czarist Russia as an anachronism in the 20^th century, a land of religious superstition, with a mass of uneducated peasants, ruled by an autocracy that was tradition-bound and surrounded by advisers, many of whom were adverse to modernization and industrialization. Hence when the Czar was overthrown with the March Revolution, the response of Wall Street, London, and other financial capitals was enthusiastic in seeing the possibilities of Russia at last being opened to large-scale foreign commerce.

The groundwork for revolution in Russia had been laid during the Russo-Japanese war when American journalist George Kennan was funded by Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., New York, to propagandize Russian POWs in the Japanese internment camps. Kennan was to claim that 50,000 revolutionary cadres had been recruited by this method, when a dozen years later he was celebrating the March Revolution:

“The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love”, he said, referring to Mr. Schiff, “and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.” Then was read a telegram from Jacob H. Schiff, part of which is as follows: “Will you say for me to those present at tonight’s meeting how deeply I regret my inability to celebrate with the Friends of Russian Freedom the actual reward of what we had hoped and striven for these long years.”[18]

While Schiff was a well-known and generous financial patron to Jewish humanitarian causes, and part of his support for revolutionary movements against the Czar can be explained by the pervasive anti-Semitism in Russia, Schiff was also acting as a capitalist in funding the revolutionary movement, as explained in a letter to The Evening Post:

Replying to your request for my opinion of the effects of the revolution upon Russia’s finances, I am quite convinced that with the certainty of the development of the country’s enormous resources, which, with the shackles removed from a great people, will follow present events, Russia will before long take rank financially amongst the most favored nations in the money markets of the world.[19]

Here Schiff is clearly reflecting the hopes of an international financier in seeing Russia brought from an anachronistic economy into a modern financial system.

Schiff’s reply reflected the general attitude of London and New York financial circles at the time of the revolution. John B Young of the National City Bank, who had been in Russia in 1916 in regard to a U.S. loan, stated in 1917 of the revolution that it has been discussed widely when he had been in Russia the previous year. He regarded those involved as “solid, responsible and conservative.”[20] In the same issue, The New York Times reported that there had been a rise in Russian exchange transactions in London 24 hours preceding the revolution, and that London had known of the revolution prior to New York. The article reported that most prominent financial and business leaders in London and New York had a positive view of the revolution.[21] Another report states that while there had been some disquiet about the revolution, “this news was by no means unwelcome in more important banking circles.” [22]

While these attitudes refer to the March Revolution, the November Bolshevik Revolution also had as many proponents among Big Business, who saw the Bolsheviks as providing the stability and economic development that the Kerensky regime could not provide. We have already considered the recommendations of William Sands of American Interventional. Two well-placed individuals from widely divergent backgrounds arrived at similar conclusions in regard to pro-Bolshevik attitudes among certain business interests: American labor leader Samuel Gompers, and conservative editor of The London Times, Henry Wickham Steed.

In 1922, The New York Times reported that Gompers, reacting to negotiations at the international economic conference at Genoa, declared that a group of “predatory international financiers” were working for the recognition of the Bolshevik regime for the opening up of resources for exploitation. Despite the rhetoric by New York and London bankers during the war that a Russian revolution would serve the Allied cause against Germany, Gompers noted that this was an “Anglo-American-German banking group” and that they were “international bankers” that did not owe any national allegiance. He also noted that prominent Americans who had a history of anti-labor attitudes were advocating recognition of the Bolshevik regime.[23]

Similarly, Henry Wickham Steed, in a first-hand account of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, stated that proceedings were interrupted by the return from Moscow of William C. Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens, “who had been sent to Russia towards the middle of February by Colonel House and Mr. Lansing, for the purpose of studying conditions, political and economic, therein for the benefit of the American Commissioners plenipotentiary to negotiate peace.” Steed states specifically and at some length that international finance was behind the move for recognition of the Bolshevik regime and other moves in favor of the Bolsheviks, and specifically identified Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., New York, as one of the principal bankers “eager to secure recognition”: “Potent international financial interests were at work in favor of the immediate recognition of the Bolshevists….”[24]

Big Business had in fact gone into Russia in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval in 1917 to examine what business opportunities the Bolsheviks might provide at a time when a Bolshevik triumph was far from certain. This was undertaken under cover of the so-called American Red Cross Mission led by Col. William Boyce Thompson, director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, among other interests. The Mission was funded mainly by Thompson and by International Harvester, which gave $200,000. The so-called Red Cross Mission was primarily comprised of business personnel, and was according to Thompson’s assistant, Cornelius Kelleher, “nothing but a mask” for business interests.[25] Of the 24 members of the Red Cross Mission, five were doctors and there were two medical researchers. The rest were lawyers and businessmen associated with Wall Street. Dr. Billings nominally headed the Mission.[26] Sutton states that the Red Cross Mission provided aid for the assistance of the revolutionaries: “We know from the files of the U.S. embassy in Petrograd that the U.S. Red Cross gave 4,000 roubles to Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of Ministers, for ‘relief of revolutionists’ and 10,000 roubles in two payments to Kerensky for ‘relief of political refugees.'”[27]

Such was Thompson’s enthusiasm for Bolshevism that he was affectionately nicknamed “the Bolshevik of Wall Street” among the denizens of the New York financial district. Thompson gave a lengthy interview with The New York Times just after his four-month tour with the American Red Cross Mission, lauding the Bolsheviks. The article is an interesting indication of how Wall Street viewed their supposedly “deadly enemies,” the Bolsheviks, at a time during which the Soviets were still far from secure. “His opinion was that Russia needs America, that America must stand by Russia,” states The New York Times, which further states:

Colonel Thompson is a banker and a capitalist, and he has large manufacturing interests. He is not a sentimentalist nor a “radical.” But he has come back from his official visit to Russia in absolute sympathy with the Russian democracy as represented by the Bolsheviki at present.[28]

While Thompson did not consider Bolshevism the final form of government, he did see it as the most promising step towards a “representative government” and that it was the “duty” of the USA to “sympathize” with and “aid” Russia “through her days of crisis.” He stated that in reply to surprise at his pro-Bolshevik sentiments he did not mind being called “red” if that meant sympathy for 1,70,000,000 people “struggling for liberty and fair living.” Thompson, like Sands, praised the Bolshevik Government as being the equivalent to America’s democracy, stating: “The present government in Russia is a government of workingmen. It is a Government by the majority, and, because our Government is a government of the majority, I don’t see how we can fail to support the Government of Russia.”

Thompson in what might be seen as a dialectical outlook, saw the prospects of the Bolshevik Government being transformed as it incorporated a more Centrist position and included employers. If Bolshevism did not proceed thus, then “God help the world,” warned Thompson. The Times article ends: “At home in New York, the Colonel has received the good-natured title of ‘the Bolshevik of Wall Street.'”[29]

The Ritual Regicide of the Romanov Dynasty

by Greg Reese 

The Ritual Regicide of the Romanov Dynasty - by Greg Reese

Started in the 1400s, the Russian monarchy was based on the second letter to the Thessalonians, where Paul speaks of a restrainer who holds back evil. As long as there was a Christian Tsar on earth, the dark powers of the Antichrist would not come to power. Symphonia is the Orthodox relationship between the church and state. Where the state protects the church, and the church protects the state from falling into sin and heresy.

In 1613, after the Russian civil war known as the Time of Troubles, the Russians elected Michael Romanov, 16 years of age, as Tsar of Russia. And the Romanov family ruled from 1613 until 1917. During this period, Russia prospered. They became more focused on Christianity and promoted it worldwide through missionary work. While Christianity was the main religion, there were Jews, Muslims, and pagans, who were free to practice their own religion. The only religion that was made illegal was the Talmudic worshiping Jews. Because the Talmudic traditions were seen as anti-Christian and in complete opposition of their spiritual goals.

These anti-Christian philosophies infiltrated the country when Freemasonry migrated to Russia in the mid 1700s. The Freemasons taught that the traditional Christian values upheld by the Dynasty were outdated and were keeping Russia from competing with the West. Liberal ideas were introduced, such as misogyny, because women weren't allowed to be Freemasons, which became so popular that if you were a noble person you had to be a Freemason. And Freemasonry taught that all religions can be one, and therefore, the Russian Orthodox Symphonia must be abolished.

The Tsar stood strongly against this, and so the idea of revolution was introduced. During the industrialization of the 1800s, factories became home to Masonic revolutionary ideas. And in 1917, the revolution began. And the Royal family was taken prisoner.

The family was taken from their home to a stone house several miles away on the highest point of the Ural mountains called Ascension Hill, and murdered. According to the official narrative, they were executed by a firing squad in the basement. But according to the evidence, they were murdered in a very dark ritual manner.

According to the investigation of the Orthodox Church, the murderers themselves, and the material evidence, this is what happened on the night of July 17^{th, 1918}.

The stone house was known by the Bolsheviks to be a place where evil acts have taken place in the past. It was prepared ahead of time. And the murder involved 11 assassins, and 11 victims. The Tsar, his wife, the four daughters, the son, and four servants. The number 11 is believed to be based on the 11 apostles who remained after Judas betrayed Christ. These 11 people were taken into the basement, they were shot in the knees, and they were stabbed with bayonets. And during all of this, their mouths were gagged to quiet their screams. In their memoirs, the murderers wrote it was so bad that they were vomiting.

The bodies were then wrapped up in white linen, placed into the back of a truck, and kept alive as they were driven to a swampy area outside of the city. They were finally murdered by being hung upside down to drain their blood. They were beheaded, their teeth removed, and their bodies chopped into pieces. The body parts were partially dissolved in acid, and then burned. Eggs were boiled, sprinkled with ash from the burnt linens which were soaked in royal blood, and consumed at the crime scene.

The Tsar’s head was placed into a jar, preserved in alcohol, and shipped to Moscow.

In the 1920s, the Romanov family diaries were released by the Bolsheviks. They showed the Tsar to be an honorable man, highly intelligent involving political affairs, and a devout Christian. As if part of the ritual, this brought shame to the Russian people who were turned against the Tsar through Marxist propaganda.

The Federal Reserve System, the Rothschilds, and the British Round Table, opposed the Tsar and the traditional Christian policies that stood in the way of their plans for world domination. And many Russians see the murder of Tsar Nicholas the second as a necessary precursor to the New World Order which began proliferating after his death. Tsar Nicholas the second is now a saint in the Russian Orthodox church, and millions of Russian Orthodox Christians believe they need to repent for allowing the Dynasty to be destroyed.

Billions for the Bankers, Debt for the People
The Real Story of the Money-Control Over America

by Pastor Sheldon Emry

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." —Thomas Jefferson

       Americans, living in what is called the richest nation on earth, seem always to be short of money. Wives are working in unprecedented numbers, husbands hope for overtime hours to earn more, or take part-time jobs evenings and weekends, children look for odd jobs for spending money, the family debt climbs higher, and psychologists say one of the biggest causes of family quarrels and breakups is "arguments over money." Much of this trouble can be traced to our present "debt-money" system. Too few Americans realize why our founding fathers wrote into Article I of the U.S. Constitution: Congress shall have the Power to Coin Money and Regulate the Value Thereof.

They did this, as we will show, in prayerful hope it would prevent "love of money" from destroying the Republic they had founded. We shall see how subversion of Article I has brought upon us the horrors of which Jefferson had warned.

MONEY IS MAN'S ONLY "CREATION"
Economists use the term "create" when speaking of the process by which money comes into existence. Now, creation means making something that did not exist before. Lumbermen make boards from trees, workers build houses from lumber, and factories manufacture automobiles from metal, glass and other materials. But in all these they did not "create," they only changed existing materials into a more usable and, therefore, more valuable form. This is not so with money. Here, and here alone, man actually "creates" something out of nothing. A piece of paper of little value is printed so that it is worth a piece of lumber. With different figures it can buy the automobile or even the house. Its value has been "created" in the true meaning of the word

MONEY "CREATING" PROFITABLE
As is seen by the above, money is very cheap to make, and whoever does the "creating" of money in a nation can make a tremendous profit! Builders work hard to make a profit of 5% above their cost to build a house.

Auto makers sell their cars for 1% to 2% above the cost of manufacture and it is considered good business. But money "manufacturers" have no limit on their profits, since a few cents will print a $1 bill or a $10,000 bill.

That profit is part of our story, but first let us consider another unique characteristic of the thing - money, the love of which is the "root of all evil."

ADEQUATE MONEY SUPPLY NEEDED
An adequate supply of money is indispensable to civilized society. We could forego many other things, but without money industry would grind to a halt, farms would become only self-sustaining units, surplus food would disappear, jobs requiring the work of more than one man or one family would remain undone, shipping, and large movements of goods would cease, hungry people would plunder and kill to remain alive, and all government except family or tribe would cease to function.

An overstatement, you say? Not at all. Money is the blood of civilized society, the means of all commercial trade except simple barter. It is the measure and the instrument by which one product is sold and another purchased. Remove money or even reduce the supply below that which is necessary to carry on current levels of trade, and the results are catastrophic. For an example, we need only look at America's Depression of the early 1930's.

THE BANKERS DEPRESSION OF THE 1930's
In 1930 America did not lack industrial capacity, fertile-farm land, skilled and willing workers or industrious farm families. It had an extensive and highly efficient transportation system in railroads, road networks, and inland and ocean waterways. Communications between regions and localities were the best in the world, utilizing telephone, teletype, radio, and a well-operated government mail system. No war had ravaged the cities or the countryside, no pestilence weakened the population, nor had famine stalked the land. The United States of America in 1930 lacked only one thing: an adequate supply of money to carry on trade and commerce. In the early 1930's, Bankers, the only source of new money and credit, deliberately refused loans to industries, stores and farms.

Payments on existing loans were required however, and money rapidly disappeared from circulation. Goods were available to be purchased, jobs waiting to be done, but the lack of money brought the nation to a standstill. By this simple ploy America was put in a "depression" and the greedy Bankers took possession of hundreds of thousands of farms, homes, and business properties. The people were told, "times are hard," and "money is short." Not understanding the system, they were cruelly robbed of their earnings, their savings, and their property.

MONEY FOR PEACE? NO! MONEY FOR WAR? YES!
World War II ended the "depression." The same Bankers who in the early 30's had no loans for peacetime houses, food and clothing, suddenly had unlimited billions to lend for Army barracks, K-rations and uniforms! A nation that in 1934 couldn't produce food for sale, suddenly could produce bombs to send free to Germany and Japan! (More on this riddle later.)

With the sudden increase in money, people were hired, farms sold their produce, factories went to two shifts, mines re-opened, and "The Great Depression" was over! Some politicians were blamed for it and others took credit for ending it. The truth is the lack of money (caused by the Bankers) brought on the depression, and adequate money ended it. The people were never told that simple truth and in this article we will endeavor to show how these same Bankers who control our money and credit have used their control to plunder America and place us in bondage.

POWER TO COIN AND REGULATE MONEY
When we can see the disastrous results of an artificially created shortage of money, we can better understand why our Founding Fathers insisted on placing the power to "create" money and the power to control it ONLY in the hands of the Federal Congress. They believed that ALL citizens should share in the profits of its "creation" and therefore the national government must be the ONLY creator of money. They further believed that ALL citizens, of whatever State or Territory, or station in life would benefit by an adequate and stable currency and therefore, the national government must also be, by law, the ONLY controller of the value of money.

Since the Federal Congress was the only legislative body subject to all the citizens at the ballot box, it was, to their minds, the only safe depository of so much profit and so much power. They wrote it out in the simple, but all-inclusive: "Congress shall have the Power to Coin Money and Regulate the Value Thereof."

HOW THE PEOPLE LOST CONTROL TO THE FEDERAL RESERVE
Instead of the Constitutional method of creating our money and putting it into circulation, we now have an entirely unconstitutional system. This has resulted in almost disastrous conditions, as we shall see.

Since our money was handled both legally and illegally before 1913, we shall consider only the years following 1913, since from that year on, ALL of our money has been created and issued by an illegal method that will eventually destroy the United States if it is not changed. Prior to 1913, America was a prosperous, powerful, and growing nation, at peace with its neighbors and the envy of the world. But - in December of 1913, Congress, with many members away for the Christmas holidays, passed what has since been known as the FEDERAL RESERVE ACT. (For the full story of how this infamous legislation was forced through our Congress, read The Creature from Jekyll Island, by G. Edward Griffin or Conquest or Consent, by W. B. Vennard). Omitting the burdensome details, it simply authorized the establishment of a Federal Reserve Corporation, with a Board of Directors (The Federal Reserve Board) to run it, and the United States was divided into 12 Federal Reserve "Districts."

This simple, but terrible, law completely removed from Congress the right to "create" money or to have any control over its "creation," and gave that function to the Federal Reserve Corporation. This was done with appropriate fanfare and propaganda that this would "remove money from politics" (they didn't say "and therefore from the people's control") and prevent "Boom and Bust" from hurting our citizens. The people were not told then, and most still do not know today, that the Federal Reserve Corporation is a private corporation controlled by bankers and therefore is operated for the financial gain of the bankers over the people rather than for the good of the people. The word "Federal" was used only to deceive the people.

MORE DISASTROUS THAN PEARL HARBOR
Since that "day of infamy," more disastrous to us than Pearl Harbor, the small group of "privileged" people who lend us "our" money have accrued to themselves all of the profits of printing our money' - and more! Since 1913 they have "created" tens of billions of dollars in money and credit, which, as their own personal property, they then lend to our government and our people at interest. "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" had become the secret policy of our National Government. An example of the process of "creation" and its conversion to people's "debt" will aid our understanding.

THEY PRINT IT - WE BORROW IT AND PAY THEM INTEREST
We shall start with the need for money. The Federal Government, having spent more than it has taken from its citizens in taxes, needs, for the sake of illustration, $1,000,000,000. Since it does not have the money, and Congress has given away its authority to "create" it, the Government must go the "creators" for the $1 billion. But, the Federal Reserve, a private corporation, doesn't just give its money away! The Bankers are willing to deliver $1,000,000,000 in money or credit to the Federal Government in exchange for the Government's agreement to pay it back - with interest! So Congress authorizes the Treasury Department to print $1,000,000,000 in U.S. Bonds, which are then delivered to the Federal Reserve Bankers.

The Federal Reserve then pays the cost of printing the $1,000,000,000 (about $1,000) and makes the exchange. The Government then uses the money to pay its obligations. What are the results of this fantastic transaction? Well, $1 billion in Government bills are paid all right, but the Government has now indebted the people to the Bankers for $1 billion on which the people must pay interest! Tens of thousands of such transactions have taken place since 1913 so that by the 1980's, the U.S. Government is indebted. to the Bankers for over $1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) on which the people pay over $100 billion a year in interest alone with no hope of ever paying off the principal. Supposedly our children and following generations will pay forever and forever!

AND THERE'S MORE
You say, "This is terrible!" Yes, it is, but we have shown only part of the sordid story. Under this unholy system, those United States Bonds have now become "assets" of the Banks in the Reserve System which they then use as "reserves" to "create" more "credit" to lend. Current "fractional reserve" requirements allow them to use that $1 billion in bonds to "create" as much as $15 billion in new "credit" to lend to States, Municipalities, to individuals and businesses. Added to the original $1 billion, they could have $16 billion of "created credit" out in loans paying them interest with their only cost being $1,000 for printing the original $1 billion! Since the U.S. Congress has not issued Constitutional money since 1863 (over 100 years), in order for the people to have money to carry on trade and commerce they are forced to borrow the "created credit" of the Monopoly Bankers and pay them usury-interest!

AND THERE'S STILL MORE
In addition to the vast wealth drawn to them through this almost unlimited usury, the Bankers who control the money at the top are able to approve or disapprove large loans to large and successful corporations to the extent that refusal of a loan will bring about a reduction in the price that that Corporation's stock sells for on the market. After depressing the price, the Bankers' agents buy large blocks of the stock, after which the sometimes multi-million dollar loan is approved, the stock rises, and is then sold for a profit. In this manner billions of dollars are made with which to buy more stock. This practice is so refined today that the Federal Reserve Board need only announce to the newspapers an increase or decrease in their "rediscount rate" to send stocks up and down as they wish. Using this method since 1913, the Bankers and their agents have purchased secret or open control of almost every large corporation in America. Using that control, they then force the corporations to borrow huge sums from their banks so that corporation earnings are siphoned off in the form of interest to the banks. This leaves little as actual "profits" which can be paid as dividends and explains why stock prices are often depressed, while the banks reap billions in interest from corporate loans. In effect, the bankers get almost all of the profits, while individual stockholders are left holding the bag.

The millions of working families of America are now indebted to the few thousand Banking Families for twice the assessed value of the entire United States. And these Banking Families obtained that debt against us for the cost of paper, ink, and bookkeeping!

THE INTEREST AMOUNT IS NEVER CREATED
The only way new money (which is not true money, but is "credit" representing a debt), goes into circulation in America is when it is borrowed from Bankers. When the State and people borrow large sums, we seem to prosper. However, the Bankers "create" only the amount of the principal of each loan, never the extra amount needed to pay the interest. Therefore. the new money never equals the new debt added. The amounts needed to pay the interest on loans is not "created," and therefore does not exist!

Under this kind of a system, where new debt always exceeds the new money no matter how much or how little is borrowed, the total debt increasingly outstrips the amount of money available to pay the debt. The people can never, ever get out of debt!

An example will show the viciousness of this usury-debt system with its "built-in" shortage of money.

IF $60,000 IS BORROWED, $255,931.20 MUST BE PAID BACK When a citizen goes to a Banker to borrow $60,000 to purchase a home or a farm, the Bank clerk has the borrower agree to pay back the loan plus interest. At 14% interest for 30 years, the Borrower must agree to pay $710.92 per month for a total of $255,931.20. The clerk then requires the citizen to assign to the Banker the right of ownership of the property if the Borrower does not make the required payments. The Bank clerk then gives the Borrower a $60,000 check or a $60,000 deposit slip crediting the Borrower's checking account with $60,000.

The Borrower then writes checks to the builder, subcontractors, etc., who in turn write checks. $60,000 of new "checkbook" money is thereby added to "money in circulation."

However, and this is the fatal flaw in a usury system, the only new money created and put into circulation is the amount of the loan, $60,000. The money to pay the interest is NOT created, and therefore was NOT added to "money in circulation."

Even so, this Borrower (and those who follow him in ownership of the property) must earn and TAKE OUT OF CIRCULATION $255,931, almost $200,000 MORE than he put IN CIRCULATION when he borrowed the original $60,000! (By the way, it is this interest which cheats all families out of nicer homes. It is not that they can't afford them; it is because the Banker's usury forces them to pay for 4 homes to get one!)

Every new loan puts the same process in operation. Each borrower adds a small sum to the total money supply when he borrows, but the payments on the loan (because of interest) then deduct a much LARGER sum from the total money supply.

There is therefore no way all debtors can pay off the money-lenders. As they pay the principal and interest, the money in circulation disappears. All they can do is struggle against each other, borrowing more and more from the money-lenders each generation. The money-lenders (Bankers), who produce nothing of value, slowly, then more rapidly, gain a death grip on the land, buildings, and present and future earnings of the whole working population.

SMALL LOANS DO THE SAME THING
If you haven't quite grasped the impact of the above, let us consider a small auto loan for 3 years at 18% interest. Step 1: Citizen borrows $5,000 and pays it into circulation (it goes to the dealer, factory, miner, etc.) and signs a note agreeing to pay the Banker $6,500. Step 2: Citizen pays $180 per month of his earnings to the Banker. In 3 years he will take OUT of circulation $1,500 more than he put IN circulation.

Every loan of Banker "created" money (credit) causes the same thing to happen. Since this has happened millions of times since 1913 (and continues today), you can see why America has gone from a prosperous, debt-free nation to a debt-ridden nation where practically every home, farm and business is paying usury-tribute to some Banker. The usury-tribute to the Bankers on personal, local, State and Federal debt totals more than the combined earnings of 25% of the working people. Soon it will be 50% and continue up.

THIS IS WHY BANKERS PROSPER IN GOOD TIMES OR BAD
In the millions of transactions made each year like those above, little actual currency changes hands, nor is it necessary that it do so. 95% of all "cash" transactions in the U.S. are by check, so the Banker is perfectly safe in "creating" that so-called "loan" by writing the check or deposit slip, not against actual money, but AGAINST YOUR PROMISE TO PAY IT BACK! The cost to him is paper, ink and a few dollars in salaries and office costs for each transaction. It is "check-kiting" on an enormous scale. The profits increase rapidly, year after year, as shown below.

These are a few taken from Arizona newspapers in January, 1979.

Valley Bank posts 49% gain in profits

Gains of 49 percent in net income and 51 percent in operating income were posted last year by Valley National Bank.

Those gains brought net income to $33,969,-000' in the year ended Dec..31 and operating income to $34,459.000. The year before those totals were $22,836.000 and $22,807,000 respectively.

Bank's profits rise 21%
Arizona Bank announced on Monday it had achieved a 21.2 percent increase in net income in 1978 over 1977. On the basis of operating income, excluding the 1977 sale of the Arizona Bank Building for $l,336,369, the bank said the increase was 43.9 percent.

Tostenrud said loans and deposits increased in the last year: Deposits 18.8 percent to $1.353 billion and loans 21.9 percent to $951 million.

THE COST TO YOU? EVENTUALLY, EVERYTHING!
In 1910 the U.S. Federal debt was only $1 billion, or $12.40 per citizen. State and local debts were practically non-existent.

By 1920, after only 6 years of Federal Reserve shenanigans, the Federal debt had jumped to $24 billion, or $226 per person.

In 1960 the Federal debt reached $284 billion, or $1,575 per citizen and State and local debts were mushrooming.

By 1981 the Federal debt passed $1 trillion and was growing exponentially as the Banker's tripled the interest rates. State and local debts are now MORE than the Federal, and with business and personal debts totaled over $6 trillion, 3 times the value of all land and buildings in America.

If we signed over to the money-leaders all of America we would still owe them 2 more Americas (plus their usury, of course!)

However, they are too cunning to take title to everything. They will instead leave you with some "illusion of ownership" so you and your children will continue to work and pay the Bankers more of your earnings on ever-increasing debts. The "establishment" has captured our people with their ungodly system of usury and debt as certainly as if they had marched in with a uniformed army.

FOR THE GAMBLERS AMONG MY READERS
To grasp the truth that periodic withdrawal of money through interest payments will inexorably transfer all wealth in the nation to the receiver of interest, imagine yourself in a poker or dice game where everyone must buy the chips (the medium of exchange) from a "banker" who does not risk chips in the game, but watches the table and every hour reaches in and takes 10% to 15% of all the chips on the table. As the game goes on, the amount of chips in the possession of each player will go up and down with his "luck."

However, the TOTAL number of chips available to play the game (carry on trade and business) will decrease rapidly.

The game will get low on chips, and some will run out. If they want to continue to play, they must buy or borrow them from the "banker." The "banker" will sell (lend) them ONLY if the player signs a "mortgage" agreeing to give the "banker" some real property (car, home, farm, business, etc.) if he cannot make periodic payments to pay back all of the chips plus some EXTRA ones (interest). The payments must be made on time, whether he wins (makes a profit) or not.

It is easy to see that no matter how skillfully they play, eventually the "banker" will end up with all of his original chips back, and except for the very best players, the rest, if they stay in long enough, will lose to the "banker" their homes, their farms, their businesses, perhaps even their cars, watches, rings, and the shirts off their backs!

Our real-life situation is MUCH WORSE than any poker game. In a poker game none is forced to go into debt, and anyone can quit at any time and keep whatever he still has. But in real life, even if we borrow little ourselves from the Bankers, the local, State, and Federal governments borrow billions in our name, squander it, then confiscate our earnings from us and pay it back to the Bankers with interest. We are forced to play the game, and none can leave except by death. We pay as long as we live, and our children pay after we die. If we cannot pay, the same government sends the police to take our property and give it to the Bankers. The Bankers risk nothing in the game; they just collect their percentage and "win it all." In Las Vegas and at other gambling centers, all games are "rigged" to pay the owner a percentage, and they rake in millions. The Federal Reserve Bankers' "game" is also rigged, and it pays off in billions!

In recent years Bankers added real "cards" to their 'game. "Credit" cards are promoted as a convenience and a great boon to trade. Actually, they are ingenious devices by which Bankers collect 2% to 5% of every retail sale from the seller and 18% interest from buyers. A real "stacked" deck!

YES, IT'S POLITICAL, TOO!
Democrat, Republican, and Independent voters who have wondered why politicians always spend more tax money than they take in should now see the reason. When they begin to study our "debt-money" system, they soon realize that these politicians are not the agents of the people but are the agents of the Bankers, for whom they plan ways to place the people further-in debt. It takes only a little imagination to see that if Congress had been "creating," and spending or issuing into circulation the necessary increase in the money supply, THERE WOULD BE NO NATIONAL DEBT, and the over $4 Trillion of other debts would be practically non-existent. Since there would be no ORIGINAL cost of money except printing, and no CONTINUING costs such as interest, Federal taxes would be almost nil. Money, once in circulation, would remain their and go on serving its purpose as a medium of exchange for generation after generation and century after century, just as coins do now, with NO payments to the Bankers whatever!

MOUNTING DEBTS AND WARS
But instead of peace and debt-free prosperity, we have ever-mounting debt and periodic wars. We as a people are now ruled by a system of Banker-owned Mammon that has usurped the mantle of government, disguised itself as our legitimate government, and set about to pauperize and control our people. It is now a centralized, all-powerful political apparatus whose main purposes are promoting war, spending the peoples' money, and propagandizing to perpetuate itself in power. Our two large political parties have become its servants, the various departments of government its spending agencies, and the Internal Revenue its collection agency.

Unknown to the people, it operates in close cooperation with similar apparatuses in other nations. which are also disguised as "governments." Some, we are told, are friends. Some, we are told, are enemies. "Enemies" are built up through international manipulations and used to frighten the American people into going billions of dollars more into debt to the Bankers for "military preparedness," "foreign aid to stop communism," "minority rights," etc. Citizens, deliberately confused by brainwashing propaganda, watch helplessly while our politicians give our food, goods, and money to Banker-controlled alien governments under the guise of "better relations" and "easing tensions." Our Banker-controlled government takes our finest and bravest sons and sends them into foreign wars with obsolete equipment and inadequate training, where tens of thousands are murdered, and hundreds of thousands are crippled. Other thousands are morally corrupted, addicted to drugs, and infected with venereal and other diseases, which they bring back to the United States. When the "war" is over, we have gained nothing, but we are scores of billions of dollars more in debt to the Bankers, which was the reason for the "war" in the first place!

BUT WAIT... THERE'S STILL MORE
The profits from these massive debts have been used to erect a complete and almost hidden economic and political colossus over our nation. They keep telling us they are trying to do us "good," when in truth they work to bring harm and injury to our people. These would-be despots know it is easier to control and rob an ill, poorly-educated and confused people than it is a healthy and intelligent population, so they deliberately prevent real cures for diseases, they degrade our educational systems, and they stir up social and racial unrest. For the same reason they favor drug use, alcohol, sexual promiscuity, abortion, pornography, and crime. Everything which debilitates the minds and bodies of the people is secretly encouraged, as it makes the people less able to oppose them or even to understand what is being done to them.

Family, morals, love of Country, the Christian religion, all that is honorable is being swept away, while they try to build their new, subservient man. Our new "rulers" are trying to change our whole racial, social, religious, and political order, but they will not change the debt-money economic system by which they rob and rule. Our people have become tenants and "debt-slaves" to the Bankers and their agents in the land our fathers conquered. It is conquest through the most gigantic fraud and swindle in the history of mankind. And we remind you again: The key to their wealth and power over us is their ability to create "money" out of nothing and lend it to us at interest. If they had not been allowed to do that, they would never have gained secret control of our nation. "The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender" (Proverbs 22:7).

Let us now consider the correct method of providing the medium of exchange (money) needed by our people.

INTEREST-FREE MONEY
History tells us of debt-free and interest-free money issued by governments. The American colonies did it in the 1700's and their wealth soon rivaled England and brought restrictions from Parliament, which led to the Revolutionary War. Abraham Lincoln did it in 1863 to help finance the Civil War. He was later assassinated by an agent of the Rothschild Bank. No debt-free or interest-free money has been issued in America since then. Several Arab nations issue interest-free loans to their citizens today. The Saracen Empire for bad interest on money for 1,000 years, and its wealth outshone even Saxon Europe. Mandarin China issued its own money, interest-free and debt-free, and historians and collectors of art today consider those centuries to be China's time of greatest wealth, culture and peace.

Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 and on, accounting for its startling rise from the depression to a world power in 5 years. Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without debt, and it took the whole Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers. Such history of money does not even appear in the textbooks of public (government) schools today.

Issuing money which doesn't have to be paid back in interest leaves the money available to use in the exchange of goods and services and its only continuing cost is replacement as the paper wears out. Money is the paper ticket by which such transfers are made and should always be in sufficient quantity to transfer all possible production of the nation to ultimate consumers.

It is as ridiculous for a nation to say to its citizens, "You must consume less because we are short of money," as it would be for an Airline to say "Our planes are flying, but we can't take you because we are short of tickets."

NO MORE BANKERS' PLUNDER
Under the present debt-usury system, the extra burden of usury forces workers and businesses to demand more money for the work and goods to pay their ever-increasing debts and taxes. This increase in prices and wages is called "inflation." Bankers, politicians and "economists" blame it on everything but the real cause, which is the usury levied on money and debt by the Bankers. This "inflation" benefits the money-lenders, since it wipes out savings of one generation so they cannot finance or help the next generation, who must then borrow from the money-lenders, and pay a large part of their life's labor to the usurer.

With an adequate supply of interest-free money, little borrowing would be required and prices would be established by people and goods, not by debts and usury.

CITIZEN CONTROL
If the Federal Congress failed to act, or acted wrongly, in the supply of money, the citizens would use the ballot or recall petition to replace those who prevented correct action with others whom the people believe would pursue a better money policy. Since the creation of money and its issuance in sufficient quantity would be one of the few functions of Congress, the voter could decide on a candidate by his stand on money, instead of the hundreds of lesser, and deliberately confusing, subjects which are presented to us today. And since money is, and would remain, a national function, local differences or local factions would not be able to sway the people from the nation's (citizens') interest. All other problems, except the nation's defense, would be taken care of in the State, County, or City governments where they are best handled and most easily corrected.

An adequate national defense would be provided by the same citizen-controlled Congress, and there would be no Bankers behind the scenes, bribing politicians to give $200 billion of American military equipment to other nations, disarming us, while alien nations prepare to attack and invade the United States of America.

A DEBT-FREE AMERICA
With debt-free and interest-free money, there would be no high and confiscatory taxation, our homes would be mortgage free with no $10,000-a-year payments to the Bankers, nor would they get $1,000 to $2,500 per year from every automobile on our roads. We would need no "easy payment" plans, "revolving" charge accounts, loans to pay medical or hospital bills, loans to pay taxes, loans to pay for burials, loans to pay loans, nor any of the thousand and one usury-bearing loans which now suck the life-blood of American families. There would be no unemployment, divorces caused by debt, destitute old people, or mounting crime, and even the so-called "deprived" classes would be deprived of neither job nor money to buy the necessities of life.

Criminals could not become politicians, nor would politicians become criminals in the pay of the Money-lenders. Our officials, at all government levels, would be working for the people instead of devising means to spend more money to place us further in debt to the Bankers. We would get out of the entangling foreign alliances that have engulfed us in four major wars and scores of minor wars since the Federal Reserve Act was passed, alliances which are now used to prevent America from preparing her own defense in the face of mounting danger from alien powers.

A debt-free America would mean mothers would not have to work. With mother at home, juvenile delinquency would decrease rapidly. The elimination of the usury and debt would be the equivalent of a 50% raise in the purchasing power of every worker. With this cancellation of all debts, the return to the people of all the property and wealth the parasitic Bankers and their quasi-legal agents have stolen by usury and fraud, and the ending of their theft of $300 Billion (or more) every year from the people, America would be prosperous and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of its citizens today. And we would be at peace! (For a Bible example of cancellation of debts to money lenders and restoration of property and money to the people, read Nehemiah 5: 1-13.)

WHY YOU HAVEN'T KNOWN
We realize this small, and necessarily incomplete, article on money may be charged with oversimplification. Some may say that if it is that simple the people would have known about it, and it could not have happened. But this MONEY-LENDERS' consPIRACY is as old as Babylon, and even in America it dates far back before the year 1913. Actually, 1913 may be considered the year in which their previous plans came to fruition, and the way opened for complete economic conquest of our people. The consPIRACY is old enough in America so that its agents have been, for many years, in positions such as newspaper publishers, editors, columnists, church ministers, university presidents, professors, textbook writers, labor union leaders, movie makers, radio and TV commentators, politicians from school board members to U.S. presidents, and many others.

CONTROLLED NEWS AND INFORMATION
These agents control the information available to our people. They manipulate public opinion, elect whom they will locally and nationally, and never expose the crooked money system. They promote school bonds, municipal bonds, expensive and detrimental farm programs, "urban renewal," foreign aid, and many other schemes which will put the people more into debt to the Bankers. Thoughtful citizens wonder why billions are spent on one program and billions on another which may duplicate it or even nullify it, such as paying some farmers not to raise crops, while at the same time building dams or canals to irrigate more farm land. Crazy or stupid? Neither. The goal is more debt. Thousand of government-sponsored ways to waste money go on continually. Most make no sense, but they are never exposed for what they really are, builders of "billions for the bankers and debts for the people."

So-called "economic experts" write syndicated columns in hundreds of newspapers, craftily designed to prevent the people from learning the simple truth about our money system. Commentators on radio and TV, preachers, educators, and politicians blame the people as wasteful, lazy, or, spend-thrift, and blame the workers, and consumers for the increase in debts and the inflation of prices, when they know the cause is the debt-money system itself. Our people are literally drowned in charges and counter-charges designed to confuse them and keep them from understanding the unconstitutional and evil money-system that is so efficiently and silently robbing the farmers, the workers, and the businessmen of the fruits of their labors and of their freedoms.

When some few Patriotic people or organizations who know the truth begin to expose them or try to stop any of their mad schemes, they are ridiculed and smeared as "right-wing extremists," "super-patriots," "ultra-rightists," "bigots," "racists," even "fascists" and "anti-Semites." Any name is used which will cause them to shut up or will at least stop other people from listening to the warning they are giving. Articles and books such as you are now reading are kept out of schools, libraries, and book stores.

Some, who are especially vocal in their exposure of the treason against our people, are harassed by government agencies such as the EPA, OSHA, the IRS, and others, causing them financial loss or bankruptcy. Using the above methods, they have been completely successful in preventing most Americans from learning the things you have read in this pamphlet. However, in spite of their control of information, they realize many citizens are learning the truth. Therefore, to prevent violence or armed resistance to their plunder of America, they plan to register all firearms and eventually to disarm all citizens. They have to eliminate most guns, except those in the hands of their government police and army.

TELL THE PEOPLE
The "almost hidden" conspirators in politics, religion, education, entertainment, and the news media are working for a Banker-owned United States in a Banker-owned world under a Banker-owned World Governments!

Love of Country and concern for your children should make you deeply interested in this, America's greatest problem, for our generation has not suffered under the "yoke" as the coming generations will. Usury and taxes will continue to take a larger and larger part of the annual earnings of the people and put them into the pockets of the Bankers and their political Agents. Increasing "government" regulations will prevent citizen protest and opposition to their control. Is it possible that your grandchildren will own neither home nor car, but will live in "government-owned" apartments and ride to work in "government-owned" buses (both paying usury to the Bankers), AND BE ALLOWED TO KEEP JUST ENOUGH OF THEIR EARNINGS TO BUY A MINIMUM OF FOOD AND CLOTHING while their Rulers wallow in luxury? In Asia and eastern Europe it is called "communism;" in America it is called "Democracy" and "Capitalism."

America will not shake off her Banker-controlled dictatorship as long as the people are ignorant of the hidden controllers. International financiers, who control most of the governments of the nations, and most sources of information, seem to have us completely within their grasp. They are afraid of only one thing: an awakened Patriotic Citizenry, armed with the truth, and with a trust, in Almighty God for deliverance. This article has given you the truth about their iniquitous system. What you do with it is in your hands.

AUDIT THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM?
The Federal Reserve has never been audited by the government since it took over our money and credit in 1913. In 1975 a bill, H.R. 4316, to require an audit was introduced in Congress.

During the April, 1975 hearings, this author submitted a statement favoring the audit, as did many others. Due to pressure from the money controllers, it was not passed. No audit of the Fed has ever been made.

WHY HAVEN'T THEY TOLD YOU?
Why haven't they told you about this scandal - the greatest fraud in history which has caused Americans and others to spill oceans of blood, pay trillions of dollars interest on fraudulent loans and burden themselves with unnecessary taxes?

Who are "they"? "They" are most of the politicians of the two old parties and elected officials. Most "educational" groups like the League of Women Voters, the Heritage Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). All mainstream news services, such as the Associated Press and the United Press International. All mainstream daily newspapers, including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. All mainstream weekly "news" magazines, such as "Time" and "Newsweek." All of the above and more have been hiding the truth from you.

WHAT SOME FAMOUS MEN HAVE SAID ABOUT THE MONEY QUESTION

ALAN GREENSPAN: "In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."

PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON: "The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction... I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity... is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

PRESIDENT JAMES A. GARFIELD: "Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce".

CONGRESSMAN LOUIS McFADDEN: "The Federal Reserve(Banks) are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers".

HORACE GREELEY: "While boasting of our noble deeds were careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

THOMAS A. EDISON: "People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest ...But here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People."

PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON: "A great industrial Nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men". (Just before he died, Wilson is reported to have stated to friends that he had been "deceived" and that "I have betrayed my Country". He referred to the Federal Reserve Act passed during his Presidency.)

SIR JOSIAH STAMP,(President of the Bank of England in the 1920's, the second richest man in Britain): "Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits".

MAJOR L .L. B. ANGUS: "The modern Banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint and unmint the modern ledger-entry currency".

RALPH M. HAWTREY (Former Secretary of the British Treasury): "Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing".

ROBERT HEMPHILL (Credit Manager of Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Ga.): "This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon".       

This study on money is not copyrighted. It may be reproduced in whole or in part for the purpose of helping the American people.

Taxation in the Bible

Gary North - July 28, 2005

There is no discussion in the Bible of the proper limits of taxation. Taxation should therefore be discussed in terms of achieving other biblical goals and enforcing other biblical principles.

The supreme biblical goal of taxation is to finance a civil government that is incapable of doing more than the Bible says it should. If it is capable of doing more, it will. This is basic to fallen man: to be as God (Gen. 3:5). The state should be limited in a way analogous to the limits placed on the king in Deuteronomy 17. So, the biblical goal of modern politics is to shrink the state -- all branches -- to levels consistent with the biblical concept of civil government: negative sanctions only. The welfare state must be de-funded.

Taxation therefore should be discussed, above all, in terms of limiting the expansion of the state, especially the central government.

R. J. Rushdoony argued that Exodus 30 -- a man's payment of half a shekel upon reaching age 20 -- was a head tax. He was incorrect. The payment went to the priests, not to a civil magistrate ("captain"). The tip-off was that it was calculated as a shekel of the sanctuary, which was a separate, ecclesiastical coin. This was blood money. It was paid on a man's entry into God's holy army, which was both priestly and civil. I discuss this in Chapter 32 of Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (1990).

What about the income tax? Is it biblical? The principle that civil government should tax income was honored by Egypt under the Pharaoh (20% -- a tyranny: Gen. 47) and Israel's kings (10% -- a tyranny: I Sam. 8:14, 17). There is no other mention of the income tax in the Bible. Conclusion: tyrannical governments prefer to tax income.

FEDERALISM

One supposed limitation on the central government is the structure of federalism: maintaining local political sovereignties. It has not worked, because federalism has been undermined.

In the United States, it was undermined by not placing enough limits on the Supreme Court. For example, the other branches of the national government should have a veto over the Court: the signature of the President and a three-quarters vote of each branch of Congress.

Federalism was also undermined by the results of the Civil War: political and judicial centralization.

Finally, it was undermined by its claim (false) that the voters had ratified the 16th amendment to the Constitution in 1913, authorizing a Federal income tax. In Great Britain, this came in 1911. World War I (1914-17) solidified taxation at levels far more oppressive than the Pharaoh of Egypt collected.

The Articles of Confederation (1781) had the correct approach: no taxation of individuals by the national government. It was this that Alexander Hamilton correctly saw had to be overturned in order to establish an American empire, which he wanted to achieve. He argued explicitly that the central government needed far more money. He argued in Federalist 12 in favor of import taxes and taxes on liquor because they would be easier to collect than taxes on farmers. He argued, therefore, not for a principle of limiting national revenues, but rather for the central government's greater ease of tax collection in order to increase its revenue. From that day until this, most American politicians have adopted this principle of taxation: ease of collection.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was a conspiracy against the concept of a limited central government. In justifying the proposed Constitution against constitutionally decentralized political power (the Articles), Federalist 30 through 36, all written by Hamilton, promoted the concept of the central government's concurrent taxation of the people, along with the states. This was what the Articles prohibited in order to make difficult the creation of a centralized empire. This had to be overturned in order to create a new empire, which Hamilton favored. It was, and it did.

So, a practical application of biblical civil government is this principle: no concurrent taxation. Each level of civil government above the local must tax only that level of government beneath it. Tax increases above the local level of civil government must come at the expense of intermediate civil governments -- politicians and bureaucrats -- and not at the expense of the people.

The first and most important goal of taxation is to see to it that only a local government taxes people and businesses directly. This keeps higher levels of government out of the pocketbooks of residents. If a business does business inside a local jurisdiction, it pays a tax locally. This is why a sales tax is ideal. A business collects the sales tax from local residents and sends the money to that jurisdiction.

Biblical principle of taxation: Every higher level of civil government must tax only the next lower level. No tax should be paid directly by residents to any level of civil government above the city or county, whichever local voters have chosen as the originating tax jurisdiction under which they live. All higher levels must tax only the next lower level. The Federal government taxes the states; the states tax the counties; the counties tax cities or county residents.

Implementation: A flat rate income tax at this level is not prohibited biblically, just so long as it does not reach the 10% level (I Sam. 8:14, 17). However, it is unlikely politically to remain biblically restrained. Voters will seek to tax higher-income residents at a higher rate: a denial of the rule of law (Ex. 12:49). A sales tax is much better for both personal privacy and judicial equity: an inherently flat tax. Everyone pays the same. A sales tax also does not tax capital and profits, which in turn spurs investment and economic growth.

The Illuminati and COMMUNISM!

by Ray Novosel

 

THE ILLUMINATI

History records that on May 1, 1776, Dr. Adam Weishaupt founded the Bavarian Order of the ILLUMINATI.  Weishaupt was a Professor of Jewish Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Germany. He was born to Jewish parents and later “converted” or more correctly, “infiltrated” Roman Catholicism.  He became a high-ranking member of The Order Of The Jesuits, whom he subsequently left to form his very own organization at the clear behest of the newly formed “House Of Rothschild.”

It was the Jewish Weishaupt's belief that only a chosen few could qualify for enough "illumination" to guide and rule the world.  The problem was, where could he find enough intellectual “light bearers” to start the ball rolling?  He subsequently found them in various lodges and orders of the day, such as the various Masonic lodges, the Rosicrucian Order and other legitimate and sincere orders of antiquity.  This is confirmed yet again by Edith Starr-Miller in her classic, “Occult Theocracy:” “As the organization of the Illuminati developed, so did its ambitions, which ended in a plot to subvert Freemasonry to its aim of world domination by any and all means ……. After obtaining control of certain Masonic Lodges, Weishaupt and his associates recklessly vaunted their growing power.” 

 

But all this didn't happen without reprisal.  Many members of the lodges and various orders, realizing that they and their harmless societies and organizations had been duly infiltrated, warned Weishaupt to discontinue his activities.  Fortunately for Weishaupt, Thomas Jefferson, in 1784, had recently been named the United States Ambassador to France.  Jefferson, an avowed Mason, favored Weishaupt's “New Order” and became sympathetic to his cause.  This “New Order” was now guaranteed to continue, where it eventually dominated all others and became known as the “Order of the Illuminati.”

 

While casually flicking through Edith Starr-Miller’s classic “Occult Theocracy” recently, I noticed that the author clearly reveals an interesting Jesuit/Jewish link - where the third General of the Jesuits, after its Spanish founder Inigo de Loyola, was that of a Belgian Jew named Eberhard Mercurian.   He held the title for 7 years between 1573 to 1580 and would no doubt have had a significant and consequential Judaizing influence on the Jesuit order, and hence upon the Roman Catholic Church.  On P313 she writes: “From the Jesuit College at Ingolstadt in 1776 is said to have issued the sect known as ‘The Illuminati of Bavaria’ founded by Adam Weishaupt, its nominal founder.”  In fact, some of the most influential Jesuits in history, such as Francisco Ribera and Emanuel Lacunza were Jews. Seeing that many of the Jesuit doctrines are similar to those found in the Babylonian Talmud, is it possible that the RCC is simply another “Agent Provocateur” that the Pharisaic serpents have used yet again to Paganize and destroy true Christianity through the vain ‘traditions of men?”

 

The Illuminati, under the renegade Weishaupt, gradually became an openly destructive Luciferic society, with everything in its doctrines and rituals the exact antithesis of Christianity.   It begins by enticing its victim into the first few initial degrees by the most beautiful altruistic and fraternal ideals and noble aspirations possible. However it gradually and almost imperceptivity weaves a net of murderous Satanism as it descends into the higher degrees.

Weishaupt wanted a deistic republic of truly global dimensions, even if it brought about violent worldwide revolution and rivers of blood.  His “benevolent dictatorship” had six main points dealing with the abolition of:

1. Ordered or nationalistic governments in the form of monarchies.
2. Private property.
3. Inheritance rights.
4. Patriotism to nationalist causes.
5. Social order in families, sexual prohibition laws and all moral codes.
6. All religious disciplines based on faith in a living God, as opposed to faith in nature, man and reason.

(It’s interesting that this is almost word-for-word from Karl Marx’s THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO and that these six points are also perfectly consistent with the Protocols in general, once again proving their legitimacy).

ILLUMINISTS MARX AND FREUD

History records that "Karl" Moses Mordecai Marx Levy (1818-1883) was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of Trier in the Rhine Province of Prussia (now Germany). His mother, Herietta Pressburg, was from Holland and like Karl's father, was Jewish and also a descendent of a long line of rabbi's.  Marxists view the family as the primary obstacle to dismantling nation-states and thus establishing a collectivist Utopia.  The social and political health of a nation-state is inversely proportional to the degree of racial, lingual, and religious diversity within it.  In other words, the greater the “diversity” in a nation-state the less stable and enduring it is - a principle well understood by Communists everywhere.  Marxism is less an economic theory, than it is a state of mind from which certain theories and practices have evolved.  This state of mind is maternal and group-centered, and includes the view that Man's natural state is collectivist, or communal.  Individual needs and wants must be subjugated to the needs of the community or state - to the needs of a borderless world or “Global Village.”

 

In 1841, Moses Hess, brought Marx into a society called the League of the Just, and taught him collectivist ideologies. Hess wrote: “Dr. Marx, that is the name of my idol, is still a very young man who will give medieval religion and politics their death blow....” [The portable Karl Marx, page 22] George Jung, another friend of Marx, wrote in the same year: “Marx will surely chase God from His heaven, and will even sue Him.” [Mystery 666, page 144]

 

Bukharin, one of Marx's associates in the First International, was an anarchist and by all accounts, an ardent Satanist. He wrote: “Satan is the first free thinker and saviour of the world. He frees Adam and impresses the seal of humanity and liberty on his forehead, by making him disobedient.”  Thus in 1917, when the second revolution took place and the Bolshevik government came to power in Russia, the hand that led the people may have been the hand of Lenin, with the words of Karl Marx, but the voice was unmistakably that of Satan.

In Marxism, society's past needs to be repaired. In the psychobabble nonsense of Freudianism, individual pasts need to be repaired.  In both worlds, these god-like Jewish thinkers believed that their deity hides things necessary for human perfection from all men from the beginning of time and that only through “extrication” of society (Marx) and of the unconscious mind (Freud) could the reality of the forbidden fruit of “perfection” be achieved. Thus, both philosophers failed to extricate themselves from their own kin’s perversion of history in forging their ideas.  So, instead of creating new sciences of economics and psychology based on a confirmed reality, Marx and Freud simply believed in their own vanities and mixed in some excerpts of the Talmudic World View they grew up with, blending them with subjective observations of a fabricated history to produce a “New Eden” for their gullible and largely neurotic clients.

 

By applying their Jewish religious learning into Talmudic ways of thinking, Marx and Freud cleverly destroyed the objective principles of Christianity into which the world had been gradually evolving for centuries. Caught between the primary conflict of a finite Christian morality together with common-sense Biblical ethics - versus the Judeo acceptance and promotion of deviation in all areas of life, both Marx and Freud committed the world to violent upheaval and dangerous hazards, the results of which have been utterly catastrophic with their full consequences yet to be revealed. Conflicts which from the creation of Adam until today, have been the result of man’s ambition to make himself equal with God, or like Nietzsche, to create God in his own image, or to proclaim, like Marx and Ben-Gurion, that there is no God and therefore man has no further need for moral laws.

 

Man thus demonstrates his disdain by propagating ideas of complete freedom from conscience, and to think and act in absolute disregard and opposition to all the well established and necessary/commonsense laws required for the maintenance of decent civil, moral and natural order. This has resulted in the environmental catastrophe, and global chaos we see all around us. Rebellious, self-glorifying ideas, which invariably lead to the mass worship of devilish leaders who advocate these insane theories and who, unfortunately, are keenly followed by the unthinking masses who are either stupid, shy or too proud to announce that the king really does have no clothes.  

 

PSYCHIATRY AS RELIGION

The religion of psychiatry is mainly defined as related to human behavior and the brain, thus excluding the spirit or soul of man, even though “psych” means soul. Through this denial of the soul, psychiatry and all its associated evils, such as “psycho-therapy” are destroying the spirit of man and has become a powerful and respectable cult.  With this failure to address the soul, psychiatry has no alternative but to view human beings as merely animals that can be trained. As a result, psychiatry has developed methods that can only be interpreted as a subtle form of brainwashing. This indoctrination has been so sweetly packaged that we barely notice psychiatry's true nature. Neither do most of us see how contrived words such as dyslexia and ADD, have been infused into our societal thought patterns so strongly that we've come to accept these as true "diseases."  Psychiatry took over our society, first by infiltrating our schools and churches under the disguise of counseling. Since most people had problems and because both churches and schools deal with people’s problems, it was easy to convince church and school leaders that they had another tool to handle difficult situations. Leaders accepted the "free" tool paid for with our tax dollars. As a result psychiatry easily manipulated and penetrated all our institutions of learning.

 

The dangers of psychiatry have even been recognized by some within it's own ranks such as psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz, who long ago wrote: “The Myth of Mental Illness” and again in the 80's by William R. Coulson, Ph.D., from USIU (United States International University) School of Human Behavior. Dr. Coulson addressed school boards throughout the country presenting the ominous message about drug education, values clarification and sex education programs he helped design for public schools along with Dr. Carl Rogers and Dr. Abraham Maslow.  Dr. Coulson said that controlled studies had now proven that drug and sex education programs that he helped create, had the exact opposite effect. He said that values clarification programs surreptitiously placed in America's schools through the years - rather than teaching values, actually eroded and destroyed them.  

 

There is another danger imposed by psychiatry that should concern everyone. It is the application of questionable psychiatric techniques and the availability of government psychiatrists that allows agencies such as the CIA and FBI to develop "psychological operations" (psy ops) programs.  Some of these dangerous programs that were under the power of this psychic mumbo-jumbo included the infamous LSD experiments, the current MK ULTRA Mind Control program and the CIA's STARGATE program. These experiments could be considered unethical, illegal, unconstitutional and damaging to one's mental health, and is why psychiatry needs to be eradicated. It is destroying our society! It is an established cult that has mesmerized our nation in such a way, that to disagree with its techniques, outcomes, and programs is to be falsely accused of mental illness; as were tens of thousands of anti-government protestors and political dissidents that received virtual death sentences in the many Jewish run gulags of the “formerly communist” Soviet Union.

 

"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. "The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.  "Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain." Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado Director of Neuropsychiatry Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974

 

Copernicanism AND The Cataclysmic Impact On Every Field Of Modern Man’s Knowledge

The Christian Bible (and the Koran) both declare the earth to be motionless. The mathematical Copernican model says the earth rotates on an "axis," (at over 1000 MPH) orbits the sun, (at 30 times rifle bullet speed) and is whooshing around a galaxy (at 250 times rifle bullet speed) - all at the same time. Over the centuries, superstars in the physical sciences established the Copernican model as an unchallenged fact. Copernicanism is a concept that is protected in a bunker under a 50 foot thick ceiling of solid "scientific" concrete. It is meant to be impregnable. It is a concept that has become ensconced in men’s minds as an indestructible cornerstone of enlightened modern man’s knowledge. Virtually all people everywhere have been taught to believe - and do believe - that this concept is based on objective science and dispassionate secular reasoning, now long since freed from silly religious superstitions based on the Bible.

Indeed, it was this Copernican heliocentrism concept that gradually broke the back of Bible credibility as the source of Absolute Truth in Western Culture. Once the Copernican Revolution had conquered the physical sciences of Astronomy and Physics and put down deep roots in Universities and lower schools everywhere, it was only a matter of time until the Biological sciences launched the “Darwinian Revolution.”

This embrace of Darwinism then quite predictably emboldened increasingly secular-minded mankind to further reject Biblical Absolutism and replace its teachings with yet more new "truths," in areas of learning having to do with economics and government. Thus was unsuccessful and floundering Marxism given new life. Marx openly tried to dedicate his own books to Darwin, exulting: "You have given me the basis for my system." Thus, the "Social Science" disciplines were born and began to make their contributions to the destruction of Bible credibility.

 

Marx’s less famous and under-rated benefactor, Friedrich Ingles, not only recognized the anti-Bible nature of Darwinism and Marxism, he - more than Marx or any of the rest of those early Communist revolutionaries - fully grasped the overriding importance of protecting the Copernican foundation of the envisioned New World Order from any and all attacks. He worked diligently to fortify against any lingering sporadic counter-attack against the Copernican foundation (by the Lutherans chiefly). He understood that the continued hardening of the Copernican paradigm into unchallengeable "fact" status was absolutely essential to the success of Marxism. Engles wrote: "...one of the basic theses of dialectic materialism [Communism], is the inseparability of movement from matter...." (Anti-Communists, think on that a minute!!) Also: CHECK pp.25-27 in “THE EARTH IS NOT MOVING,” for this statement and for other quotations by Communist physicists and mathematicians about how mathematics were "created" and how Leninist theory "reconstructed the mathematical sciences" to rule out any non-moving (inert) body in the universe, i.e., to rule out the Biblical model of a stationary Earth at the Centre of God’s Creation and simultaneously give atheism its "scientific" foundation.

 

Notice then the progression after the conquest of the physical sciences, to the biological sciences, to the social sciences and thence to the behavioral sciences. Now enter Sigmund Freud from far left stage. Freud - thoroughly marinated in evolution’s juices and ready to turn every sexual perversion from the Talmud’s pages (HERE) into normal behavior and world notoriety stated flatly: "Man is not different from, or better than, the animals."  He also declared that "...science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what IT cannot give us."

 

Lest today’s younger generation be unaware of the ineffably pervasive impact that Freud’s evolution-based, ostensibly secular "knowledge of the mind" witchcraft [i.e., psychology] has had, here are just a few assessments: "Sigmund Freud’s name is as cardinal in the history of human thought a Charles Darwin’s." "Few others in the history of the world have had a more profound influence on the way man thinks about himself." The very intellectual air we breathe has been infused with Freud’s categories of thought." No other thinker in modern times has had a comparable effect upon so many branches of knowledge." (Several revealing pages on Freud at this source: (HERE).

 

And too, lest we forget that the evolution-based revolutions sparked by the Darwin/Marx/Freud triumvirate in the late 1800’s were TOTALLY dependent on the previous success of the Copernican Revolution, consider the bottom line of what was happening over in the Physics and Astronomy Departments while Freud was at the university in Paris in the mid-1880’s: That bottom line is that the negative results of the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiments conducted in Europe and the U.S. in the 1880’s consistently showed no orbital motion of the Earth around the sun. No motion. Period. (Shades of Joshua: "Sun, stand THOU still!" [Jos.10:12])

 

"...this unexpected result kept the scientific world long in perplexity....." wrote Hans Reichenbach in his insightful book “From Copernicus To Einstein.” He further noted: "This result, announced in 1887, dumfounded scientists...." ("Dumfounded" means "astonished, amazed, astounded, bewildered, confounded, flabbergasted, shocked and stunned".) This was serious stuff! The whole cult with its "science" idol was in jeopardy! Over three centuries of carefully layered propaganda and indoctrination had defeated, and all but buried the Bible’s account of a stationary Earth. The outer wall of the Bible’s claim to Truth had been battered down by radical members of the scientific priesthood. And now they were on the verge of breaking through the second line of defense with the Evolution battering ram. This breakthrough was designed to defeat and bury not only the Creation account of man created in the image of God, but the whole Creation scenario set out in the Bible. No Creation; no Garden of Eden; no Satan; no Temptation; no Fall; no need for Jesus Christ to redeem from the fallen condition.... What’s left of Christianity but a bunch of rituals and traditions?!)

 

The long and the short of all this is that the science establishment was thrown into an absolute funk with a capital "F" by the interferometer experiments! The word "unthinkable" got a lot of exercise. World class scientists such as Poincare’, Maxwell, Lorentz, and FitzGerald heaved and sweated mightily to hold the establishment’s house of cards together - the situation was desperate!

 

Then alas, in 1905, a saviour appeared. This saviour - this man who rescued the ruling theoretical science establishment from its potentially lethal enemy (The Truth!), this saviour - who advanced a theory of Relativity which seemingly ruled out forever any challenge to the Communist physics which forbade any inertia in the universe, was feted as usual with the full red carpet treatment, and parades and statues in capitols around the world. His name became synonymous with unequalled IQ-busting human intelligence. From a long list of great men and women at the end of the 20th Century, Einstein was chosen "Man of the Century". His crowning achievement? Why so glorified by a humanist/Jewish controlled media and education? Well, after all, he did rescue the Copernican foundation of all modern man’s "knowledge"! He deserved what he got from those who willingly gave to him.

 

On pages 110-133 (and elsewhere) in “The Earth Is Not Moving,” one can see how the shenanigans posing as science that led to the secular canonization of Einstein developed. Suffice it to say here what the evidence plainly demonstrates:

1) Einstein’s Relativity hypothesis rescued heliocentricity from the findings of over 200 experiments which showed that the earth was NOT moving.

2) These experiments threatened to undo over 300 years of successful labour to transmute fictionized mathematics into the basis of modern science.

3) Moreover, by threatening the Copernican Paradigm, i.e., the very foundation - the raison d' etre, of this successful transmutation, these experiments contained the deadly potential of thwarting the rooting process of Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, Einsteinism, and (later) Saganism. These isms were essential to victory in this spiritual warfare, which intended to get rid of the Biblical God, and especially His Son Jesus, and return to Paganism. Atheist philosopher Nietzsche summed up what was really at stake just before the experiments threatened the whole unfolding secular game plan: "God is dead", "We have killed Him with our science."

 

4) From F. Engles on, Communist (atheist) physics would allow nothing to be motionless in the universe, thereby "scientifically" ruling out the Biblically mandated stationary and immovable Earth.

 

5) Einsteinian Relativity is anti-Biblical, but it is not a wholly secular concept. Indeed, it is an essential part of another "creation account" given in another "holy book", i.e., the Cabbala. This "holy book", with its 13th century Rabbinical concept of a "Big Bang-Expanding Universe" (HERE), is an instrument of another religion which, along with the Talmud, specifically targets the Bible and especially the New Testament of Jesus Christ for destruction.

 

6) It is a surpassingly interesting coincidence that the Cabbala also describes Relativity (!), Zionism, and Dispensationalism (HERE & HERE).

Anti-Bible, Anti-Christ Cabbalism/Talmudism rules modern man’s "knowledge."

"...profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called." (I Timothy 6:20).

 

THE ILLUMINATI AND COMMUNISM

From the time of Christ, around 2000 years ago, the leaders of Pharisaic Judaism have ever warred against Christianity. Around the middle ages, an alliance between the secret societies of “Pharisonry” and the leaders of Judaism coalesced into the “Permanent Revolution” or “The Conspiracy” – in the final revolt against the Divine Plan for Order established by Christ, and conspiring against white Christian civilization.

The first time these diabolical vultures called “Jews” saw a land base to own and contaminate was in 1917, when their funded agents (local gangsters) assassinated the entire Romanov family and established the first Communist country in Russia. This was the beginning of the ultimate disaster for civilization and decency.  This new Communist government was always funded, backed and supported from the Judmas (Judeo-Masonic) conspirators in New York, Washington D.C. and London (See “National Suicide” by Anthony Sutton, as well as numerous other well documented works). As Fr. Denis Fahey put it in: “The Rulers of Russia”: “The book shows Bolshevism (Communism) in its proper perspective, namely, as the most recent development in the age-long struggle waged by the Jewish Nation against the Supernatural Messias, our Lord Jesus Christ, and His Mystical Body . . .”

The intention of Communism was to break up the old order in the more incorrigible parts of the world with the utmost brutality. This commenced in Russia, where “anti-Semitism” was made a crime punishable by death as soon as the Communists took over. In fact when Lenin, financed by the International Bankers, overthrew the Russian government and established the first totalitarian dictatorship in 1917, the flag was red with a hammer and sickle, over which was superimposed the Star of David. Communism also smashed the old order in China behind the Moscow-educated murderer Mao Tse Tung, as it was done in Eastern Europe after the Communist takeover after World War II. 

By 1989, it was decided that the task of Communism was complete. The old order was sufficiently broken up and/or corrupted, where the New World Order could now be quietly announced. Suddenly the New York media was cheerleading for the crowds demonstrating against Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia, and – instead of being mowed down by tanks as in the past – the Communists mostly gave way and all became “social democrats,” where they continued to figure prominently in the running of the formerly communist countries.

Let’s look at what two world leaders had to say about the REAL goal of the Permanent Revolution, which used Communism as only one of its masks. The first quote is from the first (and, at the time of this quote, former) Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, given to “Look Magazine” in 1962, January 16th, edition: “The image of the world in 1987 as traced in my imagination: The Cold War will be a thing of the past. Internal pressure of the constantly growing intelligentsia in Russia for more freedom and the pressure of the masses for raising their living standards may lead to a gradual democratization of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the increasing influence of the workers and farmers, and the rising political importance of men of science, may transform the United States into a welfare state with a planned economy. Western and Eastern Europe will become a federation of autonomous states having a Socialist and democratic regime. With the exception of the USSR as a federated Eurasian state, all other continents will become united in a world alliance, at whose disposal will be an international police force. All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars. In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.” 

Ben Gurion missed calling the end of the Cold War by only two years, as it actually “ended” in 1989. His optimistic dream is becoming a real nightmare for Israel and the world, as his party, Judeo-masonry, continues to strive against the real order of the world, against the Kingship of Christ as explained clearly in the writings of Fr. Denis Fahey. But few can doubt that Ben Gurion was part of the inner circle that devised the game plan, as well as had the game plan in his possession.  Next world leader, Pope Benedict XV in 1920, offers a more realistic view of where the program of Communist/Judeo-Masonry was heading: “The advent of a Universal Republic, which is longed for by all the worst elements of disorder, and confidently expected by them, is an idea which is ripe for execution. From this Republic, based on the principles of absolute equality of men and community of possessions, would be banished all national distinctions, nor in it would the authority of a father over his children, or of the public power over the citizens, or of God over human society, be any longer acknowledged. If these ideas are put into practice there will inevitably followed a reign of unheard-of terror.” From “Moto Proprio, Bonem Sanc,” July 25, 1920.

Note how Pope Benedict XV sees right through Communism, which was then raging in Russia, and was merely a disguise - the “destroyer’s” mask, worn by the World Revolution of Judeo-Masonry. He prophetically sees that, after the destruction phase was over, Judeo-Masonry would call their hoped-for World Rule a “Universal Republic”, never for what it really was, that of a Communist tyranny.

Let’s put it another way: the goal was always for the International Bankers and the Monopoly Capitalists, to put in practice the Talmudic principle that the Jews deserve to own everything, and the goyim (non-Jews) deserve to own nothing. So Communism either smashed all the enemies of the International Banksters, or served as a threat to keep the Free World off balance until the Banksters in the “free” countries could use their incredible money issuing power to take over the media and the governments of the so-called “free” countries.  The Talmudic Supremists did all this in conjunction with the upper echelons of Freemasonry of which The Independent Order of the B’nai B’rith is TODAY its supreme governing body.  "The Communists are against religion (Christianity), and they seek to destroy religion; yet, when we look deeper into the nature of Communism, we see that it is essential nothing else than our religion (Judaism)." (A Program for the Jews and Humanity, Harry Waton, p. 138).

If you have got this far, only the terminally blind will deny that Marxist/Talmudic Jews wield immense power and influence worldwide, especially in the United States and where the so-called "Jewish lobby" is a decisive factor in the slavish support for Israel.  As long as this incredibly powerful religious influence remains entrenched, there will be no end to the systematic and deliberate distortion of current affairs and history, the Jewish-Zionist domination of the U.S. political system, Zionist/Nazi style oppression of the Palestinians and the Israeli threat to world peace.

READ MUCH MORE

 

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Is the New World Order Jewish?

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The Illuminati Exposed

Is the New World Order Jewish?

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American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation

American Communism and Feminism

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        I am not anti-Jewish in any way.  I am however anti-sin, anti-lies and anti-corruption.  Yes, the Jews are God's people, but most have rejected their Messiah.  Most surely are NOT God's children.  Only by confessing one's sinful condition and asking Jesus Christ to forgive those sins can anyone become BORN-AGAIN.  You are ONLY a child of God if you've been born-again.  Most Jews are arrogant, claiming that they are automatically going to heaven (which is a lie).  God is NO respecter of persons.  It's Jesus or hell, turn or burn!

As a consequence of Israel's continued rebellion against God, they have become a very stiff-necked people (just as they were back in the Bible).  Satan is the god of this world (2nd Corinthians 4:4) and there are evil people of both Jewish and Gentile origin.  As you've read in the article above, the Illuminati has Jewish roots, as well as communism and the New World Order.  Are the Jews evil and bad?  No, we're all evil and bad...that's why Jesus came to die on the cross for all OUR sins.  The Jews are definitely not the innocent victims of history (as commonly portrayed by history books), but are guilty of mass murder themselves, just as are the people of Japan, China and the U.S.  History is filled with much lies, the average person is completely brainwashed concerning history.

I am NOT anti-Jewish, but it is clear that the evils behind the new World Order are Jews, more specifically elite  Jewish bankers.  It is not a matter of being Jewish or not, it it a matter of evil power-hungry monsters wanting to destroy America as a means to an end...a New World Order.

Was there a holocaust?  Yes, it was horrible, Jewish Communist leaders Lenin and Trotsky murdered an estimated 66 million innocent People (mostly Christians) under the Bolshevik totalitarian system.  Not one person has ever been arrested or held accountable for all the tens-of-millions of people murdered, in the face of irrefutable testimonies and evidence.  Why is the news media so silent?  Is it because the news media is predominantly Jewish owned and controlled?  You decide.  Even 60 years later, Germany is still scorned and berated for the murder of millions of innocent Jews...but what about the holocaust victims of the Soviet gulags?  Don't they deserve a museum too?  What about the millions of Cambodian victims of Nixon and Kissinger?  Read The Soviet Gulags

Most people are sheeple, ignorant and so easily controlled by the news media.  As a result of 911, all the American people need to hear is that something is about to blow up and they'll sell their souls to the government.  I challenge you to seek the truth, and then proclaim it near and far.  This is our duty as Christians (Psalm 94:16).

Marxism Lives

March 18, 1999

If old Karl Marx, the embittered inventor of communism, could return from the grave, he would no doubt be surprised to find that most of the 10 planks of his Communist Manifesto, issued in 1848 in collaboration with Frederick Engels, have been happily adopted or are at least supported by Americans.

Let’s look at the 10 planks:

1. “Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.” Well, we’re working on this one. The federal government owns huge amounts of land and is acquiring more. Private property rights are being eroded deliberately in the name of protecting the environment.

2. “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” Need I say more? Before Ronald Reagan’s tax law changes we had exactly that and many Americans support the idea of taxing the rich more than the less-rich.

3. “Abolition of all rights of inheritance.” We haven’t gone all the way on that one, but heavy estate taxes are a step in that direction. Estate taxes are purely punitive because they are taxes levied on assets on which multiple taxes have already been paid many times.

4. “Confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels.” Well, our forefathers confiscated the property of those who supported the British during the Revolution, and, under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and other civil statutes, property is being confiscated right and left in the name of the war on drugs.

5. “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state . . . .” Pretty much done. See the Federal Reserve Act.

6. “Centralization of the means of communications and transport in the hands of the state.” Seen a private road or bridge lately? Who licenses all radio and television? Only the First Amendment saves the print press from federal licensing, but I suspect that hate-speech laws will soon follow hate-crime laws, and that will erode that freedom.

7. “Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state . . . .” Well, the government runs many businesses and some folks would like to see it run more.

8. “Equal obligation to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.” We’ve escaped this one mainly, in my opinion, because of the Second Amendment (the right to own firearms) and mechanization.

9. “Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of distinction between town and country.” Pretty much done, because big corporations dominate what’s left of agriculture and mass communications have more or less erased cultural differences.

10. “Free education of all children in public schools. Abolition of child factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.” Done.

Now, you must understand that what communism was driving toward was not economic nirvana for the people (that was the advertising) but total power in the hands of the state. Note, for example, the manifesto does not advocate education for children per se but education in public schools where, of course, they can be under the control of and indoctrinated by the state.

The hatred for property and for farmers was based on the knowledge that people who are economically independent of the state can assert their political freedom from state control.

Communism is just another form of slavery in which the slave is provided work, housing, food, education, medical care and retirement -- but at the price of freedom.

You can see Americans advocating the very same system today, and most of them, because of their poor education in government schools, don’t have the foggiest notion that they are advocating Marxist ideas.

(c) copyright 1999 The Orlando Sentinel

Marxism Lives | Mises Institute

BIBLICAL ECONOMICS

GOD IS AGAINST Illuminati "SOCIALISM" AND "CAPITALISM"

COMMUNISM IS OF THE DEVIL!

GOD HATES USURY

READ MOSES: THE ECONOMIST

The world is in an economic basket case and the reason why is, because we have disobeyed God’s laws, statues and judgements.

Most Christians don’t know that the Bible speaks on how a nation can have a sound economy WITHOUT debt and usury/interest. Moses was an economist and provides what we should do as a nation to return to God’s economic system.

Moses Economist talks about:

Wages

Vicious circles

True Profit

and more in this 88 page book. Get your copy by Clicking Here. (Or buy a copy here)

“the breaking of the interest slavery of productive work in all professional fields will grant it the primary position due to it. Money will once again be returned to its sole appropriate role of being a servant in the enormous enterprise of our national economy. It will become once again what it is, an indication of performed work and therewith the way will be paved to a higher goal, the rejection of the frenzied financial greed of our age.”
― Gottfried Feder, German economist 

"Interest-free money will be the downfall of the false god of capitalism."

― Kai Murros, Political theorist 

GOD'S PLAN OF ECONOMIC RESTORATION 

The following are chapters taken from the book Digest of the Divine Law by Howard B. Rand in particular these are Chapters 5, 7, 8, and 9 covering sound money, economic justice, employee and employer relations, property rights, and taxation respectively. Just as a reminder this book was written back when America still had the Gold Standard. Now the Jewish Bankers have put the world in a new period of Economic slavery, based on IOUs and Oil and rapidly the Jews are marching us toward a cashless society with the choice of digitalized CBDCs or fake crypto scams. Digest of the Divine Law offers a Biblical alternative to Jewish Capitalism and Jewish Communism!

 

We as Americans can implement a fair and just economic system such as the one about to be proposed to you right now in our lifetime if only, we would get our acts together and repent of our sins collectively as a nation and perform a citizen's arrest of the Globalist criminals in Washington. I truly believe that this is possible if not we can apply God's Laws to our own lives and hearts and create a parallel economy separate from that of the World System. Utilizing the strategy of counter-economics, localized church clinics, food banks, food trees, gardens, farms, ect,ect. God's Law in this case must be firmly established in the hearts of every Christian and even in the hearts of every unbeliever, The Psalmist wrote "GREAT PEACE HAVE THEY WHICH LOVE THY LAW" in Psalm 199:165

 

In Chapter 5 of Howard B. Rand's book Digest of the Divine Law (available online for purchase at Artisan Publishers and Destiny Publishers.) on The Second Commandment it reads "In the first commandment God declared that He only should be worshipped by His people. Then He said, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt now bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments."   

We know that the heathen custom of worshipping images was accompanied by revolting licentious acts and scenes. This fact accounts for the statement of visiting the iniquity of the fathers unto their children as a result of this sin; however, mercy will be shown to them that love Him and keep His commandments. Thus, iniquity follows those who hate Him, while mercy is shown to those who love Him.

Men are inclined to think that they do not actually bow down before an image they are free from idolatry. This is not the case. To worship before an image is to recognize its power and authority and to accept its overlordship. This is true especially when service to this object of worship becomes the ambition and end of a man's activities. As in the service of other gods, so here men set up idolatry whenever they place something above all else, even God, and it becomes an object of reverence in the place of God.

We could list a multitude of things that have been set before God and of the many superstitions men follow while their achievements are monumentalized and glorified above God. Perhaps heading the list is idolatrous worship of the profit system, making money and wealth, represented in gold and silver- the image of adoration. Men often seek money for the love of it, even at the cost of honesty and virtue.

Recently a minister proclaimed from his pulpit that the objective of everyone (including himself) was money and stated that he would doubt the veracity of anyone who denied that this was so. This modern worship of gold originated at Babylon when the king set up the image, that is, a likeness of gold on the plain of Dura (Daniel 3:1). There he gathered together the princes, the governors, the captains, the judges, the treasurers, the counselors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces for the dedication of the new system which he was inaugurating.

His demand was that they accept gold as their standard and make its possession their objective: or as the Bible says, bow down and worship it. From that day and forward men have been worshipping gold or its equivalent in the love of money which is the root of all evil. The security of life, the blessings of peace, the love and happiness between individuals have all been sacrificed upon the altar built to this image. Misery, suffering, war, destitution and want have been the gift to men from this god as men and nations have served and worshipped him. The iniquity of this service has certainly been visited upon the children from generation to generation.

Judgement has been decreed upon this image of man's adoration. The King of Babylon, 2520 years previous to our generation, attended the birth of the gold standard, raising its image sixty cubits high in the air. Today we are witnessing the beginning of the funeral services. The burial process is under way as we continue to gather this metal from the four corners of the earth and inter it deep in the ground at Fort Knox. For men to continue to worship its image, or any other object of adoration, placing service to and desire for this image of their idolatry ahead of God can bring nothing else than the wrath of God upon such an individual and nation. Already we are moving into the orbit of chastisement for the purpose of cleansing our people and nation of the vestiges of such idolatry."

Such powerful and sobering preaching against the idolatry and avarice of mammon and the spiritual bondage of filthy lucre and I believe that this is the kind of preaching we need in America today. People need to start living within their means and stop worshipping money and then God can bless us with prosperity (I'm not talking the Satanic Prosperity Gospel heresy) but the true prosperity that comes from obedience to God and his commandments. Now the following excerpts are written by Brother Howard B. Rand who was a believer in British Israelism, so he did not understand the Biblical doctrine of replacement theology. Just a disclaimer I do not necessarily hold to the view of Anglo/British Israelism (the idea that white people are the lost tribes of Israel) I believe some of their claims may be true, but it does not matter. Because true Israel is spiritual Israel.

Digest of the Divine Law by Howard B. Rand Chapter 7 Three Important Laws

Happiness, contentment and peace within a nation depends upon the operation of a just and equitable system of administration and economics. Unless a nation is blessed with perfection in laws covering the equitable distribution and exchange of labor and goods among its citizens, the people will be harassed through maladministration; while the affliction of poverty, misery and distress will be in evidence-even in the midst of plenty. Because of the ever-present evidence-even in the midst of plenty. Because of the ever-present evidence of the existence of these conditions in our modern civilization, different schemes have been and are being advocated and proclaimed by men as the solution for our social problems.

Progress and Poverty

 Henry George wrote a book entitled Progress and Poverty in which, through the theory of a single tax he proposed to eliminate conditions causing industrial depressions, for with the increase of wealth he saw a corresponding increase in want. Much can be said in favor of his proposed plan, yet it falls short of the perfect God-given system of taxation which, when in operation, will attain all that Henry George advocated, plus many other blessings that would be impossible of fulfillment by the instruction of the single tax alone. This would be due to the fact that along with a perfect system of taxation the Lord has laid down laws governing the entire scope and operation of the perfect economic order. Henry George saw clearly the evils of the present economy and his statements regarding those evils is an indictment of the failure on the part of modern civilization to remedy these conditions and remove poverty from our midst.

Socialism proposes to change these conditions by state ownership and control of the means of productions. It aims to secure the reconstruction of society, increase wealth and bring about a more equitable distribution of the products of labor through public collective management of all industries. Communism is a social system in which there is community of goods. It calls for the abolition of all private property (by force of violence, if necessary) and the absolute control by the community in all matters pertaining to labor, religion, and social relationships. Capitalism is a system of competition that favors the concentration of capital (resources or wealth employed in or available for production) in the hands of a few. Thus, in these three systems of man there is in capitalism destructive competition with poverty in the midst of plenty; In socialism, state control and the destruction of private industry; in communism, community of goods and destruction of private ownerships.

Failure of Capitalism

In operation, the system of capitalism has proved wanting and has been unable to establish an equitable distribution of wealth and bring prosperity and happiness to all men everywhere, while during its activity poverty has grown in the midst of plenty. Because this has been so, the advocates of socialism and communism have pointed to the failure of the capitalistic methods as reasons why their particular brand of social order should be established in its place. But the continuation of capitalism, the substitution of socialism, or the adoption of communism will not cure the economic ills of mankind.

THE PERFECT SYSTEM

Perfection in any true economic structure that will bring men to real happiness in the labor of hands must eliminate destructive competition and in the midst of plenty allow no poverty. It will not destroy private enterprise and industry, nor will it deprive its citizens of the right of ownership. There will be competition, but a competition in the doing of good and in the rendering of services. Private enterprise and industry will flourish in the hands of individuals who will consider themselves stewards accountable to God for the welfare and happiness of those in their employ who will share equitably in all profits. The security of private ownership will be established, and it will be protected with a manifest willingness and spirit on the part of each individual to share with others the things he possesses when it is necessary to do so. 

Let us not lose sight of the importance of the family in the plans of God, for in the perfect economic structure the spirit of the happy family life will permeate the entire community. As there are members of the family who can accomplish more than others so will there be members of the community able and capable of accomplishing above others. But as in the family each has his or her own possessions, so in the community property rights will be respected. But no member of the perfect family will withhold from a brother or sister any possession in a time of need, nor will a real brother or sister take selfish advantage of this spirit of generosity. Thus, will it be when the economic laws of the Lord are operating in a society in accord with the plans of God.

In this day of change, with the political, economic and religious systems of man coming to judgement, when the message of the kingdom and its perfect laws of social justice should "be being proclaimed," most men, as well as our spiritual leaders, are ignorant of the fact that there exists in the plans of God a perfect economic system, recorded in the Book, the keeping of which laws will guarantee the elimination of all poverty, distress and want and promises the establishment of an administration that will bring to man all its benefits. After all, not even the perfect system will operate unless there is established perfection in administration and so the law of the Lord deals with this also. 

Men have failed to recognize that after giving the Ten Commandments, the keeping of which provides perfection in moral relationships, God laid down the fundamentals of economic well-being. In the observance of these laws is the solution of all our economic troubles. But men and nations, instead of opening the Bible to discover the answers to their problems, follow a cycle of experimentation that history should along ago have taught them was but a treadmill of adversity.

Medium of Exchange

Under virgin conditions and in a primitive state men practiced barter and exchanged their labor and goods for the labor and goods of others. As a nation increased its wealth, and commercial activities multiplied, a medium of exchange became necessary whereby purchasing power might be stored for future use. The volume of that medium of exchange would control the price of goods and because this is so there is only one equitable basis against which that medium should be issued, and it is not gold! Under our system gold, an inflexible standard, has been selected, and because it has been accepted as a standard of commercial operation in order, therefore, to always keep a true balance, increase in labor and goods decreases prices while the reverse is true when there is a decrease in labor and goods' prices increase. This trends towards poverty and distress for the many, while wealth has a tendency to gravitate into the hands of the few.

In barter, an increase of labor results in an increase of goods which could be exchanged for the increased wealth of others. Thus, the industrious through labor could increase their wealth. Under a system which has gold for its standard of value, the increase of goods (the result of increased labor) may increase the poverty of the laborer through a sharp decline in values as the result of the inability of the medium of exchange to expand in the same ratio as the increase in goods. The vicious circle is completed by thus making the possession of gold more valuable than the possession of property. 

Destruction of Goods

In order today to control prices and keep a more equitable balance between goods and prices, instead of discarding the present arbitrary standard of value and adopting the divine method, men decree the destruction of goods and the curtailment of production. Thus, real wealth, the things men can use and eat, are destroyed to prevent inflation, the result of the inability of the present medium of exchange to expand with the increase in production. Inflation would never occur under the God-given system, for there the medium of exchange is wholly adequate to handle the abundance that God has provided through allowing men to discover the means for increasing the production of the farm and the factory. Today, with the increase in wealth there is a corresponding increase in poverty with periodic depressions, and despite the fact that we are in a land capable of yielding in abundance we experience untold wealth on one hand and dire poverty and distress on the other. In our national desire for continued monetary prosperity, and in order to save a system of exchange not based upon real life, true wealth is destroyed that the gold standard may continue to function that the few may be prosperous. What a travesty of intelligence to hold, when God abundantly increases our goods, that prosperity can be had only by destruction or curtailment of that increase. 

Increase possessions should spell PROSPERITY with capital letters and it should never mean adversity. The very fact that it does not do so is a condemnation of the system that fails to give liberally to the laborer his or her share in that increase. With food enough for all, thousands are on the verge starvation; with enough to clothe all, many are underclad; with an abundance of fuel, thousands suffer with the cold. The reason for this is due to the failure of the system of exchange that has become wealth. That system, valueless in itself, yet, because of the fact that it can earn upon itself, has taken the place of true wealth which must be destroyed to sustain the present system the present system of values which is wholly inadequate to meet the needs of life in such abundance as God is now willing to give unto men. The inflexibility of the interest-bearing gold standard prevents thousands from converting their labor into the necessities of life.

Under-consumption 

The cycle of poverty and depression operates as capitalism under our competitive system throttled by an interest-bearing medium of exchange increases poverty in the midst of plenty, causing people to clamor for relief. Aggressive nations turn to war to ease domestic pressure and secure coveted markets for their production.  Such relief is but temporary and the new problems that arise bring dictators to power, followed by the socialization of industry.  The end of it all is the destruction of private ownership and ultimate chaos, all because of the refusal of the nations to discard an interest-bearing medium of exchange which is condemned by God, for under its operation the poor are oppressed. Instead of turning for relief to our God-given system of economics and exchange we are trying to save the situation by a planned economy and through failure of distribution we call the unconsumed balance over-production. Actually, there is no over-production but there is definitely under-consumption. 

The Love of Money

What, then, is the difficulty? Paul put his finger on the besetting sin of the human race in its adherence to the Babylonian system of economics (which Jesus named "Mammon," declaring you cannot serve God and Mammon) when he said, "For the love of money is the root of all evil." (1 Tim 6:10.) This incarnate love leads to war while the desire for gold is a lust for power and the move to establish a controlled economy is for the purpose of perpetrating the present monetary system with all its attaining evils. 

Establishment of Gold Standard

John in Revelation declares that all nations have partaken of the evils of Babylon the Great in the desire of men to possess wealth, power and authority as they strive to acquire gold or its equivalent. When the King of Babylon, the image (likeness) of gold is this standard was established as the medium of commercial activity. The only dissenting voices in that great economic gathering were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, three young Hebrews who knew the Israel standard and would not consent to accept this Babylonian system. "The rejection by these three of the demands of the king resulted in a fiery trial out of which they came forth victorious. Their experience was the forerunner of the experience of all those who throughout the ages have been unwilling to acquiesce in the demands made upon them by this system of mammon. Business, under the present system-with its destructive competition -is war. The weak succumb under the attacks of the strong. Hundreds of millions from cradle to the grave have lived in fear of want and destitution, while millions of others have existed in abject poverty, with untold suffering and privation as the result of the failure of the system to supply to supply in abundance the needs of life to all men everywhere." (Study in Revelation pages 274-5.) The call has gone forth for God's people to leave the system: "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues." (Rev 18:4.)

 

The Foundation of True Prosperity 

It would be unjust to call upon Israel to leave the Babylonian methods of commerce if there was not another system already awaiting Israel's adoption in this time of emergency. Now there is such a system, and it was given to His people at Mount Sinai. Israel departed from its observance and in the adoption of the methods of Babylon acquired the economic evils of the heathen system.  The only foundation on which true prosperity can rest, with an unlimited expansion of industry and enterprise and an increase in production without having a corresponding increase in poverty in the midst of plenty is an adequate and equitable medium of exchange. This medium must be a perfect weight and measure regarding the value of goods.

Let us turn to the Israel laws and we find that God instructed His people as follows: "Thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have: that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." (Deut. 25:15.) Today, goods in the hands of the merchant are valued at a price, but as soon as the same goods pass into the hand of the purchaser their value has materially decreased. The same holds true regarding practically all production, regardless of the actual useable value of the goods themselves. These changing values tend to enrich the seller at the expense of the buyer. Because of these arbitrary variations in values, it makes the possession of money to be more desirable than the possession of goods and is a contributing factor in increasing poverty in the midst of plenty. 

The Lord instructed Israel, "Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small." (Deut. 25:13.) In laying down this law God condemns the modern system of finance. Think for a moment of the divers weights and measures in the bag of high finance. Because of our failure to establish a fixed standard of value in relation to gold and silver, rather than gold alone, the producer receives little for his labor. Also, the consumer must pay dearly for that which the laborer has produced. It is convenient sliding scale which is always in favor of the few against the many. Why should goods be of little value when in the possession of one, and so dear when required by another? It is clear from a study of the Israel system of exchange that a unit of value was established, fixed in its relation to goods, with silver part of the monetary system to increase volume with increase in goods.

In order to remedy economic conditions today, we must establish a unit of value and a standard of wealth that will stabilize prices. Let our national wealth in goods be backed by the necessary volume of money, increasing and decreasing with supply and demand, and prices will be stabilized. Thus goods, whether in the hand of the producer or consumer would have an inherent fixed value. The medium of exchange would increase with the increase in our national wealth. A true balance would thus be maintained in accord with Divine law. Instead of fluctuation in prices there would be a fluctuation in the volume of the medium of exchange. Increased production would mean increased purchasing power in the increase in the circularization of an increased medium of exchange. 

Inflation Impossible 

With the institution of this Israel system the increased abundance from the farm and factory would see corresponding increase in the volume of money in circulation: with workmen able and ready to absorb the increased abundance through restitution of the Israel system of labor and wages. There would be no fear of inflation under such conditions, nor would there be the evil of scarcity, bringing its inevitable destitution and want. Wealth would be in the reach of anyone who, through enterprise and industry, was willing to expand his labor in production. Today, with no adequate method of balancing gold against supply and demand fluctuation in prices is inevitable. But when money can be made to expand with the increase in goods men can always produce at a profit, for prices will have become stabilized. The production of goods will then be as profitable as the mining of gold.

Interest Forbidden

Along with the requirement that Israel possess a just system of weights and measures so that men may increase their labor and multiply their goods without a decline in values, a medium of exchange that will enable the farmer and factory worker to exchange their labor on an equitable basis, is God's requirement that the medium of exchange shall bear no interest. "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury." (Deut 23:19.) There is one exception to this law, and this applies to the stranger or those who refuse to keep the requirements of the law. Such were not to have an advantage over the Israelite by being exempt from paying interest while imposing interest on others. The exception is, "Unto the stranger thou mayest lend upon usury," and remember that the stranger here is one who refuses to accept or abide by the Israel requirements. (Strangers who obeyed the Laws of God were NOT charged interest and were treated as citizens and BROTHERS! See Leviticus 25:35-37, God is not a respecter of persons but honors all who serve and obey Him!)  

The taking of interest impoverishes a people, perpetuates poverty and works hardship on not only individuals but communities and nations as well. It also changes the medium of exchange from representing values, making it wealth and its possession to be desired more than the possession of true wealth, the things men can use. Then, too the enormous sums involved in interest charges alone have enslaved men and nations, making them pay tribute for the right to live. We have set aside God's true blessings of increase for a few dollars in interest and instead of receiving a blessing are being cursed in all the work of our hands. 

In his booklet, The Economic Law of the Lord, W.J. Cameron has this to say: "The creation of credit without the multiplication of debt is a masterpiece of Divine legislation. Another strange point is that this law which absolutely prohibits interest or increase which is called usury, comes from the same Divine power which practices increase all the time! We make dead money artificially yield a psaltery three or four or five per cent - not that money yields it, the borrower does. But God's increase, did you ever count that? The Lord Christ once touched upon it, speaking of God's interest which He pays to man, Jesus said that in some instances it was thirty-fold, some sixty, and an hundredfold. And this is not 30, 60, or 100 percent, but 3,000, 6,000 and 10,000 percent. And because we reject the living system of 10,000 per cent.  And because we reject the living system of 10,000 percent increase for our dead system of 5 percent here, we are! Need we wonder at Ezekiel's condemnation of the whole system of taking usury? He said, "Thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbors by extortion, and has forgotten me, saith the Lord God." (Ezekiel 22:12)

Taxation

But along with a just and equitable standard of value with a non-interest-bearing medium of exchange issued against this standard of value there also must be definite and fixed relationship between that which man earns and the taxes he pays. Only thus can justice be done so that there will be no confiscation of wealth. Taxes, always a problem and a troublesome question today, have become increasingly vexatious. But there is a solution of even this problem, for God has decreed how tax levies shall be made and the method of collection as well as the amount each citizen shall pay. To institute the Divine system of exchange without the Divine system of taxation there would still be privation and want through the confiscation of property under an unjust system of taxation.

 

Purpose of Government

Originally the purpose of government was to establish justice and equity, compelling the refractory to conform with laws that would insure peace. But governments cannot function without financial support, so each citizen contributes toward that support for the protection afforded him. That contribution became a financial assessment and today is called a tax levy. So long as a government carries out its legitimate purpose, protecting its peoples from within and without, a nominal tax is sufficient for such purposes; but when a government becomes aggressive or departs from the fundamental principles of administration, an abuse of the right to tax (unless there are safeguards to prevent it) will follow. 

Rewarding the Shiftless

Property, both real and personal, is today subject to taxation. Our present method of taxing property has no relationship whatever to the earning power of the individual who is compelled to meet these assessments. The fact is we penalize men for improving their property and increasing the wealth of the nation and reward those who destroy values and allow their property to deteriorate. Thus, through taxation the government fines the thrifty and industrious and rewards the shiftless. 

What is the remedy? It is a return to the Law of the Lord and its methods of taxation. Three principles must govern equitable taxation: 1st) Taxes must bear a definite relation to the income of the people and this relation must never be disturbed. 2nd) In order to conform with this first principle, taxes must be levied against income only, leaving all property, both real and personal, free from tax levies and thus not subject to confiscation. 3rd) The government must live within its income as a matter of sound business policy and remove forever the right to alter the tax principle. Under such conditions, government income is increased only by increasing the income of the people.

Israel system of taxation

The Israel system of taxation based upon the tithe complies with these principles. The tithe is a percentage of the income of the people while the word tithe means a tenth of that income, yet the returns are not limited to only a tenth of the income of the people. The fact is, the Bible sets forth three distinct tithes and when taken over a period of years amounts to about a fifth of a man's income or increase. Under the tithing system in Israel there were no tax levies made against property, either real or personal, but taxes were a percentage of a man's earnings or increase. When a man ceased to earn and failed to have any increase, he paid no taxes! His possessions were free from confiscation, and he could live and enjoy them though his earnings had ceased. Today we tax the possessions of a man and when the day comes that he ceases to earn, or have any profitable increase from his possessions, and is thus unable to meet these tax levies, his property is confiscated, and he may end his days on the poor farm. This we call "civilization." but under the God-given system a man was protected in his holdings as old age approached and was free from fear of destitution and want. 

Because of national failure to recognize and keep God's laws of taxation we suffer with excessive levies against property and possessions (any levy against property itself is excessive) resulting in oppression and economic trouble. When the day comes that the nations keep the Law of God, then the vexatious problem of taxation will be solved forever, and the administrators will live within their income which will be a percentage of the earning and the increase of the people. The people will then be able to pay all the tithes without hardship, for God will pour out a blessing of real prosperity upon the nation when they keep His laws. Meantime the individual must tithe his increase and use it in the service of the Lord. He is obliged to set aside a tenth of his income for this purpose and in order to be eligible for the blessings as set forth by Malachi the prophet (Malachi 3:10-18). Then when the nation observes the law, the tenth will be increased to a fifth to include the tax levies for the support of the government.

In these three important laws a perfect monetary system based upon the value of goods, services and the increase of our national wealth with the outlawing of usury and the institution of a system of taxation which is not confiscatory of property, the foundation will have been laid for an economic structure which in operation will be par excellent. Nothing that the socialists can conceive, nor the Communists desire can be compared to the institution of the God-given system which will out-capital capitalism in that all men will become capitalists and "sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it." In this statement is the assurance of food and drink, to replace the fear and want which is ever present with men under our present economy. 

Digest of the Divine Law by Howard B. Rand Chapter 8 Management and Labor

When men are under subjugation to another's will and command without adequate compensation for services rendered it is slavery no matter by what name such service may be called, for slavery is the involuntary servitude of one human being to another. Because this is so the number of wages received for services rendered and the right to sell one's services to whom one will is vital to the independence and standing of the laborer. 

Digest of the Divine Law by Howard B. Rand Chapter 9 Property Rights 

Digest of the Divine Law Appendix

Rethinking Christian Economics

Rethinking Christian Economics

By Todd Lewis

This paper will attempt to deal with an often under-discussed and misunderstood extension of the principle of Christian stewardship: Economics. Modern American Christians seem to espouse, whether implicitly or explicitly, one of three views on economics: 1) Laissez-faire Capitalism; 2) “Crony” Capitalism or 3) Socialism. Each of these economic models take modern economic systems and grafts Christianity onto them. They start with something else first and then add the Bible to it rather than grounding the systems upon the Bible itself. As in all world and life issues, the Christian is ought to ask first: What does the Bible say about this matter?

This paper is not exhaustive, as I have not dealt with all the possible formulations of Christian economics. Rather, I intend to bring central ideas to the reader’s attention and attempt to organize my thoughts on a hypothetical Christian economic order. In this paper, there are three main topics that I intend to cover: 1) Usury, 2) Distributism, and 3) Socialism. For transparency, I would like to inform the reader that I reject the first, have a qualified support for the second, and totally reject the third.

The Biblical Context of Usury

Usury is often considered the practice of charging unusually high rates of interest on money that is lent. Originally, however, usury denoted interest of any kind; that is, usury and interest were considered synonymous.  Thus, when I refer to usury throughout this paper, I will use the original definition.

In practice, usury requires the borrower to repay the lender a sum which is more than the principle of the amount borrowed. How much this additional amount will be is determined by the rate of interest and the period of capitalization (that is, the regularity at which the interest is added to the principle) agreed upon by the lender and borrower. The moral objection levied against usury asserts that if the borrower only borrowed the principle of the loan from the lender, then the borrower ought to be required to repay only the principle and no more. Within this framework, it is immoral for the lender to require more to be paid back to him than the original principle, for the lender would be in fact gaining money without doing any work. For example, if person A lends $1,000 to person B at 15% interest for 1 year to be capitalized annually, then the lender earns $150 without lifting a finger. The lender produced nothing and yet he earned money. It is understood that no man is entitled to either money which he has not worked for, or money that was not given to him. The borrower borrowed $1,000 dollars, not $1,150 dollars; therefore, the borrower does not owe the lender an additional $150. I will demonstrate that usury is a form of extortion and is hence not a legitimate obligation of the borrower. The Bible is very clear on the immorality and sinfulness of issuing loans with interest:

 

Exodus 22:25-27: 25 “If you lend money to any of My people who are poor among you, you shall not be like a moneylender to him; you shall not charge him interest. If you ever take your neighbor’s garment as a pledge, you shall return it to him before the sun goes down. For that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin. What will he sleep in? And it will be that when he cries to Me, I will hear, for I am gracious.”

Leviticus 25:35-38: “If one of your brethren becomes poor, and falls into poverty among you, then you shall help him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you. Take no usury or interest from him; but fear your God, that your brother may live with you. You shall not lend him your money for usury, nor lend him your food at a profit. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God.”

Nehemiah 5:6-10: 6 “And I became very angry when I heard their outcry and these words. After serious thought, I rebuked the nobles and rulers, and said to them, “Each of you is exacting usury from his brother.” So I called a great assembly against them. And I said to them, “According to our ability we have redeemed our Jewish brethren who were sold to the nations. Now indeed, will you even sell your brethren? Or should they be sold to us?” Then they were silenced and found nothing to say. Then I said, “What you are doing is not good. Should you not walk in the fear of our God because of the reproach of the nations, our enemies? I also, with my brethren and my servants, am lending them money and grain. Please, let us stop this usury!”

Psalms 15:5: “He who does not put out his money at usury, Nor does he take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things shall never be moved.”

Proverbs 28:8: “One who increases his possessions by usury and extortion Gathers it for him who will pity the poor.”

Jeremiah 15:10: “Woe is me, my mother, That you have borne me, A man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent for interest, Nor have men lent to me for interest. Every one of them curses me.”

 

Ezekiel 18:13: “If he has exacted usury Or taken increase– Shall he then live? He shall not live! If he has done any of these abominations, He shall surely die; His blood shall be upon him.”

Ezekiel 18:17: “Who has withdrawn his hand from the poor. And not received usury or increase, But has executed My judgments And walked in My statutes– He shall not die for the iniquity of his father; He shall surely live!”

Ezekiel 22:12: “In you they take bribes to shed blood; you take usury and increase; you have made profit from your neighbors by extortion, and have forgotten Me,” says the Lord God.”

The above verses provide a solid case that God did not want the Israelites to extort their fellow Israelites by means of usury. However, we see that in Deuteronomy 23:19-20: 19, although God prohibited usurious loans to His people, God allowed the Israelites to charge usurious loans to gentiles. This “loophole” was closed by Jesus Christ in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-42), as well as by his command to love our enemies in Matthew 5:44, as well as in Luke 6:27 and 6:35. We see that we should treat our enemies as the Samaritan treated the Jew in the parable. We see that we should love and pray for our enemies and do them no wrong – and if usury is wrong to apply to a man, it necessarily stands in opposition to Christ’s command. If a man will die because of lending usuriously to his brother in Ezekiel 18:13, how greater will his punishment be for usuriously lending to his enemy under the New Covenant?

Someone might object to my interpretation of the prohibition of usury by reference to the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:27 and Luke 19:13. For proper exegesis, scripture must interpret scripture. We see that the master wanted the third servant to put the money into the bank to earn interest. But was the point of the parable to teach us lending practices? Patently, no. The purpose of the parable is to teach us that if we use what God gave us, then He will entrust us with more, and that if we squander His gifts, then what He has given us will be taken from us. Christ’s words in Matthew 5:42 and Luke 6:34-35 clearly indicate that we should be liberal givers. Luke 6 even indicates that we should not even demand back the principle of the loan.

 

Now many will say that, “Yes we should give charitably with an open hand expecting nothing in return, but in the world of business and finance different rules apply.” This is not sound reasoning. Of course charity is interest-free, but loans and charity are clearly differentiated. We see that in Exodus 22:25-27 God is clearly not talking about charity, but a business transaction. For how could a loan ever be considered an act of charity? A loan is expected to be repaid, but charity is not. The prohibition of usury in business practices is also seen in Nehemiah 5:1-4, where heavily leveraged Jews were indebted for the mortgages of their land, vineyards and homes.  We also see in the Jewish Encyclopedia that according to scripture and rabbinical tradition that lending usuriously to a brother was prohibited in all cases: “There are three Biblical passages which forbid the taking of interest in the case of ‘brothers,’ but which permit, or seemingly enjoin, it when the borrower is a Gentile, namely, Ex. xxii. 24; Lev. xxv. 36, 37; Deut. xxiii. 20, 21. “^[1]

The prohibition of usury in the New Testament is extended to the unsaved as seen in Matthew 5:42 and Luke 6:34-35. We see that Jesus frequently expands the original promises and protections of the OT to cover not only Jews, but also Gentiles and the unsaved. Consider in Leviticus 19:18 that the Jews are commanded  to love their neighbors, yet the usage of “neighbors” here is actually a status reserved only for other Jews. Thus, the Jews were not required to love the Amalekites, Philistines or Edomites, among others; in fact, God ordered the Israelites to exterminate them. Followers of Christ are told also to love their neighbors in Matthew 5:43. Yet we learn in Luke 10:29-42 that our neighbor may be our worst enemy. We see that Christ has extended the definition of “neighbor” to even include those we consider enemies. It can be reasoned, then, that according to  Luke 6:34-35 the prohibition of usury includes everyone, because Christ does not specify Jew or Gentile when he states that we should lend to anyone who asks, without expecting repayment. Anyone must also include the Gentiles and the unsaved.

The critic might say that if we lend to anyone without even expecting the principle in return then we would all be taken advantage of and be left naked and bankrupt. This is not completely true. Of course Christ does not intend us to lend to people who 1) will spend the money on their pleasures, 2) who are affiliated with prohibited means of employment such as prostitution, pornography, drug dealing, the military industrial complex etc, or 3) people who will likely spend the money on criminal activity. We are to be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves. A lot of potential objections are already dealt with right here.

 

But what are we to do in the event that the person to whom we lent money does not repay the loan and seeks yet another loan from us? The answer is that we are not required to loan to that person again. Why? Firstly, we are not required to because retrospectively that person was unworthy of the loan in the first place, and secondly, given that the amount of money that most Christian’s possess is limited, the Christian should give where it will do the most good. If a Christian lends money to a person, then whether or not he continues to lend to that person will be contingent upon the borrower’s faithfulness to the agreement. If a Christian gives charity to a person, then whether or not he should give charity to that person in the future is contingent upon the how the recipient dispenses of the gift; that is, it ought to be based upon whether or not the charity accomplished its intended goal. In sum, Christians should seek out and aid those whose need is genuine. Furthermore, if a brother in a business transaction fails to pay back the loan and fails to make alternate provisions, then he has proven himself to be a liar and thief, thus forfeiting his right to the brotherhood. Liars have their place in the Lake of Fire Revelation 21:8.

Even with all this aside there is a lot of risk for a Christian lending money. For example, 1) he is not to expect even the principle of the loan back and 2) he is not allowed to leverage political power to obtain what is owed to him by another believer (1^st Corinthians 6:1-11).

We see that 1) usury was prohibited between Jews in the OT, 2) in the New Testament usury is prohibited in all cases, 3) we are not required to lend to spiritual reprobates and 4) in 1^st Corinthians 1:18, Paul writes: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Capitalism

Many Christians today either favor modern free-market capitalism or “crony” capitalism. Crony capitalism is distinguished between free-market capitalism in that the ‘crony’ capitalist earns wealth with the aid of government. A true capitalist succeeds solely in the basis of his entrepreneurial talent. Modern conservatism seeks to conflate crony capitalism with free-trade. Modern conservatives often assume that what we have in the US today is “free-market” capitalism when in fact it is no such thing. It is legalized mutual corruption of both the corporate and state apparatus. Such an economic model is based on nepotism and is obviously in conflict with Christian principles.

 

Free-market capitalism, which is endorsed by Classical Liberals, Randians, and Libertarians, is a much more competitive and just system than crony capitalism, but is not with out its flaws. As a disclaimer I do not reject the laws of economics (Say’s Law, Greshems Law etc.,), but I do reject the certain philosophical mindset that is often held by people who support free-markets.

The leading philosophical thinkers in free market ethics are, among others, Ayn Rand, Murry Rothbard and Walter Block. Both Ayn Rand and modern Libertarians are very hostile to the notion of charity and altruism. For example, Ayn Rand bases her ethics on rational egoism/self-interest, which is defined here:

“The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.

The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.”^[2]

Rand also rails against Altruism and Charity:

“What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.

“Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.

 

“Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”^[3]

“My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.”^[4]

We see an atheistic man-centered worldview in the writings of Rand. She takes the liberal dictum of “do whatever you want as long as it hurts no one” to its logical conclusion. Or in other words, man has no positive obligations to anyone other than himself. Rothbard, though he does not trumpet selfishness and shout down charity as Rand does, still affirms the former and agrees with Rand’s views on the latter, (i.e. that man has no positive obligation other than to himself).

“I must here again comment on Professor Averitt’s statement about “greed.” It’s true: greed has had a very bad press. I frankly don’t see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don’t see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, “greed” simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature given scarcity that man was born with. Greed will continue until the Garden of Eden arrives, when everything is superabundant, and we don’t have to worry about economics at all. We haven’t of course reached that point yet; we haven’t reached the point where everybody is burning his salary increases, or salary checks in general. So the question then becomes: what kind of greed are we going to have, “productive greed,” where people produce and voluntarily exchange their products with others? Or exploitative greed, organized robbery and predation, where you achieve your wealth at the expense of others? These are the two real alternatives.”^[5]

 

Rothbard monstrously redefines Charity as a self-interested greed:

“In fact, in the long run, the greatest “charity” is precisely not what we know by that name, but rather simple, “selfish” capital investment and the search for technological innovations. Poverty has been tamed by the enterprise and the capital investment of our ancestors, most of which was undoubtedly done for “selfish” motives. This is a fundamental illustration of the truth enunciated by Adam Smith that we generally help others most in those very activities in which we help ourselves.”^[6]

We see also in Walter Block in his “Defending the Undefendable” that charity is criticized, among other reasons, because:

“On of the great evils of charity, and one of the most cogent reasons for refusing to contribute to it, is that it interferes with the survival of the human species. According to the Darwinian principle of the “survival of the fittest,” those organisms most able to exist in a given environment will be “naturally selected” (by showing a greater propensity to live until the age of procreation, and thus be more likely to leave offspring). One result, in the long run, is a species whose members have a greater ability to survive. This does not imply that the strong “kill off” the weak, as has been alleged. It merely suggests that the strong will be more successful than the weak in the procreation of the species. Thus the ablest perpetuate themselves and the species thrives.”^[7]

We can see that modern capitalist philosophy is based on what is called “enlightened self-interest” or egoism. The problem for a Christian in this view is that man is the agent that determines value, goodness and morality. The egoist asks himself first how does this act benefit me, and if it does not then I will not perform it. Such a view is contradictory to the Christian requirement to love thy neighbor; see Matthew 19:9, Matthew 23:39, Mark 12:31, Mark 12:33, Luke 10:27, Romans 13:8-9, Romans 13:10, Galatians 5:14 and James 2:8, accepting wrong Romans 12:17,  1^st Corinthians 6:7, 1^st Thessalonians 5:15, and 1^st Peter 3:9.

 

The notion of loving one’s neighbor cannot be made compatible with running someone out of business in unlimited competition for the sake of personal gain. Is it in accord with Christian values to actively seek drive your brother out of business and render him unable to sustain himself and his family? This does not mean that one should not produce the highest quality goods possible which in turn might drive people out of business. Quality work should be produced not with the intent to destroy livelihood, but in order to do all things for the glory of God; see Colossians 3:17.  For the egoistic capitalist the world is seen in terms of conflict, i.e., between competitors. If people  look at the ruthless competition that is present in today’s marketplace as a kind of bloodless Darwinian struggle, it is plain to see that the ruthless desire to win at any price is the rotten fruit that necessarily grows out of  this “enlightened” self-interest. If self-interest becomes the basis for morality, why stop short of gratifying your self-interest at the expense of physically harming others? For example, in the 19th century American West the competing railroads would hire thugs to prevent each other’s crews from laying tracks, going so far as to  tear up each other’s tracks in order to get the upper hand.[8] [9]

In short, such a competitive mindset is inimical to the love of one’s brother. We see the ideal of Christian love towards brothers expressed in the Amish.  The products that the Amish are well known for, wood work and dairy products, are of the highest quality, but their goal is not to destroy the livelihood of their brothers. One could argue that this form of Christian economics is actually more efficient than traditional capitalist competition. Donald Kraybill explains in “Amish Enterprise: Plowshares to Profits” that while most small business fail, most Amish business succeed. The success is traced to numerous individual causes, but the major cause is that the Amish are a closely knit and disciplined community that helps its members out in times of need and trouble.

False Distributism

Distributism is the ideal that the economic goal of society should be to obtain the widest distribution of property amongst the most people. The end I agree to, but the means typically proposed to achieve that end I do not agree to. Distributists in theory are almost libertarian in their desire to decentralize society, but in fact are more often than not crypto-socialists. If one visits the Distributist Review you will see the same flawed Marxist theories used ostensibly to decentralize property. But one cannot purse Christian ends by Marxist means, as I will discuss in depth later. We see John Médaille^[10], David W. Cooney^[11], Hilaire Belloc^[12], and Thomas Storck^[13] all arguing for the grossly unjust notion of a graduated income tax. In Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto his second plank was the implementation of a progressive income tax: “2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” This is unjust in that it charges the rich man more than the poor and privileges the poor over the rich. We see in Exodus 30:15 that when YHWH required the Children of Israel to pay for the offering it was a flat rate of a half-shekel. The rich were not to pay more than the poor nor the poor more than the rich. When Samuel describes to the Israelites what the tyranny of a king would look like, he stated in 1^st Samuel 8:15: “He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants.” It is interesting to note the Children of Israel were required to tithe a tenth of their goods to God Leviticus 18:26. We see that when a state seeks to take more than a tenth of our earnings it is usurping God’s sovereignty. If God demanded a tenth of Israel’s produce, then the upper cap of taxation is set. If a state seeks a tenth or more of a person’s income, it is claiming that itself is greater than God. When Distributists endorse plunder under the guise of a progressive income tax they are rebelling against God’s justice and claim to be god’s themselves.

 

We see in Exodus 23:3, Leviticus 19:15, and Deuteronomy 16:19 that justice is blind and one is not to be partial to a poor man. According to Scripture, the Distributists are not inclined to justice, but to unrighteousness for they pervert justice toward the poor and take the blind fold off the eyes of justice. Why should a person be excessively taxed for having more than others? How wealthy are some of the proponents of Distributism? Why don’t they sell of all their superfluities of life and live a Spartan existence and give the surplus to the poor? Rather than personally acting out what they claim to believe, they instead plunder the rest of us through the violence of the state.  In his debate with George Bernard Shaw entitled “Do We Agree”^[14], Chesterton foolishly argues that the coal industry should be nationalized by the British government. Mr. Chesterton’s arguments look quite silly after seeing the mismanagement of coal under English nationalization in 1946, which was undone through privatization in 1994 under the Coal Industry Act of 1994. This debate shows us again the crypto socialist nature of Distributism.

The other pseudo-socialist aspect of Distributism can be found in the works of David V. Cooney^[15], Stratford Caldecott^[16],  Hilaire Belloc^[17], Thomas Stork^[18], and Angus Sibley^[19] who argue for Marx’s Eighth Plank: “Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies especially for agriculture.”

I am not opposed to Church influencing economic action and exerting a Godly influence in the marketplace, but I am opposed to economic charlatans who complain about corporate monopolies, granted by government, and seek to solve the problem by imposing government-granted monopolies of unions and guilds to resolve the resulting inequity.

In the Old Catholic encyclopedia, two types of guilds are mentioned: Merchant and Craftsmen Guilds. Merchant guilds were monopolies as described here:

“These differed from their predecessors, the religious or frith guilds, by being established primarily for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining the privilege of carrying on trade. Having secured this privilege the guilds guarded their monopoly jealously.”^[20]

 

“The merchant guilds possessed extensive powers, including the control and monopoly of all the trades in the town, which involved the power of fining all traders who were not members of the guild for illicit trading, and of inflicting punishment for all breaches of honesty or offences against the regulations of the guild.”^[21]

“The merchants’ guilds aimed at securing commercial advantages for their members and obtaining the monopoly of the trade of some country or some particular class of goods. Not alone in the German cities, but also in all foreign countries where German commerce prevailed, corporations of this sort, guilds, or Hansa (the word Hansa has the same signification as guild)”^[22]

The craftsmen guilds sought to break down monopolies:

“Seeing that the merchant guilds had become identical with the municipality, the craftsmen, ever increasing in numbers, struggled to break down the trading monopoly of the merchant guilds and to win for themselves the right of supervision over their own body. The weavers and fullers were the first crafts to obtain royal recognition of their guilds, and by 1130 they had guilds established in London, Lincoln, and Oxford. Little by little through the next two centuries they broke down the power of the merchant guilds, which received their death-blow by the statute of Edward III which in 1335 allowed foreign merchants to trade freely in England.”^[23]

Given that craftsmen guilds lead to the breakdown of the guild system in favor of free trade, I doubt the Distributists have any love lost for them. The Distributist answer to corporate monopolies is to have more corporate monopolies, only these corporate monopolies are good because the ‘good’ Catholics run them. Yet, if guilds were so great why did Pope Pius VII abolish guilds in the Papal States in 1807?^[24]

Laborers forming fraternities or charities to take care of each other's interests is not an un-Christian idea, but coercive and monopolistic enterprises are exactly what needs to be avoided, and to believe that another set of coercive monopolistic enterprises will counter the inequity is like believing that two wrongs can make a right.

 

Aristotle and Proto-Distributism

The positive argument for private property can be found in Book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle argues that man will work harder for the sake of what he owns. If all his possessions are held in collectively, then the tragedy of the commons will arise whereby resources and infrastructure are depleted but not replenished. This exploitation occurs because no one can lay claim to any of the produce of the land exclusively and each individual is given incentives to extract as much benefit as he can as quickly as he can. Furthermore, the virtues of continence and liberality cannot possibly be developed in a communist society. If all women are held in common, then the virtue of continence cannot be developed and if all land is held in common than liberality cannot be developed. The virtue of continence in general is related to self-control and in particular to sexual self-control. The virtue of liberality is giving from one’s own store to another at the right time, to the right person, for the right reason. Obviously both virtues would be impossible in a state of communism. Aristotle argues, correctly, that man’s desires are ultimately insatiable because they are unlimited, and thus they must be restrained by reason and force of habit, both of which being derived from education and the law. Widely distributed property is desirable because having a middle class is desirable. Aristotle points out in Book IV that the middle class is the mean between rich and poor, the former being in excess of wealth and the latter in a deficiency of wealth. The former seek to acquire total control over society, while the latter being envious are ungovernable. The middle class is thus in a position to serve as an impartial judge in disputes between the rich and poor. For a middle class to exist it stands to reason that property must not be concentrated in the hands of a few, but be widely distributed. The middle class has just enough property to avoid poverty, but not so much property that they can act despotically against the less fortunate while avoiding and perverting the law.

Having outlined the secular argument for widely distributed property, I will now turn to Holy Scripture. We see in the Pentateuch that God feared the concentration of power in general and the concentration of property in particular. In Leviticus 25:10-13 we are told that Israel was required after every fifty years to return the land to its original owner. This mechanism was set in place by God to keep property from gathering into the hands of a few men. God’s law against usury serves the same purpose. We see in Leviticus 25:23-28 that if a man has to sell his property to pay some debt, then 1) his nearest of kin is to buy the land back or 2) the man who received the property as a pledge of debt should, once the means of the indebted man have recovered, sell the land back to him or 3) if both means fail the land is to be returned during the year of Jubilee. We see in Numbers 36:1-13 while Zelophehad’s daughters were married into the tribe of their cousins, Zelophehad’s property remained in his tribe and was not transferred to his brother. God did not want property to switch hands from tribe to tribe. We also see the same principle at work in Judges 21:17 where for the sake of an inheritance the errant tribe of Benjamin is allowed to essentially kidnap the daughters of Shiloh at Schecem to be their wives. It was considered so important that the land apportioned to Benjamin not leave their control it was necessary to ensure the tribe’s survival.

 

The basic principle of distributed property is clearly seen in the OT. Therefore, given the best secular wisdom found in Aristotle and in divine wisdom in Holy Scripture, the moral and utilitarian reasons for distributed property can be clearly seen.

The Commons

I also contend that the medieval concept of the commons should be restored or at least its spirit. For in the words of Ivan Illich:

“People called commons those parts of the environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of community respect. People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.”^[25]

The commons are a place that is not commoditized or bought or sold, but is set in place for the sustenance of family life for those suffering from either chronic or terminal poverty (due to illness or injury or physical disability). It is a sacred place where sacred time and work is kept. It is an attempt to be faithful to the divine command of the gleanings or, in Aristotelian terms, to the public land of a well-balanced commonwealth, which ideally contains both public and private land.

The danger of having people being employed by corporations or government is that when they are fired or their wages are cut they usually have no alternative to fall back on. If a man had his “three acres and a cow,” to quote Chesterton, he would have something to fall back on so as to endure the vicissitudes of life. Or, to quote Lewis:

“I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne, that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?”^[26]

 

To be free man, one must own the land he stands on and be able to leave an inheritance for his children (Proverbs 13:22). All forms of property tax, inheritance tax, and death tax are unbiblical, for the state has no claim to a mans property (1^st Kings 21:1-29).

The Anti-Christian Nature of Socialism

Socialism is incompatible with Christianity for two reasons: 1) its founders were Satanists/Atheists and 2) it destroys the Christian conception of charity.

Marx, Bakunin and Proudhon, all founders of Marxism and Anarchism were self-styled Satanists. In his younger years, Marx wrote a series of poems expressing his hatred of God, his desire to destroy because he could not create, and the selling of his soul to Satan. Below are excerpts from his poetic works:

On Hating God:

“Heaven I would comprehend
I would draw the world to me;
Living, hating, I intend
That my star shine brilliantly …”^[27]

On Destruction:

“… Worlds I would destroy forever,
Since I can create no world;
Since my call they notice never …”^[28]

“Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,
Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.
Every word of mine is fire and action.
My breast is equal to that of the Creator.”^[29]

“I shall build my throne high overhead
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark — superstitious dread
For its marshal — blackest agony.” ^[30]

 

Satanism:

The Fiddler:

“See this sword?
the prince of darkness
Sold it to me.”^[31]

“With Satan I have struck my deal,
He chalks the signs, beats time for me
I play the death march fast and free.”^[32]

We see in Marx’s Oulanem, A Tragedy in the words of Oulanem his full hatred of God, creation and humanity:

“… I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind:
Ha! Eternity! She is an eternal grief …
Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,
Made to be the foul-calendars of Time and Space,
Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,
So that there shall be something to ruin …
If there is a something which devours,
I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins-
The world which bulks between me and the Abyss
I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
I’ll throw my arms around its harsh reality:
Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,
And then sink down to utter nothingness,
Perished, with no existence — that would be really living!”

“… the leaden world holds us fast,
And we are chained, shattered, empty, frightened,
Eternally chained to this marble block of Being …
and we —
We are the apes of a cold God.”

Further reading should be directed to Wurmbrand’s Marx and Satan. Such ungodly hostility seems to be the product of a demon, and not a man.

 

On Proudhon

 “On the other hand, Proudhon understood and felt liberty much better than he. Proudhon, when not obsessed with metaphysical doctrine, was a revolutionary by instinct; he adored Satan and proclaimed Anarchy.”^[33]

“The spirit of analysis, that untiring Satan who continually questions and denies, must sooner or later look for proof of religious dogmas. Now, whether the philosopher determine the idea of God, or declare it indeterminable; whether he approach it with his reason, or retreat from it, — I say that this idea receives a blow; and, as it is impossible for speculation to halt, the idea of God must at last disappear. Then the atheistic movement is the second act of the theological drama; and this second act follows from the first, as effect from cause. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” says the Psalmist. Let us add, And their testimony dethrones him.”^[34]

On Bakunin:

“But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”^[35]

“God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he bad induced them to commit; for, immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see Bible): “Behold, man is become as of the Gods, knowing both good and evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become immortal like Ourselves.”^[36]

We see that the Russian anarchist Nikolai Ishutin named the inner circle of his anarchist organization “Hell”^[37]. Such blasphemes are not uncommon for the Socialists. Their atheism or Satanism is manifested in their hatred of God and man. Because they cannot create with their own hands, they seek to destroy that which has been made by the hands of others. That any Christian should be so stupid to believe the words of such animals (for I will not call them men), to believe that this monstrous ideology is compatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ just shows us the depths of human ignorance and depravity.

 

Ivan Illich in his “We the People Interview” summed the problem of socialism thus:

“Then, in 300 and something, finally the Church got recognition. The bishops were made into something like magistrates. The first things those guys do, these new bishops, is creating houses of hospitality, institutionalizing what can be only what was given to us as a vocation by Jesus, as a personal vocation, institutionalizing it, creating xenodocaea [?], roofs, refuges, for foreigners. Immediately, very interesting, quite a few of the great Christian thinkers of that time, the year 300, 1600 years ago, John Chrysostom is one, shout, if you do that, if you institutionalize charity, if you make charity or hospitality into an act of a non person, a community, Christians will cease to remain famous for what we are now famous for, for having always an extra mattress, a crust of old bread and a candle, for him who might knock at their door. But, for political reasons, the Church became, from the year 400, 500 on, the main device for a thousand years roughly of proving that the State can be Christian by paying the Church to take care institutionally of small fractions of those who had needs, relieving the ordinary Christian household of the most uncomfortable duty of having a door, having a threshold, but being open for him who might knock and whom I might choose. This is what I speak about as institutionalization of charity. Historical root of the idea of services, of the service economy. Now, I cannot imagine such a system being reformable even though it might be your task and the task of courageous people whom I greatly admire for the impossible task they take on to work at its reform, at making the evils the service system carries with it as small as possible. What I would have chosen and as Mitchum and other friends have chosen together as our task is to awaken in us the sense of what this Palestinian, I say always instead of saying Samaritan, example meant. I can choose. I have to choose. I have to make my mind up whom I will take into my arms, to whom I will lose myself, whom I will treat as that vis-a-vis that face into which I look which I lovingly touch with my fingering gaze, from whom I accept being who I am as a gift.”^[38]

 

Welfarism, reaching back to Christendom, reduces the poor man to a social problem. The poor man ceases to be a fellow human being made in the image of God to be saved and fed, but a social problem to be solved, a statistic and a manifestation of a socio-historical class. Such terms are dehumanizing and render man a cog in a machine rather than the Jew or the Samaritan.

The failure of collectivism is seen in the words of Robert Dale, the son of Robert Owen of New Harmony: “All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle, must work their own downfall, for by this unjust plan of remuneration they must of necessity eliminate the valuable members –who find there services reaped by the indigent – and retain only the improvident, unskilled and vicious members.”^[39]

Allow  me to outline for the reader the Christian view of work and remuneration and then compare it with Socialism.

We see in Exodus 20:9-10 that people should labor six days and rest on the seventh because God worked for six days and rested on the seventh. For a Christian his work is an imitation of God’s work of Creation. We are co-creators with God. We see in Proverbs 6:6 and Proverbs 26:14 that God hates a sluggard and wants man to work. In Ephesians 4:28, Paul tells us that the new man in Christ does no steal any longer and in Ephesians 6:6 and Colossians 3:22-23 that we work not for ourselves or to please men, but to please God. Work is part of our worship to God. Our work must be of the highest caliber and we must engage in work as a duty toward God. In 1^st Timothy 5:8 we see that a man who does not provide for his family is an apostate worse than a pagan. We see also in Ephesians 4:28 that a man should stop stealing so he can earn his own living in order that he might have something to give to a needy brother. In taking care of the elderly, specifically widows, we see in 1^st Timothy 5:1-16 that if one is found to be a widow having grandchildren, we are to first take care of her; only if she has no living relatives is the Church to step in and care for her.

 

We see that work is holy and pleasing to God and that charity is based on subsidiary. Subsidiary is the principle that solutions to problems are to be first sought within the social level that they arise in. Only after an inability to solve the problem is a solution sought at the next level of social organization. For example, if a family has some issues, then a solution should first be sought within the family; if that fails, then friends and community; and if that fails, lastly the Church. However, we are not to take our grievances toward our brothers and sisters to courts of the state, per 1^st Corinthians 6:1-6.

Socialism is by nature satanic. Socialism seeks to make a god out of the state. It destroys the family by removing the necessity for children. As Paul says,” first learn to show piety at home and to repay their parents.” The state promises to take care of the children’s parents, obviating them of the need to fulfill the familial duty. In usurping the role of familial piety, the state is preventing Christians from developing this Christian virtue. By usurping the provision of one’s parents the state is rendering those who take its services as worse than infidels since children delegate the wellbeing of their parents to the state. The state subsidizes sin as anyone can see with the government’s liberal provision of condoms and subsidies for single mothers and homosexuals. A basic rule of economics is: “You get what you subsidize”. If the state really wanted to eliminate poverty and single-motherhood then it would stop paying for such behaviors.

The virtue of charity is undermined when the government taxes you to such a degree that you have no money to give for the provision of the needy; honest labor, which is the Apostle Paul’s solution to stealing^[40], is also penalized since, one is squeezed so hard that in order to make ends met he is tempted to steal; this in turn removes the disincentive to steal. Stealing is in fact encouraged since the government itself is engaged in legalized theft.

If people see the government  stealing they are 1) discouraged from working since they will lose the produce of their labor and 2) inclined to view theft as an ever-lesser offense. A Paul declares in 1^st Corinthians 6:10, thieves shall have no inheritance in the kingdom of God. In short, the socialist state seeks to be God in that it demands more than 10% of our income, renders it impossible for one to practice familial piety and charity, and removes the disincentive to steal.

 

In conclusion I have shown that Christian economics is neither capitalist or communist. Both systems are based on ungodly humanist assumptions. The distributists are a disappointing providing an alternative, due to their crypto-socialism. A true Christian economics is the only truly radical solution to both capitalism and communism and the only one able to truly meet the needs of individuals.

 

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^[1] “Usury”, last date modified January 30, 2014,  http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14615-usury

^[2] “Selfishness,”  last date modified January 30, 2014, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/selfishness.html

^[3] “Altruism,” last date modified January 30, 2014, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html

^[4] “Charity,” last date modified January 30, 2014, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/charity.html

^[5] “A Future of Peace and Capitalism,”  last date modified January 30, 2014,  http://mises.org/daily/1559

^[6] “Ten Ethical Objections to the Market Economy,” last date modified January 30, 2014,  http://mises.org/daily/1469

^[7] Walter Block, Defending the Undefendable, ( Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 129-130.

[8] G. J. Graves. “The Placer Country Railroad War,” Last modified January 1, 2003. http://cprr.org/Museum/Ephemera/RIC_Rail_1864.html

[9] ” The Colorado Railroad War.” Last modified 2014.

http://www.explore-old-west-colorado.com/Colorado-Railroad-War.html

^[10] “Taxes Fair or Foul,”  last date modified January 30, 2014,  http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2010/10/taxes-fair-or-foul/#comments

^[11] “Justice fairness and taxation part four,”  last date modified January 30, 2014, http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2011/04/justice-fairness-and-taxation-part-four/

^[12] “The differential tax,”  last date modified January 30, 2014, http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2011/07/the-differential-tax/

^[13] “A short primer for protesters,”  last date modified January 30, 2014, http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2011/10/a-short-primer-for-protestors/

^[14] “Do We Agree?,”  last date modified January 30, 2014, http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/debate.txt

^[15] “The Common Good,”  last date modified January 30, 2014,  http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2012/08/the-common-good/

^[16]   “A Distributist Education,” last date modified January 30, 2014, http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2012/07/a-Distributist-education/

^[17]  “The Guild System,” last date modified January 30, 2014, http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2011/11/the-guild-system/

^[18] “Jobs and the minimum wage,”  last date modified January 30, 2014, http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2011/09/jobs-and-the-minimum-wage/

^[19] “Errors of Libertarian Economics,”  last date modified January 30, 2014, http://Distributistreview.com/mag/2012/07/errors-of-libertarian-economics/

^[20]  “Guilds,” last date modified January 30, 2014,  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07066c.htm

^[21] ibid

^[22] ibid

^[23] ibid

^[24] ibid

^[25] Address at the “Asahi Symposium Science and Man – The computer-managed Society,” Tokyo, Japan (21 March 21 1982); as published in The CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1983)

^[26] “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”, last modified Janurary 30, 2014, http://cslewisjrrtolkien.classicalautographs.com/cslewis/bookexcerpts/willingslaveswelfarestate.html

^[27] “Young Marx,”  last modified Janurary 30, 2014,  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Young_Marx.pdf

^[28] ibid

^[29] Richard Wumbrand, “Marx and Satan,” Living Sacrifice Book Co (December 1986), 13.

^[30] “Marx’s Path to Communism”, last modified January 30, 2014, http://mises.org/daily/6179/Marxs-Path-to-Communism

^[31] “The Player”

^[32] “The Fiddler,” last modified Janurary 30, 2014, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/marx/1837-wil.htm

^[33] “Recollections on Marx and Engels,”  last modified Janurary 30, 2014, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/mebio.htm

^[34] “The Philosophy of Poverty:VOLUME FIRST.INTRODUCTION.,” last modified Janurary 30, 2014, http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/philosophy/intro.htm

^[35] “ God and the State,” last modified Janurary 30, 2014,  http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/ch01.htm

^[36] ibid

^[37] Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, Princeton University Press (February 1, 1990),  41

^[38] “We the People, KPFA ,”  last modified Janurary 30, 2014,   http://www.wtp.org/archive/transcripts/ivan_illich_jerry.html

^[39] George Browning Lockwood and Charles Allen Prosser, The New Harmony Movement, Augustus M Kelley Pubs; New issue of 1905 ed edition (June 1905), 185

^[40] Ephesians 4:28

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Towards a True Economic Third Position

Towards a True Economic Third Position

By Todd Lewis

 

There are at present many efforts to create a third position in economics, most of which go from the spectrum of kooky voodoo economics such as Social Credit Theory on the right and Participatory economics on the left, and essentially socialists in third position clothing such as syndicalism and fascism. The goal of this essay is not to deconstruct these false third position models, but to offer a true third position. This will essentially be similar to distributism, though I have some objections to distributism as it is now popularly formulated. For more on that see my essay “Rethinking Christian Economics.”

The Biblical Economic Model

When we discuss what economic model we should have we first need to discuss what is the nature and end of man. If man has no nature and/or no end, then any old system should work since man would be infinitely malleable and able to fit into any system with sufficient conditioning, ergo none would be better than another. This I reject. I agree with the Shorter Westminster Catechism that, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” I will not attempt in this article to give justifications for this assumption, merely assume it as the first principle of anthropology.

If we accept this basic principle of anthropology, we then look to the Bible to see what end God directs us to. If we use biblical principles we see that many forms of economic action are condemned as sin. The most significant change would be the outlawing of usury. We see prohibitions in Leviticus 25:36-37; Nehemiah 5:7-10; Psalms 15:5; Proverbs 28:8; Ezekiel 18:8-17; Ezekiel 22:12. We see in Psalms 28:8 and Ezekiel 22:12 that God views usury as akin to extortion. There was an exception for Jews to lend money to gentiles at usury in Deuteronomy 23:20. I believe that Christ in his Parable of the Good Samaritan where the term neighbor is expanded to include not only Jews, but also gentiles closed that gap, since exchanging usury is not a form of love. We see in Luke 6:35 that Christ demands we do not lend expecting anything in return. With such evidences I think that the Gentile loophole has been closed to a complete prohibition on charging of usury.

 

We see in Psalms 24:1 that God owns the earth which implies that property taxes are immoral since the government has no right to extract profit from what it does not own. Eminent domain (legalized state theft of property) is immoral where we see Ahab and Jezebel in 1st Kings 21 first murdering Naboth and then stealing his property, which was given to him as a trust by his father. As we see in Proverbs 13:22 that one should leave an inheritance for one’s children which would imply that the death tax and inheritance tax is immoral. We see in Numbers 36 the right of women to inherit property. From 1st Timothy 5:3-16, in which Paul exhorts families to take care of their elders and if the widow has no family or their family is unable to care for them then the church should do so, we can derive the principle of subsidiarity: a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” Socialism is fundamentally evil in that, insofar as it destroys private property and establishes a welfare regime, one is correspondingly less able to maintain one’s elders.

Private property is the bedrock of civilization, as Aristotle observed, men take better care of what they possess and that private property facilitates two virtues: continence and liberality. Based on the principle that no man can live in isolation for only animals and gods can live self-sufficiently in isolation, Aristotle argues that people come together to form families and families come together to form states (in his case city-states). We see that in capitalism the individual is the focus of the economy, in socialism the collective, and in distributism the family. The family is the smallest self-sufficient unit in society and thus is the wellspring of society. The word economics comes from the two Greek words Oikos (Household) and Nomos (Law). We see that historically economics was concerned with providing enough for each household to take care of its needs. This principle of self-sufficiency is the foundation of further civilizational development and as such the economy should seek to encourage self-sufficiency. In Joshua 14 and 15 we see that God desires tribes (extended households) to have land to be self-sufficient. In fact that land is not to be sold; for with the implementation of Jubilee every 50 years and the story of Naboth, we see that God desired the dispersion of property not its concentration.

 

How do we Get There?

Clearly our current economic model is not distributism and is a mixture of capitalism and socialism with seemingly the worst of both. I propose three possible methods used individually or in conjunction that could allow a transition from our current mixed-economy to a distributist economy: (1) prosecuting firms for criminal action and restoring to the victims fourfold (Luke 19:8); (2) the example shown in the Peasant’s Land Bank, and (3) the Land-to-Tiller Program.

I propose that firms that have engaged in criminal action be prosecuted and their assets be redistributed to the aggrieved parties fourfold, what I call the Lazarus Plan. This would work to divest the corporations of their ill-gotten gain and serve to chip away at concentrated wealth.
The Peasant’s Land Bank was an effort by secretary of finance Nikolai Bunge to give the peasants access to credit to purchase land from the Boyars (nobles) and in conjunction with this effort Stolypin realized that the lack of a middle class would only aid in the fomenting of rebellion and economic stagnation. After seeing the Revolution of 1905 he correctly identified the need for agrarian form. Seeing that a middle class is founded on independent property holders they sought to purchase land from the boyars to distribute the land back to the peasants. While marred by corruption and inefficiencies the process was largely successful, and by 1913 the bank had helped the peasants acquire 46 million acres. For more on the Peasant’s Land Bank and other Russian agrarian reforms see Russian Peasants and Village Lands, 1861-1917: A Summary Compiled by Alan Kimball.

In Taiwan’s Land to the Tiller Program, property was peacefully and lawfully transferred from the Chinese landlords to the peasants. Chaing’s land reform can be understood in four parts: (1) leasing to the peasants land owned by the government, (2) reduce rent to 37.5%, (3) selling government land to peasants, (4) Land to the Tiller Program. The Land to the Tiller program transferred land from the landlords to the peasants by compensating the value of the property from the landlords with 70% of the price being paid in rice and potatoes and the remaining 30% in stocks in rising government firms.

 

There are many possible peaceful and lawful means by which to transfer property in a more equitable way to the people without the needless bloodshed demanded by lunatic socialists and anarchists.

How Do We Stay There?

I have basically two means by which this property regime can be maintained. Firstly, I accept Aristotle’s notion that while man’s desires are potentially infinite, the number of goods available in the world are finite, and that man’s desires should be curtailed by education. So we begin by educating people to be content with what they need. As a practical legal method I argue for a return of biblical Sabbath year and Jubilee. We see in Deuteronomy 15:1-6 that every seven years (Sabbath Year) the tribes of Israel were required by God to free slaves, admittedly only Hebrew slaves, and forgive debts. In Leviticus 25:8-12 we see that land should be returned to its original owner. In practical terms Jubilee could be modeled in using the concept of usufruct. I will use the Investopedia definition of usufruct:

“A legal right accorded to a person or party that confers the temporary right to use and derive income or benefit from someone else’s property. Usufruct is usually conferred for a limited time period or until death. While the usufructuary has the right to use the property, he or she cannot damage or destroy it, or dispose of the property.”

If we consider limiting the time period to fifty years I think we have a rough approximation of usufruct-Jubilee contract.

Conclusion

I assert that third position economics on both the right and the left goes from either kookiness or socialism. I propose an alternative biblical/Aristotelian distributism model. I have provided a few possibilities by which our current property regime can be legally transformed into this new property regime, and how such a regime can be maintained, which is more than any anarcho-socialist on the Left or social credit theorist on the Right can do.

Christ's Attack on The Temple-Banking System

Christ's Attack on The Temple-Banking System

In this short post I want to show how Jesus driving out the “money-changers” is connected to the ancient banking system, and why it was a larger factor in Christ’s crucifixion than is typically made known.

The general narrative of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple is that he was simply chasing out greedy people trading in the name of God. This is an obfuscation of the background of the story. Jesus said that the “Kingdom of God is within you”, and proceeded to engage in iconoclasm against the banking system by flipping over “money-changing” tables inside of a “temple-bank”.

In the ancient world, banks were inside of religious temples. State-sponsored coinage was protected by divine spirits or gods inside of the temples. This gave people a sense of security to deposit their coinage at the bank, and it also gave the banking system legitimacy. The temple-bank system operated in a large network across antiquity from Greece, to Egypt, to Babylonia, all protected by gods and spirits. The first bank was believed to be in Babylonia in the temple of the sun god.

Far before the time of Christ, Israel had already collapsed into corruption and materialism. Old Testament writers like Amos refer to paid-off leaders, economic injustice, rejection of God and the general enforcement of all things corrupt (sounds familiar). Israel assimilated into yester-year’s system of “globalist banking” under the Roman empire. As many of us know, this stage in the archetype of empire has a particular flavor to it. All things become a subverted financial utility of the empire, including religion. This was the environment that Christ was born into.

Around 150 B.C. there is a reference to the temple-bank from the apocrypha. II Maccabees Ch. 3 tells of a story about a banking dispute involving the Roman “Royal Treasury” confiscating money out of the Jerusalem temple-bank, which then claims two angels and a golden-armor wearing apparition appear to protect the money:

It was utterly unthinkable to defraud those who had placed their trust in the sanctity of the place and in the sacred inviolability of a temple venerated all over the world.

But Heliodorus, because of the orders he had from the king, said that in any case this money must be confiscated for the royal treasury.

Priests prostrated themselves before the altar in their priestly robes, and called toward heaven for the one who had given the law about deposits to keep the deposits safe for those who had made them.

But just as Heliodorus was arriving at the treasury with his bodyguards, the Lord of spirits and all authority produced an apparition so great that those who had been bold enough to accompany Heliodorus were panic-stricken at God’s power and fainted away in terror.

(“Prostrated” meant to pray)

In the time of Christ, The Sanhedrin (high council of Israel) and the “Roman procurator” managed the temple-banks in Jerusalem on behalf of Rome. Both became very wealthy from managing the banks, and collecting tribute for themselves. From their view, Christ’s iconoclastic attack on the bank was an attack on the Sanhedrin’s personal finances (the people who later had Christ executed), because it was showing that the emperor had no clothes. Someone can just waltz in and flip everything over, with no divine lightning bolts raining down to save their money (also taking the banking out of the temple would make them immediately lose money). This would also explain the accusations against Jesus for “blasphemy” from the Sanhedrin, because he had “blasphemed” against their banking scam.

The same is true of Socrates’ questioning of the Greek myths, which caused him to be accused of “corrupting the children” before being executed. If the gods of Greece are under scrutiny, the legitimacy of the bank is in danger.

The high-priest of the Sanhedrin named “Caiaphas” was directly running the banking inside the temple himself. He was also the primary conspirator in the trial of Jesus. The temple was giving out loans that benefitted the elite and was “draining the economic surplus out of the rural economy”, which is where Jesus was from in Galilee [3]. So there was already economic resentment from the poor as referred to in Jesus’ sermon against the Sanhedrin in Matthew 23:14-19:

14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

16 Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!

John 11:47-48 refers to the Sanhedrin’s fear of Jesus damaging their political capital:

46 But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done.

47 Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles.

48 If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.

49 And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all,

50 Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.

12 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, 13 And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. - Matthew 21:12

The mention of dove sellers here is significant because the poor used doves for sacrifice at the Jerusalem-Bank, meaning it was the sacrifice of doves that helped to give the coinage inside the bank legitimacy. The dove is also connected to Jesus’ baptism with John the Baptist, when the Holy Spirit descends “like a dove” from Heaven to Jesus. The dove is a common symbol in The Bible, often alluding to hope, life, loyalty, and love. I’m sure you can connect the symbolism here, especially with Jesus’ emphasis on helping the poor. Christ had come to liberate people from the empire’s illusions by delivering the Holy Spirit (the true dove).

Part of this illusion was also that illness (especially leprosy) in this time was correlated to the sickness of the soul. Christ’s lack of fear or disdain for people with leprosy and his focus on healing them only further legitimized his actions at the temple.

The enchantment of money (or power) is one of the oldest sins in Christian thinking and elsewhere. It used to be understood that the irrationality and illusions required to maintain corrupt financial practices would trickle down and create mental neurosis in the psyche of society. Christ’s actions at the temple were meant to break this illusion by differentiating God from coinage. This is partially the reason Jesus was crucified four days after his actions at the temple, because it was going to hurt their political and financial scam.

 

I hope in this brief post I demonstrated that the cleansing of the temple was more than just driving out a few greedy merchants and money-changers. This was an iconoclastic demonstration against yester-year’s globalist banking illusion to separate God from money.

Sources:

1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3264170?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A3aa61d7180856cfad12eb39e2fb339ed&seq=1

 

2. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2113028?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A0f6481caabc6e50cb2299f94aa487af5&seq=1

 

3. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222015000200038

 

JEWISH SECRET SOCIETY CONSPIRED TO CRUCIFY JESUS

AN ANCIENT SECRET SOCIETY KILLED JESUS CHRIST

 

We will demonstrate today that the Jewish religious leaders were not traditional Abrahamic Covenant Jews, even though they certainly gave great lip service to it; rather, the Pharisees of Jesus' day were members of the secret society now called the Cabala. The Cabala was as occultic and Satanic as any that has ever existed, and for the past 2,000 years, has formed the cornerstone of all seriously Satanic secret societies.  A great irony of history is that the exceedingly anti-Semitic Adolf Hitler learned the Cabala while training in The Thule Secret Society and used it to justify his genocidal murder of 6 million Jews! (NOTE: Adolf Hitler did NOT kill 6 million Jews, this article is good, but this part is just plain wrong history. See the Holocaust Deprogramming page for more info)

The Pharisees literally were controlled by Satan at the time that Jesus carried out His ministry.

Since the Pharisees were practicing Satanists in their heart of hearts, this would explain much mystery concerning the Biblical account of Jesus' ministry and death. For example, it would explain the intense hatred of Jesus, with which the Pharisees were afflicted, even in the face of His many and unparalleled miracles. This would explain how "some" people who witnessed the miracle of Lazarus coming back from the dead did not believe. How could they not believe? They had just witnessed an unbelievable miracle; a man whom they personally knew, and whom they knew was genuinely dead, had just been raised back to life through the awesome power of Jesus Christ. Yet, some of them did not believe; they hurried to tell the Pharisees of Lazarus' resurrection. What was their reaction? Did they then believe? No, they felt an even more intense desire to kill Jesus. Once you understand what we have to share with you, this unbelievable hardness of heart will be more understandable.

Finally, this Satanism of the Pharisees would explain Jesus' unparalleled and uncharacteristically intense anger which He displayed toward them. If the Pharisees had been merely misguided sinners, Jesus would have displayed the same compassion toward them as he did prostitutes and tax collectors. Reread the Gospels with this concept in mind, and you will see the uncharacteristic anger from Jesus toward the Pharisees. Today, we shall study the reality that the Pharisees were deeply involved in the Jewish secret society, the Cabala, to see the impact this reality had on the ministry and the death of Jesus Christ.

Why The Secrecy?

How did secret societies get started, and why were they necessarily secret? The answer is simultaneously shocking and informative, for it lays the foundation for understanding any secret society. Christian author, the Reverend Alexander Hislop, published a book entitled, "The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship". He states that secret societies can be traced back to Nimrod, who became, after his death, the "first of deified mortals" (Page 32). Who was Nimrod? Not too many years after the great flood -- survived only by Noah and his family -- a mighty man arose in what is now known as ancient Babylon. His name was Nimrod, a mighty warrior, and he commanded a tremendous presence upon what is now known as ancient Babylon. Nimrod established a Satanic system of idolatry openly, causing many people to flock to this worship. At this time, the predominant religious system that ruled the world was the worship of the One True God. Soon after Nimrod established his "alternative" religion, based upon witchcraft and idolatry, Shem, one of Noah's sons, was greatly angered and, motivated by Almighty God, removed Nimrod. Shem militarily attacked Nimrod, defeating him, and taking him prisoner. Shem executed Nimrod and many of his Satanic priests and followers. As an example of the thorough nature of his victory, Shem ordered Nimrod's body to be cut into pieces. Each of these pieces was sent throughout the known world to demonstrate to everyone that the worship of Satan through idolatry and witchcraft would not be tolerated. The world seemed safe from this tide of evil.

However, Nimrod's wife, Semiramus, and some surviving priests, joined forces to create a secret, underground religion. They deified Nimrod, creating a counterfeit to the True Messiah, Jesus Christ. They created a system of Satanic Mysteries destined to spread over the entire world. The teachings of these "Mysteries", as they came to be called, very subtlety led men back to the very system of Nimrod's magic and idolatry, which Shem had so vigorously attacked. This false path was made appealing to men by promising them hidden knowledge, by enticing them with the allure of keeping such knowledge secret, and binding them together with severe oaths and secret signs and handshakes.

This, then, was the beginning of secret societies, starting several generations after the great flood -- in approximately 2200 B.C. Secret Societies have existed, therefore, for over 4,000 years of human history; they literally were Satan's church from the beginning. They were absolutely opposed to every part of God's plan for mankind, and were committed to destroying it. This commitment to destruction of God's system was so stated that their members were deceived into thinking that they were actually trying to accomplish "good". Is this why God warns, in Isaiah 5:20 "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil..."?

Secret societies literally turn word definitions upside down, so that they are calling the good of God evil, and the evil of Satan, good.

There is one more reason that secret societies had to be established in secret and remain secret. Their goal was nothing less than the overthrow of all existing government and of God's true religion. If they attempted to establish their organization publicly, the ruling authorities would move to immediately arrest them for treason, and the people who were ordering their lives according to the precepts of God's established system, would cry out for the arrest and execution of these people.

However, since these evil plans for overthrow originated from Satan, they were filled with exceedingly great malicious hatred for mankind. Every single plan for every country has been filled with plans to murder large numbers of people. The plans of Communism -- created by the Illuminati in the first place -- are a good example of the planned bloodshed which always accompanies the actual overthrow of the existing system of authority. Several hundred million people were systematically murdered by Communist authorities from 1918-1991. Today, the Illuminati plans to overthrow all existing national governments and replace them with a single United Nations government; at the end of the "cleansing period", 66% of all mankind is planned to die. If people of any era really and truly understood the real plans their leaders had for them, they would rise up as one, demanding arrest and execution of all the leaders of the conspiracy, including those leaders holding posts of authority in the very government they were planning to overthrow!

Therefore, such goals and activity simply had to be carried out in extreme secrecy.

But, further, leaders of these secret societies believed that their power would greatly increase if they could remain absolutely secret. Satan is the Lord of the dark, dank spiritual places, and absolutely thrives on secrecy.

In conclusion, secret societies can be traced back to the Satanic king of ancient Babylon, Nimrod. They were established after Nimrod was executed by Shem for the crime of publicly reinstating witchcraft and idolatry. To preserve this Satanic worship and to achieve the overthrow of the hated system which had destroyed Nimrod, a secret system of Satanism had to be established. Through secret societies, the Babylonian system of Satanism was preserved. From this system, Anti-Christ will arise, and will try to destroy God's system, as has been the plan from the beginning. At this point, the entire world will be covered over by the public reinstitution of the ancient Babylonian system of Satan worship. We are very close to this occurrence today; thus, we should not be surprised to realize that God identifies the system of Anti-Christ in the book of Revelation as "Mystery Babylon" (Chapter 17). God is very literal and precise in His prophecies.

The Babylon Mysteries then spread to Egypt, where the story of the death of Nimrod and Shem's dismemberment of his body was retold as the story of Osiris. Most of the key legends of which the occultic Mysteries are comprised have been retold in many cultures and always with names and places unique to the specific culture. In this way, Satan quite successfully spread his false system throughout the world, capturing the minds and hearts of the key leaders in each country.

Common Characteristics of Secret Societies and Their Leaders

As time passed, and secret societies were established in many different countries and cultures, they began to develop common characteristics, because they were serving the same supernatural being, Satan. It would be helpful now to study these similar characteristics.

1. Arrogant Pride

Members of secret societies have always been invited to join, thus creating a membership which considered itself to be exclusive, separate and superior to the rest of the people of society. This arrogant attitude was further enhanced by the teaching that hidden spiritual and temporal knowledge existed, to only be revealed to the few Adepts , or "Wise Men" as they called themselves. These "Wise Men" believed that these Mysteries were incapable of comprehension by the common, the "vulgar", masses of people. In fact, this arrogance was so common among these secret society "Wise Men" that they began the process of actually teaching falsehood to the common people, reserving the true spiritual and temporal knowledge only for themselves. Thus, these men were very different from false religious teachers such as Mohammed and Buddha, who tried to spread their teaching to the masses. Secret societies went to great lengths to hide the truth from the common people.

We must be very clear on this point: No one who was an Adept of a secret society, who had learned the secret truth, could ever reveal this truth to the common people. The penalty for such revelation to the common people was death, the most extreme and painful death possible. Keep this fact in mind, for it will have great significance later on.

2. Development of Dual Personalities

Because each member was learning tremendous, explosive information which he had promised to keep absolutely secret from any person(s) who were not members, members began to develop two distinct personalities. One personality was public and one was extremely secret. The art of deception, even of close family members, was quickly developed. Literally, what an associate saw in speech and action was far different than the person who existed on the inside.

3. Oral Teaching Revered

Secret societies taught that Oral Teaching was as important and sacred as any Written Work. As we shall see in a few moments when we study the Jewish secret society, the Cabalists, this emphasis on Oral Teaching is a very important tool of Satan. Remember, God established His Holy Scripture as written sacred work. He repeatedly stated that this written word would never change, that it would be absolutely and completely fulfilled, and that it would last for eternity. Since Satan always works in the opposite way as God, we should not be surprised that he places his great emphasis upon oral teaching. Within the confines of secret societies, oral teaching also serves the critical purpose of keeping their society and their teachings secret. Oral teachings are a tool of Satan.

4. Man Is Inherently Good

Secret societies taught that man was inherently good, that he was corrupted only by his physical and spiritual surroundings. Of course, this contradicts clear and consistent Biblical teaching that man is inherently evil.

5. Promised Redeemer

Virtually all secret societies teach that, one day, a Redeemer King will arise, to lead the entire world into this hidden knowledge. Only when all mankind is initiated into these Mysteries will the world be able to live in the "Golden Age" for which it was intended. This teaching is a counterfeit of the Truth of the Bible, which declares from beginning to the end that Messiah will establish His eternal kingdom. At this point, we need to understand one very critical detail: The Redeemer King for which occult secret societies were awaiting differs significantly from the Biblical Redeemer King, Whom we know is Jesus Christ.

There are several differences:

(1). Jesus Christ is Almighty, Omnipotent God, the Second Member of the Trinity; but, he secret society Redeemer King will an "Ascended Master", a man arising from within secret societies, who had lived many lifetimes and had reached a "perfected" state. He possessed the "Christ Consciousness" inherent in this perfected state, and thus will possess the necessary knowledge to lead mankind into the perfect Golden Age.

(2). Jesus Christ possesses inherent power, because He was and is God. The secret society Redeemer King can only "access" the power of the Logos, of the Occult, and only because he was an Adept of the Mysteries. He will not possess any inherent power; rather, the only power he will be able to command will be derived from his knowledge of the occult.

(3). Jesus Christ reestablished the Law and the Prophets, and raised the standard back to the high point at which God had established it under Moses. The Redeemer King for which the secret societies are awaiting will continue to hide the secret truths from the common people, elevating those members of the secret societies to their rightful place of honor in society.

Babylonian Secret Societies Penetrating Jewish Religious System

Let us return back to the history of secret societies now that we have established this background of understanding. At the time God led the children of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt (approximately 1500 B.C.), Middle Eastern secret society teaching had existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. In the centuries before Jesus Christ was born, this deadly virus began to penetrate Jewish religious leaders. These Jewish leaders began to dabble in the occult. A Jewish secret oral tradition began to be espoused, distinctly separate from God's written Pentateuch.

Two systems of Jewish oral teachings were created, one public and one secret. The public teaching dealt with the affairs of everyday life, such as laws on buying and selling and making contracts, and what constituted work on the Sabbath; this practical law was later called the Talmud. Jesus railed against the imposition of this man-made law upon the people, because it bound them so tightly to the priests, and it created a frustrating set of standards to which no one could attain. And, these standards were not from God; they were man-made so that the priests could control the people.

The second set of Jewish oral teachings was extremely secret and was classic secret society; these teachings later became known as the Cabala. One of the books constituting the Cabala was called the Sepher-Ha-Zohar, or Book of Light. This book was committed to writing by the Rabbi Simon and his son, Eliezer who sat in a cavern every day for 12 years with sand up to their necks. While they were in this awful physical condition, they "meditated" on the sacred law, and were frequently visited by the great prophet Elias. (Nesta Webster, "Secret Societies", p. 8). The Apostle Paul was right on target when he warned, in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15, that Satan and his demons may transform themselves into angels of light and ministers of righteousness in order to deceive gullible man. One of the most common point amongst false religions is that the original text of revelation was given to the founder by an angel of light. Both Mohammed and Joseph Smith (Mormonism) were given their "new" revelations from a angel of light.

Thus, the Jewish priesthood began formulating a plan to bring all Jewish people into spiritual and physical bondage by creating this dual system of the public Talmud plus the very secret Cabala. The teachings of the public Talmud bound the people by almost 1,000 rules of everyday living and it began to move them away from the spiritual truth that God had revealed to Moses. Thus, the first requirement of a secret society was fulfilled, that of hiding the Truth from the people, partly by outright fabrication and partly by adding to Moses' original laws.

The secret teachings of the Cabala were truly Satanic. Some authors have admitted these teachings were for "magical" purposes. One author critical of the Cabala wrote that the Cabala is "a subtle poison which enters into the veins of Judaism and wholly infests it" (Theodore Reinach, quoted by Nesta Webster in "Secret Societies", p. 9). Salomon Reinach calls the Cabala "one of the worst aberrations of the human mind". Further, the Cabala has significantly influenced the beliefs and the direction of many European secret societies which were subsequently established in succeeding centuries. This influence was so profound that many non-Jewish secret societies literally have assumed a Jewish tone and character.

Since Satan is the "Lord of this World" he has the power to prosper those who follow his leadership. This was the bait that attracted those Jewish religious leaders to the mystical, magical properties inherent in the Cabala. And, make no mistake about that fact that these Jewish leaders prospered greatly. Even though Israel was suffering under the bondage of Gentile rulers, such as Greece and Rome, the Jewish priests won a certain autonomy which enabled them to virtually rule dictatorially over their Jewish citizens. And, the common Jewish citizen simply did not understand that these religious leaders had foisted upon them a system which simultaneously put them under a yoke of bondage while elevating these leaders to positions of great power and wealth. And, the depth of misunderstanding was so great that the average Jewish citizen still greatly admired and honored these religious leaders who were so afflicting them.

Now, let us examine the Pharisees, most of whom were members of the Cabal, using the five common characteristics of which we have already spoken. We will also turn to pertinent New Testament passages to aid our understanding. You will be shocked at the new meaning to these famous Biblical passages, now that you understand that the Pharisees who developed and carried out the plan to kill Jesus were members of the secret society called the Cabala, and now that you understand Jesus was speaking directly to the members of this secret society.

The Pharisees possessed:

1. Arrogant Pride

Matthew 23:14, "Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased...But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of God against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither allow ye them that are entering to go in". One of the characteristics of secret societies is that they will deceive the common people of key truth, especially the truth of how to obtain eternal salvation; rather, they will keep this truth to themselves, as a means of power and privilege. Jesus spoke directly to this terrible situation in Luke 11:52, "Woe unto you, lawyers; for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entered in ye hindered." The teachers and lawyers of the Law knew the simple truth that God had developed for people to be saved for eternity and to develop a love for Him. Yet, they hid this simple truth from the people, substituting the terribly suffocating system of daily rules of living against which Jesus so railed. These damnable secret society Pharisees were deliberately sending entire populations of Jews to Hell because they had hidden the truth from them. This is why Jesus railed against them so terribly. You see, Satan had convinced these Pharisees that every Jew was going to Heaven anyway, simply because they were Jews; therefore, they believed it did not eternally matter what the Jews truly believed. The Pharisees kept earthly power and prestige more firmly in their hands through this spiritual deception.

2. Developed Dual Personalities

Matthew 23:27-28, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so, ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and uncleanness." Jesus is clearly speaking here of that dual personality of the member of the secret society. The Pharisee had cleverly and effectively hidden the existence of these Satanic beliefs from their subjects, but could not hide it from the Omniscient Eyes of Jesus God.

3. The Pharisees Developed Complex Systems of Oral Teaching And They Taught the Jewish People To Revere Them

Matthew 15:1-9, "Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees...saying, 'Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.' But He answered...'Why do ye transgress the commandments of God by your tradition?...ye hypocrites...'"

Jesus is clearly speaking out strongly against the evil which the secret society Pharisees had perpetrated against the Jewish people, that of creating oral tradition supposedly equal to God's Written Teaching, and, in fact, actually contradicted God's Written Word. No one understood how they had been tricked because they did not possess God's Written Word. The Pharisees had God's Written Word, and they were keeping it to themselves. We encourage you to read Matthew 15:1-20, carefully, with the insight that Jesus is speaking here primarily against secret society Satanic teachings and practices. Time after time, Jesus declares that the Pharisees are going to Hell. He minces no words. On two occasions, Jesus described the Pharisees as "Vipers", which the Dictionary of the Bible, by Dr. William Smith, gives as a synonym for "Serpent". Of course, we know that the Serpent is consistently utilized in the Bible as one of the names for Satan. But, Jesus leaves no room for error on this subject, not wanting us to miss the point that the Pharisees were not just sinners. In John 8:44, Jesus says that the father of the Pharisees was the devil. Jesus never said this to any other person or groups of persons. He was very compassionate toward sinners; the reason Jesus was so stern toward the Pharisees was that He knew they were worshipping Satan through their participation in the secret society, the Cabal.

4. The Pharisees Believed Man Is Inherently Good

Since the Pharisees believed man to be inherently good, they developed a system of salvation based upon works. This system of works was later to be called the Talmud; however, Jesus kept referring to it as the "Traditions of Men". The Bible clearly teaches, however, that man is inherently evil; therefore, there is absolutely no way that man can perform enough good works to completely atone for his evil. Jesus left no doubt that the Pharisees had concocted this system of works. Every time where He is railing against the "Traditions of Men", He is speaking of this false religious teaching that salvation can be obtained by good works. Whenever you see Jesus saying, "You say...but I say..." He is usually addressing this issue of works related salvation.

5. The Pharisees Were Looking For The Promised Redeemer/King

Both Pagan and true Judaic scholars were looking for a Messiah King to arise to lead mankind into new spiritual light and a new material prosperity. However, the pagans of the secret societies were looking for a Promised Redeemer which was far different than what the Bible taught was to come. Consequently, the people were badly misinformed as to what the true Redeemer was going to accomplish -- they were looking for the King Redeemer, not ever being told that much Messianic prophecy was "Suffering Servant". They were looking for a King, but they got a Suffering Servant, and the vast majority missed Him!

Now that we know that the Pharisees who so mightily opposed Jesus Christ, who wanted him dead so badly, and who demonstrated such supernatural hatred of Him, were members of a Satanic secret society, the Jewish Cabala, we are now ready for an even more shocking revelation.

SECRET SOCIETIES ORIGINATED UNPARDONABLE SIN

Before we get started on this portion of the discussion of that Jewish secret society, the Cabala, we need to address one fundamental misunderstanding about secret societies:

That secret societies are simply and only social organizations which carry out charitable activities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Remember Jesus' warnings against being deceived, in Matthew 24:4-5, 11, and 24. In verse 24, Jesus quantified this type of deception as He warned, "...if it were possible, they [False Prophets] shall deceive the very elect". This prophesied deception is to be so very sophisticated and so believable it will deceive virtually every person on earth who is not saved. Such is the case with all secret societies. They routinely deceive, especially their own members. Albert Pike, in his book, "Morals and Dogma", states it is necessary to deceive their own members until it can be determined that they are ready to receive the "truth".

As we have conducted research into this murky world of the New World Order, we have been repeatedly startled by the overwhelming approval given the secret society, Freemasonry, by the many Guiding Spirits of occultic writers. For example, Master D.K., writing through Alice Bailey in "The Externalisation of the Hierarchy", states, on page 511, that the Masonic Fraternity "is the home of the Mysteries, and the seat of the initiation." Of course, the word, "Mysteries" always refers to the Satanic Mysteries religions of Babylon and Egypt. Initiations are the initial ceremonies through which a person is admitted into the cult. As we have shared with you before, these initiations are, by their very nature, Satanic, and life changing. But, Master D.K. then drops the bombshell about Freemasonry, when he states, "It is a far more occult organization than can be realized and is intended to be the training school for the coming advanced occultists. " Master D.K. has just told us a secret straight out of the pit of Hell -- Freemasonry is of Satan, all their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. The same is true about all the secret societies, by whatever name they call themselves.

Earlier, we examined the little-known historic fact that the Pharisees, who so hated Jesus Christ that they plotted His murder upon the Cross, were members of a Jewish secret society called the Cabala. Once we understand this fact, we can more easily understand many of the things against which Jesus spoke. We can also understand more completely how the hatred of the Pharisees seemed to be supernatural, how the hardness of their hearts was so great, even in the face of the most incredible miracles ever performed.

In this segment, we shall study this subject more completely.

* We shall study the special hidden secular, or earthly, knowledge which these secret societies taught.
* We shall study the Pagan Promised Redeemer for which the Pharisees were waiting.
* We shall understand how the Pharisees felt they simply were duty bound to kill Jesus Christ.
* We shall see how the Pharisees could look straight at Jesus' many incredible miracles and hate him even more. The ramifications of this insight for today are extraordinary.

The major reason men have traditionally joined secret societies in the past 4,000 years is that they have been promised great and valuable knowledge which must be kept securely preserved within the confines of the society. Members were taught that this hidden secret knowledge was so special the masses of the people could not possibly comprehend them under any circumstances. This hidden knowledge was both spiritual and temporal. The spiritual knowledge was known as "Speculative" knowledge, and was taught after the men had been exposed to the practical, earthly knowledge. What were some of the aspects of this practical, earthly knowledge?

Once we share them with you, you can easily see how a group of persons who possessed these secrets could readily reach the point where they would control society economically and socially. Hang on to your hats, for you are going to be shocked.

New Age author, Elizabeth van Buren, writing in her book, "Secrets of the Illuminati", states rather matter-of-factly that Pythagoras left his home in Greece for many years to live in Egypt. Pythagoras left his home in search of a prize he highly valued; he wanted to learn the secrets of Geometry, and he knew that the only place in the world he could learn Geometry was in an Egyptian secret society. In other words, only in a Satanic secret society could Pythagoras and many others like him learn Geometry!! Satan had revealed these precious secrets to the priests of the secret societies, for the sole purpose of using this skill in mathematics as the bait to lure the best minds in he world. Satan knew that, once a man had successfully been taught something so wonderful and practical as Geometry, he would be wide open to receive the false Satanic religion contained within the spiritual, or Speculative, school of knowledge. Thus, Satan revealed this Geometry to members of ancient secret societies.

Now, at this point, you may be objecting, saying that there is no Biblical basis for this concept that Satan can reveal knowledge of this kind to anyone. If this is what you are thinking, you are only partially correct. The Bible does teach us that God revealed practical knowledge to certain families in the Old Testament. When God was preparing to build His sanctuary, He gave Moses extremely detailed instructions as to how to build it, including the materials of which it was to be built and how the individual pieces were to be fashioned. From Exodus 35:30-36:4, we see the tremendous revelation that the Holy Spirit had placed the knowledge and practical skill necessary to build this sanctuary according to God's wishes in the minds of certain men. In other words, one morning, these chosen men awoke to discover they suddenly possessed the skillful knowledge to work and create beautiful masterpieces with certain materials. Some suddenly knew how to work with gold, some with silver, and some with bronze, just to mention a few. Further, God gave these men the ability to teach this skillful knowledge to others as they saw fit. And the purpose of this sudden implantation of knowledge was to glorify God in the building of His sanctuary.

Could Satan supernaturally also reveal secrets to men who had given themselves over to the worship of him, so inherent in secret societies? The Bible reveals that Satan can do what he wants in this world, where he is repeatedly called the "Lord of this World", unless the Holy Spirit specifically prohibits him.

Members of the occult are taught that certain subjects were revealed to men in secret societies. Some of these subjects, in addition to Geometry mentioned above, were:

* Astronomy
* Physics
* Medicine
* Higher Mathematics
* Music
* Art
* Literature
* The planting of subliminal messages

This concept is a shocking one, indeed. If it is true, we can understand how the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians could have built such incredibly difficult buildings and monuments, many of which have stood the erosion of time and the natural elements. Now, we can understand better how the ancients could have developed such high level cultures. We can also understand how the few individuals who possessed such special knowledge could quickly rise to high levels of prominence and power, to the point where they could become the privileged leaders of any culture. We could easily see how these few individuals could accumulate vast wealth for themselves and their posterity. Satan could then use this power, skill, and wealth to further advance his kingdom.

But many of you may still harbor doubts about these claims, and it is understandable that you would. After all, these authors are writing about men who lived several thousand years ago; certainly, from a vantage point of this many years, authors may misunderstand some of the material which seems to indicate to them such a scenario. Is there any indication from today's highly technological society that Satan intervened in the minds of men who were worshipping him through secret societies in order to impart sudden knowledge? Indeed, there is, and some of these men are still alive.

* Marcel Vogel, an occultist who was one of the original inventors of the IBM computers, claimed in the early 1980's, that he had received the inspiration for his computer coding during a psychic molasses dream. In other words, a demon worked through Mr. Vogel to create the computer!!

Now consider other inventors which were also occultists.

* Both inventors of the Apple computer were occultists. To demonstrate that the computer had an occultic base, they priced it at $666.66.
* Thomas Edison was a dedicated Theosophist.
* The developer of the Xerographic process credited his invention to a psychic dream.
* Master D.K., writing through Alice Bailey in " The Externalization", reveals the atomic bomb "emerged from a first ray Ashram (demon) working in conjunction with a fifth group" (scientists working for the American government). In other words, the secret of the atomic bomb was revealed to scientists!

If this information is true, it would explain how the tremendous explosion in knowledge and invention, which the world has seen since approximately 1917, has occurred. Within a person's lifetime, the world has reached the point where the economy can be global and can be so structured that no one can buy or sell unless they take some kind of a mark. The world has reached a point that rulers could keep track of their subjects every minute of every day. The world has reached a point that the cultural and linguistic differences which have historically kept the peoples of the world divided have now been overridden so that we can see the One-World Nation and Government forming. For the same reasons, the world is now heading rapidly for that prophesied One-World Religion. None of this apparent fulfillment of God's End Time prophecy could have been possible in the horse and buggy days of the past. This approaching scenario is possible only because of the tremendously sudden explosion of knowledge in the Twentieth Century.

Thus, we can see how the secret societies were able to lure the best minds in the world in every age, and were further able to impart to them the very practical knowledge which would enable them to dominate their culture and government for Satan.

But, now let us return to our core subject of the Pharisees. As we briefly said last week, secret societies were also looking the sudden appearance of a Promised Redeemer. However, their Promised Redeemer was not the One promised through Biblical prophecy; rather, their Promised Redeemer was a man who had reached perfection upon whom the ultimate Christ Consciousness would descend at the right moment in world history to lead the world into its foreseen "Golden Age". In other words, this counterfeit Christ for whom the Pagans were awaiting is the Anti-Christ. Satan had cleverly dispersed the prophecy of the coming Redeemer in many secret societies of that day. The Wise Men who came to Bethlehem seeking the king which had been born, had been awaiting for the Pagan Redeemer. More specifically, they were knowledgeable of the remarkably precise prophecy in Daniel 9:24-26, and they realized the world was within a man's lifetime of fulfillment. These men were members of the Pagan sect called the Zoroasters. This Persian sect were among the Wise Men of Babylon in Daniel 2:1-18. In fact, these Pagans classified Daniel as being a Wise Man in the same mold from which they were cast; as such they were very familiar with Daniel's writings, including the prophecy of the Seventy Weeks of years in Daniel 9:24-26. Thus, the Pagan Promised Redeemer was not God, but a man, a man who had been perfected through secret societies, and upon whom the Christ Consciousness had fallen.

The Jewish secret society, the Cabala, were looking for a Promised Redeemer of the same type as other secret societies. These Jews were awaiting for a man to arise from within a secret society, a mighty, rich ruler king in Israel, a warrior who would triumphantly lead Israel out of Gentile domination, ruling from the House of David forever.

Therefore, they were horrified when Jesus' birth was announced to humble shepherds instead of to the ruling council of the Cabala. They rejected the very idea that the Promised Redeemer could possibly be born to peasant parents in a stable. Oh, no, their Redeemer would be born of secret society parents, who were wealthy, influential, and powerful. And, surely, this Redeemer would be born in a palace. Thus, they initially rejected the idea that Jesus could be the Christ, and evidently did not complain when King Herod attempted to kill Him.

Later, when Jesus began His ministry, these Jewish Cabalists were further horrified at the prospect that Jesus might be the Promised Redeemer. In addition to his humble background, the Cabalist Pharisees rejected Jesus' claim to be the Promised Redeemer on other grounds:

Jesus revealed hidden spiritual truth directly to the masses of the people. The Pharisees knew Jesus had learned the truth contained within the Old Testament; they assumed Jesus had learned it from a secret society somewhere. However, Jesus was not keeping these truths secret from the masses, but was eagerly and daily revealing it to them. Remember, secret societies require their members to keep all the secrets to which they have been exposed absolutely to themselves. The severe oaths, which every member of secret societies take, call for painful death to be executed if anyone revealed any secrets of the society to a nonmember. Thus, the Pharisees believed Jesus to be worthy of a severe and painful death.

Members of secret societies loathed the average citizen. They deliberately attempted to mislead them spiritually, and they built up social barriers to keep the masses separate from the members of the societies. Thus, when Jesus began to associate with the common people, and especially with the most sinful of the common people, the Pharisees knew Jesus could not be their Promised Redeemer. 3. The Pharisees had carefully mislead the common people through the creation of the Talmud. The daily living restrictions of Talmudic law were so restrictive as to bind the people in absolute bondage to the Pharisees. The Talmud had also hid God's Divine Truth contained within the books of Moses. And Jesus responded dramatically to these "Traditions of Men", condemning them with extremely strong words. The Pharisees counterattacked with plots to kill Him.

They believed this Promised Redeemer would be capable of tremendous miracles and healings, because he was an Adept who could access the inherent power contained within the secret society. As we begin to explore this particular subject, please listen closely, because we are dealing with a most explosive subject. When Jesus began to validate His ministry through the many miracles of healings and casting out demons, the Pharisees were not surprised. There is great power in the practice of the occult, because Satan is truly supernatural. Certain Pharisees had been able to perform some of the feats Jesus was doing, because they were able to access the power of the demons. Therefore, when Jesus performed the miracles which the occultic Pharisees had been able to do, they simply attributed Jesus' power to the occult. When Jesus performed a miracle greater than the Pharisees had been able to perform, they simply attributed these miracles to their belief that Jesus was more of an Adept in the Occult than were they.

We pick up this Pharisaic belief in Matthew 12:22-37. Jesus had just cast a demon out of a man, and the Pharisees verbalized their secret society belief, when they are recorded as saying, in verse 24, "This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils". Jesus' response was immediate, and two-pronged. First, Jesus asked the obvious question: if He was casting out demons by the power of the occult, then by what power were the Pharisees able to cast out demons? You see, casting out demons had proven to be a very popular and easy way in which to convince the average person that you were genuinely righteous and filled with the Holy Spirit. However, the Pharisees knew their power to cast out demons came from demons.

Second, Jesus uttered the most frightening statement ever uttered in all history, "All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men...neither in this world, neither in the world to come." The revelation that Jesus had created a new sin that was unforgivable is incredible. Never in the Old Testament had God even hinted at the existence of an unforgivable sin. But Jesus created it here. The Unforgivable Sin is simply attributing Jesus' power to perform His miracles to Satan or to one of his demons. When a person says this, he is denying the power and the work of the Holy Spirit. This is the one sin which God will never forgive. Further, once a person commits this sin, the Holy Spirit will stop working in his life, trying to convict him of his sin, and trying to bring him to repentance. Thus, Satan has free access to this person's soul, to do with him what he wishes. Satan can begin to harden this person's heart to monstrous levels.

There is absolutely no evidence the Pharisees stopped making this claim once Jesus warned them this sin was unforgivable. In fact, their deplorable activity at the Cross strongly indicates they still believed this lie and were propagating it. As Jesus was dying, the Pharisees mocked him repeatedly, for not coming down off the Cross in great power to save Himself. They still believed Jesus did not possess inherent power, that He had power only when He could access it properly from the occult. When He did not come off that Cross, the Pharisees felt vindicated in this belief. Thus, the Pharisees felt they had performed their duty as the guardians of their secret society oath not to reveal secrets to non-members. Since they believed Jesus was a member of a secret society, they believed He was worthy of a painful, excruciating death, as called for in secret society oaths. The Pharisees had just done their duty.

We want to close with the tremendous ramifications this belief of the Pharisees has today. When they uttered their belief that Jesus could only perform His many miracles because He was an Adept in a secret society, Jesus declared they were guilty of an Unpardonable Sin. One would think that this warning would make everyone very cautious about ever making such a claim again, because their own soul would be irretrievably lost. Sadly, this is not the case. Nesta Webster, in the book, "Secret Societies and Subversive Movements", records, on page 92, that the group, the Carpocratian Gnostics, held this view. Further, this belief runs like a consistent thread "all through the secret societies up to the present day".

In other words, members of secret societies have been committing the Unpardonable Sin since Jesus' warning as recorded in Matthew 12:24. The list of guilty societies includes such well-known societies as The Brotherhood of Death Societies, Rosicrucian, and Freemasonry. As we have reported earlier, the Brotherhood of Death Society is a loose organization spreading around the globe. There are two very well-known Brotherhood of Death Societies, one in Germany and one in the United States. The society in Germany is called the Thule Society; Adolf Hitler was a member of the Thule Society. If we understand that Hitler committed the Unpardonable Sin when he was being trained as an Adept in this secret society, we can easily understand how he could have perpetrated such monstrous acts of vengeance upon the world during World War II. We can easily understand how his mind could have become so hardened and so saturated with hate for the Jew first and the Christian second. Many of Hitler's governmental officials were also members of the Thule Society, so they were guilty of this Unpardonable Sin. As we stated before, once a person has committed this sin, the Holy Spirit ceases to work in their heart and mind, to convict them of sin, and attempting to move them to repentance. This person ceases to have a conscience. They can easily become so hardened of heart and mind that they can be mightily used of Satan, without feeling the least bit of remorse and guilt.

The Brotherhood of Death Society in the United States is the Skull and Bones Society in Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Its belief structure is identical to that of the Thule Society. Therefore, we can conclude that Bones Men affirm this belief about Jesus Christ, thus condemning them to committing the Unpardonable Sin. The list of some of the Families comprising Skull and Bones is frightening, for it immediately shows the extent to which America has been influenced by this Satanic organization. Remember, the men of these families have likely committed the Unpardonable Sin.

This is the list of American families belonging to Skull & BOnes.(Quoting from Antony Sutton, "America's Secret Establishment", p. 22).

* Rockefeller Family (Standard Oil)
* Weyerhaeuser Family (Lumber)
* Sloane Family (Retailing)
* Pillsbury Family (Flour Milling)
* J.P. Morgan Family (Banking)
* Taft Family (Politics)
* Bush Family, including former President George Bush and the current President, George W. Bush

Wait a minute, you say, both Presidents Bush likely committed the Unpardonable Sin because of his membership in Skull and Bones? Yes. Now, you can see how easy it was for Bush to lead the charge into the Satanic New World Order. Now you can see that Bush was far different in his innermost heart than he was on his media-created surface.

How about former President Clinton? We Christians already know that he has been the most anti-Christian President in history. It is likely that Clinton may have fallen in this trap through his involvement with the Rhodes Scholarship Program in England. We have long known that Cecil Rhodes was an early member of the Illuminati, working with the Rothschilds in the early 1800's. But Sutton introduces a new element to this story, on page 23 of his book quoted above. Sutton states that Cecil Rhodes founded a secret society called "Milners Round Table", founded on the same foundation as the Illuminati and "the Jewish secret society equivalents".

We believe it possible that former President Clinton may have committed the Unpardonable Sin.

Once a person has committed this heinous sin, the Holy Spirit stops working in that person's life, restraining sin and convicting him of sin. As a result, a person can become incredibly hard-hearted, callous and cruel. As the world is hurtling toward the One World government, economy, and religion of Antichrist, can you see how leadership comprised of men who have committed this sin have been maneuvered into place by the Lord of this World, to begin the awful judgments pronounced by the Book of Revelation.

The Old Testament Prophets Attack on Baal as a Social & Economic Force

The Old Testament Prophets Attack on Baal as a Social & Economic Force

This essay is a continuation of my last essay “Christ’s Attack on the Temple-Banking System”. I am going to show that Christ had arrived within the religious and political tradition of the Old Testament prophets, which was against all things materialist, empire, and mercantile.

The Old Testament is becoming increasingly obscured, disconnected from it’s context, and forgotten. Jesus was a descendent of the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament, which is a politically and socially anti-materialist view. This view takes great concern with social and economic injustice on helpless people. In this essay I am going to show the contemporary relevance of the Old Testament prophets in their dissent against the materialism of Baal and Baalism.

Baal was a merchant cult network in the ancient world, most present among the Canaanites (Canaanite was synonymous for “merchant”) of northern Israel. Northern Israel was an urban and industrial-agrarian economy who traded with the Phoenician merchant states and other economic territories. Baal was known as a “fertility god”, who would bless his people with strong crop cycles if honored with rituals and sacrifices. Temple prostitution for fertility rituals and child sacrifice were part of harnessing the power of the agricultural-weather god. This social and economic order of Baalism was centered around self-empowerment and required an army of diviners, necromancers, and fortune tellers to politically propagate itself.

Baalism was focused on controlling the supernatural world to maximize economic output. Whether it was controlling the weather, predicting the future, or practicing magic, the goal was to subjugate nature for self-empowerment. Rites and rituals also served as a cover to absorb irrational economic mechanisms. Child sacrifice could cut down on mouths to feed in times of economic malfunction, or serve as a solution to impregnating a temple prostitute.

Modern industrial technology used as a tool of economic control is just one reassertion of Baalism in the present day. Federally-funded weather modification technology is the realization of supernatural weather control. Mass data fed to algorithms is used to predict the future as the diviners once tried, and the pharmaceutical monopoly encourages population control as the institution of human sacrifice did. Increasingly complex methods of finance allow for the artificial enforcement of value in trade. All of these mechanisms are required to manage a system founded on irrational self-empowerment for the cryptocracy. In this way, much of the planet has been turned into a sacrificial altar to Baal. The golden age of prophecy began as reaction against these Faustian-Promethean mechanisms by re-asserting the Divine Law and Divine Providence.

Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson writes:

The sacrifice of children existed as a means of securing success, as in America, where abortion is a sacrifice to secure personal success and “career advancement.” The technophilia of Baalism itself demands sacrifice, as seen in America, where the advent of the automobile and the superhighway has led to an estimated 1.2 million deaths per year worldwide, about the size of the population of Nebraska.

The first distinction that must be made is that most of the prophets resided in the southern kingdom of Judea and not northern Israel. Southern Judea could be viewed as a rural-pastoral society while Northern Israel was an industrial cosmopolitan society. King David first united the rural Hebrew tribes and the cosmopolitan Canaanites under one nation called “Israel”. Shortly after, under the reign of Solomon’s monarchy (David’s son), Israel adopted “monopoly capitalism”, or what we may call today “globalism”.

King Solomon embraced occultism and legalized the worship of Baal in Israel, which was more compatible with the empire’s new economics. This led to the erosion of the old social code, and to the suppression of the God of the prophets. Baal was subversively mixed with the prophet’s God to accommodate the “old believers” within the economic engine. A civil war followed King Solomon’s death where Judea became it’s own kingdom separate from Israel. Later on, Judea fell under the same corruption as Israel.

The prophets opposed the social and economic degeneration under Baalism, as well as the corrupted religious institution of state-propagandists they called “False Prophets”. The Biblical prophets were often attacked by kings, priests, and mobs for counter-signaling their prosperity message. Jesus referenced this saying “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee”.

False Prophets were employed by kings at the Jerusalem Temple to work as state propagandists. As I pointed out in my last essay, the Jerusalem temple was also a bank (and Baal was printed on the coins at the bank in Jesus’ time). These paid prophets tended to be diviners, fortune tellers, and dream interpreters. Jezebel even imported 850 prophets of Baal to accommodate her new financial system in Israel, before being defeated by Elijah’s military insurgency.

The social backgrounds of the four major prophets and twelve minor prophets varied widely, from rural sheep herders, to aristocrats, to military leaders. All took major concern of the social and spiritual erosion happening under the merchant-materialist reign, both locally and internationally. All of them wished to separate Baal from God, and reach the small remnant of people who still had the “ears to hear”.

The first prophet Amos, a peasant herdsman from rural Judea, appeared in reaction against the social degeneration during the new Victorian age that had begun in Israel. Amos condemns religious and political institutions for implementing permanent poverty on it’s people through usurious loans, land grabs, and the importation of foreign gods. He accuses political leaders of taking bribes, sacrificing to Molech (Assyrian star god), and driving the wise into hiding. He is harsh on the middle class who are apathetically enjoying the “comfort” of this situation as well. Jesus nearly paraphrases him in condemning the Pharisees for “devouring the homes of widows”.

Amos’ slogan was “The day of the Lord will be a day of darkness, not light”, continually mocking the nation’s “prosperity gospel” propaganda. After telling the kings, priests, and normies of Israel that they were effectively doomed and cursed by God, Amos asserts that there is a universal God and a universal divine law known to all nations, and that the Israelites are not exempt from this law:

7 Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir? - Amos 9:7

Amos undoubtedly puts a strong emphasis on universal social justice (in the true sense of the term) as being in accordance with the divine law. He was banned from Bethel after accurately prophesying the destruction of Israel (this came about through an Assyrian invasion and an earthquake), which is why he wrote his message down to later be added in The Bible.

Although the prophets were against the top-down oppression of poor and helpless people, they had little populist sympathies. By the time Amos began preaching (800 B.C.), they considered much of the population to be as corrupt as the people who were oppressing them, “like people, like priest”, says Micah.

Isaiah the aristocrat, condemns society from top to bottom in comparing Judea and Israel to Sodom and Gomorrah. He notes infantile adults, neighbors hating each other, status signaling, domineering women, oppression of the poor, drunken delusions, real estate scams, and more. He describes the arrogant seductive women who take pride in their fashion accessories, and tells them their male providers will perish (Isaiah 3:16-26). This connects to Amos calling the elite trend-setting women “Cows of Bashan”, who use their husband’s power to wreak havoc on the poor.

The prophet’s battle against Baal is archetypal, and is part of a larger picture. To them, Baal is the negation of all ethical imperatives. An authentic and holistic society is not possible when the principles of Baalism have been infused into the founding religion of the culture. Only self-interest, power-seeking, and ultimately dysfunction can thrive. Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, says Isaiah.

The prophet’s founding mythos called back to the pastoral pre-commercialized life, before the Davidic monarchy. This is of course connected to the symbol of the lamb, as many of them were sheep herders. Reactionary religious movements like the Nazirites and Rechabites refused to assimilate to the then-modern way of living in Israel, choosing to live in tents like nomads instead. They took vows to not cut their hair or drink wine, as their ancestors did. John the Baptist was a product of this sentiment, who was also executed for disavowing King Herod.

Although the prophets were influenced or sometimes descended from these sentiments, most did not live as nomads. They understood God was present in history no matter what was happening, and they looked forward to the future, even if it was grim.

The prophets have an understanding of God that is moving in a qualitative historical fashion. Meaning the past, present, and future are bound together by a rational telos. Hegel called this the “cunning of reason”, while Giambattista Vico called this “Divine Providence”. God is present within both personal and macro events. This is essentially what the prophets are articulating, that by dismissing the divine law, you are going to be on the irrational side of the rational movement of history.

8 I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. - Revelations 1:8

Although Baal has returned in full renaissance form, we can take the insights and stories of the Prophets to heart, and know that we are not crazy. I don’t need to go on any further about the archetypal re-manifestations of Baal in the world, if you’re reading this I’m sure you already know. The faithful remnant who has the eyes to see and ears to hear will be eternally vindicated through our hope in Christ. So let’s enjoy what God has given us here, and laugh at the petty delusions of the Baalists as Amos did.

Thanks ;)

References:

R.B.Y. Scott - The Relevance Of The Prophets

Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson -https://www.rusjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Prophets.pdf

The Bible

Iceland Jailed Bankers and Rejected Austerity--and It's Been a Success

Opinion | Iceland Jailed Bankers and Rejected Austerity--and It's Been a Success | Common Dreams

When the global economic crisis hit in 2008, Iceland suffered terribly--perhaps more than any other country. The savings of 50,000 people were wiped out, plunging Icelanders into debt and placing 25 percent of its homeowners in mortgage default.

Now, less than a decade later, the nation's economy is booming. And this year it will become the first culturally European country that faced collapse to beat its pre-crisis peak of economic output.

That's because it took a different approach. Instead of imposing devastating austerity measures and bailing out its banks, Iceland let its banks go bust and focused on social welfare policies. In March, the International Monetary Fund announced that the country had achieved economic recovery "without compromising its welfare model" of universal health care and education.

Iceland allowed those responsible for the crisis--its bankers--to be prosecuted as criminals. Again, a sharp contrast to the United States and elsewhere in Europe, where CEOs escaped punishment.

"Why should we have a part of our society that is not being policed or without responsibility?" asked special prosecutor Olafur Hauksson in the wake of the collapse. "It is dangerous that someone is too big to investigate--it gives a sense there is a safe haven."

By refusing to allow its currency, the krona, to suffer ultra-low inflation to protect the assets of the rich--as in the rest of the West--Iceland let the krona tumble. The resulting inflation and higher prices have helped its export industries, unlike what happened in many European Union countries, which are contending with ongoing deflation.

On Monday, Iceland's Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson announced the introduction of a 39 percent tax on creditors seeking to reclaim assets from the country's failed banks. As The Guardian explains, this is "an attempt to prevent foreign investors rushing en masse to withdraw billions currently frozen in Iceland's financial system."

This tax has been introduced as the country winds down capital controls imposed in response to the crisis. Again, flouting free market orthodoxy, this move restricts Icelanders' ability to move their money out of the country in order to protect the krona. Initially intended to expire after six months, the controls have been in place for more than six years.

As a result, it's estimated that about 1,200 billion Icelandic krona have been frozen--the equivalent of $9 billion. If capital controls were removed, Iceland could face a spate of bankruptcies and problems with liquidity. "There is not sufficient foreign currency to release 1,200bn [krona] in foreign currency," The Guardian quoted Benedikt Gislason, an adviser to the government, as saying. "The Icelandic economy would not survive."

All of these actions have, unsurprisingly, drawn the ire of other countries--in ideological and measurable ways. By refusing to honor bank guarantees given by British and Dutch investors in Icesave--a subsidiary of one of Iceland's main banks, Landsbanki--Iceland created enemies of its European neighbors. But it has now repaid 85 percent of U.K. claims, and the Icelandic finance minister announced recently that all will be settled by the end of the year.

When asked why Iceland was enjoying such a strong recovery while everyone else is still mired in debt, President Olafur Ragnar Grimmson said in 2013:

"Why are the banks considered to be the holy churches of the modern economy? Why are private banks not like airlines and telecommunication companies and allowed to go bankrupt if they have been run in an irresponsible way? The theory that you have to bail out banks is a theory that you allow bankers to enjoy for their own profit, their success, and then let ordinary people bear their failure through taxes and austerity. People in enlightened democracies are not going to accept that in the long run."

There you have it. Instead of conceding to the crooks who made the mess, Iceland listened to its people. And the data speaks for itself.

American Carnage and the Establishment of a Military Dictatorship.

By 

Emanuel Pastreich
Global Research, February 06, 2025
Fear No Evil 5 February 2025
Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/american-carnage-establishment-military-dictatorship/5879189

It breaks the heart to see so many lost souls congratulating themselves on the impending approval of Gabbard and Kennedy by the Senate, two corrupt and gutless politicians who have not said a word in opposition to the takeover of the Federal Government by the vicious gangs that prop up the Trump and Musk puppets. They are delighted that Trump had somehow shut down the “deep state” by closing USAID without any explanation or transparency.

The Trump regime is engaging in an unprecedented takeover of the federal government by intimation, bribes, and force, and it is covertly merging the United States Northern Command, the FBI, ICE, and intelligence agencies into one massive instrument of oppression that serves not the senile Donald Trump, nor the narcissist figurehead Elon Musk, but a dark cabinet of billionaires who intend to weaponize the entire United States government against its own citizens and the world, to dismantle all parts of government that serve the needs of citizens, and to sell off everything held in common to the highest bidder, or the best connected financier.

Some are staging a few protests. The Democratic Party is so supine and inert as to not even warrant comment. What we need to do is to declare that this entire administration, and most of the Congress enabling it, are in clear violation of federal law, the Constitution, and of the most basic mores the separate civilization from barbarism.

Trump and Company has dipped into barbarism and they must all step down, every one of them. If they will not, then the citizens, as they are entitled to do by the Constitution, should take action—and must do so without involving the puppet Democrat Party that exists only to try to bait citizens into useless conflicts that distract from the predations of the billionaire parasite class.

 

Elon Musk is using the bogus “Department of Government Efficiency” to run the entire federal government much as he ran Twitter when he took it over, ordering mass firings, giving ultimatums to administrators, and using the threat of force to make the entire civil service his own playpen.

For all the corruption in the FBI and the Department of Justice, it is clear that the Trump administration is not trying to restore transparency, but rather to use the decay of the institutions as an excuse to further reshape all of government into a weapon—using threats against government officials as a means of forcing through change.

There is no indication that Trump intends to end the interference abroad in other nations by the US government, or to end the spying on, and oppression of, citizens at home. Trump has never made such a statement, and most of his words imply the complete opposite.

This militarization of the government itself is unprecedented in American history.

When Musk seized control of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and fired hundreds of employees on the spot, and then ordered all of the agency’s nearly 10,000 employees to stay home, the enthusiasts of Trump revolution were ecstatic. Here, they claimed, was proof that a real war with the “deep state” was beginning. Nothing could be further from the truth.

USAID is deeply corrupt and has used its services to further the interests of multinational corporations and served as cover for intelligence agencies pushing for imperialist expansion. It is a fiction that USAID made no contributions at all, however. Moreover, USAID is not being shut down—despite the headlines, but rather being made a part of the even more imperialist State Department of Marco Rubio. The same campaigns carried out under USAID will be carried out under new names.

If a legitimate administration had wanted to reform, or to end, USAID, it would have released all documentation concerning its previous illegal activities and brought charges against its administrators based on federal and international law. A series of hearings would have been held and, without any doubt, the criminality in USAID would be revealed to not be in USAID at all, but in the intelligence agencies that use it, and in the multinational banks that manipulate those intelligence agencies. Blaming USAID is like blaming the butcher for the killing of chickens or the assassin for the murder of foreign leaders.

None of the criminal corporations and intelligence operators behind USAID were exposed in the last week. No classified documents indicating criminal action were released.

USAID was shut down so as to frighten other more essential government agencies so that they fear the new powers of the Trump regime.

When Musk stated, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” he was making a direct death threat to civil servants throughout the federal government.

When he stated that, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

He was not talking about reality, about how USAID was abused by the rich to undermine national sovereignty of nations around the world. He was falsely attributing the totalitarian nature of government under corporate control to Marxism and Socialism in an attempt to mislead the public.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal agency set up after the 2008 Wall Street crash, was also shut down by the self-appointed Musk so as to assure there will be no part of government overseeing the destruction of the entire financial system. Trump named Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the hedge fund billionaire, as administrator to oversee its demise.

 

The president is not empowered by law or the constitution to shut down USAID or CFPB. The Congress must act to do so. To take such action without congressional approval is grounds in itself for immediate impeachment. The complicity or corruption of Democrats is irrelevant. We are talking about the rule of law.

And that was not all. The Trump regime froze all federal grants and payments in an order issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Although a federal judge temporarily blocked the order, a shutdown of federal payments to state, local and non-governmental agencies, including for Medicaid, has started, and the Trump regime intends to try again to shut down the government entirely by ending the system for payment. The chaos imposed by previous American regimes abroad in Syria or Iraq, in Nicaragua or El Salvador, has at last come home to roost.

This war on the economy also is being waged a through a bid to take over the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve by a tiny handful of operatives reporting to the billionaires. Musk’s DOGE was given access to the Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS), the Treasury system that handles 90% of the payments made by the US government, including Social Security checks, income tax refunds, and federal paychecks. That is to say that DOGE, now but an extension of Musk’s opaque “X” (SpaceX, X, Tesla and other scams), now controls all payments for the entire federal government and can stop them, or misdirect them, at any time.

 

The Treasury’s top career civil servant in the Bureau of Fiscal Service, David Lebryk, was immediately removed from office when he objected to the intervention by private company into what should be a technical system for making payments.

As is so often the case in dying empires, career civil servants are the first to go. Most likely, money itself will be destroyed next and citizens forced to turn to the crypto currencies offered up by billionaires as the United States faces something like the German inflation of 1923.

Already plans are in place to eliminate the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and privatize, or eliminate, much of the Department of Health and Human Services using the pretext that Kennedy is somehow fighting vaccines—when he is doing nothing of the sort.

The Department of Defense is also being rendered as a totalitarian force that can seize anyone and lock them up in in the torture chambers of El Salvador, or on Guantanamo Bay, if the White House gives the word.

Immediate Impeachment is the only option, but it must be accompanied by criminal charges against all the collaborating politicians, Democratic and Republican alike.

*Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

If Trump Won’t Sic DOGE on the Federal Reserve, What Is the Point?

By Ben Bartee
Global Research, March 03, 2025
Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-sic-doge-federal-reserve/5881276

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!” -Mayer Amschel Rothschild (possible misattribution, but nonetheless consistent with multinational banker ideology)

Presidents come and go.

Some die in office; some retire into the lap of luxury and build monuments to their own greatness using public money; some get shot in the head by magic bullets.

However, they go out, they leave after four or eight years.

Presidents are temporary; the Fed is permanent.

It’s also entirely beyond any democratic accountability whatsoever — a fact we, ironically, never hear a peep of protestation about from the self-professed Guardians of Democracy™ on the left.

Via Investopedia (emphasis added):

“The independence of America’s central bank has always been a contentious issue. In the early days of the Republic, the founding fathers ultimately opted against having a central monetary authority. Although Alexander Hamilton was successful at establishing the Bank of the United States for several years, it ultimately failed. It was not until the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that established the present-day central bank…

The monetary decisions of the Federal Reserve are meant to be separate from the government, and policy moves do not have to be ratified by the President, or anyone else in the Executive Branch…

Independence can also make it easier to execute policies that are politically unpopular but serve a greater public interest. Another argument is that the central bank should be filled with economists and other experts*, rather than politicians or those under political sway.”

*”Trust the experts”! Have we learned our lesson on putting blind faith in government bureaucrats with their own set of (often perverse) interests? Certainly, I have and you probably have, but the NPCs still appear, by and large, to enjoy their domestication.

Watch Fed hobgoblin Alan Greenspan declare on national television that his organization does whatever it wants and its relationships with whatever current president — or Congress, or any other entity — “don’t matter.”

 

So where is DOGE?

The Department of Education and even USAID are low-hanging fruit compared to the Fed.

When the dust settles, if DOGE never takes on the Fed, failing to do so might turn out worse than useless if the public is led to believe the essential corruption infesting the government has been rooted out when, in fact, only the leaves of the putrid tree have been pruned.

“Everyone go back to sleep now, we cut out the child-tranny budget items,” the sirens will sing as they try to lull the MAGA base back into complacency, satiated by the anti-DEI culture war slop the multinational bankers are always happy to dole out if it means they slip the noose yet again.

The money machine and the interests that run it are, in the final analysis, the fount from which spring the child trannyism and the endless wars and the biomedical terror that have defined the early part of this century. Those are merely the downstream manifestations of an unaccountable and rapacious permanent shadow-state with an endless cash supply at its fingertips.

Trump or Harris, to American finance not much changes

Larry Fink. One name, one guarantee. The billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, was already clear in October at a conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association: "I'm tired of hearing that this is the biggest election of your lifetime. The reality is that over time it doesn't matter." Because the important fact is that both Dems and Reps have ongoing investments with the financial giant, as Fink explained, "we work with both administrations and we're having conversations with both candidates."

BlackRock has, therefore, a revolving door with the U.S. government. Veterans of the asset manager held senior positions in Treasury in the Joe Biden administration. A BlackRock executive was also a key economic adviser to Kamala Harris. Trump's Treasury, on the other hand, was run by former Goldman Sachs IT director Steven Mnuchin, who made his fortune as a hedge fund manager and ended up with political offices.

The challenge of the 2024 U.S. election was a race to see who could get the most support from Wall Street.

Trump is very sympathetic to international finance: as president he significantly reduced taxes on the wealthy, leading billionaires to pay less than the working class. In 2018, the 400 richest U.S. households paid an average effective tax rate of 23 percent, lower than the average 24.2 percent paid by the bottom 50 percent of households. Calculations in hand, the richest 5 percent of Americans would see a tax cut of at least 1.2 percent, while the bottom 95 percent of people will have to pay more, including a 4.8 percent tax increase for the poorest 20 percent of the country. One of the main funders of Trump's presidential campaigns, in 2024 and 2020, is the billionaire CEO of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman (coincidentally Zionist), considered Wall Street's largest political donor, who in 2022 was proclaimed the highest paid CEO in the U.S. financial services industry. Consistent with turbo-capitalist logic, Blackstone, which owns the largest number of rental housing units in the U.S., has been evicting tenants en masse, contributing to the homelessness crisis, which grew by 12 percent in 2023.

Although BlackRock and Blackstone are two different companies, they have common histories, and BlackRock owns 6.56 percent of Blackstone, making it the second largest shareholder. Case in point? Blackstone's largest shareholder is Vanguard, which holds a 9.05 percent stake. The fourth largest shareholder is State Street, which holds 4.12 percent.

BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are known as the "big three" U.S. index fund managers. In a 2017 paper, it was noted that the Big Three are the largest shareholders of 438 companies in the S&P 500, an index composed of the 500 largest companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges. These 438 companies made up 88 percent of the total number of companies in the S&P 500 and accounted for 82 percent of the index's market capitalization at the time.

Oligarchy is the factual political form of the United States of America.

Let's come to the just concluded elections: they were the second most expensive in American history, after the 2020 election. It may be a coincidence, but in the last 20 years, the most Wall Street-funded candidates are the ones who won the House and Senate elections. No correlation?

Trump is a good investment

Wall Street seems eager to capitalize on Donald Trump's victory: the Big Three - BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street - are undeterred by the possibility of his victory and remain optimistic after the election, predicting market growth, a surge in tech and cryptocurrencies, and a stronger dollar under Trump.

The blond wisp of a man who will return to Washington is in perfect agreement with BlackRock about cryptocurrencies, so much so that he has promised to make America the crypto capital of the world and has suggested that people invest in Bitcoin as a safe haven asset.

Last January 11, BlackRock launched its iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), whose fund quickly became the largest in the world. This year the firm has made headlines for its aggressive asset accumulation in cryptocurrencies. It may be a coincidence, but immediately after Trump's victory the crypto market soared, with a new all-time high in the value of Bitcoin.

Let's pay attention to what BlackRock said as soon as Trump was elected: "A Trump victory opens the door to tax cuts, deregulation and tougher trade policies. Control of the House is critical. The high budget deficit is one of the factors that we believe will drive up inflation and long-term Treasury yields."

Keep in mind that control of the House-where there is still no absolute majority of Reps over Dems-would give the Trump administration broader powers to implement its fiscal, energy, trade and regulatory agenda. S&P 500 futures jumped more than 2 percent to a record high as the U.S. dollar rose and U.S. bond yields rose.

"On trade, Trump has proposed a wide range of tariffs, including 60 percent on China and universal tariffs of 10-20 percent," BlackRock's statement continued. "Trump's victory will likely result in some deregulation, including reduced banking regulations, although big tech may remain a bipartisan antitrust target. Under Trump, Republicans are aiming to increase energy production, although U.S. oil and gas production has already reached historic highs and increased production will take time. Reducing parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, such as credits for electric vehicles, is on the agenda, but complete repeal seems unlikely, in our view. We expect Trump to pursue permit reform to expand energy infrastructure."

Put another way: we are ready to invest, capitalize, get even richer. The political question is relative. With Trump's victory, once again the hegemon of capital is preparing to speculate and profit at the expense of the masses. Business is business.

 

https://sott.net/en496198

 

AYN RAND THE SELFISH JEWISH ILLUMINATI WITCH

Ayn Rand, a Jewess born in Russia, got into Hollywood screenwriting through Jewish connections. After being required to write a screenplay for a story in which she hated all the characters, she wrote her novel The Fountainhead, which was on a similar theme as the screenplay but espoused pursuit of self-interest. It became a bestseller.

In her next novel, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand attacked altruism. The talented and creative people go on strike and the USA collapses. After the collapse the creative people return to build a society based on “the virtue of selfishness.”

The extreme individualist ideology that she espoused directly conflicted with mainstream social thinking since the Great Depression, which was based on the (true) understanding that uninhibited pursuit of self-interest had been an underlying cause of the Depression. Rand was propagandizing for that piece of acquired wisdom to be discarded.

Ayn Rand’s circle considered themselves to be promoting a revolution toward “a totally free society.”

Enter the idolators of technology. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of the 1980s were heavily influenced by Ayn Rand. The Californian Ideology said that computers would enable everyone to become a Randian hero. Computers would allow the world to become more free, ordered through individual choices, with less need of government to maintain order, including less need of economic regulation. Extreme individualism and antipathy toward government translate into globalism and free trade.

Alan Greenspan was a member of Ayn Rand’s circle. An economic boom started during the Clinton administration, after Alan Greenspan persuaded Clinton to cut taxes. It was believed that the boom could go on forever because of the controlling factor of computers, keeping everybody well informed and preventing anything from going too far as had occurred prior to the Great Depression. This was called “the new economy.”

Greenspan worried, however, because he noticed that profits were increasing while there was no increase in productivity. He warned in 1996 that the market was overvalued, but then changed his mind under pressure, deciding that computers were somehow contributing to productivity in ways that he could not detect.

The documentary points out Ayn Rand’s inability to live in a purely rational manner, while convincing herself that everything that she did was rational. Similarly, despite the pervasive implementation of new technology, human nature remained the same.

By 1997 the U.S. Government was dominated by global free-trade thinkers. Southeast Asian nations were pressured to open their economies to foreign investment. Joseph Stiglitz of the Council of Economic Advisors was worried about this. He says that it was only in the interest of a very small group of people to do this. Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin blocked the CEA’s attempt to warn the president. Stiglitz believed that Rubin was working for the finance markets.

Overly optimistic investment in Thailand and South Korea led to economic crisis in those countries. The IMF offered loans to stabilize their economies, under the condition that the governments eliminate economic barriers in those countries. Indonesia also was pressured to make this agreement in 1998. What happened was that the IMF bailout money was used to allow Western investors to withdraw their investments: then the economies collapsed. Then U.S. taxpayers had to bail out the IMF.

Robert Rubin was making these decisions while Bill Clinton was tied up with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Power over U.S. foreign policy had been transferred in effect from the elected President of the United States to financiers. (This could last so long as the president is merely an idiotic or corrupt frontman willing to acquiesce in plutocratic predations.)

The attack on the World Trade Center was an attack on a symbol of the Ayn Rand ideology. This economic shock exposed weaknesses in the economy: many companies like Enron had been falsifying profits and concealing debts, which had become easier as a result of deregulation.

Stability of the U.S. economy after the World Trade Center attacks was maintained by the Chinese Politburo. China sold cheap goods to the USA and used the profits to buy US Treasury Bonds, which in turn funded lending to bad credit risks. In 2008, when this orgy of bad lending came to a crashing end, the United States taxpayer was required to save the bankers from the consequences of their bad lending decisions just as had occurred in 1998.

U.S. society is now stuck in a way of looking at the world that is false and produces bad results. The rule of unregulated self-interest turns out to be the rule of a few super-wealthy financiers, without accountability.

 

Ayn Rand and the “Californian Ideology” as Proximate Causes of U.S. Economic Decline | National Vanguard

Ayn Rand didn't believe in passion. She believed in "reason." Yet she was a hypocrite. She fell in love with a disciple half her age, Nathaniel Branden, and then tried to destroy him when he dumped her for a younger woman.

The movie is based on the book by Branden's wife, Barbara. Although she too had been betrayed by her husband, she urged Rand not to destroy his career:

Barbara Branden: I'm asking you to show compassion.
Ayn Rand: Why?
Barbara Branden: It's what humans do.

This cuts to the core of Ayn Rand's philosophy. She didn't believe in the existence of the soul. Our soul is our true identity. It is our connection to God, what makes us "human."

Rand didn't believe in God or religion, which she termed "the supernatural." She was a materialist. "Reason" is totally based on the senses: "emotion ultimately derives from the thinking one has done, or has failed to do."

(In fact, reason divorced from moral absolutes is nothing but expedience.)

As a materialist, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was identical to a Communist. Her real name was Alice Rosenbaum and she took her name from her typewriter. She could have been Ayn Remington, but that wasn't as catchy.

 

WHO IS JOHN GALT?

This explains Ayn Rand's "success."

She was part of the Illuminati dialectic. On the one hand, they constructed Communism and socialism, "collectivism;" and then they used Ayn Rand to posit its dialectic opposite, Rand's "Objectivism"  a form of individualism. While individualists and collectivists fight it out in aPunch and Judy Show, they don't see the puppet masters.

This dialectic is largely specious. Both reject God and the existence of the soul. "Collectivism" is simply a means to win popular support for a totalitarian government run by Illuminati Jews and their Masonic fart catchers. Objectivism releases these billionaire Illuminati psychopaths from conscience or any social obligation.

The Cabalist Jew believes that God is formless, unknowable and not even in the world. The Cabalist Jew alone is human, and channels God's Will.

 

Atlas Shrugged is a novel about business titans like John Galt who go on strike because they are hampered by government regulation.

Who is John Galt?  He is Ayn Rand. He is the Cabalist Jew who demands the world accept him as God. He is Rothschild and Rockefeller.

He is the Illuminati.

Ayn Rand - Another Communist (Satanist) Jew - henrymakow.com

 

John Todd exposes Ayn Rand

OVER IN THE CENTER IS ITS (The Illuminati's) HEART, THE BANK OF ENGLAND, THE BANK OF FRANCE, THE FEDERAL RESERVE ACT. Most people feel the Federal Reserve Act is a government organization. It is not! It has nothing to do with the Government of the United States; it is a stockholder company owned by individuals. Much of the stock is owned by non-Americans.

MANY BANKS and FAMOUS CORPORATIONS ARE OWNED OR CONTROLLED BY THE ILLUMINATI. We tell Christians across the U.S. that housewives and husbands cannot shop any day or any week without buying from a company that the Illuminati owns, it is impossible.

PHILLIP ROTHSCHILD ORDERED ONE OF HIS MISTRESSES TO WRITE AN 1100-PAGE BOOK that would describe to all witches how they would take control of the World through the Illuminati: It’s called Atlas Shrugged. (By Ayn Rand) One of the things in it is happening on the front pages of the newspapers across the United States right now. In fact she spent a third of the book describing how they would raise the oil prices and then later destroy the oil fields and then they would also completely shut down the coal.

IT ALSO DESCRIBED HOW THEY WOULD BLOW UP GRAIN MILLS, how they would derail trains. Their sole purpose is to bankrupt their own companies and destroy their own companies until they destroyed the currency of the whole World, and still be so financially strong they would withstand it! 

John Todd, the Illuminati and Witchcraft - James Japan

NOTE: NEVER FORGET THE EXPLODING FOOD PROCESSING PLANTS, WAS THIS POSSIBLY DONE BY DESIGN? Can Someone Explain Why So Many Food Processing

Plants Are Blowing Up? – PJ Media

 

Good for further study

Can Someone Explain Why So Many Food Processing Plants Are Blowing Up? – PJ Media

Food Processing Plants And Distribution Centers Are Burning Down. *UPDATE 11* One Of Largest US Egg Suppliers Burns Down – winepressnews.com

 

Evangelicals Seduced By Ayn Rand Worship Crypto-Satanism, Suggest Scholars

"I give people Ayn Rand with trappings" - Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan (to Kim Klein of the Washington Post, 1970)

"if a man smite thee on one cheek, SMASH him on the other!" - Anton LaVey, from The Satanic Bible (Section III, paragraph 7)

Ayn Rand has long been the intellectual darling of many both on the secular right but also the religious right, and that's curious given Rand's writing is widely credited with having inspired Anton LaVey, founder of the Church Of Satan and author of The Satanic Bible. Cited in the rather staid academic work Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, Anton LaVey is quoted as having admitted that his religion was "just Ayn Rand's philosophy with ceremony and ritual added."

Rand's Objectivism celebrates selfishness as a virtue. And, as it happens, the glorification of selfishness is one of the foundational principles of Anton LaVey's form of Satanism.

This raises a bit of a conundrum for Christian conservative fans of Ayn Rand's philosophy - are they really caught up in idolatrous worship at the altar of crypto-Satanism? Are they to be meek and selfless like Jesus, turning the other cheek to their enemy? Or do they follow LaVey's approach, and "SMASH him on the other!"?

It's a question that Frank Cocozzelli and Frederick Clarkson raise, if gently, in their essay The Randian Fault That Could Shake Conservatism. As they write,  

 

"The spectacular failure of the film version of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged has drawn fresh attention to one of modern conservatism's most influential and controversial figures. Movement conservatism usually presents itself as the stalwart guardian of traditional faith. But conservatism may experience a profound identity crisis due to the increasing popularity Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- which celebrates selfishness as a virtue; declares religious faith to be incompatible with reason; and altruism -- including self-sacrifice - is a vice. Objectivism says there are only two kinds of people in this world, creators and parasites.  Suffice to say, such a view is very far from the vision of most conservative Christians."

The current Church of Satan acknowledges Ayn Rand's influence on LaVey's thought while stressing that there are significant differences between LaVeyan Satanism and Rand's Objectivism:

 

Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, is an acknowledged source for some of the Satanic philosophy as outlined in The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey. Ayn Rand was a brilliant and insightful author and philosopher and her best-selling novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead continue to attract deserved attention for a new generation of readers. I am a strong admirer of Ayn Rand but I am an even stronger admirer of Anton LaVey for the vital differences between the philosophies of Objectivism and Satanism.

| Evangelicals Seduced By Ayn Rand Worship Crypto-Satanism, Suggest Scholars

The Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand/Satanism Connection Made Simple

Leading up to the 2012 election, prominent conservative evangelicals such as former Nixon hatchet-man turned born-gain Christian Chuck Colson, apparently worried that a possible VP pick for the upcoming election was deeply in thrall to Ayn Rand's ideas, began to drop loud hints that Christians who followed Ayn Rand were in the thrall of "anti-Christian" ideas. And it was true; Ayn Rand's ideas have been credited with inspiring the Church of Satan.

 

"I give people Ayn Rand, with trappings"
--- Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan (to Kim Klein of the Washington Post, 1970), as cited on page 2 of Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, by Jesper Aagaard Peterson (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009)

"Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism." --- Congressman Paul Ryan, 2009 official Ryan For Congress video ad.

"My great friend, the late Bill Buckley - one of his greatest contributions to modern conservatism was his effort to purge it of cranks and crypto-cultists and for Buckley, Ayn Rand and her followers certainly fit that description...  [Ayn Rand's] patently anti-Christian ideas seem to be gaining steam... powerful committee chairmen on Capital Hill make their staffers read her tracts." --- former Nixon Administration member Charles Colson, May 2011 installment of his "Two Minute Warning" video series, titled Atlas Shrugged and So Should You

He tried to warn them. To no avail. So in 2012 the late Chuck Colson's nightmare scenario came to life. How many prominent conservatives have praised Ayn Rand's books? I've lost count. It's odd, because among relevant academics and also among LaVeyan satanists, it is taken for granted that Ayn Rand's ideas played a major role in the creation of the philosophy behind The Church of Satan. Some even credit one specific section of Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged as having provided the intellectual template for The Satanic Bible [see my handy quote base, below].

As it happens, a certain Wisconsin Congressman who became a topic of national conversation in 2012 has also cited that very section in Atlas Shrugged, as one of his key philosophical guiding lights [quote base, again].

[update, 8/28/2012 - my new 3 and 1/2 minute video, below, showcases statements by Paul Ryan, in praise of Ayn Rand, Charles Colson's attacks on Rand and her followers, statements from Rand, and quotes from Anton LaVey]

 

 

Murray Rothbard – founder of modern libertarianism, chief academic officer of leading libertarian think tank the Mises Institute, and one of the most important thinkers in the Austrian School of Economics –argued in 1972 that Rand was a champion for her own aggrandizement, not for liberty or reason.

Rothbard accused Rand -in a long but must-read essay – of being acting like a typical cult leader:

The Ayn Rand cult … flourished for just ten years in the 1960s…. It also promoted slavish dependence on the guru in the name of independence; adoration and obedience to the leader in the name of every person’s individuality; and blind emotion and faith in the guru in the name of Reason.

***

Since every cult is grounded on a faith in the infallibility of the guru, it becomes necessary to keep its disciples in ignorance of contradictory infidel writings which may wean cult members away from the fold.

***

Just as Communists are often instructed not to read anti-Communist literature, the Rand cult went further to disseminate what was virtually an Index of Permitted Books.

***

The philosophical rationale for keeping Rand cultists in blissful ignorance was the Randian theory of “not giving your sanction to the Enemy.”

***

In a development eerily reminiscent of the organized hatred directed against the arch-heretic Emanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s 1984, Rand cultists were required to sign a loyalty oath to Rand; essential to the loyalty oath was a declaration that the signer would henceforth never read any future works of the apostate and arch-heretic Branden [Rand’s number 2]. After the split, any Rand cultist seen carrying a book or writing by Branden was promptly excommunicated.

***

Cultists were required to swear their unquestioning belief that Rand was right and Branden wrong, even though they were not permitted to learn the facts behind the split. In fact, the mere failure to take a stand, the mere attempt to find the facts, or the statement that one could not take a stand on such a grave matter without knowledge of the facts was sufficient for instant expulsion. For such an attitude was conclusive proof of the defective “loyalty” of the disciple to his guru, Ayn Rand.

***

Just as the Marxist movements developed jargon and slogans which were clung to for fear of uttering incorrect deviations, the same was true in the Randian movement. In the name of “precision of language,” in short, nuance and even synonyms were in effect prohibited.

***

Wit and humor, as might be gathered from this incident, were verboten in the Randian movement. The philosophical rationale was that humor demonstrates that one “is not serious about one’s values.” The actual reason, of course, is that no cult can withstand the piercing and sobering effect, the sane perspective, provided by humor. One was permitted to sneer at one’s enemies, but that was the only humor allowed, if humor that be.

Personal enjoyment, indeed, was also frowned upon in the movement and denounced as hedonistic “whim-worship.” In particular, nothing could be enjoyed for its own sake – every activity had to serve some indirect, “rational” function. Thus, food was not to be savored, but only eaten joylessly as a necessary means of one’s survival; sex was not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but only to be engaged in grimly as a reflection and reaffirmation of one’s “highest values”; painting or movies only to be enjoyed if one could find “rational values” in doing so. All of these values were not simply to be discovered quietly by each person – the heresy of “subjectivism” – but had to be proven to the rest of the cult. In practice, as will be seen further below, the only safe aesthetic or romantic “values” or objects for the member were those explicitly sanctioned by Ayn Rand or other top disciples.

***

Any such confession meant a harrowing process of ideological and psychological purification, supposedly ending in one’s success at achieving rationality, independence, and self-esteem and therefore an unquestioning and blind devotion to Ayn Rand.

***

One top young Randian … was deathly afraid to ask the question, it being so basic that he knew he would be excommunicated on the spot for simply raising the point; but he had complete faith that if Rand should be asked the question, she would answer it satisfactorily and resolve his doubts. And so he waited, year after year, hoping against hope that someone would ask the question, be expelled, but that his own doubts would then be resolved in the process.

In the manner of many cults, loyalty to the guru had to supersede loyalty to family and friends – typically the first personal crises for the fledgling Randian. If non-Randian family and friends persisted in their heresies even after being hectored at some length by the young neophyte, they were then considered to be irrational and part of the Enemy and had to be abandoned. The same was true of spouses; many marriages were broken up by the cult leadership who sternly informed either the wife or the husband that their spouses were not sufficiently Rand worthy. Indeed, since emotions resulted only from premises, and since the leaders’ premises were by definition supremely rational, that top leadership presumed to try to match and unmatch couples.

***

One girl, a certified top Randian, who experienced the misfortune of falling in love with an unworthy non-Randian. The leadership told the girl that if she persisted in her desire to marry the man, she would be instantly excommunicated. She did so nevertheless, and was promptly expelled.

***

But the most important sanction for the enforcement of loyalty and obedience, the most important instrument for psychological control of the members, was the development and practice of Objectivist Psychotherapy. In effect, this psychological theory held that since emotion always stems from incorrect ideas, that therefore all neurosis did so as well; and hence, the cure for that neurosis is to discover and purge oneself of those incorrect ideas and values. And since Randian ideas were all correct and all deviation therefore incorrect, Objectivist Psychotherapy consisted of (a) inculcating everyone with Randian theory – except now in a supposedly psycho-therapeutic setting; and (b) searching for the hidden deviation from Randian theory responsible for the neurosis and purging it by correcting the deviation.

***

It is no wonder that the enormous psychological pressure of cult membership led to an extremely high turnover in the Randian movement, relatively far more so than among the Communists.

***

Such fear was greater than that of a Communist member, because the Randian had far less leeway for ideological or personal deviation. Furthermore, since Rand had an absolute and total line on every conceivable question of ideology and daily life, all aspects of such life had to be searched – by oneself and by others – for suspicious heresies and deviations. Everything was the object of fear and suspicion. There was the fear of making an independent judgment, for suppose that the member was to make a statement on some subject on which he did not know Rand’s position, and then were to find out that Rand disagreed.

***

Every Randian lived in – and indeed was himself – a community of spies and informers, ready to ferret out and denounce any deviations from Randian doctrine. Thus, one time a Randian, walking with a girl friend, told her that he had attended a party at which several Randians had made an impromptu tape imitating the voices of the top Randian leaders. Stricken by this dire information and after spending a sleepless night, the girl rushed to inform the top leadership of this terrible transgression. Promptly, the leading participants were called on the carpet by their Objectivist Psychotherapist and bitterly denounced in their “therapy” sessions: “After all,” said the therapist, “you wouldn’t mock God.” When the owner of the tape refused the therapist’s demand to relinquish it so that it could be inspected in detail, his doom as a member of the movement was effectively sealed.

No Randian, even the top leadership, was exempt from the all-pervasive fear and repression. Every one of the original cadre, for example, was placed on probation at least once, and was forced to demonstrate his loyalty to Rand at length and in numerous ways.

***

Cult theory decreed that happiness can only be achieved by being a committed Randian; they couldn’t even be intelligent, since how could seemingly intelligent people not be Randians, especially if they commit the gravest sin – failing to become Randians once they were exposed to this new gospel.

***

The errant member was peremptorily ordered to appear at a “trial” to hear charges against him. If he refused to appear – as he would if he had any shred of self-respect left – then the trial would continue in absentia, with all the members present taking turns in denouncing the expelled member, reading charges against him (again in a manner eerily reminiscent of 1984)…. Having his closest friend take the leading part in the heresy proceeding was of course important as a way of forcing the friend to demonstrate his own loyalty to Rand, thereby clearing himself of any lingering taint by association. It is reported that when Branden was expelled, one of his closest former friends in New York sent him a letter proclaiming that the only moral thing he could do at that point was to commit suicide – a strange position for an allegedly pro-life, pro-individual-purpose philosophy to take.

***

Robotically, the Randians intoned their slogans, generally imitating the poses and manner of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, and further, imitating their common cult vision of heroes and heroines of the Randian fictional canon …. Many of the young men managed to look like carbon copies of Branden, while the young women tried to look like Barbara Branden, replete with the cigarette-holder held aloft, derived from Ayn Rand herself, that was supposed to symbolize the high moral standards and the mocking contempt wielded by Randian heroines.

***

Preferring Bach, for example, to Rachmaninoff, subjected one to charges of believing in a “malevolent universe.” lf not corrected by self-criticism and psychotherapeutic brainwashing, such deviation could well lead to ejection from the movement.

***

If the Rand line was totalitarian, encompassing all of one’s life, then, even when all the general premises were agreed upon and Randians checked with headquarters to see who was In or Out, there was still need to have some “judicial” mechanism to resolve concrete issues and to make sure that every member toed the line on that question. No one was ever allowed to be neutral on any issue. The judicial mechanism to resolve such concrete disputes was, as usual in cults, the rank one enjoyed in the Randian hierarchy.

***

There was an unofficial designation that was far more revealing: “the senior collective” …. each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden. There was, for example, Nathan’s sister Elaine Kalberman; his brother-in-law, Harry Kalberman; his first cousin, Dr. Allan Blumenthal, who assumed the mantle of leading Objectivist Psychotherapist after Branden’s expulsion; Barbara’s first cousin, Leonard Piekoff; and Joan Mitchell, wife of Allan Blumenthal. Alan Greenspan’s familial relation was more tenuous, being the former husband of Joan Mitchell. The only non-relative in the class of ’43 was Mary Ann Rukovina, who made the top rank after being the college roommate of Joan Mitchell.

***

The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality, not with everyone’s right reason but only with Rand’s reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand’s herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand’s mind and will.

***

The guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.

Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians, despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.

Postscript:  Ayn Rand’s main real life hero was apparently a serial killer.  See this, this and this. 

Ayn Rand Was NOT a Libertarian - Global Research Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it: Never allow the Synagogue of Satan to control the money supply! READ MORE AT: Jew Watch - Leaders - Alan Greenspan

WILD FIRES USED TO CLEAR OUT AREAS FOR THE RICH ELITE'S PLANNED SMART CITIES.

Are Natural Disasters Clearing the Way for SMART Cities? California, Maui, Valencia, Australia, the list goes on

 

 

L.A. The latest casualty of the SMART City agenda added to the list

By General Maddox

As wildfires rage across California, particularly in the Los Angeles region, a troubling pattern emerges: natural disasters seem to target regions earmarked for SMART city upgrades. Whether it’s wildfires, floods, or other catastrophes, the aftermath often leads to redevelopment aligned with SMART city initiatives. This isn’t an isolated phenomenon. From Maui’s fires to Valencia’s floods, and even the catastrophic disasters in Australia, the alignment is too consistent to ignore.

Los Angeles: Wildfires and SMART City Goals

Los Angeles is leading the SMART city charge, with its SMART LA 2028 plan promising advanced infrastructure and integrated data systems. While these initiatives are marketed as sustainable and future-focused, it’s notable that many areas affected by wildfires coincidentally fall within the scope of these planned upgrades.

The question arises: are these fires purely natural occurrences, or is their timing convenient for clearing the way for large-scale redevelopment?

Maui: From Paradise to Reconstruction

The fires that devastated Lahaina in 2023 left the community in ruins. While the official narrative cited environmental factors and resource mismanagement, it’s worth noting that Maui was also part of a broader SMART city vision. Plans for “sustainable and resilient” infrastructure in the region were already in motion, and now the destruction provides a blank slate for these developments.

Can we chalk this up to a coincidence, or are such disasters part of a broader trend? Let’s continue.

Valencia, Spain: Floods and SMART City Development

In October 2023, Valencia experienced catastrophic flooding, with streets submerged and entire neighborhoods destroyed. At the same time, the city is pushing forward with its Valencia Smart City Plan, a blueprint for a technology-driven urban future.

As in Maui and Los Angeles, the devastation caused by natural disasters seems to align perfectly with the agenda for redevelopment. With the timing of such disasters lining up perfectly with the plans for redevelopment.

Chile: Chilean government labeled the fires as the country’s worst disaster since the 2010 Chile earthquake

The Chile wildfires received very little media coverage but were also some of the country’s most devastating in its history. Among the most damaged regions was Valparaiso and the resort town of Viña Del Mar. Once again is it just a coincidence that this particular spot was also earmarked for a SMART city upgrade?

Australia: Fires and Floods Clearing the Way

Australia provides one of the most striking examples of this phenomenon. The bushfires of 2019-2020 scorched vast areas, and these were quickly followed by record-breaking floods in 2022. Many of the hardest-hit regions are now slated for SMART city redevelopment, raising significant questions about the connection between these disasters and urban planning initiatives.

According to an investigative report from TOTT News, the 2022 floods were concentrated in areas such as Lismore, Northern Rivers, and parts of Queensland—regions already tied to ambitious SMART city upgrades. This isn’t the first time Australia has faced this pattern. During the 2020 bushfires, similar regions were devastated, only to see redevelopment plans tied to SMART infrastructure emerge in the aftermath.

The TOTT News report also highlights how recovery programs, heavily influenced by government policies, seem to prioritize rebuilding in ways that align with SMART city frameworks. This has led to accusations that natural disasters are being exploited—or even engineered—to facilitate such transitions.

A Global Trend or Mere Coincidence?

California, Maui, Valencia, Chile, and Australia are not isolated cases. Around the world, countries like Canada, Greece, and others are seeing disasters strike regions associated with SMART city initiatives. This global pattern raises several pressing questions:

• Why do so many SMART city developments arise in areas previously devastated by natural disasters?

• Why is the timing of these plans for SMART Cities so close to the natural disasters?

• Are these disasters entirely natural, or are they being manipulated to serve a larger agenda?

• Who truly benefits from these rebuilding efforts—the affected communities or corporate interests driving the SMART city agenda?

Cui Bono: Who Benefits?

The beneficiaries of this cycle are clear: large corporations, policymakers, and developers invested in SMART city technology. With billions of dollars at stake, the devastation caused by disasters provides a convenient opportunity for redevelopment. Meanwhile, the residents of these areas are often displaced, silenced, or forced to accept “progress” they didn’t consent to. The insurance companies conveniently deny coverage to their customers who are then forced to accept rock bottom buyouts for their properties if anything at all.

Final Thoughts

The recurring alignment between natural disasters and SMART city development is more than a coincidence—it’s a pattern that demands scrutiny. While environmental mismanagement and bureaucratic incompetence are real issues, they cannot fully explain why certain regions bear the brunt of these events, only to be reshaped into hubs of technology and surveillance.

As wildfires, floods, and other disasters continue to disrupt lives across the globe, we must ask ourselves: is this truly natural, or is it by design? The answers lie in the shadows of official narratives, waiting for those bold enough to uncover them.

Stay vigilant. Stay critical. Stay informed.

 

| Are Natural Disasters Clearing the Way for SMART Cities? California, Maui, Valencia, Australia, the list goes on Real News Australia

SMART CITY FIRES: Not just Los Angeles, but EVERY CITY designated as a future smart city has been BURNT TO THE GROUND – are these ALL coincidences? 

• • Smart City Burnout: Every major city slated for transformation into a "smart city" has recently experienced devastating fires, suggesting a pattern rather than mere coincidence. These fires often start and spread rapidly, leaving little time for effective firefighting.

 

• • Planned Infernos: The timing and nature of these fires raise suspicions of deliberate actions, possibly involving weather or energy weapons, arson, or a deliberate lack of resources for firefighters. Some see this as part of a blueprint to control populations through the creation of police-state smart cities.

 

• • Global Impact: This phenomenon is not limited to a single region; cities around the world, including Santiago, Spain, Cortana (Italy), and others, have all fallen victim to these fires. It raises questions about whether similar events might occur in other key cities like London.

 

• • Future Smart Cities: Several cities are targeted for smart city development, including Singapore, New York City, London, Paris, and many others. These cities are considered ideal for advanced technological integration, but the recent events raise concerns about potential government control and the population's loss of autonomy.

 

Should we call them “smart fires?” Every major city that the globalists have planned to turn into a “smart city” has been burned to the ground recently. This is beyond coincidence, as evidence points to weather weapons, energy weapons, arsonists, lack of resources and funds for firefighters, and politicians with no remorse celebrating after the destruction.

 

The fires seem very planned, like they’re “smart fires,” that start, spread, and devastate places where these massive cities can have new buildings, apartments, and rail systems built. It’s all part of what seems to be a blueprint plan for controlling the populace 100 percent soon in police-state smart cities that are like scenes straight out of a George Orwell book and film.

Every major city with “smart city” plans already in place has coincidentally burned to the ground, all around the world

We’re not just talking about Maui and Los Angeles, but also Santiago Chili, Spain, Cortana Italy all were announced to become smart cities in the near future, and they’ve all been devastated by infernos that nobody had the proper resources to put out. Is London next? Should we expect to see a “climate change” inferno burst out in London in the next few weeks, so that the government and globalists can seize all the land for free or at bankruptcy pricing for the new “smart city?”

 

What other cities are on the docket to become smart cities? Do you live in one now? Here are some other cities on the list that have been deemed perfect for the development of a 15-minute smart city dictatorship, where the government can turn off all power, electric vehicles, food supply, money supply, and internet with the flick of a switch, should the populace not fall in line with every narrative, like a new plannedemic lockdown or climate change lockdown.

 

Cities considered frontrunners for becoming "smart cities" include Singapore, Zurich, Oslo, Taipei, Lausanne, New York City, London, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Toronto, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Geneva, Stockholm, Hamburg, and Abu Dhabi, with extreme focus on advanced technology integration in the realms of transportation, energy management, and food and water supply, and you get the idea.

 

Here’s a list of 14 cities in the USA ready to be burnt to the ground using weather and energy weapons in preparation to become Orwellian AI and government-controlled 15-minute-smart-cities:

 

 

1. 1. Dallas, Texas: Smart Dallas project with LED streetlights, AI-enabled cameras, and Wi-Fi, reducing crime and increasing digital connectivity.

 

1. 1. Chicago, Illinois: Connect Chicago providing internet access, digital skills training, and online learning. Chicago Works for You program offers online service delivery views. Chicago City Health Atlas provides local health trend information.

 

1. 1. Denver, Colorado: CityNow program testing solar mini-grids, remote-controlled LED streetlights, and smart road systems to minimize energy use and reduce congestion.

 

1. 1. Seattle, Washington: Food Rescue Innovation Lab to reduce food waste and improve food distribution for people with food insecurity.

 

1. 1. Charlotte, North Carolina: Access Charlotte extending internet access and improving digital navigation, with digital literacy and online learning programs.

 

1. 1. San Francisco, California: Smart transportation initiatives like bike-sharing, SF park for real-time parking info, and smart waste management to reduce unnecessary trash collection trips.

 

1. 1. Washington, DC: Uses AI and analytics from video cameras to monitor city traffic and movement. Added smart street lights and digital kiosks for free public WiFi.

 

1. 1. Boston, Massachusetts: Innovative parking apps, smart lighting, and Go Boston 2030 initiative to encourage alternate forms of transportation.

 

1. 1. Chattanooga, Tennessee: Uses AI and digital twins for smart intersections and IoT devices to optimize trucking routes.

 

1. 1. Boulder, Colorado: Added smart parking, vehicle-to-grid EV charging, and real-time smart air quality monitoring.

 

1. 1. San Jose, California: Expands internet access, WiFi extenders, and adopts FirstNet for reliable communication between first responders.

 

1. 1. New York City: Uses AI and analytics for modernizing the grid, adding free WiFi and charging stations, and implementing smart traffic management and lights.

 

1. 1. Miami, Florida: Maximizes city poles with IoT sensors and smart lights, focuses on smart civil building infrastructure with temperature control, facial recognition, and AI assistants.

 

1. LaGrange, Georgia: Unveiled a solar roadway system producing energy for a solar-powered EV charging station, the first of its kind in the USA.

 

Tune your apocalypse dial to Preparedness.news for updates on real news about surviving the Smart City burn plans for every metropolitan city around the world. #SmartCityFires

 

Sources for this article include:

 

Censored.news

 

NaturalNews.com

 

SandTech.com

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THE JEWS ARE FAST MOVING THE ENSLAVE YOU!

 

"The Jewish people as a whole will be its own messiah. It will attain world dominion by the dissolution of other races, by the abolition of frontiers, the annihilation of monarchy, and by the establishment of a world republic in which the Jews will everywhere exercise the privilege of citizenship. In this new world order the children of Israel will furnish all the leaders without encountering opposition. The governments of the different peoples forming the world republic will fall without difficulty into the hands of the Jews. It will then be possible for the Jewish rulers to abolish private property, and everywhere to make use of the resources of the state. Thus, will the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, in which it is said that when the messianic time is come, the Jews will have all the property of the whole world in their hands. "-Alleged letter of Baruch Levy to Karl Marx, check out Solving the Mystery of Babylon the Great by Edward Hendrie for more details. 

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In These Very Moments, The Protocols Are Being Rewritten

By Gilad Atzmon

http://www.gilad.co.uk

 

For many years my detractors have pointed at the following quote as evidence of my anti Jewish sentiments:

 

"American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ are an authentic document or a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do control the world."

 

Both Zionists as well as anti Zionist Zionists cling to this quote as evidence that my ideas are ‘anti Semitic’.  As if Jewish power and dominance is a product of my sick imagination. 

 

In the article on antisemitism that was published back in December 2003 I presented an extensive list of Zionist Jews in Bush Administration. I also pointed out that “in Clinton's administration the situation was even worse. Even though the Jews only make up 1.9 per cent of the country's population,  an astounding 56 per cent of Clinton's appointees were Jews.”  I tried to warn Jews that their excessive power is dangerous for our universe as well as Jewry.    

 

I have never retracted or apologised for statements of what I believed and still believe to be the truth. It is not a secret that with time, many scholars have supported my position. In 2006 Mearsheimer and Walt published their book on The Israeli Lobby. 

 

45% of the Brits are regarded by the Jewish leaders as ‘antisemites’ because the Brits acknowledged in response to survey questions that Jews enjoy extensive power in media, politics and finance.

 

For 12 years I’ve been accused of being an ‘antisemite’ for stating the obvious - the question of whether the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is an authentic document or a forgery is irrelevant. Jewish power in media, finance and politics is immense and devastatingly dangerous.

 

Today, Yossi Sarid, the Israeli light Zionist veteran politician agreed with my position. This is what he wrote in Haaretz:

 

“In these very moments, the protocols are being rewritten. Rich Jews are writing them in their own handwriting. They, in their wealth, are confirming with their own signatures what anti-Semites used to slander them with in days gone by: We, the elders of Zion, pull the strings of Congress, and the congressmen are nothing but marionettes who do our will. If they don’t understand our words, they’ll understand our threats. And if in the past, we ran the show from behind the scenes, now we’re doing it openly, from center stage. And if you forget our donations, the wellspring will run dry.”

 

One question remains, is telling the truth about Jewish power Antisemitism?

 

My answer is unequivocal. No it isn’t, truth is liberation.

 

The Jewish CBDC Regime
By Brother Nathanael Kapner
January 20 2024

“END THE FED!” cried Ron Paul.

Yet no one—not even his son—picked up the ball.

The FED—The Federal Reserve Bank—is about to roll out the digital dollar, “CBDC,” “Central Bank Digital Currency.”

Like a check, cash, or credit card, the FED will assign “Digital Wallets” with your own password with a set of numbers chipped into your Real ID Card.

Your Wallet will be stored on a Central Data Base for both digital deposits and purchases.

“Payments are made faster, safer, and easier!” yelps Janet Yellen at Treasury.

Not so fast.

Centralization is Jewry’s ploy for total domination over the goy.

Throwing a curve, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs spins it with verve:

“It’s all about inclusion! Around the globe people who can’t access a bank can make transactions right at their fingertips.”

Notice the names:

Janet Yellen, David Solomon.

They’re Jews.

Who controls the Fed?

Past Chairmen make up the stew:

Warburg, Burns, Meyer, Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, gives you the clue: JEWS through and through.

“The Federal Reserve is an independent agency,” says former Chaiman Alan Greenspan.

“And that means no agency of government can overrule actions we take.”

It’s private. It’s not Federal. Jews control it.

It’s a consortium of Jewish banks, Citi, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and others.

All led by the big boys, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase

Both banks, no surprise, are led by Jewish CEOs, David Solomon of Goldman, Jamie Dimon of Chase.

(Dimon’s ancestry is traced to a Jewish banking family in Thessaloniki, Greece.)

What does this mean for the Digital Dollar, the CBDC?

It gives Jews—malicious, sneaky, murderous, Christ-hating, lying Jews—full control over all the monies going into–and coming out of your Digital Wallet.”

CANCELLING YOU OUT is now “faster, safer, easier,” Janet Yellen, or any Jew in charge of your money, would say.

Ever heard of “Social Credit?”

Some kike will decide if you comply.

“End The Fed!” cried Ron Paul.

We may all be crying soon.

The Jewish CBDC Regime | Real Jew News

CBDCs Are Coming: Elite Plan to Use These ‘Digital Currency’ to Enslave Humanity

Time is running out. No, you didn’t vote for it, nor were you consulted about it. And yet, it might be the most fundamental power grab by global elites in the history of modern civilization.

Your new currency will become the ultimate layer of personal surveillance, and compliance. 

How is it that so few people are aware of such a sweeping global transformation in how humans interact, buy, sell and trade? 

It’s now clear that the CBDC train is coming down the tracks a break-neck speed.

The question is: what are you going to do about it? 

Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse report…

Central bank digital currencies CBDCs are feverishly being developed all over the globe, and this is something that should deeply alarm all of us. 

For a moment, I would like for you to imagine a world where the government instantly knows whenever you buy or sell something.  No transaction would ever be truly private, not even your most personal or embarrassing ones.  In addition, your money would not be truly your own under such a system.  Your access to the digital currency system would be a privilege which could potentially be suspended or revoked with the click of a mouse.  All of a  sudden you would not be able to buy or sell anything and you would become an outcast from society.  Under no circumstances should any government ever be given such power.

Unfortunately, the CBDCs are coming, and they are going to radically change how commerce gets done.

Here in the United States, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has posted a job listing for a “Senior Crypto Architect” to work on the development of a digital dollar.

U.S. Representative Warren Davidson is very upset about this, because he believes that a CBDC issued by the Federal Reserve would be the “financial equivalent of the Death Star”…

The job description specified that the Federal Reserve seeks a technologist to “perform central bank digital currency (CBDC) research and development.”

The expert will work to “ensure the Federal Reserve is well-positioned to design, develop, and implement technology to support a CBDC as may be required by the Board of Governors.”

Although the job listing shows that the Federal Reserve is only working on CBDC research, Rep Davidson believes it is a sign of what is to come and described it as the “financial equivalent of the Death Star.”

Davidson added that CBDC would turn money into a tool of coercion and control.

Sadly, he is right on target.

Once “digital dollars” issued by the Federal Reserve become the dominant form of currency in our nation, whoever has power over that system would truly have an unprecedented “tool of coercion and control”.

So we must not allow this to happen.

Sadly, CBDCs are now in development all around the world.

For example, the UK has been moving toward the development of their own CBDC…

The de facto head of His Majesty’s Treasury announced this week that the Bank of England has begun consultations on implementing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that could usher in the globalist vision of a cashless society in which all transactions are traceable by the government.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt revealed that, as a part of his ‘Edinburgh Reforms’ of Britain’s financial services, the Bank of England will begin consultations on the design of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which would act as a digital version of the pound sterling.

Meanwhile, the EU is looking at creating a digital version of the euro.  The following comes from the official website of the European Central Bank…

We are working with the national central banks of the euro area to investigate whether to introduce a digital euro. It would be a central bank digital currency, an electronic equivalent to cash. And it would complement banknotes and coins, giving people an additional choice about how to pay.

A CBDC is currently being tested in Brazil, and it turns out that it has hidden backdoor features that would actually allow the government “to freeze people’s funds and adjust their balances at will”…

Brazil, like most other masters, seeks to control the population with a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. Its pilot program made it possible for the ruling class to have complete control over the money of the slaves.

The new system contains hidden backdoor features allowing the Brazilian government to freeze people’s funds and adjust their balances at will.  Even though these features are “hidden”, there is no secret as to why these sociopaths all so desperately need people to accept their enslavement through a CBDC scheme.

According to a blockchain developer by the name of Pedro Magalhaes, founder of the Web3 consulting firm Iora Labs, the ruling class will have access to every single slave’s bank account once they roll out the CBDC system.

Magalhaes claimed that he reverse-engineered the code behind Brazil’s CBDC program, which led him to this shocking discovery.

And in Russia, the “digital ruble” is already here.

Just a few days ago, Vladimir Putin signed “the digital ruble bill” into law…

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin signed the digital ruble bill into law today, allowing the country’s central bank to issue its own digital currency.

The digital ruble, which the Bank of Russia has long been mulling over, will be used for payments along with other methods, according to the new amendments to Russia’s Civil Code. The digital ruble accounts will be managed by the central bank, the law says. The bill passed its third, final hearing on July 11 and had been waiting for the president to be signed.

Digital ruble is a CBDC project the Bank of Russia has been working on since 2020, when the Bank of Russia published its first analytical report on the topic. Later, the regulator updated the report including the feedback from Russian banks and other financial market participants. The regulator announced it stared piloting the system with a number of Russian banks in February 2022, shortly before the country started a war in Ukraine.

This was a historic development.

So why did we barely hear anything about it in the news?

Overall, it is being reported that 130 different countries are now interested in potentially developing their own CBDCs…

Out of 195 countries in the world, 130 nations are moving towards building their Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

Wow.

Our world is changing so rapidly now.

Once a “digital currency” is introduced where you live, how will you keep your “digital wallet” safe?

After all, someone could just steal your “digital wallet” and spend all of the “digital currency” that you have saved up.

Well, one German economist is warning that eventually we could see “digital wallets” actually get implanted under the skin…

A well-known German economist has revealed that central banks around the world are planning to introduce central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in the form of microchips implanted under the skin. This technology will enable complete government control over personal finances of its citizens.

“I was taught by a central banker [that] the CBDCs look like a small grain of rice that they want to put under your skin,” said Richard Werner in an interview with podcaster Ivor Cummins. Werner is known for developing the now commonly used bank practice of quantitative easing.

Let us hope that nothing like that happens any time soon.

But we truly are living in unprecedented times, and they are only going to get crazier with each passing year.

If we are going to object to the implementation of CBDCs, the time is now.

Hopefully we can get a lot more people in the general population to wake up, because the clock is ticking.

CBDCs Are Coming: Elite Plan to Use These 'Digital Currency' to Enslave Humanity - 21st Century Wire

 

Lockdowns, Coronavirus, and Banks: Following the Money

Lockdowns, Coronavirus, and Banks: Following the Money, by Tony Hall - The Unz Review

Tony Hall • August 13, 2020

 •

It usually makes sense to follow the money when seeking understanding of almost any major change. The strategy of following the money in our current convergence of crises in late summer of 2020 leads us directly to the lockdowns. The lockdowns were first imposed on people in the Wuhan area of China. Then other populations throughout the world were told to “shelter in place,” all in the name of combating the COVID-19 virus.

Understanding of the enormous impact of the lockdowns is still developing. The lockdowns are proving to pack a far more devastating punch than any other aspect of the strange sequence of events that is making 2020 a year like no other. Even when the issues are narrowed to those of human health, the lockdowns have had, and will continue to have, far more wide-ranging and devastating impacts than the celebrity virus.

The lockdowns have, for starters, been directly responsible for explosive rates of suicide, domestic violence, overdoses, and depression. In the long run, these maladies from the lockdowns will probably kill and harm many more people than COVID-19.

But this comparison does not tell the full story. The nature and length of the lockdowns are causing millions of people to lose their jobs, businesses and financial viability. It seems that the economic descent is still gathering force. The assault of the lockdowns on our economic wellbeing still has much farther to go.

The lockdowns have proven to be a powerful instrument of social control. This attribute is becoming very attractive especially to some politicians. They have discovered they can derive considerable political traction from hyping and exploiting the largely manufactured pandemic panic.

The lockdowns are still a work-in-progress. There are past lockdowns, revolving lockdowns, partial lockdowns, mandatory lockdowns, voluntary lockdowns, severe lockdowns and probably an array of many lockdown types yet to be invented.

The lockdowns extend to disruptions in supply chains, disruptions in money flows, drops in consumption, breakdowns in transport and travelling, increased bankruptcies, losses of finance leading to losses of housing, as well as the inability to pay taxes and debts.

The lockdowns extend beyond personal habitations to prohibitions on large assemblies of people in stadiums, concert halls, churches, and a myriad of places devoted to public recreation and entertainment. On the basis of this way of looking at what is happening, it becomes clear the economic and health effects of the lockdowns are far more pronounced than the damage wrought directly by the new coronavirus.

This approach to following the money leads to the question of whether the spread of COVID-19 was set in motion as a pretext. Was COVID-19 unleashed as an expedient for bringing about the lockdowns with the goal of crashing the existing economy? What rationale could there possibly be for purposely crashing the existing economy?

One possible reason might have been to put in place new structures to create the framework for a new set of economic relationships. With these changes would come accompanying sets of altered social and political relationships.

Among the economic changes being sought are the robotization of almost everything, cashless financial interactions, and elaborate AI impositions. These AI impositions extend to digital alterations of human consciousness and behavior. The emphasis being placed on vaccines is very much interwoven with plans to extend AI into an altered matrix of human nanobiotechnology.

There are other possibilities to consider. One is that in the autumn of 2019 the economy was already starting to falter. Fortuitously for some, the new virus came along at a moment when it could be exploited as a scapegoat. By placing responsibility for the economic debacle on pathogens rather than people, Wall Street bankers and federal authorities are let off the hook. They can escape any accounting for an economic calamity that they had a hand in helping to instigate.

A presentation in August of 2019 by the Wall Street leviathan, BlackRock Financial Management, provides a telling indicator of foreknowledge. It was well understood by many insiders in 2019 that a sharp economic downturn was imminent.

At a meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole Wyoming, BlackRock representatives delivered a strategy for dealing with the future downturn. Several months later during the spring of 2020 this strategy was adopted by both the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve. BlackRock’s plan from August of 2019 set the basis of the federal response to the much-anticipated economic meltdown.

Much of this essay is devoted to considering the background of the controversial agencies now responding to the economic devastation created by the lockdowns. One of these agencies is empowered to bring into existence large quantities of debt-laden money.

 

The very public role in 2020 of the Federal Reserve of the United States resuscitates many old grievances. When the Federal Reserve was first created in 1913 it was heavily criticized as a giveaway of federal authority.

The critics lamented the giveaway to private bankers whose firms acquired ownership of all twelve of the regional banks that together constitute the Federal Reserve. Of these twelve regional banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is by far the largest and most dominant especially right now.

The Federal Reserve of the United States combined forces with dozens of other privately-owned central banks thoughout the world to form the Bank of International Settlements. Many of the key archetypes for this type of banking were developed in Europe and the City of London where the Rothschild banking family had a large and resilient role, one that persists until this day.

Along with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, BlackRock was deeply involved in helping to administer the bailout in 2008. This bailout resuscitated many failing Wall Street firms together with their counterparties in a number of speculative ventures involving various forms of derivatives.

The bailouts resulted in payments of $29 trillion, much of it going to restore failing financial institutions whose excesses actually caused the giant economic crash. Where the financial sector profited greatly from the bailouts, taxpayers were abused yet again. The burden of an expanded national debt fell ultimately on taxpayers who must pay the interest on the loans for the federal bailout of the “too big to fail” financial institutions.

Unsettling precedents are set by the Wall Street club’s manipulation of the economic crash of 2007-2010 to enrich its own members so extravagantly. This prior experience bodes poorly for the intervention by the same players in this current round of responses to the economic crisis of 2020.

In preparing this essay I have enjoyed the many articles by Pam Martens and Russ Martens in Wall Street on Parade. These hundreds of well-researched articles form a significant primary source on the recent history of the Federal Reserve, including over the last few months.

In this essay I draw a contrast between the privately-owned regional banks of the Federal Reserve and the government-owned Bank of Canada that once issued low-interest loans to build infrastructure projects.

With this arrangement in place, Canada went through a major period of national growth between 1938 and 1974. Canada emerged from this period with a national debt of only $20 billion. Then in 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau dropped this arrangement to enable Canada to join the Bank of International Settlements. One result is that national debt rose to $700 billion by 2020.

We need to face the current financial crisis by developing new institutions that avoid the pitfalls of old remedies for old problems that no longer prevail. We need to make special efforts to change our approach to the problem of excessive debts and the overconcentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Locking Down the Viability of Commerce

Of all the facets of the ongoing fiasco generally associated with the coronavirus crisis, none has been so widely catastrophic as the so-called “lockdowns.” The supposed cure of the lockdowns is itself proving to be much more lethal and debilitating than COVID-19’s flu-like impact on human health.

Many questions arise from the immense economic consequences attributed to the initial effort to “flatten the curve” of the hospital treatments for COVID-19. Did the financial crisis occur as a result of the spread of the new coronavirus crisis? Or was the COVID-19 crisis set in motion to help give cover to a long-building economic meltdown that was already well underway in the autumn of 2019?

The lockdowns were first instituted in Wuhan China with the objective of slowing down the spread of the virus so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Were the Chinese lockdowns engineered in part to create a model to be followed in Europe, North America, Indochina and other sites of infection like India and Australia? The Chinese lockdowns in Hubei province and then in other parts of China apparently set an example influencing the decision of governments in many jurisdictions. Was this Chinese example for the rest of the world created by design to influence the nature of international responses?

The lockdowns represented a new form of response to a public health crisis. Quarantines have long been used as a means of safeguarding the public from the spread of contagious maladies. Quarantines, however, involve isolating the sick to protect the well. On the other hand the lockdowns are directed at limiting the movement and circulation of almost everyone whether or not they show symptoms of any infections.

Hence lockdowns, or, more euphemistically “sheltering in place,” led to the cancellation of many activities and to the shutdown of institutions. The results extended, for instance, to the closure of schools, sports events, theatrical presentations and business operations. In this way the lockdowns also led to the crippling of many forms of economic interaction. National economies as well as international trade and commerce were severely impacted.

The concept of lockdowns was not universally embraced and applied. For instance, the governments of Sweden and South Korea did not accept the emerging orthodoxy about enforcing compliance with all kinds of restrictions on human interactions. Alternatively, the government of Israel was an early and strident enforcer of very severe lockdown policies.

At first it seemed the lockdown succeeded magnificently in saving Israeli lives. According to Israel Shamir, in other European states the Israeli model was often brought up as an example. In due course, however, the full extent of the assault on the viability of the Israeli economy began to come into focus. Then popular resistance was aroused to reject government attempts to enforce a second wave of lockdowns against a second wave of supposed infections. As Shamir sees it, the result is that “Today Israel is a failed state with a ruined economy and unhappy citizens.”

In many countries the lockdowns began with a few crucial decisions made at the highest level of government. Large and proliferating consequences would flow from the initial determination of what activities, businesses, organizations, institutions and workers were to be designated as “essential.”

The consequences would be severe for those individuals and businesses excluded from the designation identifying what is essential. This deep intervention into the realm of free choice in market relations set a major precedent for much more intervention of a similar nature to come.

The arbitrary division of activities into essential and nonessential categories created a template to be frequently replicated and revised in the name of serving public heath. Suddenly central planning took a great leap forward. The momentum from a generation of neoliberalism was checked even as the antagonistic polarities between rich and poor continued to grow.

To be defined as “nonessential” would soon be equated with job losses and business failures across many fields of enterprise as the first wave of lockdowns outside China unfolded. Indeed, it becomes clearer every day that revolving lockdowns, restrictions and social distancing are being managed in order to help give false justification to a speciously idealized vaccine fix as the only conclusive solution to a manufactured problem.

What must it have meant for breadwinners who fed themselves and their families through wages or self-employment to be declared by government to be “non-essential”? Surely for real providers their jobs, their businesses and their earnings were essential for themselves and their dependents. All jobs and all businesses that people depend on for livelihoods, sustenance and survival are essential in their own way.

Was COVID-19 a Cover for an Anticipated or Planned Financial Crisis?

A major sign of financial distress in the US economy kicked in in mid-September of 2019 when there was a breakdown in the normal operation of the Repo Market. This repurchase market in the United States is important in maintaining liquidity in the financial system.

Those directing entities like large banks, Wall Street traders and hedge funds frequently seek large amounts of cash on a short-term basis. They obtain this cash from, for instance, money market funds by putting up securities, often Treasury Bills, as collateral. Most often the financial instruments go back, say the following night, to their original owners with interest payments attached for the use of the cash.

In mid-September the trust broke down between participants in the Repo Market. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York then entered the picture making trillions of dollars available to keep the system for short-term moving of assets going. This intervention repeated the operation that came in response to the first signs of trouble as Wall Street moved towards the stock market crash of 2008.

One of the major problems on the eve of the bailout of 2008-09, like the problem in the autumn of 2019, had to do with the overwhelming of the real economy by massive speculative activity. The problem then, like a big part of the problem now, involves the disproportionate size of the derivative bets. The making of these bets have become a dangerous addiction that continues to this day to menace the viability of the financial system headquartered on Wall Street.

By March of 2020 it was reported that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had turned on its money spigot to create $9 trillion in new money with the goal of keeping the failing Repo Market operational. The precise destinations of that money together with the terms of its disbursement, however, remain a secret. As Pam Martens and Russ Martens write,

Since the Fed turned on its latest money spigot to Wall Street [in September of 2019], it has refused to provide the public with the dollar amounts going to any specific banks. This has denied the public the ability to know which financial institutions are in trouble. The Fed, exactly as it did in 2008, has drawn a dark curtain around troubled banks and the public’s right to know, while aiding and abetting a financial coverup of just how bad things are on Wall Street.

Looking back at the prior bailout from their temporal vantage point in January of 2020, the authors noted “During the 2007 to 2010 financial collapse on Wall Street – the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Fed funnelled a total of $29 trillion in cumulative loans to Wall Street banks, their trading houses and their foreign derivative counterparties.”

The authors compared the rate of the transfer of funds from the New York Federal Reserve Bank to the Wall Street banking establishment in the 2008 crash and in the early stages of the 2020 financial debacle. The authors observed, “at this rate, [the Fed] is going to top the rate of money it threw at the 2008 crisis in no time at all.”

The view that all was well with the economy until the impact of the health crisis began to be felt in early 2020 leads away from the fact that money markets began to falter dangerously in the autumn of 2019. The problems with the Repo Market were part of a litany of indicators pointing to turbulence ahead in troubled economic waters.

For instance, the resignation in 2019 of about 1,500 prominent corporate CEOs can be seen as a suggestion that news was circulating prior to 2020 about the imminence of serious financial problems ahead. Insiders’ awareness of menacing developments threatening the workings of the global economy were probably a factor in the decision of a large number of senior executives to exit the upper echelons of the business world.

Not only did a record number of CEOs resign, but many of them sold off the bulk of their shares in the companies they were leaving.

Pam Marten and Russ Marten who follow Wall Street’s machinations on a daily basis have advanced the case that the Federal Reserve is engaged in fraud by trying to make it seem that “the banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy condition;” that it is only because of “the COVID-19 pandemic” that the financial system is” unravelling,”

The authors argue that this misrepresentation was deployed because the deceivers are apparently “desperate” to prevent Congress from conducting an investigation for the second time in twelve years on why the Fed, “had to engage in trillions of dollars of Wall Street bailouts.” In spite of the Fed’s fear of facing a Congressional investigation after the November 2020 vote, such a timely investigation of the US financial sector would well serve the public interest.

 

The authors present a number of signs demonstrating that “the Fed knew, or should have known…. that there was a big banking crisis brewing in August of last year. [2019]” The signs of the financial crisis in the making included negative yields on government bonds around the world as well as big drops in the Dow Jones average. The plunge in the price of stocks was led by US banks, but especially Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.

Another significant indicator that something was deeply wrong in financial markets was a telling inversion in the value of Treasury notes with the two-year rate yielding more than the ten-year rate.

Yet another sign of serious trouble ahead involved repeated contractions in the size of the German economy. Moreover, in September of 2019 news broke that officials of JP Morgan Chase faced criminal charges for RICO-style racketeering. This scandal added to the evidence of converging problems plaguing core economic institutions as more disruptive mayhem gathered on the horizons.

Accordingly, there is ample cause to ask if there are major underlying reasons for the financial crash of 2020 other than the misnamed pandemic and the lockdowns done in its name of “flattening” its spikes of infection. At the same time, there is ample cause to recognize that the lockdowns have been a very significant factor in the depth of the economic debacle that is making 2020 a year like no other.

Some go further. They argue that the financial crash of 2020 was not only anticipated but planned and pushed forward with clear understanding of its instrumental role in the Great Reset sought by self-appointed protagonists of creative destruction. The advocates of this interpretation place significant weight on the importance of the lockdowns as an effective means of obliterating in a single act a host of old economic relationships. For instance Peter Koenig examines the “farce and diabolical agenda of a universal lockdown.”

Koenig writes, “The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.”

Inflating the Numbers and Traumatizing the Public to Energize the Epidemic of Fear

There have been many pandemics in global history whose effects on human health have been much more pervasive and devastating than the current one said to be generated by a new coronavirus. In spite, however, of its comparatively mild flu-like effects on human health, at least at this point in the summer of 2020, there has never been a contagion whose spread has generated so much global publicity and hype. As in the aftermath of 9/11, this hype extends to audacious levels of media-generated panic. As with the psyop of 9/11, the media-induced panic has been expertly finessed by practitioners skilled in leveraging the currency of fear to realize a host of radical political objectives.

According to Robert E. Wright in an essay published by the American Institute for Economic Research, “closing down the U.S. economy in response to COVID-19 was probably the worst public policy in at least one-hundred years.” As Wright sees it, the decision to lock down the economy was made in ignorant disregard of the deep and devastating impact that such an action would spur. “Economic lockdowns were the fantasies of government officials so out of touch with economic and physical reality that they thought the costs would be fairly low.”

The consequences, Wright predicts, will extend across many domains including the violence done to the rule of law. The lockdowns, he writes, “turned the Constitution into a frail and worthless fabric.” Writing in late April, Wright touched on the comparisons to be made between the economic lockdowns and slavery. He write, “Slaves definitely had it worse than Americans under lockdown do, but already Americans are beginning to protest their confinement and to subtly subvert authorities, just as chattel slaves did.”

The people held captive in confined lockdown settings have had the time and often the inclination to imbibe much of the 24/7 media coverage of the misnamed pandemic. Taken together, all this media sensationalism has come to constitute one of the most concerted psychological operations ever.

The implications have been enormous for the mental health of multitudes of people. This massive alteration of attitudes and behaviours is the outcome of media experiments performed on human subjects without their informed consent. The media’s success in bringing about herd subservience to propagandistic messaging represents a huge incentive for more of the same to come. It turns out that the subject matter of public health offers virtually limitless potential for power-seeking interests and agents to meddle with the privacies, civil liberties and human rights of those they seek to manipulate, control and exploit.

The social, economic and health impacts of the dislocations flowing from the lockdowns are proving to be especially devastating on the poorest, the most deprived and the most vulnerable members of society. This impact will continue to be marked in many ways, including in increased rates of suicide, domestic violence, mental illness, addictions, homelessness, and incarceration far larger than those caused directly by COVID-19. As rates of deprivation through poverty escalate, so too will crime rates soar.

The over-the-top alarmism of the big media cabals has been well financed by the advertising revenue of the pharmaceutical industry. With some few exceptions, major media outlets pushed the public to accept the lockdowns as well as the attending losses in jobs and business activity. In seeking to push the agenda of their sponsors, the big media cartels have been especially unmindful of their journalistic responsibilities. Their tendency has been to avoid or censor forums where even expert practitioners of public health can publicly question and discuss government dictates about vital issues of public policy.

Whether in Germany or the United States or many other countries, front line workers in this health care crisis have nevertheless gathered together with the goal of trying to correct the one-sided prejudices of of discriminatory media coverage. One of the major themes in the presentations by medical practitioners is to confront the chorus of media misrepresentations on the remedial effects of hydroxychloroquine and zinc.

On July 27 a group of doctors gathered on the grounds of the US Supreme Court to try to address the biases of the media and the blind spots of government.

Another aspect in the collateral damage engendered by COVID-19 alarmism is marked in the fatalities arising from the wholesale postponement of many necessary interventions including surgery. How many have died or will die because of the hold put on medical interventions to remedy cancer, heart conditions and many other potentially lethal ailments?

Did the unprecedented lockdowns come about as part of a preconceived plan to inflate the severity of an anticipated financial meltdown? What is to be made of the suspicious intervention of administrators to produce severely padded numbers of reported deaths in almost every jurisdiction? This kind of manipulation of statistics raised the possibility that we are witnessing a purposeful and systemic inflation of the severity of this health care crisis.

Questions about the number of cases arise because of serious problems in the means of testing for the presence of a supposedly new coronavirus. Both the serology system for measuring antibodies and the PCR system for manufacturing amplified replications of viral fragments are extremely problematic.

US Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi condemned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for allowing a “Wild West” system of unregulated COVID-19 tests to flood into the US market.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-antibody-testing-inaccurate-data-60-minutes-2020-06-28/

None other than Bill Gates echoed Congressman Krishnamoorth’s assessment. In a rare moment of respite from his full throttle vaccine hucksterism, Gates acknowledged in August that “The majority of all US tests [for COVID-19] are completely garbage, wasted.”

https://www.wired.com/story/bill-gates-on-covid-most-us-tests-are-completely-garbage/

Kary B. Mullis, the inventor of the supposed “gold standard” PCR test, stated explicitly that the procedure he invented was not suitable as a “diagnostic tool.” In April of 2020 Celia Farber reported at length on the various subtleties and complexities of the PCR tests. Farber’s extensive investigations led her to the conclusion that the Mullis procedure is not equipped with the means of producing simple yes or no verdicts on the existence of infections including on COVID-19.

https://uncoverdc.com/2020/04/07/was-the-covid-19-test-meant-to-detect-a-virus/

See also

https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/27/covid19-pcr-tests-are-scientifically-meaningless/

The problems with calculating case numbers extend to widespread reports that have described people who were not tested for COVID-19 but who nevertheless received notices from officials counting them as COVID-19 positive. Broadcaster Armstrong Williams addressed the phenomenon on his network of MSM media outlets in late July.

From the mass of responses he received, Williams estimated that those not tested but counted as a positive probably extends probably to hundreds of thousands of individuals. What would drive the effort to exaggerate the size of the afflicted population?

This same pattern of inflation of case numbers was reinforced by the Tricare branch of the US Defense Department’s Military Health System. This branch sent out notices to 600,000 individuals who had not been tested. The notices nevertheless informed the recipients that they had tested positive for COVID 19.

Is the inflation of COVID-19 death rates and cases numbers an expression of the zeal to justify the massive lockdowns? Were the lockdowns in China conceived as part of a scheme to help create the conditions for the public’s acceptance of a plan to remake the world’s political economy? What is to be made of the fact that those most identified with the World Economic Forum (WEF) have led the way in putting a positive spin on the reset arising from the very health crisis the WEF helped introduce and publicize in Oct. of 2019?

As Usual, the Poor Get Poorer

The original Chinese lockdowns in the winter of 2020 caused the breakdowns of import-export supply chains extending across the planet. Lockdowns in the movement of raw materials, parts, finished products, expertise, money and more shut down domestic businesses in China as well as transnational commerce in many countries outside China. The supply chain disruptions were especially severe for businesses that have dispensed with the practice of keeping on hand large inventories of parts and raw material, depending instead on just-in-time deliveries.

As the supply chains broke down domestically and internationally, many enterprises lacked the revenue to pay their expenses. Bankruptcies began to proliferate at rates that will probably continue to be astronomical for some time. All kinds of loans and liabilities were not paid out in full or at all. Many homes are being re-mortgaged or cast into real estate markets as happened during the prelude and course of the bailouts of 2007-2010.

The brunt of the financial onslaught hit small businesses especially hard. Collectively small businesses have been a big creator of jobs. They have picked up some of the slack from the rush of big businesses to downsize their number of full-time employees. Moreover, small businesses and start-ups are often the site of exceptionally agile innovations across broad spectrums of economic activity. The hard financial slam on the small business sector, therefore, is packing a heavy punch on the economic conditions of everyone.

The devastating impact of the economic meltdown on workers and small businesses in Europe and North America extends in especially lethal ways to the massive population of poor people living all over the world. Many of these poor people reside in countries where much of the paid work is irregular and informal.

At the end of April the International Labor Organization (ILO), an entity created along with the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, estimated that there would be 1.6 billion victims of the meltdown in the worldwide “informal economy.” In the first month of the crisis these workers based largely in Africa and Latin America lost 60% of their subsistence level incomes.

As ILO Director-General, Guy Ryder, has asserted,

This pandemic has laid bare in the cruellest way, the extraordinary precariousness and injustices of our world of work. It is the decimation of livelihoods in the informal economy – where six out of ten workers make a living – which has ignited the warnings from our colleagues in the World Food Programme, of the coming pandemic of hunger. It is the gaping holes in the social protection systems of even the richest countries, which have left millions in situations of deprivation. It is the failure to guarantee workplace safety that condemns nearly 3 million to die each year because of the work they do. And it is the unchecked dynamic of growing inequality which means that if, in medical terms, the virus does not discriminate between its victims in its social and economic impact, it discriminates brutally against the poorest and the powerless.

Guy Ryder remembered the optimistic rhetoric in officialdom’s responses to the economic crash of 2007-2009. He compares the expectations currently being aroused by the vaccination fixation with the many optimistic sentiments previously suggesting the imminence of remedies for grotesque levels of global inequality. Ryder reflected,

We’ve heard it before. The mantra which provided the mood music of the crash of 2008-2009 was that once the vaccine to the virus of financial excess had been developed and applied, the global economy would be safer, fairer, more sustainable. But that didn’t happen. The old normal was restored with a vengeance and those on the lower echelons of labour markets found themselves even further behind.

The internationalization of increased unemployment and poverty brought about in the name of combating the corona crisis is having the effect of further widening the polarization between rich and poor on a global scale. Ryder’s metaphor about the false promises concerning a “vaccine” to correct “financial excess” can well be seen as a precautionary comment on the flowery rhetoric currently adorning the calls for a global reset.

Wall Street and 9/11

The world economic crisis of 2020 is creating the context for large-scale repeats of some key aspects of the bailout of 2007-2010. The bailout of 2007-2008 drew, in turn, from many practices developed in the period when the explosive events of 9/11 triggered a worldwide reset of global geopolitics.

While the events of 2008 and 2020 both drew attention to the geopolitical importance of Wall Street, the terrible pummelling of New York’s financial district was the event that ushered in a new era of history, an era that has delivered us to the current financial meltdown/lockdown.

It lies well beyond the scope of this essay to go into detail about the dynamics of what really transpired on 9/11. Nevertheless, some explicit reckoning with this topic is crucial to understanding some of the essential themes addressed in this essay.

Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the relevance of 9/11 to the background and nature of the current debacle. The execution and spinning of 9/11 were instrumental in creating the repertoire of political trickery presently being adapted in the manufacturing and exploiting of the COVID-19 hysteria. A consistent attribute of the journey from 9/11 to COVID-19 has been the amplification of executive authority through the medium of emergency measures enactments, policies and dictates.

Wall Street is a major site where much of this political trickery was concocted in planning exercises extending to many other sites of power and intrigue. In the case of 9/11, a number of prominent Wall Street firms were involved before, during and after the events of September 11. As is extremely well documented, these events have been misrepresented in ways that helped to further harness the military might of the United States to the expansionistic designs of Israel in the Middle East.

The response of the Federal Reserve to the events of 9/11 helped set in motion a basic approach to disaster management that continues to this day. Almost immediately following the pulverization of Manhattan’s most gigantic and iconographic landmarks, Federal Reserve officials made it their highest priority to inject liquidity into financial markets. Many different kinds of scenario can be advanced behind the cover of infusing liquidity into markets.

For three days in a row the Federal Reserve Bank of New York turned on its money spigots to inject transfusions of $100 billion dollars of newly generated funds into the Wall Street home of the financial system. The declared aim was to keep the flow of capital between financial institutions well lubricated. The Federal Reserve’s infusions of new money into Wall Street took many forms. New habits and appetites were thereby cultivated in ways that continue to influence the behaviour of Wall Street organizations in the financial debacle of 2020.

The revelations concerning the events of 9/11 contained a number of financial surprises. Questions immediately arose, for instance, about whether the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers had obliterated software and hardware vital to the continuing operations of computerized banking systems. Whatever problems arose along these lines, it turned out that there was sufficient digital information backed up in other locations to keep banking operations viable.

But while much digital data survived the destruction of core installations in the US financial sector, some strategic information was indeed obliterated. For instance, strategic records entailed in federal investigations into many business scandals were lost. Some of the incinerated data touched on, for instance, the machinations of the energy giant, Enron, along with its Wall Street partners, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.

The writings of E. P Heidner are prominent in the literature posing theories about the elimination of incriminating documentation as a result of the controlled demolitions of 9/11. What information was eliminated and what was retained in the wake of the devastation? Heidner has published a very ambitious account placing the events of 9/11 at the forefront of a deep and elaborate relationship linking George H. W. Bush to Canada’s Barrick Gold and the emergence of gold derivatives.

The surprises involving 9/11 and Wall Street included evidence concerning trading on the New York Stock Exchange. A few individuals enriched themselves significantly by purchasing a disproportionately high number of put options on shares about to fall precipitously as a result of the anticipated events of 9/11. Investigators, however, chose to ignore this evidence because it did not conform to the prevailing interpretation of who did what to whom on 9/11.

Another suspicious group of transactions conducted right before 9/11 involved some very large purchases of five-year US Treasury notes. These instruments are well known hedges when one has knowledge that a world crisis is imminent. One of these purchases was a $5 billion transaction. The US Treasury Department would have been informed about the identity of the purchaser. Nevertheless the FBI and the Securities Exchange Commission collaborated to point public attention away from these suspect transactions. (p. 199)

On the very day of 9/11 local police arrested Israeli suspects employed in the New York area as Urban Movers. The local investigators were soon pressured to ignore the evidence, however, and go along with the agenda of the White House and the media chorus during the autumn of 2001.

In the hours following the pulverization of the Twin Towers the dominant mantra was raised “Osama bin Laden and al-Qeada did it.” That mantra led in the weeks, months and years that followed to US-led invasions of several Muslim-majority countries. Some have described these military campaigns as wars for Israel.

Soon New York area jails were being filled up with random Muslims picked up for nothing more than visa violations and such. The unrelenting demonization of Muslims collectively can now be seen in retrospect as a dramatic psychological operation meant to poison minds as the pounding of the war drums grew in intensity. In the process a traumatized public were introduced to concepts like “jihad.” At no time has there ever been a credible police investigation into the question of who is responsible for the 9/11 crimes.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chose September 10, the day before 9/11, to break the news at a press conference that $2.3 trillion had gone missing from the Pentagon’s budget. Not surprisingly the story of the missing money got buried the next day as reports of the debacle in Manhattan and Washington DC dominated MSM news coverage.

As reported by Forbes Magazine, the size of the amount said to have gone missing in Donald Rumsfeld’s 2001 report of Defense Department spending had mushroomed by 2015 to around $21 trillion. It was Mark Skidmore, an Economics Professor at the University of Michigan, who became the main sleuth responsible for identifying the gargantuan amount of federal funds that the US government can’t account for.

As the agency that created the missing tens of trillions that apparently has disappeared without a trace, wouldn’t the US Federal Reserve be in a position to render some assistance in tracking down the lost funds? Or is the Federal Reserve somehow a participant or a complicit party in the disappearance of the tens of trillions without a paper trail?

The inability or unwillingness of officialdom to explain what happened to the lost $21 trillion, an amount comparable to the size of the entire US national debt prior to the lockdowns, might be viewed in the light of the black budgets of the US Department of Defense (DOD). Black budgets are off-the-books funds devoted to secret research and to secret initiatives in applied research.

In explaining this phenomenon, former Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellyer, has observed, “thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which Congress and the Commander In Chief have deliberately been kept in the dark.” Eric Zuess goes further. As he explains it, the entire Defense Department operates pretty much on the basis of an unusual system well outside the standard rules of accounting applied in other federal agencies.

When news broke about the missing $21 trillion, federal authorities responded by promising that special audits would be conducted to explain the irregularities. The results of those audits, if they took place at all, were never published. The fact that the Defense of Department has developed in a kind of audit free zone has made it a natural magnet for people and interests engaged in all kinds of criminal activities.

Eric Zuess calls attention to the 1,000 military bases around the world that form a natural network conducive to the cultivation of many forms of criminal trafficking. Zuess includes in his reflections commentary on the secret installations in some American embassies but especially in the giant US Embassy in Baghdad Iraq.

The US complex in Baghdad’s Green Zone is the biggest Embassy in the world. Its monumental form on a 104 acre site expresses the expansionary dynamics of US military intervention in the Middle East and Eurasia following 9/11.

The phenomenon of missing tens of trillions calls attention to larger patterns of kleptocratic activity that forms a major subject addressed here. The shifts into new forms of organized crime in the name of “national security” began to come to light in the late 1980s. An important source of disclosures was the series of revelations that accompanied the coming apart of the Saudi-backed Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the BCCI.

The nature of this financial institution, where CIA operatives were prominent among its clients, provides a good window into the political economy of drug dealing, money laundering, weapons smuggling, regime change and many much more criminal acts that took place along the road to 9/11.

The BCCI was a key site of financial transactions that contributed to the end of the Cold War and the inception of many new kinds of conflict. These activities often involved the well-financed activities of mercenaries, proxy armies, and a heavy reliance on private contractors of many sorts.

The Enron scandal was seen to embody some of the same lapses facilitated by fraudulent accounting integral to the BCCI scandal. Given the bubble of secrecy surrounding the Federal Reserve, there are thick barriers blocking deep investigation into whether or not the US Central Bank was involved in the relationship of the US national security establishment and the BCCI.

The kind of dark transactions that the BCCI was designed to facilitate must have been channelled after its demise into other banking institutions probably with Wall Street connections. Since 9/11, however, many emergency measures have been imposed that add extra layers of secrecy protecting the perpetrators of many criminal acts from public exposure and criminal prosecutions.

The events of 9/11 have sometimes been described as the basis of a global coup. To this day there is no genuine consensus about what really transpired to create the illusion of justification for repeated US military invasions of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Eurasia.

The 9/11 debacle and the emergency measures that followed presented Wall Street with an array of new opportunities for profit that came with the elaborate refurbishing and retooling of the military-industrial complex.

The response to 9/11 was expanded and generalized upon to create the basis of a war directed not at a particular enemy, but rather at an ill-defined conception identified as “terrorism.” This alteration was part of a complex of changes adding trillions to the flow of money energizing the axis of interaction linking the Pentagon and Wall Street and the abundance of new companies created to advance the geopolitical objectives emerging from the 9/11 coup.

According to Pam Martens and Russ Martens, the excesses of deregulation helped induce an anything-goes-ethos on Wall Street and at its Federal Reserve regulator in the wake of 9/11. As the authors tell it, the response to 9/11 helped set important precedents for the maintaining flows of credit and capital in financial markets.

Often the destination of the funds generated in the name of pumping liquidity into markets was not identified and reported in transactions classified as financial emergency measures. While the priority was on keeping financial pumps primed, there was much less concern for transparency and accountability among those in positions of power at the Federal Reserve.

The financial sector’s capture of the government instruments meant to regulate the behaviour of Wall Street institutions was much like the deregulation of the US pharmaceutical industry. Both episodes highlight a message that has become especially insistent as the twenty-first century unfolds.

The nature of the response to 9/11 emphasized the mercenary ascent of corporate dominance as the primary force directing governments. Throughout this transformation the message to citizens became increasingly clear. Buyer Beware. We cannot depend on governments to represent our will and interests. We cannot even count on our governments to protect citizens from corporatist attacks especially on human health and whatever financial security we have been able to build up.

Bailouts, Derivatives, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 was essential to the process of dramatically cutting back the government’s role as a protector of the public interest on the financial services sector. The Glass-Steagall Act was an essential measure in US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Some view the New Deal as a strategy for saving capitalism by moderating ts most sharp-edged features. Instituted in 1933 in response to the onset of the Great Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act separated the operations of deposit-accepting banks from the more speculative activity of investment brokers.

The termination of the regulatory framework put in place by the Glass Steagall Act opened much new space for all kinds of experiments in the manipulation of money in financial markets. The changes began with the merger of different sorts of financial institutions including some in the insurance field. Those overseeing the reconstituted entities headquartered on Wall Street took advantage of their widened latitudes of operation. They developed all sorts of ways of elaborating their financial services and presenting them in new packages.

The word, “derivative” is often associated with many applications of the new possibilities in the reconstituted financial services sector. The word, derivative, can be applied to many kinds of transactions involving speculative bets of various sorts. As the word suggests, a derivative is derived from a fixed asset such as currency, bonds, stocks, and commodities. Alterations in the values of fixed assets affect the value of derivatives that often take the form of contracts between two or more parties.

One of the most famous derivatives in the era of the financial crash of 2007-2010 was described as mortgaged-backed securities. On the surface these bundles of debt-burdened properties might seem easy to understand. But that would be a delusion. The value of these products was affected, for instance, by unpredictable shifts in interest rates, liar loans extended to homebuyers who lacked the capacity to make regular mortgage payments, and significant shifts in the value of real estate.

Mortgage-backed securities were just one type of a huge array of derivatives invented on the run in the heady atmosphere of secret and unregulated transactions between counterparties. Derivatives could involve contracts formalizing bets between rivals gambling on the outcome of competitive efforts to shape the future. An array of derivative bets was built around transactions often placed behind the veil of esoteric nomenclature like “collateralized debt obligations” or “credit default swaps.”

The variables in derivative bets might include competing national security agendas involving, for instance, pipeline constructions, regime change, weapons development and sales, false flag terror events, or money laundering. Since derivative bets involve confidential transactions with secret outcomes, they can be derived from all sorts of criteria. Derivative bets can, for instance, involve all manner of computerized calculations that in some cases are constructed much like war game scenarios.

The complexity of derivatives became greater when the American Insurance Group, AIG, began selling insurance programs to protect all sides in derivative bets from suffering too drastically from the consequences of being on the losing side of transactions.

The derivative frenzy, sometimes involving bets being made by parties unable to cover potential losses, overwhelmed the scale of the day-to-day economy. The “real economy” embodies exchanges of goods, services, wages and such that supply the basic necessities for human survival with some margin for recreation, travel, cultural engagement and such.

The Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements calculated in 2008 that the size of the all forms of derivative products had a monetary value of $1.14 quadrillion. A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. By comparison, the estimated value of all the real estate in the world was $75 trillion in 2008.

[Bank for International Settlements, Semiannual OTC derivative statistics at end-December, 2008.]

As the enticements of derivative betting preoccupied the leading directors of Wall Street institutions, their more traditional way of relating to one another began to falter. It was in this atmosphere that the Repo Market became problematic in December of 2007 just as it showed similar signs of breakdown in September of 2019.

In both instances the level of distrust between those in charge of financial institutions began to falter because they all had good reason to believe that their fellow bankers were overextended. All had reason to believe their counterparts were mired by too much speculative activity enabled by all sorts of novel experiments including various forms of derivative dealing.

In December of 2007 as in the autumn of 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was forced to enter the picture to keep the financial pumps on Wall Street primed. The New York Fed kept the liquidity cycles flowing by invoking its power to create new money with the interest charged to tax payers.

As the financial crisis unfolded in 2008 and 2009 the Federal Reserve, but especially the privately-owned New York Federal Reserve bank, stepped forward to bail out many financial institutions that had become insolvent or near insolvent. In the process precedents and patterns were established that are being re-enacted with some modifications in 2020.

One of the innovations that took place in 2008 was the decision by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to hire a large Wall Street financial institution, BlackRock, to administer the bailouts. These transfers of money went through three specially created companies now being replicated as Special Purpose Vehicles in the course of the payouts of 2020.

In 2008-09 BlackRock administered the three companies named after the address of the New York Federal Reserve Bank on Maiden Lane. BlackRock emerged from an older Wall Street firm called Blackstone. Its former chair, Peter C. Peterson, was a former Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The original Maiden Lane company paid Bear Stearns Corp $30 billion. This amount from the New York Fed covered the debt of Bear Stearns, a condition negotiated to clear the way for the purchase of the old Wall Street institution by JP Morgan Chase. Maiden Lane II was a vehicle for payouts to companies that had purchased “mortgage-backed securities” before these derivative products turned soar.

Maiden Lane III was to pay off “multi-sector collateralized debt obligations.” Among these bailouts were payoffs to the counterparties of the insurance giant, AIG. As noted, AIG had developed an insurance product to be sold to those engaged in derivative bets. When the bottom fell out of markets, AIG lacked the means to pay off the large number of insurance claims made against it. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York stepped in to bail out the counterparties of AIG, many of them deemed to be “too big to fail.”

Among the counterparties of AIG was Goldman Sachs. It received of $13 billion from the Federal Reserve. Other bailouts to AIG’s counterparties were $12 billion to Deutsche Bank, $6.8 billion to Merrill Lynch, $5 billion to Switzerland’s UBS, $7.9 billion to Barclays, and $5.2 billion to Bank of America. Some of these banks received additional funds from other parts of the overall bailout transaction. Many dozens of other counterparties to AIG also received payouts in 2008-2009. Among them were the Bank of Montreal and Bank of Scotland.

The entire amount of the bailouts was subsequently calculated to be a whopping $29 trillion with a “t.” The lion’s share of these funds went to prop up US financial institutions and the many foreign banks with which they conducted business.

Much of this money went to the firms that were shareholders in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or partners of the big Wall Street firms. Citigroup, the recipient of the largest amount, received about $2.5 trillion in the federal bailouts. Merrill Lynch received $2 trillion, The Federal Reserve Bank was established by Congressional statute in 1913. The Federal Reserve headquarters is situated in Washington DC. The Central Bank was composed of twelve constituent regional banks. Each one of these regional banks is owned by private banks. 

The private ownership of the banks that are the proprietors of the Federal Reserve system has been highly contentious from its inception. The creation of the Federal Reserve continues to be perceived by many of its critics as an unjustifiable giveaway whereby the US government ceded to private interests its vital capacity to issue its own currency and to direct monetary policy like the setting of interest rates.

Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade explain the controversial Federal Reserve structure as follows

While the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. is deemed an “independent federal agency,” with its Chair and Governors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the 12 regional Fed banks are private corporations owned by the member banks in their region. The settled law under John L. Lewis v. the United States confirms: “Each Federal Reserve Bank is a separate corporation owned by commercial banks in its region.”

In the case of the New York Fed, which is located in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, its largest shareowners are behemoth multinational banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

There was no genuine effort after the financial debacle of 2007-2010 to correct the main structural problems and weaknesses of the Wall Street-based US financial sector. The Dodd-Frank Bill signed into law by US President Barack Obama in 2010 did make some cosmetic changes. But the main features of the regulatory capture that has taken place with the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act remained with only minor alterations. In particular the framework was held in place for speculative excess in derivative bets.

In the summer edition of The Atlantic, Frank Partnoy outlined a gloomy assessment of the continuity leading from the events of 2007-2010 to the current situation. This current situation draws a strange contrast between the lockdown-shattered quality of the economy and the propped-up value of the stock market whose future value will in all probability prove unsustainable. Partnoy writes,

It is a distasteful fact that the present situation is so dire in part because the banks fell right back into bad behavior after the last crash—taking too many risks, hiding debt in complex instruments and off-balance-sheet entities, and generally exploiting loopholes in laws intended to rein in their greed. Sparing them for a second time this century will be that much harder.

Wall Street Criminality on Display

The frauds and felonies of the Wall Street banks have continued after the future earnings of US taxpayers returned them to solvency after 2010. The record of infamy is comparable to that of the pharmaceutical industry.

The criminal behaviour in both sectors is very relevant to the overlapping crises that are underway in both the public health and financial sectors. In 2012 the crime spree in the financial sector began with astounding revelations about the role of many major banks in the LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate. The LIBOR rates create the basis of interest rates involved in the borrowing and lending of money in the international arena.

When the scandal broke there were 35 different LIBOR rates involving various types of currency and various time frames for loans between banks. The rates were calculated every day based on information forwarded from 16 different banks to a panel on London. The reporting banks included Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, and Deutsche Bank. The influence of the LIBOR rate extended beyond banks to affect the price of credit in many types of transactions.

The emergence of information that the banks were working together to rig the interest rate created the basis for a huge economic scandal. Fines extending from hundreds of millions into more than a billion dollars were placed on each of the offending banks. But in this instance and many others to follow, criminality was attached to the financial entities but not to top officials responsible for the decisions that put their corporations on the wrong side of the law.

One of the factors in the banking frauds comprising the LIBOR scandal was the temptation to improve the chance for financial gains in derivative bets. The biggest failure of the federal response to the financial meltdown of 2007-210 was that little was done to curb the excesses of transactions in the realm of derivatives.

Derivatives involved a form of gambling that exists in a kind of twilight zone. This twilight zone fills a space somewhere between the realm of the real economy and the realm of notional value. Notional values find expression in unrealized speculation about what might or might not come to fruition; what might or might not happen; who might win and who might lose in derivative speculations.

The addiction of Wall Street firms to derivative betting remains unchecked to this day. The bankers’ continuing fixation with unregulated gambling, often with other people’s money, is deeply menacing for the future of the global economy…. indeed for the future of everyone on earth. According to the Office of the Controller of Currency, in 2019 JP Morgan Chase had $59 trillion in derivative bets. In July of 2020 it emerged that Citigroup held $62 trillion in derivative contracts, about $30 trillion more than it held before it was bailed out in 2008. In 2019 Goldman Sachs held $47 trillion and Bank of America held $20.4 trillion in derivate bets.

A big part of the scandal embodied in these figures is embedded in the reality that all of these banks carry their most risky derivative bets in units of their corporate networks that are protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This peril played a significant part in deepening the crisis engendered by financial meltdown that began in 2007.

One of the most redeeming features of the Dodd-Frank Act as originally drafted was a provision preventing financial institutions from keeping their derivative portfolios in banks whose deposits and depositors were backed up by federal insurance.

Citigroup led the push in Congress in 2014 to allow Wall Street institutions to revert back to a more deregulated and danger-prone economic environment. The notoriously inept decisions and actions of Citigroup had played a significant role in the lead up to the financial debacle of 2007 to 2010. Since 2016 Citigroup has become once again the biggest risk taker by loading itself up with more derivative speculations than any other financial institution in the world.

By returning derivative speculations to the protections of federal financial backstops, taxpayers are once again forced to assume responsibility for the most outlandish risks of Wall Street’s high rollers. It is taxpayers who are the backers of the federal government when it comes to their commitment to compensate banks for losses, even when these losses come about from derivative bets.

How much more Wall Street risk and public debt can be loaded onto taxpayers and even onto generations of taxpayers yet unborn? How is national debt to be understood when it plunders working people to guarantee and augment the wealth of the most privileged branches of society? Why should those most responsible for creating the most excessive risks to the financial wellbeing of our societies be protected from bearing the consequences of the very risks they themselves created?

Along with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase stands out among a group of financial sector reprobates most deeply involved in sketchy activities that extend deep into the realm of criminality. In a simmering scandal six of JP Morgan Chase’s traders have been accused of breaking laws in conducting the bank’s futures trading in the value of precious metals. They have been accused of violating the RICO statute, a law meant for people suspected of being part of organized crime.

In the charges pressed by the Justice Department on JP Morgan Chase’s traders it is alleged that they “conducted the affairs of the [minerals] desk through a pattern of racketeering activity, specifically, wire fraud affecting a financial institution and bank fraud.”

In 2012 JP Morgan Chase faced a $1 billion fine for its role in the “London Wale” series of derivative bets described as follows by the Chair of the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation. Senator Carl Levin explained, “Our findings open a window into the hidden world of high stakes derivatives trading by big banks. It exposes a derivatives trading culture at JPMorgan that piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.”

Traders at Goldman Sachs appear to have been part of the Wall Street crime spree. The tentacles of corruption in the Goldman Sachs case apparently extend deep into the US Justice Department. The case involves allegations of embezzlement, money laundering and missing billions. These manifestations of malfeasance all spin out of a scandal-prone Malaysian sovereign wealth fund administered by Goldman Sachs.

A big part of the scandal reported in Wall Street on Parade in July of 2020 involves the fact that the Justice Department’s prosecutors seem to be dragging their feet in this possible criminal felony case against Goldman Sachs. The prosecutors, including the US Attorney-General, William Barr, worked previously for the law firm, Kirkland and Ellis. Kirkland and Ellis was retained to defend Goldman Sachs in this matter.

Pam Martens and Russ Martens express dismay at the failure of US officialdom to hold Wall Street institutions accountable for the crime spree of some of its biggest firms. They write, “Congress and the executive branch of the government seem determined to protect Wall Street criminals, which simply assures their proliferation.”

Even racketeering charges against officials at JP Morgan Chase, where Jamie Dimon presides as CEO, failed to receive any attention from the professional deceivers that these days dominate MSM. The star reporters of Wall Street on Parade write, “Crime and fraud are so de rigueur at the bank led by Dimon that not one major newspaper ran the headline [of the racketeering charge] on the front page or anywhere else in the paper.

While federal charges that JP Morgan Chase’s Wall Street operation engaged in criminal racketeering was not of interest to the press, Jamie Dimon’s surprise visit in early June to a Chase branch in Mt. Kisco New York aroused considerable media attention. Dimon was photographed with staff wearing a mask and taking the knee. By participating in this ritual Dimon signaled that his Wall Street operation is in league with the sometimes violent cancel culture pushed into prominence by the Democratic Party in partnership with Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon takes a knee with employees in front of a bank vault. Credit: JPMorgan

In an article on 21 July marking ten years since the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the Martens duo conclude, “So here we are today, watching the Fed conduct another secret multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street while the voices of Congress and mainstream media are nowhere to be heard.”

Enter BlackRock

In March it was announced that representatives of the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board and the BlackRock financial management were joining forces to make adjustments in the US economy. The aim was to address the financial dislocations resulting from the decision to lock down businesses, citizens, schools, entertainment, and social mingling outside the home, all in response to the health care hysteria promoted by governments and their media extensions.

The format of this process suggested some relaxation in the strict distinctions historically drawn between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. What would be the role of the third member of the group? In reflecting on this topic Joyce Nelson observed, “the new bailout bill not only further erases the line between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, it places BlackRock effectively in an overseer position for both.”

Some saw as symbolically instructive the delegation to BlackRock of a larger role than that assigned it during the first bailout of 2007-2008. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of this prominent Wall Street firm’s return to a strategic role near the very heart of this major exercise of federal power. This invitation to take part in such crucial negotiations at such a consequential juncture in history caused some to characterize BlackRock as a “fourth branch of government.”

As Victoria Guida commented in Politico, “This is a transformational moment for the Fed, and BlackRock’s now going to be in an even stronger position to serve the Fed in the future.”

BlackRock officials had been instrumental in helping to manoeuvre their company into such a strategic role by responding proactively to the understanding in some elite circles that another financial debacle was imminent. Only months before the financial meltdown actually occurred a group of former central bankers all commissioned by BlackRock delivered a recovery plan in August of 2019.

Presented at a G 7 summit of central bankers in Jackson Hole Wyoming, the plan for the government responses to the looming financial collapse was entitled Dealing with the Next Downturn. Its authors are Stanley Fischer, former Governor of the Central Bank of Israel, Philipp Hildebrande, former Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, Jean Boivin, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, and Elga Bartsch, Economist at Morgan Stanley.

The BlackRock Team at Jackson Hole put forward the case that a more aggressive and coordinated combination of monetary and fiscal policy must be brought to the job of stimulating a financial recovery. Monetary policy includes the setting of interest rates. Where monetary policy has historically been the domain of the central banks, fiscal policy, involving issues of taxation as well as the content and size of government budgets, lies within the jurisdiction of elected legislatures.

The nub of the proposal to unite fiscal and monetary policy put the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve on the same political platform. As the author of this merger of monetary and fiscal policy, BlackRock became third member of the triumvirate charged to address the broad array of economic maladies that arrived in the wake of the lockdowns.

In the spring of 2020 BlackRock has been hired by the Bank of Canada and by Sweden’s Central Bank, the Riksbank, to deliver on the approaches to crisis management its representatives had laid out at Jackson Hole. BlackRock’s most high-profile and strategic engagement, however, began with its involvement in the negotiation of the $2 trillion CARES stimulus package that passed through the US Congress in March of 2020.

The CARES Act included $367 billion for loans and grants to small business, $130 billion for health care systems, $150 billion for state and local government, $500 billion for loans to corporate America, and $25 billion for airlines (in addition to loans).

The heart of the plan involved a payout of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households making up to $75,000. This payment to citizens approaches the concept of disseminating “helicopter money” as referred to in BlackRock’s initial outline for dealing with the “downturn.” Helicopter money distributed by the federal government to its citizens was also related to the concept of “going direct” in strategies for stimulating the economy.

BlackRock seems to be moving into the space recently held by Goldman Sachs as Wall Street’s best embodiment of ostentatious success including in the preparation of its corporate leaders for high-ranking positions in the federal government. Laurence Fink, BlackRock’s founder and CEO, might well have replicated this career path to become Treasury Secretary if Hillary Clinton had succeeded in becoming US President in 2016.

BlackRock’s leadership went to great lengths to avoid being tagged with the title in the United States of a “systematically important financial institution” (sifi). To be subject to this “sifi” label entails added federal scrutiny and regulation as well as heightened requirements to keep high amounts of capital on hand. BlackRock’s status as a private company not subject to sifi regulations makes the financial management firm more attractive to its federal partners in the federal payout operation presently underway.

One of the reasons for including a private company in the trio of partners involved in the payouts is to sneak around limitations on the legal powers of the Federal Reserve. As explained by Ellen Brown in her essay, Meet BlackRock: The New Great Vampire Squid, the Federal Reserve can only purchase “safe federally-guaranteed assets.” As a private company, BlackRock apparently faces no such restrictions. It can purchase more risky assets not backstopped by federal insurance.

The regional banks of the Federal Reserve Board are owned by private companies whose directors seem to have been part of the decision to include BlackRock in the implementation of the CARES process. There can be no doubt that the format of the CARES negotiations pulled the supposedly independent Federal Reserve more deeply into the political orbit of the US Treasury branch. The presence of a major Wall Street firm in the process, however, apparently gave the advocates of the Fed’s supposed independence from politics a sense that they retained some leverage in the process.

The inclusion of private companies in the conduct of government business has become in recent decades a very common expression of neoliberalism. One of the reasons for this embrace of public-private partnerships in the conduct of government business is to take advantage of the legal nature of private companies. The apportionment to private companies of significant roles in deciding and implementing public policies helps put veils of secrecy over the true nature of government decisions and actions.

Private companies can more easily assert claims to “proprietary information” than can public institutions when they act on behalf of citizens. This feature of privatization in the performance of public responsibilities by elected government runs counter to the imperatives of democratic transparency. It puts obstacles in the way of genuine accountability because the public is more likely to be kept in the dark about key aspects of what is being decided and done on their behalf.

Suck Up Economics and State Monopoly Capitalism

BlackRock owns, controls, or manages about $30 trillion in total in securities. It directly controls or owns somewhat less than a third of this amount. The remainder of the assets BlackRock manages are to service clients responsible for taking care of pension funds, philanthropies, foundations, endowments, family offices, superannuation funds and such.

A big part of BlackRock’s business model involves attracting customers by allowing them access to great masses of timely information of significant utility to those responsible for making investment decisions. This technological wizardry happens on a very advanced computational platform known as Aladdin.

Aladdin remains a work-in-progress, one that is widely recognized as the most sophisticated medium of its kind for assessing all manner of financial risks and potentials for profit. Its future as an investment platform is to become more and more integrated into the complex mix of hardware and software animating Artificial Intelligence.

BlackRock’s job is to dispense funds ushered into existence through the money-creating powers of the Federal Reserve. These transactions are to take place through eleven so-called “special purpose vehicles” similar to the Maiden Lane companies that BlackRock administered during the prior bailouts.

The funds it distributes in this round starting in 2020 are meant, at least at this early stage of the crisis, as payments for various sorts of assets. These assets might include an array of corporate bonds spanning a range from so-called investment grade to garbage grade junk bonds. The losses incurred in this exchange, involving supposed assets that might turn out to be worthless, or loans that might not be paid back, are to be charged to the US Treasury. Ultimately the liability lies on US taxpayers who are the holders of the national debt.

Bonds of varying levels of worth lie beneath another asset eligible for transformation into cash. This instrument of value is referred to as Exchange Traded Funds, ETFs. ETFs happen to be a specialty of BlackRock ever since the company launched a range of commercial ETFs into Stock Market circulation through its iShares division. BlackRock’s role on both sides of buying and selling ETFs comes up repeatedly as one of the many conflicts of interest of which the Wall Street firm stands accused.

Given that BlackRock is involved in one way or another in the proprietorship of pretty much every major company in the world, there is plenty to back up the allegation that Black Rock is an interested party in most of the transactions in which it engages as part of its partnership with the US Fed and Treasury Branch.

Pam Matens and Russ Martens have been very critical of the role of the Federal Reserve and BlackRock in the current economic crisis. They have anticipated that, if the current drift of events continues, American taxpayers will once again be gobsmacked with a huge growth in the national debt. This development would amount to another major transfer of wealth away from working people to the beneficiaries of Wall Street firms and the same commercial institutions that received the lion’s share of funds during the last bailout.

The co-authors picture BlackRock is part of a scheme to use “Special Purpose Vehicles” like “Enron used to hide the true state of its finances and blow itself up.” They entitle their article published on 31 March, 2020 as “The Dark Secrets in the Fed’s Wall Street Bailout Are Getting a Devious Makeover in Today’s Bailout.”

The authors observe. “What makes the New York Fed’s bailout of Wall Street so much more dangerous this time around is that it has decided to use a different structure for its loans to Wall Street – one that will force losses on taxpayers and, it hopes, will provide an ironclad secrecy curtain around how much it spends and where the money goes.”

I find this account of an effort by the Federal Reserve to create an “ironclad secrecy curtain” shocking under these circumstances. It suggests an intention to exceed the deceptiveness of the last bailout. This warning renews longstanding suspicions that the failures of transparency and accountability have not subsided since the beginning of the era when deregulation and the 9/11 deceptions converged in the domestic and international operations of Wall Street.

The structural problems already identified in the process initiated to implement the CARES Act could have enormous consequences if the current economic crisis continues to deteriorate. This deterioration is not likely to stop anytime soon given the depth of the crash and its probable domino effects. It was reported in late July that during the second quarter of 2020 the US Gross Domestic Product collapsed at an annualized rate of 33%, the deepest decline in output ever recorded since the US government began measuring GDP in 1947.

The CARES Act helped set in motion a program with the potential to repeat elements of the earlier bailout. The amount of $454 billion was to be set aside to assist the banking sector. The Fed can leverage this amount by ten times according to the principles of fractional reserve banking.

The news of this development caused Mike Whitney to imagine “the Fed turning itself into a hedge fund in order to buy the sludge that has accumulated on the balance sheets of corporations and financial institutions for the last decade,” Whitney pictured an onslaught of “scheming sharpies who will figure out how to game the system and turn the whole fiasco into another Wall Street looting operation.”

Meanwhile the Martens Team at Wall Street on Parade called attention to the $9 trillion already injected by the New York Fed to flood liquidity into the still-troubled Repo Markets that began to falter in September of 2019. Add to this revelation the news that the Fed “has not announced one scintilla of information on what specific Wall Street firms have received this money or how much they individually received.”

There is no doubt that the nature of economic relations will be substantially altered in the process of dealing with the financial meltdown induced by the lockdowns and by the overreliance on high debt rates combined with artificially low interest rates prior to 2020. The altered political economy that is beginning to emerge following the lockdowns is sometimes described as state monopoly capitalism.

In deciding what companies get bailed out and what companies don’t, the financial authorities that are intervening in this crisis are pretty much deciding what enterprises get the advantage of federal financial backstops and what enterprises will not enjoy government sanction. Increasingly, therefore, it is the state that determines winners and losers in the organizing of financial relations. This development further undermines any notion that some idealized vision of competition and market forces will determine winners and losers in the economy of the future.

As Peter Ewarts has observed, it seems that BlackRock is being delegated by federal authorities to exercise “discretionary powers to pick winners and losers,” a choice that is “where the real bonanza and clout lies.” Will the winners be chosen from the companies run by executives that used the money gained from the prior bailouts to engage in stock buy backs? This process of buying back stock tends to be reflected in CEO bonuses and higher share prices. Alternatively this way of allocating funds tends to short change workers as well as innovation and efficiency in industrial production?

Will companies be rewarded whose executives have moved production facilities overseas or issued billions in junk bonds? Will companies be rewarded whose directors have participated in the effort to censor the Internet, bring about lockdowns or foment mask hysteria? Why is it that the coddled elites serving the financial imperatives of most wealthy branches of society are being put in the best position to decide who gets a life preserver from the state and who must sink and drown?

Might this bias be a factor in the current process that led Forbes Magazine to conclude in a headline that “Billionaries Are Getting Richer During the Covid-19 Pandemic While Most Americans Suffer.”

There can be no doubt that the financial transactions beginning with the CARES Act represent a crucial initial stage in what the promoters of the World Economic Forum have been labeling as the Great Reset. Laurence Fink and the BlackRock firm are significant participants in the World Economic Forum. The WEF helped introduce the pandemic in Event 201 in October of 2019 even as it is now trying to put a positive face on the fiasco.

Why should the people most harshly affected by the lockdowns tolerate that the very Wall Street interests dispossessing them, are tasked once again to lead and exploit the reset of the financial system? As presently structured by the likes of BlackRock and its beneficiaries, this process is once again transferring new wealth to the most wealthy branches of society. Simultaneously it is burdening the rest of the population with yet another massive increase in both personal and national indebtedness.

There is no more discussion of “trickle down” economics, a frequent metaphor invoked in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Instead we are in the midst of an increasingly intense phase of suck up economics. The rich are being further enriched and further empowered through the dispossession of the poor and the middle classes. This procedure, initiated when locked down citizens were sidelined from the political process, has the potential to result in the largest upward transfer of wealth so far in history.

BlackRock Versus the Debt-Lite Legacy of the Bank of Canada

At the end of March Laurence Fink, CEO and founder of BlackRock, announced in a letter to his company’s shareholder, “We are honored to have been selected to assist the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of Canada on programs designed to facilitate capital to businesses and support the economy.”

This announcement might leave the impression that the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York are similar institutions. This impression is unfounded. The two banks have very different structures and histories. A spotlight on these differences helps illuminate the nature of a number of core financial issues.

These financial issues should command avid attention during this time of reckoning with a serious economic crisis that may well be still in its early stages. Such issues inevitably draw attention to the current manifestations of very old questions about the character of money and its relationship to the concepts of usury and debt. Questions about debt, debt enslavement as well as the possibility of debt renunciation or debt forgiveness are becoming especially pressing.

These controversial queries arise in an era when a tiny minority is aggressively asserting sweeping claims to ownership of vast concentrations of the world’s available assets. The other side of this picture reveals that the largest mass of humanity is sinking into a swamp of rising debt on a scale that is concurrently unsustainable and unconscionable. How did this level of inequity reach such audacious extremes? Are there any remedies in sight?

There is nothing to suggest structural remediation in the current approach to the economic crisis. In fact so far there is every indication that the current approach of bringing about an enormous expansion in the availability of debt-laden money will only compound the further dispossession of the already dispossessed in order to expand the wealth of the already wealthy.

As already noted, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of twelve regional banks that together constitute the US Federal Reserve. Every regional Federal Reserve Bank is owned by a group of private banks. Each of the private banks at the base of a Federal Reserve regional bank marks its proprietorship through the ownership of shares. These shares cannot be freely traded in stock markets. The ownership of these shares expresses the private ownership of the US banking system.

The Fed’s New York regional bank has a special role in money creation given its location at the heart of the US financial sector on and around Wall Street. In this crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is creating new money in the name of holding back onslaughts of destitution and penury in a traumatized society. Ever since 1913 every new dollar brought into existence by the Federal Reserve, which is the central bank of the United States, creates added debt that collects compound interest as long as it is left unpaid.

The Bank of Canada was created to counter the delegation of money-creating authority to privately-owned banks. The Bank of Canada was founded during the Great Depression, a time when the failure of many existing institutions created the conditions to try out alternative entities in the attempt to improve economic relationships.

One of the driving forces in the creation of Canada’s new banking system was Gerald Gratten McGeer. McGreer was an elected official in British Columbia dedicated to changing the system so that the people of Canada could generate their own currency through the sovereign authority of Canada’s Parliament. McGeer helped to push the national government of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in this direction. The wheels were set in motion in 1933 through the work on the Royal Commission on Banking and Currency.

McGeer drew much of his inspiration from former US President, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln led the US federal government throughout the US Civil War. To finance the Armed Forces of the Union, Lincoln used the authority of the federal government to create “Greenbacks” as a means of paying the troops. By employing the sovereign authority of the US government to create its own currency, Lincoln avoided the intrigues that often accompanied the process of borrowing money from foreign lenders.

McGreer had obtained what he viewed as credible evidence that Lincoln had been assassinated because of his antagonism to the designs of private bankers seeking to widen their base of power in the United States. The Canadian politician had taken to heart a comment attributed often to Lincoln: “The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity.”

The Bank of Canada was created in 1934 and nationalized as a Crown Corporation in 1938. To this day it retains its founding charter that affirms,

WHEREAS it is desirable to establish a central bank in Canada to regulate credit and currency in the best interests of the economic life of the nation, to control and protect the external value of the national monetary unit and to mitigate by its influence fluctuations in the general level of production, trade, prices and employment, so far as may be possible within the scope of monetary action, and generally to promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada.

The Bank of Canada formed an essential basis of a very creative period of Canadian growth, development, and diversification throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century. The Bank of Canada created the capital that financed the Canadian war effort from 1939 until 1945. After the war the Bank of Canada lent money at very low rates of interest to the municipal, provincial and national governments. The monies were used for infrastructure projects and for investments to increase the wellbeing and creative potential of Canada’s most important resource, its people.

This type of low interest or no interest financing formed the economic basis for projects like the creation of a national pension plan, national health care insurance, the Trans-Canada Highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Avro-Arrow initiative as well as a formidable system of colleges and universities.

One could say that the Bank of Canada provided an indigenous money supply that was spent into the operations of a fast growing economy greased with lots of federal liquidity. The new money derived its value from the efforts of Canadian workers. Together they brought about significant increases in the country’s net worth through practical improvements that bettered the lives of all citizens.

Consider the contrast between this type of national development and the kind of larceny facilitated by the Federal Reserve’s infusions of the money it creates into Wall Street’s operations in the twenty-first century. In, for instance, the financial bailouts of 2007 to 2010 the largest part of the newly-created money ended up in the coffers of the wealthy whereas the new debt created ended up as part of a US national debt.

The burden of carrying this debt falls inter-generationally on average working people who form the lion’s share of taxpayers. They have long been saddled with an “inextinguishable debt” that unrelentingly grows, hardly ever shrinks, and remains basically unpayable forever. The very concept of “compound interest” conveys the image of an overall debt spread out over many venues. This debt must grow in perpetuity. There is a constant need for additional debtors while existing debtors must face constantly growing personal debt.

There is reason to suspect that the financial debacle of 2020 will re-enact some the worst excesses of the 2008 bailout. Might the payouts this time around to derivative-addicted Wall Street firms like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase exceed the scale of the prior bailout? Would there be any way of even knowing whether the current round of payouts outdoes the former round of bailouts? The current process of federal disbursements is not transparent. In fact the process has been described as one designed to “provide an ironclad secrecy curtain around how much [the Fed} spends and where the money goes.”

Why is the Canadian government turning to the very firm that emerged as Wall Street’s main fixer and winner in the 2008 bailouts? Why is Justin Trudeau looking to BlackRock to respond to the Canadian aspects of the 2020 economic crash?

Justin Trudeau seems unwilling or unable to provide a coherent answer to this question and others requiring thoughtful replies rather than barrages of platitudes. Why is Justin Trudeau instituting what Joyce Nelson has characterized as a “new feudalism” in Canada’s economic policies?

Any decent effort of response on Trudeau’s part would have to make some reference to the background of the current debacle. There would have to be some acknowledgment that between 1934 and 1974 the Canada government did not build up any significant national debt. Then, between 1974 and 2020, the national debt of Canada skyrocketed from $22 billion to $700 billion.

Why was such a good and sustainable use of the Bank of Canada put aside, one that contributed magnificently to the health and wellbeing of the Canadian people as well as the Canadian federation? Who lost out? Who gained besides the international bankers?

The incomprehensible abandonment of a winning formula for Canadian development by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau puts a special onus on his son, Canada’s current PM, to explain the incredibly costly mistake of his father. Why won’t Justin Trudeau fix the mistake of his father and restore the Bank of Canada to its former role in Canadian nation building?

There has never been a full and satisfactory explanation of what really happened in 1974 to persuade Pierre Trudeau to throw aside the means of developing infrastructure with resources generated internally within Canada. Trudeau Senior’s decision to stop building up Canada through the operation of the Canadian people’s own national bank was not debated in Parliament. The option was never part of an election platform let alone the subject of a national referendum.

Apparently the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements, which is often referred to as the central bank for central bankers, had some role in Pierre Trudeau’s decision to cease using the Bank of Canada’s powers to generate near-debt-free Canadian currency.

Government as a Means of Escaping Debt Entrapment

That powers of debt-lite money creation invested by Parliament in the Bank of Canada have never been formally withdrawn. The Bank of Canada could still revert back to the direct creation of Canadian currency to be spent into an economy of national recovery; to be spent in investments in infrastructure as well as in cultivating and applying the creative skills of the Canadian people.

Between 2011 and 2017 a court case was brought against the government of Canada with the aim of restoring the Bank of Canada to its former role. As Rocco Galati, the lawyer for the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) explained “Not only has the government abandoned its constitutional duty to govern, but it has transferred it to international private banks which corresponds to an abandonment of its sovereignty.”

After some significant rulings and contentious appeals, the COMER case came to an end without delivering results that its plaintiffs sought. But the court case helped to put a spotlight on the potential of the Bank of Canada. If properly utilized, this institution could provide a model corrective to the subordination of governance to the international Lords of Debt Exploitation and their minions.

This process of politicizing the role of the Bank of Canada should extend to a process of calling out Justin Trudeau’s current approach to selling off key components of Canada’s infrastructure.

This topic came up in private discussions between Larry Fink and Justin Trudeau at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2016. Fink apparently got Trudeau interested in attracting private investors to the project of improving or building Canadian infrastructure projects like roads, high-speed trains, airports and such. This kind of approach to developing infrastructure projects runs counter to the role once played by the Bank of Canada in incorporating self-sufficiency into the process of national building.

The dangers and opportunities in this time of manufactured crises are indeed unprecedented. Instead of rejecting the Davos crowd’s preoccupation with a giant reset, why not embrace the concept? Why not treat this moment as an opening to reset the global economy in a way that would restore the Bank of Canada to some of its former functions. Why not highlight this return to the sovereign embrace of benevolent nation building as an example for the rest of the world?

Why not reconstitute the worldwide structures of the international system of economic relations to restore elected governments to the functions that have been pre-empted by unaccountable institutions like the US Federal Reserve or the Bank for International Settlements? Why not renew the model of banking as an exercise and expression of national sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples in a dynamic global arena of rules-based economic interaction?

Why not withdraw the power from private bankers to create national currencies? Why not follow the advice of the deceased Abraham Lincoln by restoring “the greatest of all creative possibilities available to governments,” namely their power to issue money and set interest rates. The restoration of economic power to governments and the people and peoples they represent would involve the infusion of life into conceptions of globalization very different than those used to justify the industrialization of China and the deindustrialization of North America.

By delegating to international organizations much of their capacity to influence the economic conditions affecting their own people, national legislatures have lost much of their capacity to provide responsible government. Governments thus weakened are not realistically in a position to derive their authority from the consent of the governed. When representative bodies cannot effectively express the right of their constituents to collective self-determination in economic realm, what legitimacy is left to the institution of representative government?

This strange moment puts humanity face to face with much that is novel and unprecedented and much that is old and integral to the history of human interaction. The economic dimensions of this crisis constitute its most devastating and far-reaching attribute. The supposed remedy being rushed into operation is to flood large quantities of debt-laden loans into existence and for governments to distribute the borrowed funds to individuals, businesses, and organizations as they see fit.

Once again, vast quantities of debt-laden money are being created without the informed consent of those on whose shoulders the vastly increased loads of debt are falling. Once again governments are rewarding political friends and punishing political enemies by means of the way the new funds are being apportioned.

Decisions are pushed forward that emanate not from citizen constituents but from cabals of supranational connivers actively engaged in wrecking what little remains of responsible government. As governments lose legitimacy by engaging in collusion with corrupt cronies and international crime syndicates they must depend more and more on police state thuggery to enforce some semblance of order.

This process is going forward in spite of the fact that alternative means exist to create as much new money as is required without having to pay large amounts of compound interest to private bankers. Every sovereign government has the capacity to generate new money by following the model of the Bank of Canada between 1938 and 1974.

There is an especially urgent need at this time for some serious reckoning with the economic dimensions of the crisis before us. This reckoning will inevitably meet the resistance of extremely powerful interests who are deriving great benefits from the existing system. The process of privatizing the creation of money has enriched and empowered a clique whose institutionalized, deep-rooted and continuing kleptocracy was exposed in part by the bailout of 2008.

Why should we take for granted in 2020 that the best way to deal with the economic debacle put before us is to create new money by agreeing to go much deeper into a quagmire of debt entrapment. This debt trap, whose cumulative amount will soon be more that $300 trillion globally, creates gross liabilities in a trajectory of disadvantage that severely limits the life chances even of many generations still unborn.

The other side of debt is embodied in assets. Who gets the assets and who gets the liabilities that coalesce to form indebtedness? What is to be made of the role of birth or inheritance or race or natural ability or social connections in apportioning assets or imposing the enslavements of accumulated debt?

John Perkins addressed some of these issues in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and in a subsequent follow-up volume. Perkins chronicled how an inter-related complex of US institutions aligned themselves with his own greedy and unscrupulous interventions. The goal of their coordinated aggressions was aimed at imposing the enslavements of massive debt with compound interest. Their version of loan sharking is one of many manifestations expressing a very old and common phenomenon. It often happens that powerful interests parasitically exploit the weak to further enrich themselves.

This partnership between John Perkins and the kleptocratic agencies directed by the US government has long been drawing wealth from struggling countries by pushing them more deeply into national indebtedness. Once the governments of target countries succumbed to greater dependence on debt-based financing, the conditions were ripe to force officials into adopting policies of austerity that harmed local citizens in order to augment the assets of international investors.

Significantly the World Bank demonstrated how this coercion works in the context of the current economic crisis. The World Bank attempted to impose conditions on a loan of $940 million to Belarus because the WB wanted Belarus to conform to the lockdowns that are a primary cause of the current manufactured crisis.

As revealed by the Belarus’s President, Alexander Lukashenko, the World Bank wanted his country to adopt the full set of COVID-19 measures that had been implemented by the Italian government. Lukashenko said no to the loan. He refused to accept the conditions and carried on the established policies of Belarus, a country that has “not implemented strict coronavirus containment measures.”

Lukashenko is far from alone in his contempt for the manipulative tactics of the apparatus promoting the manufactured crisis. For instance Tanzanian President, John Magufuli, tested the accuracy of the testing procedures being forced on his country by the World Health Organization. President and Medical Doctor Mugufi included in the samples submitted to the testing agency some tissue of a goat and a papaya. Both the goat and the papaya tested positive for COVID-19, an outcome he publicized before ordering the WHO group to leave his country.

The Political Economy of Usury From the Middle Ages to the Era of Social Credit and Ezra Pound

We cannot assess the division of humanity between a massive group of debtors and a much smaller group of creditors without touching on the issue of usury. The subject of usury, the lending of money with the addition of interest payments, has been an extremely contentious issue throughout much of human history.

There were prohibitions against usury in ancient Greece, ancient India and the Roman Empire. Throughout much of the last thousand years usury has been regarded as a sin outlawed in the Bible, the Torah and the Koran. At different times in history the Roman Catholic Church has been an especially zealous opponent of some forms of usury.

Considering the nature of our current predicaments including obscene levels of economic inequality, usury might yet again arouse contentions. Some of the core ethical issues raised by the resort to usury remain unresolved. How is it ethical, for instance, to subject disinherited children in poor countries to the indignities of deepened poverty so that rich folks in rich parts of the world can reap larger dividends?

Beginning in the Middle Ages, forms of usury began to show up first in the Italian city states and in the towns of the Franco-Flemish realm. The act of loaning money with interest gradually spread throughout Europe. In some predominately-Muslim jurisdictions, the concept conveyed in the Arabic term, “riba,” approximated the idea of usury or interest. Over time various versions of riba have affected Muslim banking practices.

Often there were prohibitions preventing Jews from demanding interest on loans made to other Jews. There were many Talmudic teachings, however, permitting interest to be collected from gentiles when they borrowed money from Jews. Many accounts of Jewish efforts to break down prohibitions on usury highlight obstacles preventing Jews from pursuing other lines of work. The case is made that the pull of some Jews into banking came about in part because of their exclusion from other occupations.

Whatever the case, the obstacles to usury continued to be lessened including through the changes to Biblical interpretation that came with the Protestant Reformation. Even in the twentieth century, however, usury continued to arouse criticism and distrust. Ezra Pound was one of those who became very outspoken when it came to problems with usury.

The modernist poet and scholar, Ezra Pound, was one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. The importance of his work was expressed not only in his own literary efforts but also in his contributions to other authors in his circle of friends and colleagues.

Pound’s outspoken criticism of usury formed part of the discourse that was integral to the political movements seeking economic reform. The creation and successful nationalization of the Bank of Canada was one of the outgrowths of the concerted quest to give substance to economic institutions that would more effectively serve human needs.

The creation of the Bank of Canada drew on the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and also on those of many other theorists including Major C.H. Douglas. While Major Douglas and John Maynard Keynes each denounced one another’s work, both sought to stimulate economic activity by expanding the supply and distribution of money. Major Douglas’ vision of Social Credit, one that Pound enthusiastically embraced, sought to bring about greater harmony and equilibrium between the forces of production and consumption.

A biographer of Pound has explained that this formidable literary figure believed “there was the prospect of building a Social Credit society where money served the consumer and served the producer.” As Pound pictured it, “the middle men” seeking usurious, interest bearing profit” to be collected “without work or prior motivation, could be cut out.” During the Depression the hope of prosperity through the application of Social Credit principles was seized upon by many. One of them was an evangelical preacher in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Largely as a result of the popularity he gained by incorporating Major Douglas’ analysis of Social Credit into his Sunday afternoon Christian radio broadcast, “Bible Bill” Aberhart became the Premier of Alberta. His Social Credit Party gained 56 of 63 seats in the Alberta Legislature. The Social Credit Party continued in power until 1971.

The Social Credit preoccupation with bringing about changes in the relationship of citizens to financial institutions helped add to the discourse from which the Bank of Canada emerged as a dynamic instrument of nation building.

The enthusiasm was well placed of those who threw their lot in with the movement to create and enlivened the Bank of Canada. The generations that put their trust in this federal financial institution had the satisfaction of knowing that their taxes were not devoured to pay big amounts of interest to private bankers in the style that presently prevails almost everywhere.

Like his good friend and colleague, Ernest Hemingway, Pound was a devotee of clear, terse and succinct prose.

This characteristic of his writing comes through strongly in his harsh condemnations of usury. “Usury is the cancer of the world,” Pound wrote. He explained, “Until you know who has lent to whom, you know nothing of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.”

Ezra Pound was born in Idaho but was attracted to Italy throughout long periods of his life. In Italy he lionized its fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. He embraced the Axis side in World War II developing close relations with the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. Pound threw himself into the contest producing a torrent of radio broadcasts seeking to win over English-speaking converts to the Axis side. These broadcasts are today widely described as war propaganda.

Pound was indicted in the United States in 1943 and arrested at the war’s end by the US Armed Forces in Italy. After being jailed in Pisa, Pound was charged with treason. Then Pound was diagnosed as being mentally unfit to face charges.

The finding that he was mentally ill caused Pound to be locked up as a patient in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the Washington DC area for the next 13 years. In spite of his severe prejudices against Jewish bankers and his active embrace of fascism during the war years, Pound continued to carry on very lively interactions with his formidable circle of poets, essayists and novelists.

Pound’s circle included James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot. All these writers wrote works that won a Nobel Prize for Literature. These and many other authors benefited from Pound’s encouragement and mentorship. In 1948 Eustace Mullins joined Pound’s circle. Mullins was introduced to the famous poet and scholar through Pound’s wife, Dorothy Shakespeare,

When he first met Pound, Mullins was an art school student and a veteran of the US Air Force. He had already published some short pieces in the British journal, Social Creditor. Mullins remembered Pound’s place of forced residence as “a hideous, urine-soaked madhouse in Washington D.C.” As their visits became increasingly regular, Pound encouraged Mullins to conduct research into the history and activities of the Federal Reserve.

When Pound proposed the idea Mullins was unaware of the existence of the Federal Reserve. Nevertheless, Mullins threw himself into the project that he supported by combining his research with work as a book stacker at the Library of Congress. At the Library he befriended George Stimpson who was well known among Washington journalists and government officials for his wealth of knowledge and his ability to locate relevant research materials.

Stimpson happily worked with Mullins. He helped the aspiring author by guiding him into the primary and secondary literature illuminating many facets of the Federal Reserve’s history

Eustace Mullins Explores the Secrets of the Federal Reserve

An initial edition of the volume appeared in 1952 as Mullins on the Federal Reserve. Another edition with added information was published in 1954. The text has been republished many times, sometimes in different editions under the title Secrets of the Federal Reserve. The text is organized around both thematic and chronological facets.

Mullins lays out the history of the Federal Reserve with considerable attention to the institution’s roots and origins. The author emphasizes several strands of continuity showing the links of the Federal Reserve to the banking establishments of Europe but especially those of Great Britain and Germany.

Mullins characterizes the Federal Reserve as the most powerful institution in the United States whose influence grew so that “it gradually superseded the popular elected government of the United States.” The power of the Fed and its core facet, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is said to have become so formidable because the agency operates in secrecy without any genuine form of accountability to any public institution. The NY Fed combines the power of secrecy with the enormous power to create new currency and to set interest rates becoming in the process “the most gigantic trust on earth.”

Mullins makes the case that the financial district known as the City of London exercised enormous influence over the activities of the Federal Reserve and many of the large Wall Street banks. Mullins wrote, “London is the world’s financial centre, because it commands enormous sums of capital created at its command by the Federal Reserve Board of the United States.”

Mullins is conscientious in presenting many citations to back up his observations and interpretations. He cites, for instance the New York Times on January of 1920 where it states, “The Federal Reserve is a fount of credit not capital.” The manipulation of credit, however, can greatly affect the industrial economy by affecting the ability of manufacturers and farmers to produce.

Mullins emphasizes throughout the text how events are often engineered to strengthen the hand of the Lords of Credit in the matrix of society’s operations. In referring, for instance, to a secret banker’s plan to crash the stock market in 1929, Mullins expressed a view that could as easily describe the growing suspicion in 2020. Could it be that the lockdowns of businesses and workers were purposely engineered to strengthen the hands of the Lords of Credit whose main platform is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

Mullins explains that sometimes “bankers paralyse the industrial energies of the country” in order to highlight and strengthen “their tremendous powers” over the financial and business organization of the American economy. Mullins’ observation that “panic is an instrument of [financial] power” is another statement with obvious relevance to the current crisis.

As have many authors since, Mullins emphasizes the importance of a top-secret meeting on Jekyll Island in the state of Georgia in 1910. At this meeting Paul Warburg essentially took the intellectual lead in creating a plan for a Central Bank in the United States. Such an institution was long contemplated and promoted but it had been stopped repeatedly, most famously be Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s political career culminated in his winning the US presidency between 1829 and 1837.

Warburg left his family banking business in Hamburg Germany in 1902. He joined the Wall Street Office of Kuhn Loeb, a Wall Street House that helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Mullins devotes much effort to describing the complex of alliances and rivalries that characterized banking before and after the founding of the Fed.

Weaving throughout these networks of financial activity were the banking operations of the Rothschild family. Mullins leaves no doubt that the operations of the Rothschild family of bankers were extensive, elaborate and very influential.

In the nineteenth century the Rothschild banking establishment gradually wove its operations into those of large segments of Europe’s royal and aristocratic establishments. Mullins emphasizes the genesis of the close business relationship between the Rothschild banking clan and a London-based US company, George Peabody and Company.

Peabody’s bank was passed on to a father and son team, Junius Spencer Morgan and John Pierpont Morgan. In the days of the Fed’s founding and even today, the name of J.P. Morgan is synonymous with New York banking. Mullins explains how the Rothschild bankers kept a fairly low profile in New York by conducting much of their American business largely through the financial organizations associated with the name and reputation of J.P. Morgan.

Mullins outlines the role of the Federal Reserve in the funding of two world wars. Many of the topics covered in Secrets of the Federal Reserve were later pursued in much more detail in the prolific writings of Antony C. Sutton.

Most of Sutton’s volumes describe the role of Wall Street in helping to bring about many of world history’s major turning points during the twentieth century. These turning points include Wall Street’s funding of the rise of the National Socialist government in Germany in the 1930s and the role of Wall Street in financing the Bolshevik Revolution and the business activities of the Soviet Union.

The capacity of the New York Bank of the Federal Reserve to create vast quantities of credit to finance wars, often with the same bankers funding competing sides in conflicts, provided the key to the creation of huge fortunes. The funding of both sides in war can be seen as an early form of hedging one’s bets. This kind of high impact intervention through banking sometimes created huge leverage for a very small number of people to steer history towards preconceived destinations.

As Mullins explains it, the Federal Reserve was founded in extreme secrecy and often employs deceptive tactics to misrepresent its true nature. As Mullins sees it, for instance, the creation of the twelve regional banks was a ploy to gain political acceptance for the Central Bank’s core entity, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mullins explains, “the other eleven banks were so many expensive mausoleums erected to salve local pride and quell the Jacksonian fears of the hinterland.”

The ability of Wall Street bankers to invoke the credit creating powers of the New York Fed forms a key aspect of the frequent military adventurism of the US government. This military adventurism continued full force even after the United States became the world’s largest debtor nation after 1990. How large has been the role of the US Fed in building up the US national debt together with the tens of trillions missing from the books of the US Defense Department?

The Israel Lobby and the Federal Reserve

Much of the military adventurism of the United States especially after 9/11 was directed into invasions of Muslim-majority countries that threaten a particular view of Israel as a dominant power in its region and in the world. Why would it be that the Federal Reserve is any less involved in creating the available credit for the waging of wars in the twenty-first century than it was in creating the wars of the twentieth century?

In his authorship of The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Mullins seems largely oblivious to the role in world history of Zionism and the genesis of Israel. His main attention lay elsewhere. As I read his text, he accurately conveyed how the large Jewish influence in the banking institution of Europe, including the influence of the Rothschild consortium, was extended into Wall Street including the Federal Reserve.

While Mullins does not shy aware from dealing with the Jewish component of the story he set out to tell, I don’t think he belabours this subject or becomes aggressively polemical about it. Certainly the same cannot be said of some of his critics whose condemnations of Mullins can sometimes be extremely polemical.

Mullins might have made more of the identity politics prevailing throughout the twentieth century. The sensibilities of the dominant Christian constituency in the United States probably influenced the decisions of many customers shopping for banking services. Quite likely some of them would have been more comfortable dealing with firms identified with names like J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Mellon rather than Warburg, Greenspan or Fink. Times, however, have changed.

Some of the more severe prejudices seem to have subsided around the time that Sandy Weill combined his Travellers Insurance Company with Citicorp to create Citigroup. This merger helped create the political momentum leading to the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. With Glass-Steagall’s elimination, Citigroup tried to become a giant department store of varied financial services. In its inner sanctums, however, Citigroup developed a preoccupation with derivatives that continues yet.

In the twenty-first century it happened that some of the cosmetic overlays were removed that had previously been imposed to disguise the large representation of Jews in Wall Street banking, including in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For good or bad, usury has become a core features of how the contemporary world is organized. Some reckoning with the ethnic inheritances attending usury are therefore inescapable, especially when dealing with the some of the most dramatic displays of usury on steroids in Wall Street institutions.

Where I see the need to draw a line in the sand is not on the question of the ethnicity of Wall Street personnel. Rather this line in the sand involves the question of how power is used or abused at the domineering heights of our financial institutions. Generally speaking it is not a justifiable use of the Federal Reserve to produce credit that enables the waging of wars that are offensive rather than defensive in character.

The waging of war has long been one of the big bonanzas producing major windfalls for international bankers. In the twenty-first century so many of the wars involve the flexing of military might by the United States to advance the expansionary designs of the Israeli state. The US Federal Reserve has been part of the process of creating what some would consider wars for Israel in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

Why are the money-generating powers of the secretive Federal Reserve being invoked to help fund wars for Israel and also to help shape public opinion to accept the US role in these wars of aggression. Especially sensitive is the further indebting of the American people to subsidize the production of propaganda aimed at persuading them to back wars for Israel. This propaganda is deemed necessary to deflate opposition to Israel’s actions including the ruthless dehumanizing treatment of Palestinian Arabs.

We have seen that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was deeply engaged in 2008 in transferring tens of trillions into the coffers of its own member institutions and counterparties. What uses were made of this bailout produced through a dubious process of legalized financial larceny?

One way or another the Israel Lobby must be a prime beneficiary of the machinations of Wall Street and its money spigot, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This pattern of priority can easily be related to US federal funding of the Israel project as a higher priority in federal budgeting than even the basic needs of the domestic population of the United States. Black Lives Do Matter but why is it that the lives of Israel First Partisans seem to matter more than any other group?

This Israel Lobby has the power to prevent any critic of Israeli policies from gaining the nomination of a major US party to run for US president. The result is that, in election after election, Americans are offered a very limited choice between competitors who are equally supportive of Israel.

The Israel Lobby can intervene to prevent the leadership of opposition parties from adopting policies that emphasize equity in Israel-Palestinian relations. Through its campaign contributions, the Israel Lobby dominates the process of choosing and electing representatives in Congress. How much does it cost to buy the political obedience of most federal politicians? How much does it cost to replicate this feat in the state legislatures and even municipal governments?

Through the ownership and/or control of major media outlets, the Israel Lobby exerts major influence in determining the main outlines of much public discourse when it comes to US-Israeli relations and many related subjects. How could one calculate the amount of money it took to achieve this feat? How much of this money is directed into payments for compliance, in other words, bribery? In the post-Epstein era what is the role of bribery’s criminal cousin, namely backmail?

The Israel Lobby is deeply engaged with other lobbies in transforming the Internet from an open forum of public interaction and debate into a centrally controlled propaganda instrument. Prominent among the Internet’s most aggressive censors and thought police are Google, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Through all kinds of interventions the Israel Lobby asserts significant forms of control over a broad array of institutions and operations including those of the judiciary, the universities, book publishing, magazine publishing, municipal governments, trade unions and cultural groups. The biggest and most influential cultural group of all is the Hollywood film industry. Not surprisingly there is little in its cinematic output that provides critical perspectives on Zionism and its emanations.

The injection of huge amounts of money are essential to the exercise of so much concerted influence over such a broad sweep of political, intellectual and cultural organizations. Where do the large quantities of money supporting the activities the Israel project come from? Why is it that so many of agencies of the Israel Lobby have the status of charitable organizations with the capacity to extend tax write-offs to donors? What is the relationship of the Israel Lobby to Wall Street and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

Even the act of asking such questions will be seen by some as heretical. There is, however, nothing wrong with looking into issues that have so much impact on the quality of our political discourse… so much impact on our capacity to live together with the civility and security we have been losing so quickly with the imposition of the economically crippling lockdowns.

It is no less legitimate to ask questions about the ethnic identity of those who benefit most from the US economy than it is to ask questions about what groups suffer the most from the deprivations of poverty. Wouldn’t it make sense to try to moderate the disparities beginning with processes of research and discussion?

In a book of the same name, former ADL Executive Director, Abe Foxman, has opened the discussion of Jews and Money. Foxman effectively counters the view that all Jews are rich. Foxman, of course, is correct in this assertion. All Jews are not rich. Some are outright poor. A fairly large number of Jews, however, are somewhat rich and a small minority of Jews are disproportionately invested with wealth and power. Jews are especially well represented in the billionaires club both within the United States and internationally.

Some of the wealthiest Jews are part of the Wall Street establishment including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Perhaps the time has come to begin retiring this, “the most gigantic trust on earth.” Perhaps it is time to retire some of the debt created over more than a century of putting private bankers in charge of dictating interest rates as well as creating debt-laden dollars. Perhaps the time has come to lessen the debt burden that is narrowing the life chances of so many people who have been funding the wars for Israel mounted in the wake of the 9/11 deception.

The severity of the crisis before us compel all thoughtful people of conscience to look beyond the redeployment of old institutions and old remedies for old problems that are different from the challenges facing us now. One of the most obvious ways to avert further calamity is to move away altogether from the empowerment of private bankers to massively expand national debts with compound interest charged to tax payers.

The alternative to this approach is to change the present means of creating new money. The creation of many banking systems similar to that of the Bank of Canada should be considered in the quest for the main ingredients of a global reset. The Bank of Canada brought about an almost-debt-free run of prodigious nation building before Pierre Trudeau bent the policies of his government to meet the impositions of the Bank of International Settlements.

 

(Republished from American Herald Tribune by permission of author or representative)

The Jewish Plot to Enslave Humanity

At the Roots of Political Judaism

Pierre Simon • May 14, 2024

The Jewish Plot to Enslave Humanity, by Pierre Simon - The Unz Review

_{With a lie you can go very far, but there is no turning back.}

Jewish proverb

Globalist Jews and their vassals have a nasty habit of smearing their opponents with accusations of “conspiracy theorists,” implying by this slur that conspiracies exist only in the fertile imagination of their critics, who are commonly portrayed as a bunch of lying crazies. However, according to Harvard University biological anthropology professor Richard Wrangham,

The vital innovation that has given rise to a new kind of political system is the plot. The ability to plot [conspire] rather than the ability to make weapons is what balanced the forces between the classical alpha males and the coalition of the weak. The ability to plot is an example of what psychologist Michael Tomasello has termed “shared intentionality,” a type of collaboration in which participants have psychological states in common. This ability has recently been deemed by psychologist Michael Tomasello to be unique to the human species. Humans excel in shared intentionality, which is already present in children as young as one year old, whereas chimpanzees show almost no signs of it. According to Tomasello, the typically human development of shared intentionality explains why humans can do many special things, from using mathematics to building skyscrapers and from playing a symphony to forming governments.[1]

If, as Richard Wrangham believes, selection against reactive aggression in impulsive people who have difficulty with frustration has indeed led to the self-domestication of humans, globalism and its off-shoot Zionism would in this sense be an attempt to domesticate humanity a step further into slavery. This attempt is only made possible by the shared intentionality of the main belligerents. It’s a conspiracy in the purest sense of the word. One of globalism’s most prominent conspirators, Jewish vassal, David Rockefeller, makes no secret of the fact:

Some people even think that we [the Rockefeller family] are part of a secret Cabala working against the best interests of the United States that we are internationalists conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I am guilty, and proud of it.[2]

This Jewish plot against humanity is also vindicated in a book by Joseph W. Bendersky called The Jewish Threat. Antisemitic Politics in the US Army. “Put simply,” writes Ron Unz, the Jewish editor in chief and owner of one of America’s most trusted information websites, The Unz Review, “U.S. military leaders in those decades widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organized Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilization.”[3]

Humans are made that way, to carry out a project, they need a master plan, a strategy, a method, and to avoid alerting their opponents, they must necessarily plan in secret, i.e., plot. Shared intentionality is indeed one of our instincts. Whether it’s a sports team, an army, a political party, or the globalist hydra, without a game plan or a playbook, you will fail.

If you want, in other words, to exterminate 6 million Jews in gas chambers, you need a plan, it won’t happen by telepathy or by “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus—mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy,” as the most prestigious Holocaust specialist Raul Hilberg puts it in what is considered the bible of the Holocaust: The Destruction of the European Jews.[4]

What else could he say! Contrary to Jewish claims, as conclusively shown in both Zundel trials[5] and in a huge number of contradictory books and articles,[6] there are no documents, no signed order by Hitler or anyone else for that matter, no plans for the construction of gas chambers, no pictures of a homicidal gas chamber, no traces of gas in the alleged gas chambers presented to the public, no bills for the hundreds of tons of coal needed to incinerate millions of bodies, no mass graves, no ashes anywhere, just witness accounts and Hollywood fictions that don’t prove a thing.[7] Circular statements like the following one is what Holocaust fanatics such as Deborah Lipstadt consider as sufficient proof:

It is not necessary to ask how, technically, such a mass murder was possible. It was technically possible because it took place. This is the obligatory starting point of any historical investigation on this subject. It was our duty to simply remind you of this truth: there is not, nor can there be, any debate about the existence of gas chambers.[8]

But beware, Ms. Lipstadt, with the advent of artificial intelligence, this kind of “overwhelming” evidence may no longer be enough. For example, if you ask infoChatbot the following questions, as Catholic intellectual Dr. E. Michael Jones did, you get the following answers:

How many Jews died in Auschwitz?

The chatbot answered: “It is estimated that at least 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz, the majority of whom were Jews.

Were the Jews murdered in Auschwitz cremated?

Yes, the bodies of those murdered at Auschwitz were cremated.

How many crematoria were there in Auschwitz?

There was a total of four crematoria in Auschwitz.

How long does it take for a crematorium to cremate a body?

It usually takes between two and three hours to cremate a body in a crematorium.

Is it possible to cremate 1.1 million bodies using only four crematoria in four years?”

No.

How many years would it take?”

It would take over 78 years to cremate 1.1 million bodies using only four crematoria.[9]

Let’s leave it up to Ms. Lipstadt to work through the infoChatbot quagmire while we get back to our topic: The Jewish plot to enslave humanity. So, what is the master plan that is used by the Jewish Globo-Zionists to achieve their goal of hegemonic domination? There are several, as we shall see below, but one is more important than the others.

Torah (NOTE: JEWS DISTORT THE TORAH, THE JEWS WILL KILLETH YOU AND THINK THEY DOETH GOD A SERVICE, SEE JOHN 16:2)

The Pentateuch or the Hebrew Bible called the Torah, which is composed of the five books, Genesis, Exile, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy is not the master plan as such, but it is placed first because it contains a recurring theme in political Judaism: the world belongs to the Jews and all non-Jews on the planet are at the mercy and whim of Jewish interests. The following passage from chapter 7 of Deuteronomy is pretty chilling, to say the least:

For you are a people sacred to the LORD, your god; he has chosen you from all the nations on the face of the earth to be a people peculiarly his own.

You shall consume all the nations which the LORD, your god, will deliver up to you.

Rout them utterly until they are annihilated.

He will deliver their kings into your hand, that you may make their names perish from under the heavens.

No man will be able to stand up against you, till you have put an end to them.

The Torah, in other words, is the foundation on which all the following expressions of political Judaism are built. “Its central ideology is summed up in Yahweh, the national god of the Israelites, who, through the Mosaic covenant, promised his people dominion over the nations on condition that they be separated,” notes the French historian and essayist Laurent Guyénot in his book Our God Is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us.[10]

The Torah is thus one of the blueprints that the Jewish race uses to enslave humanity. The playbook of the Open Society of George Soros, born Schwartz, for example, is in fact derived from the Torah, more specifically from Deuteronomy 20-10 and 20-11:

When you go near a city to fight against it, then proclaim an offer of peace to it. And it shall be that if they accept your offer of peace, and open to you, then all the people who are found in it shall be placed under tribute to you, and serve you.[11]

As noted by Doctor of Philosophy Lucien Cerise,

the phraseology of openness is in fact designed to disarm human communities by making them feel guilty about being closed. In 2007, the German government and the Council of Europe launched a project called Days of Tolerance in Ukraine’s intercultural cities, designed to open Ukrainians’ minds and prepare them to welcome non-European immigrants. Opening doors and making doors open are principles of social engineering, destroying a system not by piercing its defences, but by making them open, with its consent and abusing its trust after having usurped the identity of the victim or saviour.[12]

                                                                                                                Talmud (Talmudic Judaism Is A Perversion of the Torah)

This compilation of continuously updated comments is the common Jewish law, the religious-legal code, which serves as the unifying force and the spiritual rallying point of the Jewish people. The Talmud gave birth to the universally adaptable Jew, providing him with “an invisible framework for the governance of man” says Jewish historian Max Dimont.[13] The philosophy of this book is the primary foundation of political Judaism today and the virtual guidebook for the Jewish goal of a global imperium.

Simply put, the Talmud can be viewed as “a group evolutionary strategy used by Jews in their competition for social, political, and cultural dominance with non-Jews,” notes evolutionary psychologist Dr. Kevin MacDonald in his landmark book, The Culture of Critique. An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements.[14]

In his work, Zionism and Apartheid (1975), Russian writer Valery Skurlatov asserts that “both Judaism and Zionism have the same socio-economic class basis — and thus a common purpose — world domination. Judaism contains in coded form the strategy, universal in class-oriented societies, of the ‘chosen people.’ Only ‘their own’ are initiated into this secret strategy.”[15]

It was the Spanish-born Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135-1204), now remembered as Maimonides and as Ramban who, in the 12^th century,

helped institutionalize the Talmud as the driving force behind worldwide Jewish thinking. No serious student of the New World Order can dispute the fact that what the Talmud and other pivotal writing put forth is precisely the concept that is brought into being today as a consequence of global Jewish power in the hands of the Rothschild Empire. While the Rothschild Empire initially opposed establishing a Jewish state, once they recognized the benefit of a strategically placed Jewish state in Palestine as a base for global machinations, they became Zionism’s greatest patrons. As such, Edmond Rothschild is hailed as “the Father of Israel” and honoured on Israeli currency today.[16]

Isaac Luria’s Cabala

According to a concept in the Cabala of Isaac Luria called tikkun olam or “repair of the world” in Hebrew, the creation of the Tree of Life, the Kabbalistic symbol of the universe, was an accident that produced a great disorder that only the Jewish people have the power to repair by hastening the coming of their Messiah to the Holy Land through social, political, and military actions.[17]

In the 16^th century, this religious belief, which originated in the 13^th century, became part of the Jewish orthodoxy. Thus, since that time, a number of Jewish elites have been working tirelessly from morning to night, directly or indirectly, with the help of their non-Jewish vassals, for the realization of this messianic utopia born in the fertile imagination of a handful of Jewish mystics such as Moses Nahmanide, Abraham Abulafia, Solomon Molcho, David Reubeni, Isaac Luria, Sabbataï Tsevi, and Jacob Frank.[18]

Jewish oligarch Jacques Attali, the multifaceted eminence grise of several French presidents, repeatedly condemned for plagiarism[19] is an ardent follower of the Lurianic Cabala and of tikkun olam:

Why should the world be repaired? God is there for that, if the world needs repairing, it is because God has decided not to do it anymore, so this opens up dizzying perspectives and one must have read and understood something in Luria at least to be able to reflect on this subject, so it refers to the responsibility of the human condition, and in the forefront of human responsibility, to Jewish responsibility. We are alone, and Auschwitz confirmed it to us, for all those who did not want to hear it, the repair of the world is us and nobody else. I think that this mission refers fundamentally to the Jewish expectation that “we are here to repair the world.”[20]

Jewish billionaire and busy warmonger Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) also swears by tikkun olam:

No more saving the world. Never mind starting it again. But just to repair it, the way one repairs broken vases. The word “repair” is very beautiful. It is modest. It is wise. But it is also dizzying. It was Isaac Luria’s, of course.[21]

And Jewish vaccine promoter Peter Hotez is also convinced that he is doing his part to repair the world. In his essay Science Tikkun: Repairing the World through the Science of Neglected Diseases, Science Diplomacy, and Public Engagement, Hotez claims, as noted by Karl Hamaers the author of Covert Covid Culprits. An Inquest Chronicle, that

one of the ways the world is broken is in the human immune system, and that one of the ways Jews are going to fix that for the benefit of the rest of us Gentiles is through vaccines.[22]

But don’t be fooled by appearances. Under the guise of holy intentions, writes Karl Haemers, “Mr. Hofez is part of a vast cabal bent on protecting the pharmaceutical industry and the global public health infrastructure from scrutiny.”[23]
 As for Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has always publicly asserted that his fight is part of a universalist approach to human rights, he admitted in a speech given during a Jewish convention that as a “representative of the tribe of Israel,” he had committed himself to the overthrow of Khadafi “under the banner” of his “loyalty to Zionism and Israel,” adding that it was “as a Jew” that he had “taken part in this political adventure.”[24] Always ahead of his time, Jacques Attali’s way of repairing the world is to promote universalism and planetary race-mixing for everyone except Jews.[25] When Jews such Hofez, BHL, and Attali “repair the world,” they are repairing it to better suit themselves and their Jewish agenda.

Sabbateï Tsevi’s Cabala

But if the tikkun olam of J. Attali, BHL, and Hofez seems rather positive and innocent on the surface, since it is simply a matter of metaphorically gluing back together the broken pieces of the vase of the universe, there is also a dark side to the Cabala, that of the Jewish cabalist Sabbataï Tsevi (1626-1676) the enfant terrible of the Cabala. In his version of things, instead of repairing broken vessels by gluing them back together, one must destroy the vessels that are judged to be defective by the parties involved.[26]

This is the principle of redemption through sin preached by the disgraced Weinstein who believes that he can save humanity in his own particular way by taking on the burden of sexual assault. According to sources close to the famously fallen producer (now redeemed by the wave of a magic wand), he has indeed resigned himself to being punished as a martyr for social change. “Weinstein could be seen as a disciple of Sabbataï Tsevi who declared himself the Messiah in 1666,” quips the Jewish philosopher and jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, “and the transition from all-round sinner to new messianic figure was certainly swift for serial sexual predator Weinstein. But this should not surprise us. The fact that Weinstein sees himself as a martyr for social change is perfectly in keeping with tikkun olam, the misguided Jewish belief that it is up to Jews to fix the world.”[27]

The Sabbataist doctrine was also preached by the Canadian Jewish singer Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) in his last album released in October 2016. In that record’s eponymous song, You Want It Darker, Cohen declares his belief in the doctrine of Sabbataï Tsevi, a manic-depressive who thought he was the Messiah of the Jews. During one of his manic phases, Tsevi proclaimed the abolition of God’s commandments and his belief in Satan, “the one who allows what is forbidden.” In his sick mind, sin becomes virtue and the normal becomes abnormal. What was at first only a serious mental pathology became the central dogma of globalism and its off-shoot Zionism: in order to do good, to purify oneself from the impure, one must first do evil.[28]

Jacob Frank’s Cabala

The Sabbataist antinomianism would later be taken up by Tsevi’s disciple Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who declared that the end of time and the destruction of all laws will not be complete until depravity has spread to the whole of society: “I have not come to elevate, I have come to destroy and bring down all things until everything is swallowed up so deep that it cannot sink any lower… There is no ascension without first descending.”[29]

There is a familiar nihilistic aspect to the Sabbato-Frankist conception of things that one cannot fail to recognize in today’s Western society, where things such as blasphemous desacralizations à la Charlie Hebdo, pedophilia, zoophilia, transgenderism, homosexuality, adultery, feminism, abortion on demand, and pornography are encouraged, even exalted. In this clean slate policy, all traditional values and religions are annihilated, paving the way for atheism and the secular, anticlerical tendencies embodied in Freemasonry, liberalism, and Jacobinism [communism]. This is what Leonard Cohen metaphorically declares in the line of his song that he repeats like a mantra, “You want it darker we kill the flame.”

Thus, to rebuild back better on the ruins of the impure, one must destroy the kellipot, those impure barks of the Tree of Life that stand in the way of the redemption of humanity: territorial borders, nations, patriotism, identity, order, law, family, marriage, patriarchy, biological sex, the ethnic and racial diversity that nature has created, morality and religion, government, property, and inheritance rights, economic, social, and cultural protectionism, everything, absolutely everything.

A strategy of birth in pain and chaos that will essentially result in the resurrection of the Hebrew world not only on the ruins of the order established on the principles of Christian civilization, as Mgr. Henri Delassus rightly claimed, at a time when Christianity was dominant,[30] but on the ruins of all non-Jewish races, religions, and civilizations.

It is these ideas from the Torah, the Talmud, and the Cabala that animate the Likud party, the Tsahal army, as well as the Jewish media, academics, banks, financiers, corporations, and the tens of thousands of synagogues, Jewish associations, foundations, and think tanks spread out in a spider web fashion all over the world. These ideas are the blueprints or protocols that the Jewish race follows to impose its will on the world and to enslave humanity. As stated by the greatly beloved Sephardic rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, who passed away in 2013,

goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world—only to serve the people of Israel.

In Israel, death has no dominion over them… With Gentiles, it will be like any person—they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money.

This is his servant… That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew.

Why are Gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat… That is why Gentiles were created.

— Weekly Saturday night sermon in October 2010.[31]

These are not just empty words. This great Jewish sage is simply following a passage from the Hebrew Bible found in the book of Isaiah (61:5-6). Until his death in 2013, Ovadia Yosef, who was for thirty years a highly respected religious authority and listened to by Israeli leaders, including the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, was the embodiment par excellence of the ideas that prevail today in Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.[32] When Yosef died in 2003, 800,000 Israelis attended his funeral, the largest in Israel’s history. In its October 7, 2013, issue, The Times of Israel called Yosef a “giant of Jewish thought.”

To recap: Globalism and its off-shoot Zionism is basically a multifaceted mystico-political project whose stated aim is the redemption of mankind but whose secret aim is the enslavement of mankind. The real goal of the Globo-Zionists is a “Jewish utopia” where all the wealth of the world will be held by the Jews and all the nations of the earth will be subservient to them and their “God.”[33] In other words, globalism and its off-shoot Zionism is not only about a Jewish state, it is about a Jewish-Based World Order. As prominent Jewish writer, Israel Shamir, says,

Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews, the world is. Palestine is just the place for world state headquarters. The Jews intend to turn Jerusalem into the supreme capital of the world, and its rebuilt temple into the focal point of the earth […] .[34]

Should we be concerned about the hegemonic, revolutionary, even tyrannical, and genocidal character of globalism and its off-shoot Zionism? To watch the “most moral army in the world,” of the “only democracy in the Middle East,” unabashedly torture, rape, and exterminate the Palestinian children, women, and the elderly of Gaza, without a shred of human remorse, in front of the entire planet, and with the consent of the Jewish-controlled Western governments, it’s high time to ask some serious questions.

Please, Mr. Bernard-Henry Levy, reassure us on this matter, it turns out that your tribe when captured by their ill will for power “can become great murderers, among the greatest known in modern history.”[35],[36]

Notes

[1] Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, Pantheon, 2019, p. 166-167.

[2] David Rockefeller, Memoirs, Random House, 2002, p. 405.

[3] Ron Unz, “Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society,” The Unz Review, May 6, 2024.

[4] Robert Faurisson, “Raul Hilberg Now Explains that the Genocide of the Jews Was Carried Out by Telepathy,” Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, Sept. 1, 1988.

[5] Charles E. Weber, “Encyclopedic Work on Zündel Holocaust Trial’ an ‘Absolute Necessity,” The Unz Review, Mar/Apr 1995.

[6] Ron Unz, American Pravda: Holocaust Denial. Analyzing the History of a Controversial Movement, The Unz Review, August 27, 2018.

[7] Germar Rudolph, The Holocaust Lectures. Controversial Issues Cross-Examined, Holocaust Handbooks, vol. 15, Castle Hill Publishers, 2017.

[8] Le Monde, February 21, 1979.

[9] E. Michael Jones, “Why It’s Easier to Talk to a Robot Than to a Jew. How Artificial Intelligence destroyed the Holocaust,” The Unz Review, May 21, 2023.

[10] Laurent Guyénot, Our God is Your god too, but He has chosen us. Essays on Jewish Power, AFNIL, 2020, p.1.

[11] Lucien Cerise, Ukraine. La guerre hybride de l’OTAN, Cultures & Racines, 2022, p. 259.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Michael Collins Piper, The New Babylon. Those Who Reign Supreme. A Panoramic Overview of the Historical, Religious, and Economic Origins of the New World Order, American Free Press, 2015, p. 63.

[14] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique. An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political movements, Kindle, 2021.

[15] Michael Collins Piper, work cited, p. 61.

[16] Ibid., p. 56.

[17] Tikkun olam, Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia.

[18] Youssef Hindi, Occident et Islam. Tome I : Sources et genèse messianiques du sionisme de l’Europe médiévale au choc des civilisations, Sigest, 2015.

[19] « Les plus grands génies du plagiat », GQ, June 11, 2013.

[20] Jacques Attali – économiste, Delphine Horvilleur – rabbin de la communauté MJLF, « Le judaïsme, une religion de la distinction : peuple élu, peuple électeur », Akadem, le campus numérique juif, 2012 (vidéo).

[21] Tikkun olam, Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia.

[22] Karl Hamaers, Covert Covid Culprits. An Inquest Chronicle, The Barnes Review, 2022, pp.170-177.

[23] Ibid.

[24] OUMMA TV, BHL : « Je suis le représentant de la tribu d’Israël », Agora Vox, June 4, 2012.

[25] Laurent Obertone, La France interdite : La Vérité sur l’immigration, Ring, 2018, p. 372.

[26] Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Sabbatai Tsevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (translator), Princeton University Press, 1976.

[27] Gilad Atzmon, “Harvey Weinstein, Sabbatai Zevi and Tikun Olam,” gilad.online, November 1, 2017.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Cited by Youssef Hindi, book cited, p.82.

[30] Mgr Henri Delassus, La Conjuration antichrétienne : Le Temple maçonnique voulant s’élever sur les ruines de l’Église catholique, Éditions Saint-Rémi, 2018, new edition.

[31] Lazar Berman, “5 of Ovadia Yosef’s Most Controversial Quotations,” The Times of Israel, October 9, 2013.

[32] Youssef Hindi, Occident et Islam, book cited, p. 227.

[33] Michael Higger Ph.D., The Jewish Utopia, The Lord Baltimore Press, 1932.

[34] Israel Shamir, Cabala of Power, self-published, 2009, pp. 88-89.

[35] Steve Plocker, “Stalin’s Jews,” Yediot Aharonot, December 26, 2006.

[36] Michael Higger, work cited.

Is the North American Union Back on the Agenda?

 

Is the North American Union Back on the Agenda?

When Donald Trump posts a map merging Canada with the United States and calls Canada a “51st state,” it’s tempting to dismiss it as classic Trump showmanship. But combine that with whispers of his supposed “deal” for Greenland, Trudeau’s resignation, and the eerie re-emergence of the Club of Rome’s “Ten Kingdoms” map, and you start to wonder: Is the North American Union being dusted off?

For those unfamiliar, the North American Union (NAU) was the fever dream of globalist elites back in 2008, folding the US, Canada, and Mexico into one neat package, complete with a new constitution and currency (the “Amero”). The idea? To dissolve national borders under the guise of “free trade” and usher in the next chapter of the New World Order. It faced massive public backlash, and the globalists quietly shelved it. Or did they?

Fast forward to today, and suddenly we’re watching the same play unfold with different actors. Greenland - strategically vital and resource-rich is back on the bargaining table. Canada is framed as a “drain” on the US economy, its sovereignty trivialized. All while Arctic resource wars with Russia and China heat up, and Washington angles for dominance over the last untapped frontier.

And here’s the twist: Trump. A man once heralded as the anti-globalist could be positioned to deliver on their most audacious plan yet. Call it the ultimate psy-op: get conservatives, who rightly opposed the NAU when Obama floated it, to cheer for it now. Same agenda, different salesman. The ouroboros eats its tail.

For Canadians, the message is clear: sovereignty is under siege. Trump is just saying the quiet part out loud. The real question is, why isn’t Canada looking to the Global South and BRICS for inspiration? Sovereign nations finding strength in cooperation, not in servitude to Washington.

As for Greenland? Trump’s bravado about “buying it” feels less like comedy and more like foreshadowing. The Arctic isn’t just about ice, it’s about resources, shipping routes, and global dominance. The chessboard is set, and the elites are betting you won’t see the move until it’s too late.

The North American Union isn’t just a conspiracy theory but also a reminder that sovereignty is a fragile thing, and the globalists never really let go of their grand designs. Whether it’s called NAU, the Amero, or “just business,” the goal is always the same: consolidation of power, resources, and nations into the hands of the few.

So, Canada, what’s it going to be? Independence, or the 51st star on the flag? Your move.

Is the North American Union Back on the Agenda? _Gerry Nolan | Politics | Before It's News

 

Reclaiming the Canal? Trump Praises BlackRock’s Acquisition of Panama Ports

In a high-stakes acquisition that reshapes control over one of the world’s most critical trade routes, BlackRock has secured key port infrastructure on both sides of the Panama Canal, purchasing the assets from Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison Holdings in a $22.8 billion deal.

As reported by Reuters,

The deal with the BlackRock-led consortium includes 90% of Panama Ports Company, which has operated the Balboa and Cristobal ports at each end of the canal for over two decades, said CK Hutchison.

That effectively shifts control of these strategic gateways from Chinese ownership to the world’s most powerful private asset manager.

BlackRock’s consortium includes Terminal Investment (TiL) and Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).

TiL, a Swiss-based terminal operator, controls ports worldwide. Those include Rotterdam, Singapore, and Los Angeles. GIP, a New York-based investment firm, specializes in energy, transport, and infrastructure assets. It manages billions in critical global projects.

Together, they control trade flows through one of the world’s most critical chokepoints.

BlackRock’s chairman and CEO Larry Fink described the deal as a testament to the firm’s ability to secure high-value investments for its clients, emphasizing that these ports play a crucial role in global economic growth.

With 43 additional ports across 23 countries included in the deal, BlackRock is cementing its influence in global logistics at a level rivaling state-controlled entities.

The parties have settled on the key terms, with final agreements anticipated by April 2.

Trump: Starting to Reclaim the Canal?

President Donald Trump praised the deal during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, presenting it as an advancement in national security.

From there, he shifted to a historical account of the canal’s construction by Americans. The president acknowledged its eventual transfer to Panama under the Carter-Torrijos Treaties. He left the audience to connect the dots between the past and a present where no real “reclaiming” is actually taking place.

Trump did not provide any details on whether the “large American company” had plans to transfer control of these ports to the U.S. government. Neither Fink nor representatives from TiL or GIP have suggested that this deal would return the ports to American hands.

Concerns over Chinese influence in Panama are valid. However, handing control to BlackRock does not serve American national interests.

On the contrary, this deal shifts critical global trade infrastructure into the hands of private investment firms with no public accountability. It remains under corporate control, not national oversight.

For all of Trump’s talk of “reclaiming” the canal, the only entity making real gains here is BlackRock.

Panama

Trump’s rhetoric may have played well to his audience, but in Panama itself, the reaction was far less enthusiastic. Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino strongly rejected Trump’s assertion that his administration was “reclaiming” the canal. In a statement on X, Mulino accused Trump of “lying again,” and called the claim an affront to Panama’s sovereignty.

Panama asserts that it maintains full control over the canal. The sale of port operations to a U.S.-based company, it insists, is a business transaction — not a transfer of control to the U.S. government.

BlackRock: The Engine of Globalist Control

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, controls over $10 trillion in global assets. It holds more power than most national economies.

As The New American has extensively covered, BlackRock shapes government policies, central banks, and multinational corporations. It steers economic and political decisions to align with its broader globalist agenda.

Under Fink, the firm drives the push for centralized financial control, digital currencies, and ESG (environmental, social, and/or governance) policies. These policies enforce ideological conformity on businesses and governments.

BlackRock works closely with the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations (here and here), and central banks. Through these partnerships, it acts as the financial arm of the globalist agenda. Effectively, it promotes policies that weaken national sovereignty and restrict individual freedoms.

It also leads the push for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). This programmable money would allow governments and financial elites to track, restrict, and control every transaction. If CBDCs are implemented, financial autonomy as we know it could become a relic of the past.

In the United States, BlackRock’s influence extends beyond investments and corporate policy. It has directly shaped fiscal decisions, with devastating consequences.

During the Covid pandemic, Larry Fink played a key role in U.S. fiscal policy. In March 2020, at Trump’s invitation, BlackRock assumed an unprecedented role within the Federal Reserve. This intervention triggered one of the largest wealth transfers in modern history, enriching corporate elites while gutting the middle class.

Victory for Whom?

By controlling ports, infrastructure, and global logistics, BlackRock tightens its grip on the arteries of global trade. This control makes it easier to enforce compliance with its economic and political agendas. Those who control trade routes, digital finance, and economic policies hold unparalleled leverage over governments and populations.

BlackRock’s privatization of key Panama Canal ports expands the reach of a corporate giant bent on consolidating global control. Instead of sovereign nations shaping trade and economic policy, power shifts to an unelected financial oligarchy. This elite now dictates the terms of international commerce.

Trump’s celebration of this deal ignores the true cost: the steady erosion of national sovereignty and economic self-determination. While the narrative frames it as a strategic win against China, in reality, it further entrenches the same globalist power structures that Trump once railed against.

For those who value national sovereignty, free markets, and individual liberties, BlackRock’s takeover of the Panama Canal is no victory. It is a warning. A warning that corporate control over global infrastructure is accelerating. With it comes the power to shape policies that serve elite interests — at the expense of individual freedom.

Reclaiming the Canal? Trump Praises BlackRock’s Acquisition of Panama Ports - The New American

Their Goal is Neo-Feudalism
Introduction

Toffler’s Third Wave theory is a revolutionary premise which includes globalization, or what some refer to as the New World Order. As this revolution occurs, many negative events will increasingly occur, he tells us, including upheavals, turbulence, overthrows, and widespread violence.

These are not random events but are all connected to this global revolution. And, these perils offer fascinating new potentials, we’re told. According to him, we won’t totally destroy ourselves. This global civilization will be a positive alternative to what we had. It won’t quite be a utopia. Instead it will be a realistic, attainable, practical utopia, or what he calls a practopia. In the end it will be a better world.

H.G. Wells too agreed with this group’s plan for global domination. He rationalized that because humankind is facing turbulent forces that will destroy it, fundamental changes in the world system must be made. Wells thought that this global system could abolish poverty, slavery, and despair. Professor Quigley also agreed with the group’s overall idea that a single world government would promote peace and prosperity.

On the surface, this appears to make sense. Few of us can argue with initiatives to advance the human race. After all, who doesn’t want improvement? Who doesn’t want peace? This movement is made possible using an ideology that associates the restructuring of the governmental systems of the various countries with ideas such as improvement, peace, technology, and evolution. These ideas can be expressed using the single term, advancement.

Globalism, mentions Toffler, is more than an ideology that serves the interests of a small group. Just as nationalism represented an entire nation, globalism represents the entire planet. It is an evolutionary necessity. It is a step toward “cosmic consciousness,” which, he says includes making radical changes to the US Constitution.

More specifically, the ideological message contained in this movement is that in order for a country to advance, its governing structure must be changed, its constitution must be altered, and it must be merged into a global government.

The Contract

In the US, this means that the Constitution needs to be updated in order for our society to improve. The basic message is that it is old, outdated, and no longer necessary. This idea is not completely irrational at a glance because things do change. Technology improves. Our understanding of events sharpens. Therefore, things do need to be updated.

However, changes that remove crucial safety measures that guarantee basic human rights are not an improvement. As an example, the creators of the US Constitution had an understanding of a historical pattern of tyrants repressing populations. This document was created as a safety measure to prevent a destructive historical norm from happening. Some things, regardless of how old they are, should never be altered, particularly when they are guidelines which prevent tyranny.

These individuals recognized that whenever governmental power was consolidated, tyranny always resulted. So, the Constitution was designed to limit the power of the federal government by separating it into three branches. It was also designed to prevent the growth of the federal government.

The US Constitution cannot be properly understood without the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln said it was the principles through which the US Constitution should be interpreted. The Declaration states that governments are constructed to serve the people, and secure their unalienable rights, such as freedom and the pursuit of happiness. A government has only the power that people give it.

The basic reason for the American colonists’ decision to separate from Britain was that a series of intolerable acts were imposed by the British Crown against them. For years the Americans pursued peaceful resolutions with the crown but received retaliation instead of discussion. Each attempt by the early Americans to resolve the matters peacefully only brought more injury.

In addition to trying to resolve the matters they sought to inform the people of England of what was occurring, but they were mostly ignored. So they decided to leave a record of what happened so that future generations would know why they separated. The record is known as the Declaration of Independence. It described how the king of England engaged in a series of injurious acts to establish a tyranny over the states. They included:

• Holding legislative meetings in far-off places in order to fatigue people into compliance.
• Sending armed troops to live among the people and murder them.
• Trade sanctions.
• Forcing people to be brought to England to face false charges with no trial by jury.
• Controlling and ravaging the coasts, and burning towns.
• Sending large armies of mercenaries to commit murder, and other acts.

“The history of the present King of Great Britain” states the Declaration “is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.” It continued, “We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America … do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown.”

So, the US Constitution was created to prevent the government from violating a person’s rights contained in the Bill of Rights, and to limit the size of the government. It was basically a contract. The First Amendment allows people to peacefully hold the government accountable to it by petitioning it for its violations.

According to the Declaration, when a government becomes destructive and no longer serves them, when it violates the contract, it is the duty of the people to change it. If their petitions for redress are ignored, it is their duty to abolish it.

Therefore, the technique of linking the advancement of our civilization with the removal of a critical safety measure that guarantees basic human rights is a blatant act of deception. Those who are able to see this global movement in its true form (a fake democracy) are labeled resisters, nonstate actors, or nationalists, who are standing in the way of progress.

According to Brzezinski, as this process occurs, certain ideologies must be adopted by people in order for conflict to be avoided. To minimize the significance of the Constitution, Brzezinski mentioned: “There is no doubt that America emits a compelling and appealing message of liberty to the world. However, much of the message is procedure, with its emphasis on a constitutional process that guarantees human rights and freedom of choice.”

Brzezinski mentioned how a national constitutional convention was necessary in order examine the relevance of the existing contract. The convention would also develop methods to streamline (consolidate) the administrative structure of the US Government. Anytime a consolidation such as this occurs it results in tyranny.

“In the past,” explained Brzezinski, “the division of power has traditionally caused programs of inefficiency, poor coordination, and dispersal of authority, but today the new communications and computation techniques make possible both increased authority at the lower levels and almost instant national coordination.”

Once again, these recommendations are done under the guise of making things more efficient, making improvements, etc. In the context of the role of agencies of the federal government, the RAND Corporation advocated a similar consolidation process in 2003, stating, “divided authority could be a formula for bureaucratic gridlock and inaction, with many having the right to say ‘no,’ but no element strong enough to see a program proposal through to approval and successful execution.”

Toffler says the US Constitution was a magnificent achievement for the system of government that was in place at that time. However, it is now obsolete and must be radically changed. A whole new system of government must replace it.

He declared: “That piece of paper, with the Bill of Rights ... is increasingly obsolete ... and hence oppressive [and] dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented … capable of making intelligent, democratic decisions necessary for our survival in a new world.”

That’s correct, Mr. Toffler just referred to the Bill of Rights as dangerous. According to Toffler, the primary enemies of this new civilization are those who are resisting globalization. These individuals and groups are believed to be an obstacle to human evolution. The basic struggle taking place during globalization is what Toffler refers to as the super struggle, which is between those who are holding on to certain ideologies (freedom) and those who are advancing the New World Order (neo-feudalism).

Wells similarly wrote that if constitutions and leaders of countries could be dealt with they would not be attacked. He specifically mentioned that it would be more difficult to merge America into this global system because its government was legally bound to a constitution. The primary enemies to this movement, he said, would be those who valued local independence. Wells mentioned that these individuals would be destroyed using scientific methods.

“The forces of nationalism,” announced the US Army War College in its April of 2002 article Information Operations and Asymmetric Warfare…Are We Ready?, are interfering with “world unification.” These current and future threats, they explained, will be identified and dealt with using electronic warfare (EW).

According to Dr. John B. Alexander, conspiracy theorists believe that the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, and Council on Foreign Relations are attempting to take away their individual freedom, and that these think tanks are controlling the development and use of NLW to create a docile society under their rule. He informs us that these beliefs are unfounded.

Feudalism

In his 1977 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski mentioned that when it is complete, this global empire would be based on the structure of earlier empires, which includes a hierarchy of vassals, tributaries, protectorates, and colonies.

A vassal is a term related to a system of feudalism that existed in Medieval Europe. A vassal was a feudal tenant under the protectorate of a feudal lord. Closely related terms include serf, peasant, and slave. In part 1A, The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition defines a serf as “a member of the lowest feudal class...” and “a person in bondage or servitude” in part 3. It explains a vassal as a “slave” in part 2A.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition states in part 1A of its definition that a serf is: “A member of a servile feudal class bound to the land and subject to the will of its owner.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth Edition, describes a serf as “a person in a condition of servitude or modified slavery,” and defines it in part 1 as a “slave.” Under feudalism vassals were born into a permanent system of bondage. “To some degree,” Brzezinski elaborates, “[that] terminology is not altogether inappropriate.”

Professor Quigley sums up this consolidation process as: “Nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert.”

Congress is Complicit

There is no question that individual members of the US Congress are serving their constituents. However, the evidence presented here, which will be expanded upon in the next volume, suggests that the US Congress as a whole has been completely subverted. Congress appears to be actively helping these wealthy interests establish their global dictatorship legally.

Congressmen are handled by agents of corporations called lobbyists. Corporations assign at least two lobbyists for each member of congress. The lobbyists provide these elected officials with documentation in order to persuade them to favor legislation which benefits the sponsoring organization, which may be a special interest group, corporation, or a foreign government.

There are also think tanks which provide policy reports to influence the views of congress. These lobbyists have access to vast amounts of funds and research results to support their views on any piece of legislation.

The pharmaceutical industry has the largest number of lobbyists in Washington, with two for every member of congress. In many cases these corporate agents are actually writing the laws and regulations which US citizens must follow.

In the late 1960s there were less than 70 lobbyists in Washington. By the mid 1980s there were about 8 thousand, some representing foreign governments. Now there are over 30 thousand, outnumbering congressmen, senators, and their staffs 2 to 1.

The influence lobbyists have on congress far exceeds that of the individual citizen. From 1998 to 2004 these corporate agents spent over $12 billion lobbying congress. In 2004 alone, corporations and national organizations spent about 5.5 million per day lobbying congress and other federal agencies.

Congressmen are influenced in a number of ways, including campaign contributions and legal bribes in the form of gifts. Millions of lobbying money is spent taking these elected officials on vacations, sporting events, shopping sprees, tours, etc. Some of these take place under the guise of “fact finding” ventures.

“Representatives in the House and Senate,” explained Lou Dobbs in his book, War On The Middle Class, “look upon those ‘gifts’ not as bribes to do the bidding of their corporate ... masters, but rather as perks appropriate to their lofty positions of power.”

Corporations also influence congress by using their lobbyists to contribute to the political campaigns of these politicians to help them get reelected. Some of this is done through political action committees (PACs). PACs are organizations created or promoted by elected officials, and serve as support organizations for fund raising, media ads, and publicizing certain views of a particular issue. Although lobbyists have restrictions on how much money they can give to members of congress, PACs allows them to circumvent these restrictions.

The money that these elected officials receive via PACs is given under the condition that they will continue to pass laws that are favorable to the sponsoring interests. Although this activity is supposed to be monitored, the House Ethics Committee is ineffective. Because members of Congress are influenced by corporations, it is relatively simple for them to be used to further these corporate objectives. The following initiatives by Congress serve this global political agenda:

• The proposal of a thought-based law known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR1955), introduced by Representative Jane Harman on April 19 of 2007, passed in the House 404 to 6 on October 23 2007.
• As part of an effort to limit free speech on the internet, the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, led by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, released the May 8, 2008 report Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat, which mentions that extremists are using the internet to recruit followers into a global terrorist movement.
• On April 24, 1996 the Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Bill of 1995 (S. 390/H.R. 896), that was introduced after the public had been traumatized by the Oklahoma City Bombing, became law under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), which was signed by President Clinton. It authorized an increase in the targeting of American citizens. Tremendous support was given to the bill in Senate and House which voted in favor of it 98 and 293, respectively.
• Congress passed the USA Patriot Act with an overwhelming majority of 98 votes in the Senate and 357 in the House. This ended the Bill of Rights. Although the original bill which they approved was switched in the early morning hours with a different one, they still voted for it. Regardless, in summer of 2005 Congress again voted in favor (251 in the house and 89 in the senate) not only to extend the act, but to broaden its scope and make most of it permanent. This time they were completely aware of its blatant constitutional violations.
• The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited both the National Guard and regular military from working with local or federal police to target the US population, was abolished by the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act of October 17, 2007. It also allows for militarized police roundups of protesters, “potential terrorists” and “undesirables.” It allows the president to put US troops in any city for to suppress public disorder. The Act was passed by a unanimous vote in the Senate and 396 in the House.
• The Military Commission Act of 2006, which basically abolishes habeas corpus, was passed by congress with an approval of 65 in the Senate and 250 in the House. All that is necessary for any US citizen to be secretly imprisoned indefinitely with no trial is for the president to declare them an enemy combatant.

Congressmen are also profiting from the Global War on Terror. 151 of them received a total of at least $15 million in personal income between 2004 and 2006 from defense contractors, through dividends, capital gains, royalties, and interest.

In the early 1990s the US Congress started to become increasingly receptive to nonlethal weapons for domestic use due to the lobbying efforts of the US Global Strategy Council. They worked with the DOD to test and field these weapons through the National Defense Authorization Act of 1996, due to an expansion in military operations other than war.

They continue to support the development of directed-energy weapons with their defense budget authorizations. Congress has funded these new weapons. They are aware that they exist and that some of them are classified. They also know that they’re being used on civilians.

Warnings by Historical Figures

According to Professor Quigley, this group has been able to hide itself quite successfully. The public has not been aware of its impact on world affairs because it is not closely integrated, but instead appears as a series of overlapping inner-core groups that are concealed by formal front organizations, which themselves have no obvious political significance.

As we’ve discovered, these formal front organizations include the Bilderberg group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and other think tanks, as well as intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, and the various tax-exempt foundations.

These organizations have interlocking memberships. They exist to further the ambitions of the wealthy elite who wish to control the planet. For decades, presidents, congressmen, authors, committees, and highly-decorated military officers have encountered this network in one form or another and were able to perceive its true intention of enslaving people. They have issued us warnings.

Congressman Lawrence P. McDonald wrote in November of 1975: “Money alone is not enough to quench the thirst and lusts of the super-rich. Instead, many of them use their vast wealth, and the influence such riches give them, to achieve even more power.”

He continued: “Power of a magnitude never dreamed of by the tyrants and despots of earlier ages. Power on a worldwide scale. Power over people, not just products.” He warned that the most important issue of our time is the effort by these wealthy elite to create a global government which would combine capitalism and communism. He said that their intentions were incredibly evil.

In the early 1980s resolutions calling for an investigation into the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations were drafted by the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Congressman McDonald, who would have led the investigation, introduced the resolutions into the House of Representatives, but nothing happened. In 1983 Congressman McDonald died during a curious incident involving a Russian missile which blew up the commercial airliner he was on, killing all 269 passengers.

Officials that participated in multiple congressional investigations going back to 1912 stated that a wealthy cabal existed which posed a serious danger to the public, and was capable of using invisible force to carry out anything it deemed necessary.

A global government was its ultimate goal, according to these investigators, who could not complete their studies because the attacks against them were incredible. Presidents such as Jackson, Jefferson, Garfield, and Lincoln were aware that these wealthy elites were relentlessly trying to overthrow the republic. They issued warnings to the people. Garfield and Lincoln were assassinated and Jackson was almost murdered.

In his farewell speech on January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned that a combined force consisting of the military and corporations existed. He referred to it as the military-industrial complex. It was capable of influencing every city, state, and office of government.

He announced: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. … We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Even Professor Quigley, who approved of this group’s goal, stated: “No country that values its safety should allow ... a small number of men to wield such power in administration and politics.” He described the idea that this small group was controlling the publication of documents relating to its activities, monopolizing the writing and teaching of history, and shaping public opinion as, terrifying.

In New York City on April 27, 1961, President John F. Kennedy warned of a common danger that was threatening our society in every sphere of human activity. He said that a ruthless mechanism was operating covertly from behind the scenes to establish control of the entire planet. And that although no war had been declared, no greater threat to our society had ever existed.

These enemies to freedom, said Kennedy, use infiltration and subversion. They rely on covert methods of expanding their control. This group accumulated vast material and human resources, including military, diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and political, which it was using to covertly expand around the globe. He referred to it as a massive conspiracy which he intended to expose. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. ... Today no war has been declared—and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion.

Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.

I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of “clear and present danger” then I can only say that the danger has never been clearer and its presence has never been more immanent.

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice...

It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, and no secret is revealed.

New World War: Their Goal is Neo-Feudalism

ALL WARS ARE BANKER'S WARS

By Michael Rivero

"The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term usury which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money, because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of making money this is the most unnatural." -- Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

 

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of a pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this world would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain slaves of the Bankers and pay for the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits." -- Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920s, the second richest man in Britain

 

"The Bank, its property and assets and all deposits and other funds entrusted to it shall be immune in time of peace and in time of war from any measure such as expropriation, requisition, seizure, confiscation, prohibition or restriction of gold or currency export or import, and any other measure." -- Article 10, Instrument of Foundation, Bank of International Settlements

 

"When the world around the IMF goes downhill, we thrive. We become extremely active because we lend money, we earn interest and charges and all the rest of it, and the institution does well. When the world goes well and we've had years of growth, as was the case back in 2006 and 2007, the IMF doesn't do so well both financially and otherwise." -- Christine Lagarde

I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than to force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this.

The United States fought the American Revolution primarily over King George III's Currency act, which forced the colonists to conduct their business only using printed bank notes borrowed from the Bank of England at interest.

Benjamin Franklin, acting as the colonies' representative to Britain, argued against this move in 1763.

 

"You see, a legitimate government can both spend and lend money into circulation, while banks can only lend significant amounts of their promissory bank notes, for they can neither give away nor spend but a tiny fraction of the money the people need. Thus, when your bankers here in England place money in circulation, there is always a debt principal to be returned and usury to be paid. The result is that you have always too little credit in circulation to give the workers full employment. You do not have too many workers, you have too little money in circulation, and that [money] which circulates all bears the endless burden of unpayable debt and usury.....In the Colonies, we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip [interest-free, wealth-based money issued by The Colonies 1750-1764 before Bank of England crooks made it illegal]. We issue it in proper proportion to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one."

The following year, King George III passed the Currency act which outlawed all forms of money in the colonies, forcing them to conduct all commerce using bank notes borrowed at interest from the Bank of England!

"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing." -- William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694

After the revolution, the new United States adopted a radically different economic system in which the government issued its own value-based money, so that private banks like the Bank of England were not siphoning off the wealth of the people through interest-bearing bank notes.

"The refusal of King George 3rd to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the revolution." -- Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father

Following the revolution, the US Government actually took steps to keep the bankers out of the new government!

 

"Any person holding any office or any stock in any institution in the nature of a bank for issuing or discounting bills or notes payable to bearer or order, cannot be a member of the House whilst he holds such office or stock." -- Third Congress of the United States Senate, 23rd of December, 1793, signed by the President, George Washington

 

"If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash." -- George Washington

 

"All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." -- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson.

 

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -- Thomas Jefferson

 

"Paper is poverty. It is the ghost of money and not money itself." -- Thomas Jefferson

 

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance." -- James Madison

 

"Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money." . . . "We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people." -- Daniel Webster

 

"Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible.
"When, through process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of the government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers.
"These truths are well known among our principal men, who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voter through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance.
"It is thus, by discrete action, we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished." -- Montagu Norman, Governor of The Bank Of England, addressing the United States Bankers Association, NYC 1924

The First Bank of the United States

But bankers are nothing if not dedicated to their schemes to acquire your wealth and know full well how easy it is to corrupt a nation's leaders.

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes... Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

Just one year after Mayer Amschel Rothschild had uttered his infamous "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws", the bankers succeeded in setting up a new Private Central Bank called the First Bank of the United States, largely through the efforts of the Rothschild's chief US supporter, Alexander Hamilton.

Founded in 1791, by the end of its twenty year charter the First Bank of the United States had almost ruined the nation's economy, while enriching the bankers. Congress refused to renew the charter and signaled their intention to go back to a state issued value based currency on which the people paid no interest at all to any banker. This resulted in a threat from Nathan Mayer Rothschild against the US Government, "Either the application for renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war." Congress still refused to renew the charter for the First Bank of the United States, whereupon Nathan Mayer Rothschild railed, "Teach those impudent Americans a lesson! Bring them back to colonial status!" The British Prime Minister at the time, Spencer Perceval was adamently opposed to war with the United States, primarily because the majority of England's military might was occupied with the ongoing Napoleonic wars. Spencer Perceval was concerned that Britain might not prevail in a new American war, a concern shared by many in the British government. Then, Spencer Perceval was assassinated (the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated in office) and replaced by Robert Banks Jenkinson, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who was fully supportive of a war to recapture the colonies.

"If my sons did not want wars, there would be none." -- Gutle Schnaper, wife of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and mother of his five sons

Financed at virtually no interest by the Rothschild controlled Bank of England, Britain then provoked the war of 1812 to recolonize the United States and force them back into the slavery of the Bank of England, or to plunge the United States into so much debt they would be forced to accept a new private central bank. And the plan worked. Even though the War of 1812 was won by the United States, Congress was forced to grant a new charter for yet another private bank issuing the public currency as loans at interest, the Second Bank of the United States. Once again, private bankers were in control of the nation's money supply and cared not who made the laws or how many British and American soldiers had to die for it.

Andrew Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States

Once again the nation was plunged into debt, unemployment, and poverty by the predations of the private central bank, and in 1832 Andrew Jackson successfully campaigned for his second term as President under the slogan, "Jackson And No Bank!" True to his word, Jackson succeeded in blocking the renewal of the charter for the Second Bank of the United States.

"Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!" -- Andrew Jackson, shortly before ending the charter of the Second Bank of the United States. From the original minutes of the Philadelphia committee of citizens sent to meet with President Jackson (February 1834), according to Andrew Jackson and the Bank of the United States (1928) by Stan V. Henkels

Shortly after President Jackson (the only American President to actually pay off the National Debt) ended the Second Bank of the United States, there was an attempted assassination which failed when both pistols used by the assassin, Richard Lawrence, failed to fire. Lawrence later said that with Jackson dead, "Money would be more plenty."

Following the loss of its charter, the Second Bank of the United States tried to operate as a normal bank, but failed after just 5 years.

President Zachary Taylor

President Zachary Taylor opposed the creation of a new Private Central Bank, owing to the historical abuses of the First and Second Banks of the United States.

"The idea of a national bank is dead, and will not be revived in my time." -- Zachary TaylorTaylor died on July 9, 1850 after eating a bowl of cherries and milk rumored to have been poisoned. The symptoms he displayed are consistent with acute arsenic poisoning.

President James Buchanan

President James Buchanan also opposed a private central bank. During the panic of 1857 he attempted to set limits on banks issuing more loans than they had actual funds, and to require all issued bank notes to be backed by Federal Government assets. He was poisoned with arsenic and survived, although 38 other people at the dinner died.

The public school system is as subservient to the bankers' wishes to keep certain history from you, just as the corporate media is subservient to Monsanto's wishes to keep the dangers of GMOs from you, and the global warming cult's wishes to conceal from you that the Earth has actually been cooling for the last 16 years. Thus is should come as little surprise that much of the real reasons for the events of the Civil War are not well known to the average American.

 

"The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." -- The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863

President Abraham Lincoln

When the Confederacy seceded from the United States, the bankers once again saw the opportunity for a rich harvest of debt, and offered to fund Lincoln's efforts to bring the south back into the union, but at 30% interest. Lincoln remarked that he would not free the black man by enslaving the white man to the bankers and using his authority as President, issued a new government currency, the greenback. This was a direct threat to the wealth and power of the central bankers, who quickly responded.

"If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe." -- The London Times responding to Lincoln's decision to issue government Greenbacks to finance the Civil War, rather than agree to private banker's loans at 30% interest.

In 1872 New York bankers sent a letter to every bank in the United States, urging them to fund newspapers that opposed government-issued money (Lincoln's greenbacks).

"Dear Sir: It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers... as will oppose the issuing of greenback paper money, and that you also withhold patronage or favors from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the Government issue of money. Let the Government issue the coin and the banks issue the paper money of the country... [T]o restore to circulation the Government issue of money, will be to provide the people with money, and will therefore seriously affect your individual profit as bankers and lenders." -- Triumphant plutocracy; the story of American public life from 1870 to 1920, by Lynn Wheeler"It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that." -- Triumphant plutocracy; the story of American public life from 1870 to 1920, by Lynn Wheeler"Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power, and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care for the laborer, while the European plan, led on by England, is for capital to control labor by controlling the wages. THIS CAN BE DONE BY CONTROLLING THE MONEY." -- Triumphant plutocracy; the story of American public life from 1870 to 1920, by Lynn Wheeler

Goaded by the private bankers, much of Europe supported the Confederacy against the Union, with the expectation that victory over Lincoln would mean the end of the Greenback. France and Britain considered an outright attack on the United States to aid the confederacy, but were held at bay by Russia, which had just ended the serfdom system and had a state central bank similar to the system the United States had been founded on.

Left free of European intervention, the Union won the war, and Lincoln announced his intention to go on issuing greenbacks. Following Lincoln's assassination, the Greenbacks were pulled from circulation and the American people forced to go back to an economy based on bank notes borrowed at interest from the private bankers. Tsar Alexander II, who authorized Russian military assistance to Lincoln, was subsequently the victim of multiple attempts on his life in 1866, 1879, and 1880, until his assassination in 1881.

 

"I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe." -- Abraham Lincoln

 

"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy." -- Abraham Lincoln

 

"The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. " -- Abraham Lincoln

President Andrew Johnson

In Andrew Johnson's 1886 Fourth Annual Message (forerunner of the State of the Union), he dared question the validity and legitimacy of the accumulated debt. In particular the practice of allowing the banks to make loans using ink and paper but demanding repayment in silver and gold.

"The anomalous condition of our currency is in striking contrast with that which was originally designed. Our circulation now embraces, first, notes of the national banks, which are made receivable for all dues to the Government, excluding imposts, and by all its creditors, excepting in payment of interest upon its bonds and the securities themselves; second, legal tender, issued by the United States, and which the law requires shall be received as well in payment of all debts between citizens as of all Government dues, excepting imposts; and, third, gold and silver coin. By the operation of our present system of finance however, the metallic currency, when collected, is reserved only for one class of Government creditors, who, holding its bonds, semiannually receive their interest in coin from the National Treasury. There is no reason which will be accepted as satisfactory by the people why those who defend us on the land and protect us on the sea; the pensioner upon the gratitude of the nation, bearing the scars and wounds received while in its service; the public servants in the various departments of the Government; the farmer who supplies the soldiers of the Army and the sailors of the Navy; the artisan who toils in the nation's workshops, or the mechanics and laborers who build its edifices and construct its forts and vessels of war, should, in payment of their just and hard-earned dues, receive depreciated paper, while another class of their countrymen, no more deserving are paid in coin of gold and silver. "

With the end of Lincoln's Greenbacks, the US could no longer create its own interest free money and was manipulated during the term of President Ruthford B. Hayes into borrowing from the Rothschilds banking system in 1878, restoring to the Rothschilds control of the US economy they had lost under Andrew Jackson.

 

Messrs. Rothschild & Sons to Mr. Sherman.
[Cable message.]

April 12,1878.
Hon. John Sherman,
Secretary of the Treasury, Washington D. C.:

Very pleased we have entered into relations again with American Government. Shall do our best to make the business successful.

ROTHSCHILDS.

President James Garfield

James A. Garfield was elected President in 1880 on a platform of government control of the money supply.

 

"The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value. Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender. The present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory circulation. These notes are not money, but promises to pay money. If the holders demand it, the promise should be kept. -- James Garfield

 

"By the experience of commercial nations in all ages it has been found that gold and silver afford the only safe foundation for a monetary system. Confusion has recently been created by variations in the relative value of the two metals, but I confidently believe that arrangements can be made between the leading commercial nations which will secure the general use of both metals. Congress should provide that the compulsory coinage of silver now required by law may not disturb our monetary system by driving either metal out of circulation. If possible, such an adjustment should be made that the purchasing power of every coined dollar will be exactly equal to its debt-paying power in all the markets of the world. --James Garfield

 

"Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce, and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." -- President James A. Garfield, two weeks before he was assassinated Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881 and died of his wounds several weeks later. Chester A. Arthur succeeded Garfield as President.

 

"There is too much loose talk nowadays about the danger of so much capital in the hands of a few men." -- Baron Alphonso Rothschild, 1892

President William McKinley

In 1896, William McKinley was elected President in the middle of a depression-driven debate over gold-backed government currency versus bank notes borrowed at interest from private banks. McKinley favored gold-backed currencies and a balanced government budget which would free the public from accumulating debt.

 

"Our financial system needs some revision; our money is all good now, but its value must not further be threatened. It should all be put upon an enduring basis, not subject to easy attack, nor its stability to doubt or dispute. Our currency should continue under the supervision of the Government. The several forms of our paper money offer, in my judgment, a constant embarrassment to the Government and a safe balance in the Treasury." -- William McKinley

 

McKinley was shot by an out-of-work anarchist on September 14, 1901, in Buffalo, NY, succumbing to his wounds a few days later. He was suceeded in office by Theodore Roosevelt.

The Aldrich Plan

In 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich, Frank Vanderlip of National City (Citibank), Henry Davison of Morgan Bank, and Paul Warburg of the Kuhn, Loeb Investment House met secretly on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to formulate a plan for a US central bank, and created the Aldrich Plan, which called for a system of fifteen regional central banks, openly and directly controlled by Wall Street commercial banks. These banks would have the legal ability to create mnoney out of thin air and represented an attempt to create a new Bank of the United States. Public reaction was swift.

Do to the intense public opposition to the Aldrich Plan, the measure was defeated in the House of Representaives in 1912. One year later the bankers would be back!

The Third Bank of the United States, aka The Federal Reserve

Following the defeat of the Aldrich Plan, in 1913, the Private Central Bankers of Europe, in particular the Rothschilds of Great Britain and the Warburgs of Germany, met with their American financial collaborators once again on Jekyll Island, Georgia to form a new banking cartel with the express purpose of forcing the United States to accept a private central bank, with the aim of placing complete control of the United States money supply once again under the control of private bankers. Owing to hostility over the previous banks, the name was changed from the Third Bank of the United States to "The Federal Reserve" system in order to grant the new bank a quasi-governmental image, but in fact it is a privately owned bank, no more "Federal" than Federal Express.

In the following video, former Chairman of the FED Allan Greenspan admits the Federal Reserve is a private bank and answers to no government authority.