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Old July 23rd, 2012 #1
Alex Linder
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Default #1 World Government Thread: Carroll Quigley, Superelite and More: Who actually runs the world?

Who Really Runs the World? Conspiracies, Hidden Agendas and the Plan for World Government

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

So, who runs the world? It’s a question that people have struggled with since people began to struggle. It’s certainly a question with many interpretations, and incites answers of many varied perspectives.

Often, it is relegated to the realm of “conspiracy theory,” in that, those who discuss this question or propose answers to it, are purveyors of a conspiratorial view of the world. However, it is my intention to discard the labels, which seek to disprove a position without actually proving anything to the contrary. One of these labels – “conspiracy theorist” – does just that: it’s very application to a particular perspective or viewpoint has the intention of “disproving without proof;” all that is needed is to simply apply the label.

What I intend to do is analyse the social structure of the transnational ruling class, the international elite, who together run the world. This is not a conspiratorial opinion piece, but is an examination of the socially constructed elite class of people; what is the nature of power, how does it get used, and who holds it?

A Historical Understanding of Power

In answering the question “Who Runs the World?” we must understand what positions within society hold the most power, and thus, the answer becomes clear. If we simply understand this as heads of state, the answer will be flawed and inaccurate. We must examine the globe as a whole, and the power structures of the global political economy.

The greatest position of power within the global capitalist system lies in the authority of money-creation: the central banking system. The central banking system, originating in 1694 in England, consists of an international network of central banks that are privately owned by wealthy shareholders and are granted governmental authority to print and issue a nation’s currency, and set interest rates, collecting revenue and making profit through the interest charged. Central banks give loans to both governments and industries, controlling both simultaneously. The ultimate centre of power in the central banking system is at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in Basle, Switzerland; which is the central bank to the world’s central banks, and is also a private bank owned by the world’s central banks.

As Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley wrote:

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, 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, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.1

The central banks, and thus the central banking system as a whole, is a privately owned system in which the major shareholders are powerful international banking houses. These international banking houses emerged in tandem with the evolution of the central banking system. The central banking system first emerged in London, and expanded across Europe with time. With that expansion, the European banking houses also rose and expanded across the continent.

The French Revolution resulted with Napoleon coming to power, who granted the French bankers a central bank of France, which they privately controlled.2 It was also out of the French Revolution that one of the major banking houses of the world emerged, the Rothschilds. Emerging out of a European Jewish ghetto, the Rothschilds quickly rose to the forefront in banking, and established banking houses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples, allowing them to profit off of all sides in the Napoleonic wars.3

As Carroll Quigley wrote in his monumental Tragedy and Hope, “The merchant bankers of London had already at hand in 1810-1850 the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the London money market,” and that:

In time they brought into their financial network the provincial banking centres, organised as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other.4

At the same time, in the United States, we saw the emergence of a powerful group of bankers and industrialists, such as the Morgans, Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies, and they created massive industrial monopolies and oligopolies throughout the 19th century.5 These banking interests were very close to and allied with the powerful European banking houses.

The European, and particularly the British elites of the time, were beginning to organise their power in an effort to properly exert their influence internationally. At this time, European empires were engaging in the Scramble for Africa, in which nearly the entire continent of Africa, save Ethiopia, was colonised and carved up by European nations. One notable imperialist was Cecil Rhodes who made his fortune from diamond and gold mining in Africa with financial support from the Rothschilds,6 and “at that time [had] the biggest concentration of financial capital in the world.”7

Cecil Rhodes was also known for his radical views regarding America, particularly in that he would “talk with total seriousness of ‘the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire’.”8 Rhodes saw himself not simply as a moneymaker, but primarily as an “empire builder.”

As Carroll Quigley explained, in 1891 three British elites met with the intent to create a secret society. The three men were Cecil Rhodes, William T. Stead, a prominent journalist of the day, and Reginald Baliol Brett, a “friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George V.” Within this secret society, “real power was to be exercised by the leader, and a ‘Junta of Three.’ The leader was to be Rhodes, and the Junta was to be Stead, Brett, and Alfred Milner.”9

The purpose of this secret society, which was later headed by Alfred Milner, was: “The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise… [with] the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire.” [Emphasis added]10 Essentially, it outlined a British-led cosmopolitical world order, one global system of governance under British hegemony. Among key players within this group were the Rothschilds and other banking interests.11

After the 1907 banking panic in the US, instigated by JP Morgan, pressure was placed upon the American political establishment to create a “stable” banking system. In 1910, a secret meeting of financiers was held on Jekyll Island, where they planned for the “creation of a National Reserve Association with fifteen major regions, controlled by a board of commercial bankers but empowered by the federal government to act like a central bank – creating money and lending reserves to private banks.”12

It was largely Paul M. Warburg, a Wall Street investment banker, who “had come up with a design for a single central bank [in 1910]. He called it the United Reserve Bank. From this and his later service on the first Federal Reserve Board, Warburg has, with some justice, been called the father of the System.”13 President Woodrow Wilson followed the plan almost exactly as outlined by the Wall Street financiers, and added to it the creation of a Federal Reserve Board in Washington, which the President would appoint.14

Thus, true power in the world order was held by international banking houses, which privately owned the global central banking system, allowing them to control the credit of nations, and finance and control governments and industry.

However, though the economic system was firmly in their control, allowing them to establish influence over finance, they needed to shape elite ideology accordingly. In effect, what was required was to socially construct a ruling class, internationally, which would serve their interests. To do this, these bankers set out to undertake a project of establishing think tanks to organise elites from politics, economics, academia, media, and the military into a generally cohesive and controllable ideology.

Constructing a Ruling Class: Rise of the Think Tanks

During World War I, a group of American scholars were tasked with briefing “Woodrow Wilson about options for the postwar world once the Kaiser and imperial Germany fell to defeat.” This group was called, “The Inquiry.” The group advised Wilson mostly through his trusted aide, Col. Edward M. House, who was Wilson’s “unofficial envoy to Europe during the period between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the intervention by the United States in 1917,” and was the prime driving force in the Wilson administration behind the establishment of the Federal Reserve System.15

“The Inquiry” laid the foundations for the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most powerful think tank in the US and, “The scholars of the Inquiry helped draw the borders of post World War I central Europe.” On May 30, 1919, a group of scholars and diplomats from Britain and the US met at the Hotel Majestic, where they “proposed a permanent Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs, with one branch in London, the other in New York.” When the scholars returned from Paris, they were met with open arms by New York lawyers and financiers, and together they formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. The “British diplomats returning from Paris had made great headway in founding their Royal Institute of International Affairs.” The Anglo-American Institute envisioned in Paris, with two branches and combined membership was not feasible, so both the British and American branches retained national membership, however, they would cooperate closely with one another.16 They were referred to, and still are, as “Sister Institutes.”17

The Milner Group, the secret society formed by Cecil Rhodes, “dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it.”18

There were other groups founded in many countries representing the same interests of the secret Milner Group, and they came to be known as the Round Table Groups, preeminent among them were the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States, and parallel groups were set up in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India.19

These were, in effect, the first international think tanks, which remain today, and are in their respective nations, among the top, if not the most prominent think tanks.

In 2008, a major study was done by the University of Philadelphia’s International Relations Program – the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program – which sought to analyse and examine the most powerful and influential think tanks in the world. While it is a useful resource to understanding the influence of think tanks, there is a flaw in its analysis. It failed to take into account the international origins of the Round Table Group think tanks, particularly the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States; Chatham House or the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London; the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, now renamed the Canadian International Council; and their respective sister organisations in India, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Further nations have since added to this group of related think tanks, including Germany, and a recently established European Council on Foreign Relations. The report, while putting focus on the international nature of think tanks, analysed these ones as separate institutions without being related or affiliated. This has, in effect, skewed the results of the study. However, it is still useful to examine.

The top think tanks in the United States include the Council on Foreign Relations, (which was put at number 2, however, should be placed at the number 1 spot), the Brookings Institution, (which was inaccurately given the position of number one), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, RAND Corporation, Heritage Foundation, Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute, among others.

The top think tanks in the world, outside of the United States, are Chatham House (sitting at number one), the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the UK, the German Council on Foreign Relations, the French Institute of International Relations, the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, the Fraser Institute in Canada, the European Council on Foreign Relations, the International Crisis Group in Belgium, and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs.20

In 1954, the Bilderberg Group was founded in the Netherlands. Every year since then the group holds a secretive meeting, drawing roughly 130 of the political-financial-military-academic-media elites from North America and Western Europe as “an informal network of influential people who could consult each other privately and confidentially.”21

Regular participants include the CEOs or Chairmen of some of the largest corporations in the world, oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and Total SA, as well as various European monarchs, international bankers such as David Rockefeller, major politicians, presidents, prime ministers, and central bankers of the world.22 The Bilderberg Group acts as a “secretive global think-tank,” with an original intent “to link governments and economies in Europe and North America amid the Cold War.”23

In 1970, David Rockefeller became Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, while also being Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan. In 1970, an academic who joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1965 wrote a book called Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. The author, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called for the formation of “A Community of the Developed Nations,” consisting of Western Europe, the United States and Japan. Brzezinski wrote about how “the traditional sovereignty of nation states is becoming increasingly unglued as transnational forces such as multinational corporations, banks, and international organisations play a larger and larger role in shaping global politics.”

So, in 1972, David Rockefeller and Brzezinski “presented the idea of a trilateral grouping at the annual Bilderberg meeting.” In July of 1972, seventeen powerful people met at David Rockefeller’s estate in New York to plan for the creation of another grouping. Also at the meeting was Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, the President of the Ford Foundation, (brother of William Bundy, editor of Foreign Affairs) and Bayless Manning, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.24 In 1973, these people formed the Trilateral Commission, which acted as a sister organisation to Bilderberg, linking the elites of Western Europe, North America, and Japan into a transnational ruling class.

These think tanks have effectively socially constructed an ideologically cohesive ruling class in each nation and fostered the expansion of international ideological alignment among national elites, allowing for the development of a transnational ruling class sharing a dominant ideology.

These same interests, controlled by the international banking houses, had to socially construct society itself. To do this, they created a massive network of tax-exempt foundations and non-profit organisations, which shaped civil society according to their designs. Among the most prominent of these are the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The “Foundations” of Civil Society

These foundations shaped civil society by financing research projects and initiatives into major social projects, creating both a dominant world-view for the elite classes, as well as managing the other classes.

These foundations, since their establishment, played a large part in the funding and organising of the eugenics movement, which helped facilitate this racist, elitist ideology to having enormous growth and influence, ultimately culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. From then, the word “eugenics” had to be dropped from the ideology and philanthropy of elites, and was replaced with new forms of eugenics policies and concepts. Among them, genetics, population control and environmentalism.

These foundations also funded seemingly progressive and alternative media sources in an effort to control the opposition, and manage the resistance to their world order, essentially making it ineffective and misguided.

The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1912, and immediately began giving money to eugenics research organisations.25 Eugenics was a pseudo-scientific and social science movement that emerged in the late 19th century, and gained significant traction in the first half of the 20th century. One of the founding ideologues of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and cousin to Charles Darwin, wrote that eugenics “is the study of all agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”26 Ultimately, it was about the “sound” breeding of people and maintaining “purity” and “superiority” of the blood. It was an inherently racist ideology, which saw all non-white racial categories of people as inherently and naturally inferior, and sought to ground these racist theories in “science.”

The vast wealth and fortunes of the major industrialists and bankers in the United States flowed heavily into the eugenics organisations, promoting and expanding this racist and elitist ideology. Money from the Harriman railroad fortune, with millions given by the Rockefeller and Carnegie family fortunes were subsequently “devoted to sterilisation of several hundred thousands of American ‘defectives’ annually, as a matter of eugenics.”27


In the United States, 27 states passed eugenics based sterilisation laws of the “unfit,” which ultimately led to the sterilisation of over 60,000 people. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Carnegie and especially the Rockefeller Foundation, funded eugenics research in Germany, directly financing the Nazi scientists who perpetrated some of the greatest crimes of the Holocaust.28

Following the Holocaust, the word “eugenics” was highly discredited. Thus, these elites who wanted to continue with the implementation of their racist and elitist ideology desperately needed a new name for it. In 1939, the Eugenics Records Office became known as the Genetics Record Office.29 However, tens of thousands of Americans continued to be sterilised throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, the majority of which were women.30

Edwin Black analysed how the pseudoscience of eugenics transformed into what we know as the science of genetics. In a 1943 edition of Eugenical News, an article titled “Eugenics After the War,” cited Charles Davenport, a major founder of eugenics, in his vision of “a new mankind of biological castes with master races in control and slave races serving them.”31

A 1946 article in Eugenical News stated that, “Population, genetics, [and] psychology, are the three sciences to which the eugenicist must look for the factual material on which to build an acceptable philosophy of eugenics and to develop and defend practical eugenics proposals.” As Black explained, “the incremental effort to transform eugenics into human genetics forged an entire worldwide infrastructure,” with the founding of the Institute for Human Genetics in Copenhagen in 1938, led by Tage Kemp, a Rockefeller Foundation eugenicist, and was financed with money from the Rockefeller Foundation.32

Today, much of civil society and major social projects are a product of these foundations, and align with various new forms of eugenics. The areas of population control and environmentalism are closely aligned and span a broad range of intellectual avenues. The major population control organisations emerged with funding from these various foundations, particularly the Rockefeller foundations and philanthropies.

These organisations, such as the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funded major civil society movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, in an effort to “create a wedge between social movement activists and their unpaid grassroots constituents, thereby facilitating professionalisation and institutionalisation within the movement,” ultimately facilitating a “narrowing and taming of the potential for broad dissent,” with an aim of limiting goals to “ameliorative rather than radical change.”33

Two major organisations in the development of the environmental movement were the Conservation Foundation and Resources for the Future, which were founded and funded with money from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and helped “launch an explicitly pro-corporate approach to resource conservation.”34 Even the World Wildlife Fund was founded in the early 1960s by the former president of the British Eugenics Society, and its first President was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a founding member of the Bilderberg Group.

While the environmental movement positions people as the major problem for the earth, relating humanity to a cancer, population control becomes a significant factor in proposing environmental solutions.

In May of 2009, a secret meeting of billionaire philanthropists took place in which they sought to coordinate how to “address” the world’s environmental, social, and industrial threats. Each billionaire at the meeting was given 15 minutes to discuss their “preferred” cause, and then they deliberated to create an “umbrella” cause to harness all their interests. The end result was that the umbrella cause for which the billionaires would aim to “give to” was population control, which “would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.” Among those present at the meeting were David Rockefeller, Jr., George Soros, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and even Oprah Winfrey.35

Conclusion

At the top of the list of those who run the world, we have the major international banking houses, which control the global central banking system. From there, these dynastic banking families created an international network of think tanks, which socialised the ruling elites of each nation and the international community as a whole, into a cohesive transnational elite class. The foundations they established helped shape civil society both nationally and internationally, playing a major part in the funding – and thus coordinating and co-opting – of major social-political movements.

An excellent example of one member of the top of the hierarchy of the global elite is David Rockefeller, patriarch of the Rockefeller family. Long serving as Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan bank, he revolutionised the notion of building a truly global bank. He was also Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a founding member of Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission, heavily involved in the family philanthropies, and sits atop a vast number of boards and foundations. Even Alan Greenspan, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, said that David Rockefeller and the CFR have, “in many respects, formulated the foreign policy of this country.”36

In another speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then World Bank President James Wolfesohn, said in 2005, in honour of David Rockefeller’s 90th birthday, that, “the person who had perhaps the greatest influence on my life professionally in this country, and I’m very happy to say personally there afterwards, is David Rockefeller.” He then said, “In fact, it’s fair to say that there has been no other single family influence greater than the Rockefeller’s in the whole issue of globalisation and in the whole issue of addressing the questions which, in some ways, are still before us today. And for that David, we’re deeply grateful to you and for your own contribution in carrying these forward in the way that you did.”37

David Rockefeller, himself, wrote, “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicised incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterising my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”38
Footnotes

1. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, New York: Macmillan Company, 1966, 324

2. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 515; Robert Elgie and Helen Thompson, ed., The Politics of Central Banks, New York: Routledge, 1998, 97-98

3. Sylvia Nasar, ‘Masters of the Universe’, The New York Times: January 23, 2000; ‘The Family That Bankrolled Europe’, BBC News: July 9, 1999.

4. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 51

5. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper Perennial: New York, 2003, 323

6. Carroll Quigley, op.cit., 130

7. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2004, 186

8. Ibid, 190

9. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, GSG & Associates, 1981, 3

10. Ibid, 33

11. Ibid, 34

12. William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, 276

13. John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1975, 121-122

14. William Greider, op.cit., 277

15. H.W. Brands, ‘He Is My Independent Self’, The Washington Post: June 11, 2006.

16. CFR, ‘Continuing the Inquiry. History of CFR’.

17. Chatham House, ‘CHATHAM HOUSE (The Royal Institute of International Affairs): Background’, Chatham House History.

18. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, op.cit., 5

19. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, op.cit., 132-133

20. James G. McGann, Ph.D., The Global “Go-To Think Tanks”: The Leading Public Policy Research Organizations In The World, The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program: University of Pennsylvania, International Relations Program, 2008, 26-28

21. CBC, ‘Informal forum or global conspiracy?’, CBC News Online: June 13, 2006.

22. Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, South End Press: 1980, 161-171

23. Glen McGregor, ‘Secretive power brokers meeting coming to Ottawa?’, Ottawa Citizen: May 24, 2006

24. Holly Sklar, ed., op.cit., 76-78

25. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York: Thunders’s Mouth Press, 2004, 93

26. Ibid, 18

27. Ibid, 101-102

28. Edwin Black, ‘Eugenics and the Nazis – the California connection’, The San Francisco Chronicle: November 9, 2003

29. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak, op.cit., 396

30. Ibid, 398

31. Ibid, 416

32. Ibid, 418

33. Michael Barker, The Liberal Foundations of Environmentalism: Revisiting the Rockefeller-Ford Connection, Capitalism Nature Socialism: 19, (2), June 2008, 18

34. Ibid, 19-20

35. John Harlow, ‘Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation’, Times Online: May 24, 2009

36. CFR, Remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations Annual Corporate Conference, Transcripts: March 10, 2005.

37. CFR, Council on Foreign Relations Special Symposium in honor of David Rockefeller’s 90th Birthday, Transcript: May 23, 2005.

38. David Rockefeller, Memoirs, New York: Random House: 2002, 405

Reprinted with permission from New Dawn Magazine.


July 21, 2012

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project. Visit his website.

http://lewrockwell.com/orig10/marshall16.1.html
 
Old July 29th, 2012 #2
Hugh
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I've previously posted on aspects of this:

Gaining political power
http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=66710

The Anglosphere - Network civilization
http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=87111


Networks
http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=86418


To place the above in context and bring them in line with what's happening across Europe, the situation in Greece etc, the way Europe works needs to be broadly understood.

Apart from Britain, neither Greece, nor the countries in the EU, are independent countries.

We can compare Greece with New York City.
Greece has roughly the same power over their countries and people, as New York City has over New Yorkers.

The EU is the equivalent of the New York State legislature, making the day to day laws for New Yorkers.

Within the EU at the core is the EU commission, much like a merged combination of the party leadership and policy setting bodies of the Republicans and Democrats at state level.

The EU commission in turn receives its instructions from the OSCE, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, based in Austria.
http://www.osce.org/

This body is the equivalent of the US congress, and it runs all the countries in Europe at the meta policy level except financially.
It's a UN body, which answers in turn to the UN Security Council, which in turn sits at the core of the UN.
For Europe, the UN Security Council, along with other key bodies, is the equivalent of a combination of the US senate and presidents cabinet.

The EU central bank, like all central banks including the US Federal Reserve, is run from the Bank for International settlements in Basel, Switzerland.
The BIS controls the central banks globally much like the central banks in turn control the non-central banks within their various states.
http://www.bis.org/

Global and thus European trade is controlled via the World Trade Organisation
http://www.wto.org/

The World Bank makes these loans, and the IMF together with the target country's central bank, set economic and financial policy for countries which take loans from the World Bank.
http://www.worldbank.org/
http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm

As collateral for the loans, governments are required to privatise or corporatise state owned infrastructure and utilities, state owned land, as well as natural resources, and rights to mining, water etc.

The controlling shares in these now corporatised institutions are then given to the World Bank as collateral.
The IMF deliberately sets economic requirements which destroy the country's concerned economy, which force the country to allow the World bank to call up the debt, and take complete ownership of these shares as repayment of the debt to the World Bank.

The World Bank in turn sells these shares, rights etc the corporations that own the World bank, which are mostly natural resource corporations, such as mining, oil, water, energy etc. Thus countries no longer control their own natural resources.

The power of the aristocracy in Europe, certainly since the days of Rome, have based their power and incomes on mostly mining and other natural resources, as well as control of trade routes.

The EU financial crisis, is designed to cause these remaining aristocratic families mining etc corporations to go bankrupt, so they and their mining etc rights are taken by the banks/creditors, and they in turn sell them up the chain to the global mining, oil etc corporations, most of which were created by Europe's royal families and the Jews several centuries ago to handle the colonial trading and mining industries.

It is naive in the extreme to think that just because the families that have ruled Europe for millenia in some cases, no longer call themselves kings and dukes etc, that they no longer exist.
It is also naive to think that these families were not able to cross the sea to the US.
They created the US, and many states were created by one or two of these families, which control them to this day.

The families state to the think tanks what they want done.
The think tanks develop the strategy, and then pass it to whoever necessary.

The aristocracy since feudal days in the early 800's have traditionally had one son inherit the bulk of the family fortune, the next son would go into government, which until a century ago meant the church which formed the backbone of the civil service.
Any remaining sons would go into the armed forces.
Where a family was short of sons, it would marry its daughters to sons from other aristocratic families, who would then compensate for the shortfall. Where it lacked money, their sons would marry Jewish bankers and traders daughters.
The Jews would go to these families, and offer to pay them the same amount up front as these families obtained from taxation. the Jews would then be given the right to collect the taxes.

That system still operates to this day, where the federal government/treasury receives money from the Jews via the Federal reserve system, and the Jews then collect their taxes plus profit via the IRS.

Thus for around 1200 years, a tiny group of people have owned all of Europe, and headed its civil service/church and the armed forces.

To give an idea of how few are involved, William the Conqueror in 1066 divided England between roughly 5000 families.
20 percent plus of those families today still own the same land they were given a millenia ago and of course, much more.
They have received the taxes from those lands, as well as controlled/owned most of the companies, church lands etc as well, all this time.

Their fortunes are buried in trusts and banks and mining companies an stock exchanges all over the world. There is no way to measure their wealth.

These families and their equivalents set up the trading companies, armed them with their own troops, and sent them out to
create the colonies, which were their private property.

They also created the thinktanks which set up the various political parties, and develop their policies and run these families estates, which we call states/countries.

They are continually at war with each other, but generally, they kept the non-Whites away, and Whites did progress.

The Jews had constantly been infiltrating the Catholic church which till the renaissance was the largest landowner in Europe, and which formed the civil service.

Europe has had two totally different histories and cultures running parallel and concurrently since the Caesars divided the Roman Empire into the poorer, uneducated Western half run from Rome and Ravenna, and the immensely richer, more densely populated and better educated East, run from Constantinople, founded on the site of the city of Byzantium, dominated by Greeks.

The Romans called it Constantinople, the Greeks preferred to call it by its older name, Byzantium, thus the Byzantine empire.

When Rome fell, only the minor, Western Roman empire fell. It's leading families fled to Constantinople, where they proceeded to continue to rule till the Turks took it in the 1400's.

The Dark Ages after Rome fell in Western Europe, Catholicism etc only affected say a third of Whites.

The other two thirds of Whites lived in Eastern Europe under the continuing Eastern Roman empire, which was brilliant in all respects, till it was taken by the Turks, and became Istanbul.

The White leading families then fled to Western Europe, intermarried with the Western aristocracy, where with their knowledge etc they created the Renaissance, which with the remnants of the Eastern trade routes, led to the colonial age.
They were the ones who brought into Western Europe the maps, funds, expertise etc that were used to explore alternative, non-Muslim controlled routes to the East.

The aristocracy and church i.e. Catholics had kept the people in Europe uneducated to control them, but the influx of Greeks etc and Byzantines and new knowledge led people to ask questions, and break away from the Catholic church. So the Protestant movement and religious wars began, the refugees and prisoners, slaves etc populating the colonies.

Then the Jews decided to make their play and take it all.
They had been kept out of England since the 1200's, so when Cromwell killed Charles 1, they saw their chance.
They broke Cromwell, put in Charles 2, and so began to take over England. The Puritan refugees from these wars became the first Americans.

From England the Jews had a tentative power base, so then started the French and American revolutions, and began to kill off the aristocracy and leadership, and take over their mines, companies. colonies etc.
They then shifted their base to the proto US, and from there could safely run the various German revolutions.
The British aristocracy now realised the value of the Americas, and so proceeded to take it back, financing the north in the US civil war, eventually taking back control in 1865.

The other European aristocratic families e.g. France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland and Eastern Europe and of course Byzantium etc were all involved in the US to a greater or lesser degree, and their battles with each other, their investments etc have kept the US mostly free and independent, and they brought in their peoples and populated it.

Britain and the British had the upper hand until WW1, when the refugees from WW 1 and 2 tipped the scales the other way.

Now none of them have a firm upper hand, as one rises, so the others ally against that one rising, and bring it down again.

With WW1 and 2, even more of the aristocracy fled to the US, settled within various core states each, and have brought their European enmity and alliances with them.

With most of Europe's leading families now in the US, they in turn are now creating the global institutions they need to run their mini empires from the US.

As these relocated families recreate their power bases within the US, they are looking to Central and South America, and now want to split up the Americas between them again, like they split up Europe etc.

They don't think in terms of states, they think of terms of their serfs living on their estates.

The stresses of the conflicts between these families within the US, as well as the new European cultures, together with the ever present Jews who are sand in the engine, and the non White invasion, are splitting up the US.

America has never been free entirely of Europe, but it was mostly free.
Those days are over, and it is now going to become ruled by the same families who rule Europe, ad run the same way they run Europe.

They unite their people via global religious denominations and ethnicity, and within the US, people who in Europe called themselves Italians, Germans etc now have swopped those ethnic identities for religious denominations, which are dominated by the old aristocratic families. As they now organise, so ethnic group identity and power are rising, and the US will in time divide into ethno-religious states, and European states and identities will be recreated within the US, linking back to their core populations in Europe, and so e.g. the English will centre in New England and with parts of Canada, as will the French and the Germans.

So we will see American and European ethnic groups have a state in Europe and a state in the US and use these to support each other across the waters, and so America will be pulled into European affairs, and Europe into American affairs.

That's why I keep saying we must prepare for secession and break up, as they divide the US between them. These people do not play, and in most cases it will be a bloody break up. The entire thing is too complex to continue, and will collapse back into the traditional ethno-nationalist White nations, which were each centred around a couple mega cities.

Many cities today are larger and more powerful than many countries, and we will see the city state become the norm, so need to organise and work within that system and structure as it arrives.

The Jews, whilst not communists themselves, have used communism to make a place for themselves beyond banking, and to start ruling directly, but whilst Jews have the power to bring down governments and other ruling families, they lack the numbers to replace them, so the result is a vaccuum of power, into which WN need to start entering and filling.

A good structure to start with is a thinktank to develop policies and strategies.
A church as a cover organisation to bring people together and build up funds, property etc.
Business improvement districts to provide real power structures and gain economic control.
With these we then have the power to begin to place our people into political positions.
__________________
Secede. Control taxbases/municipalities. Use boycotts, divestment, sanctions, strikes.
http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/...d-Jan-2015.pdf
https://canvasopedia.org/wp-content/...Points-web.pdf

Last edited by Hugh; July 29th, 2012 at 07:13 PM.
 
Old August 21st, 2012 #3
Alex Linder
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Class Warfare in 2012. Ho, Ho, Ho

by Gary North

The media are filled with stories claiming that the Obama vs. Romney race is all about class warfare. I have my doubts. Here is why.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in their then-anonymous tract, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), began chapter 1 with these words: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

You would be hard-pressed to find any theory of history more wrong-headed than this one.

To prove their case, they should have defined "class." They never did. In the unpublished third volume of Das Kapital, Marx wrote this: "The first question to he answered is this: What constitutes a class? – I see. The first question. This appears in Chapter 52. Three paragraphs later, the manuscript broke off.

This was written around 1865. He died in 1883. He never wrote another book. It appeared in 1895. Engels edited it. It would have helped if Marx had told us what a class is. In The Manifesto, he followed sentence one with this:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

I see. And what of these conflicts: racial, religious, linguistic, tribal, and geographical? Nothing to them, Marx said. Illusions. They are nothing more than conflicts over the social superstructure. The mode of production: that is what counts. Always. Just find out the answer to this: Who owns the tools of production? Then you will be able to know who the players are in world history.

Then what was the wave of the future, according to Marx? The conflict between the proletarians and the capitalists. The proletarian revolution will overthrow the rule of capitalists forever, he said.

The proletarian is the factory laborer. What percentage of the American work force is involved in manufacturing? About 10%. It was 30% in 1950. About 83% were involved in services in 2007.

Nice try, Karl. Thanks for playing. Thanks for all those slogans: "class struggle," "revolutions are the locomotives of history," "the mode of production," and "cash nexus." Great stuff! Any proletarian in the West can search for them on Google. He will not be disappointed.

Until approximately December 31, 1991, the day the Communist Party of the Soviet Union disbanded and abolished the Soviet Union, Communists and Marxists were taken seriously by Western scholars as legitimate participants in academic discussion. On New Years Day, 1992, the entire academic world dropped Marxism into the ash can of history, to use the convenient phrase of Trotsky/Bernstein. What a difference a day makes. Eggheads respect power. When the Commies lost power, the eggheads abandoned them.

Nice try, Vladimir. Thanks for playing. Thanks for causing 100 million deaths as a direct result of Marx's theory of history. Thanks also for Hitler. Without you, Hitler would have been an unemployed former corporal.

Ideas have consequences.

OBAMA VS. ROMNEY

I searched Google for "Obama, Romney, and "class warfare." I got over 2,000,000 hits.

Conclusion: old slogans live on long after they have ceased to be relevant. That's what gives us columnists fodder for our digital cannons.

I liked this from The Daily Beast, better known as the dying beast. It is what remains of Newsweek. We are told that Republicans have long played the class warfare card.

Richard Nixon seethed with class anger. "What starts the process really are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid," he confided to a friend. "Sometimes it's because you're poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts."

Read this again. Where is the class anger? He was talking about opportunity and personal performance. He was talking about an economic system that let a lower-middle-class boy like Nixon earn a B.A. degree from the elitist private school Whittier College and a law degree from Duke University. It's about those on the bottom as kids being able to climb to the top. Its about social resentment, not class warfare. It's the kid who was pushed around getting even.

Social resentment probably motivated Nixon to get even with his many enemies until they finally got him. The same resentment motivated Lyndon Johnson. How he hated Bobby Kennedy and his Harvard cohorts! He did not hate Republicans with anything like this hatred. The Republicans could not beat him in 1964. Goldwater and he were both rich. He did not despise Goldwater. His hatred of Bobby was social envy, not class warfare. Bobby went to Harvard. Johnson went to Southwest Texas State Teachers' College.

The article went on.

Then there are the more recent examples. In 1988, George H.W. Bush accused Michael Dukakis of having learned his views in "Harvard Yard's boutique," a bastion of "liberalism and elitism."

Let me add a single word. This word will help us to understand the nature of class warfare in American presidential politics.

Then there are the more recent examples. In 1988, George H.W. Bush, Yale, accused Michael Dukakis of having learned his views in "Harvard Yard's boutique," a bastion of "liberalism and elitism."

Here, my friends, is a serious rivalry: Harvard vs. Yale. It goes back over 300 years. Think of the election of 1912: Teddy Roosevelt (Harvard, Porcellian Club) vs. William Howard Taft (Yale, Skull & Bones) vs. Woodrow Wilson (Johns Hopkins). Wilson was the outsider. Princeton came late.

Here was the "deep proletarian issue" of Wilson's career. He had resigned as president of Princeton College after he lost a crucial battle – the first loss in his academic career and the last until the debate over the League of Nations. He had tried to abolish the eating clubs (elitist) and replace them with common dining halls. He never forgave the elitists. He quit to run for governor of New Jersey in 1910.

Yes, I see! A man of the people! The proletarians' representative!

Consider the inter-campus rivalry in recent years. There was a breather in 1992: Bush (Yale) vs. Clinton (Yale law School). Then came 2000. It heated up again: Gore (Harvard) vs. Bush, Jr. (Yale). But this was not a full-scale confrontation. Bush also went to Harvard Business School. Then, the nation got another breather. It was John Kerry, Yale (Skull & Bones) vs. Bush, Yale (Skull & Bones). In 2008, an outsider entered the fray: McCain (Annapolis). He battled Obama (Harvard Law). Today, Yale is on the outs. It's Harvard Law vs. Harvard Law, plus Harvard MBA (Romney earned both in one shot).

Dr. Obama, J.D., vs. Dr. Romney, J.D., MBA. Class warfare. Yes. I read it in The Daily Beast.

"Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains."

THE ENDLESS BATTLE: CFR TEAM A VS. CFR TEAM B

Back in 1976, an insightful author named Susan Huck wrote an article for American Opinion, " the monthly magazine of the John Birch Society. She was commenting on the supposedly titanic presidential struggle between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. She described it as a battle between CFR Team A and CFR Team B. I have used that designation ever since. This is one of the most profound insights into 20th-century American politics that anyone has ever written. I can think of no textbook, no sophisticated statistical study, that comes closer to what is really involved every four years, when the Republican Party and the Democratic Party battle for control of the White House.

I remember the statement by Carter's right-hand man, Hamilton Jordan (pronounced Jerden).

"If, after the inauguration, you find a Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed. And I'd quit.'"


We find this statement quoted over and over. It was a classic statement, and it was made even more classic by the fact that it happened, and Jordan did not quit. It was almost a perfect forecast of what was about to happen, and he did not see the irony after it happened of what had just happened. He had called it perfectly, and he said it would be a complete betrayal of what they had been involved in, and when the betrayal was complete, he did not quit.

He was unbelievably na‹ve. He believed all the rhetoric of Carter's populism. He did not understand what it meant when Carter was brought into the Trilateral Commission by David Rockefeller in the first year it began, 1973. That was three years before the election. Carter was the hand-picked man of David Rockefeller, and Jordan was simply a convenient technician hired by Carter to get him elected.

A major Establishment book on the control of American foreign-policy by the Council on Foreign Relations, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986), was written by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. Isaacson graduated from Harvard in 1974. In 1996, Isaacson became senior editor of Time magazine. He became chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003. An insider? You had better believe it. He is the author of the best-selling biography of Steve Jobs. Thomas ever since 1991 has been the assistant managing editor at Newsweek. He formerly worked for Time. He teaches journalism at Princeton. An insider? You had better believe it.

Let me show you how these two shrugged off Jordan's statement a decade later.

The fact that Carter hired both men – and the Jordan did not quit – was held out of the time as evidence that the Eastern Establishment was alive, well, and still indispensable. But in fact the selection of Brzezinski and Vance showed precisely the opposite. Brzezinski and Vance were only superficially similar. True, they were both members of the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller's elite international meeting group, and regulars at the Council on Foreign Relations. But, in fact, they couldn't have been more different (p. 726).

This is the heart, mind, and soul of the magnificent deception that has been going on in the United States ever since the election of 1932. The textbooks never tell you that, before he was elected Governor of New York in 1928, Franklin Roosevelt had worked on projects with Herbert Hoover. They knew each other personally. Yet if you look at the major biographies of Roosevelt, this period of his life, when he was a corporate bond salesman for Wall Street, is conveniently ignored.

There have been only two major presidential elections since 1932 that did not conform to this Punch and Judy arrangement. One was in 1964, when Goldwater was able to get the Republican nomination, and the Eastern Republican Establishment literally walked out of the convention, and then spent the rest of the summer torpedoing Goldwater's campaign. The other exception, which was only a partial exception, was Reagan's election in 1980. His new Chief of Staff was James Baker III. Baker, then as now, was one of the chief advisors to George H. W. Bush. The Reagan administration was run by Bush's men, with only a few exceptions, for all eight years. Then Bush replaced him.

The American people, decade after decade, generation after generation, are persuaded that presidential elections are fought over fundamental differences regarding the way the world works and the way the world ought to work. Yet every newly inaugurated President brings in his senior advisers, most of whom are men recruited by the Council on Foreign Relations, and some have been trained in the Trilateral Commission. This never gets any attention by the media, because the media at the top are run by members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

The typical Republican conservative is aware of none of this. He perhaps has heard a hint or two about it, but he has never spent any time reading the literature that has been produced by conservatives regarding this arrangement ever since the publication of Dan Smoot's book in 1960, The Invisible Government. The importance of the Skull and Bones connection goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. How is it that an organization that only takes 15 members a year has elected three Presidents, and would have elected a fourth in 2004 if John Kerry had won,

I find it very difficult to believe class warfare in United States had its incarnation in the election of 2004. Somehow, the thought of the proletarian masses going to the barricades after the defeat of John Kerry by George W. Bush is a difficult image for me to picture. First of all, there are no proletarian masses. Second, I don't think anybody in Skull and Bones represents them. I don't think anybody at the Harvard Law School represents them.

What I do believe is that there are factions within the American political establishment, just as there are within any establishment. I think they sort out over such issues as Saudi Arabian oil versus the foreign policy of the state of Israel. I think this division has been going on since at least 1948. The big banks and big oil are in cahoots together, because that is where the money is. But the question of the sovereignty of the state of Israel is nevertheless an important foreign-policy question, and so there is a constant trade-off between the special interests of the two factions.

There are certainly conflict between Republicans and Democrats. Each side wants to get its share of the booty after each election. But the nation is almost evenly divided, as never before in its history. We have a situation in which the Democrats won the presidency for two terms under Clinton, and the Republicans won the presidency for two terms under George W. Bush. This has never happened before in American history. No two-term President has ever been followed by another two-term President of the rival political party. If Obama wins, he will be a two-term President of a rival political party following the previous two-term President. The voters seem is divided as Team A and Team B of the Council on Foreign Relations.

CONCLUSION

At the margin, one group or the other gets some benefits. One group or the other gets to preside over a giant federal bureaucracy in which virtually all of the employees are protected by Civil Service legislation, so no President has the power firing more than a few hundred of them.

No one is talking about the unfunded liabilities of the United States government, which are now in the range of $222 trillion. Nobody is talking about closing Guant namo Bay prison, even though Obama promised that he would when he ran back in 2008. Nobody is talking about an immediate withdrawal of troops out of Afghanistan.

So, where is the great debate? It isn't about Medicare, Social Security, Afghanistan, the war on terror, Federal Reserve policy, a Federal Reserve audit, immigration, tax policy, or even the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Where exactly is the great ideological battlefield on which class warfare is being conducted?

There comes a time when people ought to face reality. I realize that, for the vast majority of Americans, such a time has not yet arrived. It arrived for me no later than 1968.

I voted for Richard Nixon in 1968 for only one reason: to get even with the mainstream media for their defense of Soviet spy Alger Hiss, and their tarring and feathering of Nixon as late as 1962 for being the politician, more than any other, who got Hiss convicted of perjury for his lying denial of having committed espionage for the Soviet Union. I figured revenge is a legitimate political motivation, so I voted for Nixon. That was the last time I voted for either CFR Team A or CFR Team B.

August 22, 2012

Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.

http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1188.html
 
Old September 3rd, 2012 #4
Alex Linder
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How the Council on Foreign Relations Controls Conservative Republicans

by Gary North

I sent a stripped-down version of my movie review of 2016 to my Tea Party Economist list. I knew it would outrage some of them.

Why did I do it? To make sure D'Souza sees it. The list is large. Someone will send it to him. I want him to know that the Old Right isn't buying his thesis that Obama's agenda is somehow uniquely wrong because it is anti-colonialist. Obama is a defender of the American Empire as Bush was. His agenda is that of one of the factions of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is not in bed with the neocons, meaning big on Israel, but the dominant foreign policy objectives of the CFR were pro-oil and therefore pro-Arab long before 1948, let alone the late 1960s, when the neocons showed up.

In domestic policy, his rhetoric is Democrat. But this is nothing new. The domestic policies of both CFR wings are the same: the maintenance of the American Empire, what President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address (1961) called the military-industrial complex. He should have called it the military-industrial-oil-banking-AIPAC complex. This is why Clinton had the Homeland Security legislation in reserve, and why Bush presented it to Congress when the nation was in hysteria over 9-11.

I have discussed Council on Foreign Relations Team A vs. Team B for 35 years. I have seen two anti-CFR people get through the screening.

The only exception to the vetting process over the last 80 years was Barry Goldwater. When he got the nomination, the eastern wing of the Republican Party walked out of the convention, and it would not provide the money to let him win. The media turned against him overwhelmingly. The Council on Foreign Relations members understood exactly what he meant in terms of a threat to them, and they torpedoed his campaign. They cared not at all that Lyndon Johnson would win. That was irrelevant to them. It is equally irrelevant to them today whether Obama wins or loses. He is expendable. So is Romney.

REAGAN

Ronald Reagan also seems to be an exception. Here was one case in which the elite really did have trouble suppressing his candidacy. He was too good with the media, and he had already proven twice that he could win in California. There were no real leaders in the Republican Party in early 1980 – before Volcker's recession – who were capable of beating Carter.

Reagan trounced George Bush in the primaries. He told his supporters in the "Reagan Right" that he would not select Bush as his running mate. Yet he reversed himself at the Republican National Convention. Not only did he put Bush on the ticket, he turned the White House over to James Baker III, Bush's senior advisor, then as now. Baker became Reagan's Chief of Staff. Bush became the Presidential nominee in 1988. He needed the VP position. No one since Herbert Hoover had been elected President without having been a governor, a U.S. Senator, VP, or a victorious general. As soon as Bush was inaugurated in 1989, he appointed Baker as his Secretary of State. Bush had been a Skull & Bones member at Yale. He was married into the family of Brown Brothers Harriman, the international private banking firm. He was a CFR member.

Reagan's initial cabinet contained only one person who could be regarded as a philosophical conservative, James Watt, the Interior Secretary. He was fired two years later. His replacement, William Clark, was conservative. He was pushed out by Michael Deaver. He lasted two years.

I have discussed the CFR's vetting process here.

The story of the CFR is well known to those of us who have been in the conservative wing of the party for over 50 years. It has been over half a century since Dan Smoot wrote The Invisible Government (1960). In late 1964, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society shifted his entire life's work from anti-Communism to anti-conspiracy, and forced the restructuring of the Birch Society's magazine, American Opinion. The story of the CFR/Federal Reserve alliance has been known to the hard-core Right for a generation. But it is still not known to the standard conservative, who came into the movement in 1980 or later.

NAIVE CONSERVATIVES

This is why any attempt to warn conservatives about the latest Republican Party presidential campaign is always regarded by them as an attack from the Left. They think of themselves as being on the far Right, and they cannot abide by any criticism based on the history of Republican politics, basic economics, CFR influence, or anything else. They just assume that the criticism has to come from somebody on the Left, because they have been trained to think that the national conservatives within the Republican Party's leadership do not share with Democrat liberals the same background, ideology, social networks, and screening. They are outraged by criticism. Why? Because they perceive that such criticism has an unstated implication: they have been taken in. No one wants to hear this.

D'Souza made a movie about Obama as anti-colonialist. This is utterly irrelevant in American foreign policy. Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-colonialist. He was an anti-British colonialist. He used World War II to replace British colonialism. Harry Truman completed the process. The Council on Foreign Relations supported this replacement. It still does. Truman's recognition of the state of Israel had serious opponents in the Council on Foreign Relations, most notably his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. Obama is extending a pre-Israel (1948), non-neoconservative (post-1965) American agenda in foreign policy. D'Souza ignores all this in his movie. So what if Obama is anti-British colonialism? It has been gone for 50 years. The main theme of his movie is utterly irrelevant. It is simply a neocon propaganda film well within the orbit CFR opinion against the big-oil wing.

The standard Republican conservative, being ignorant of the history of American foreign policy since 1947, is blissfully unaware of this.

Here is an example that I received from one subscriber.

I am deeply offended by your liberal Mafia remarks. Your opinions are far from fact and in fact are B.S. right out of the liberal handbook. Sickening, misleading, untruthful and disgusting. America is not stupid as you seem to think. Look in the mirror!

I have been told this for over 40 years. In high school, I was taught by a very conservative civics teacher, who was legendary in Southern California. He was the most conservative public school high school teacher in the region. About a decade after I graduated from his class, I was a teaching assistant at the University of California, Riverside. One of his recent graduates had been in one of my sections. I knew nothing about this. Later, the teacher told me that this student had informed him that I was a communist. This was at about the time that I was writing my book on Marx, Marx's Religion of Revolution.

The student could not comprehend the meaning of communism. He could not comprehend the difference between the Old Right and conservatism. At that point, neoconservatism was only about three or four years old, so he probably was not familiar with that strand of political theory.

The conservative movement has always been filled with naïve people. People are attracted to a fringe movement, rarely because of their understanding of the mainstream, but only because they don't like the mainstream, and they are determined to take a stand against it. The subtleties of the political philosophy or economic theories of the group they joined are lost on them. They got excited. They committed. And they now send their money to the Republican Party, because it seems to be fighting all those terrible liberals. The thought that the two parties have been completely vetted at the top by the same group of elite deal-doers, who in fact are very famous people, does not occur to them. The fact that, at the top of American politics, the limits of discussion have been set by the same group of a few thousand people, is lost on them.

THE SUPERCLASS

When you realize that the process is international, as described in the book by David Rothkopf, Superclass, it seems beyond belief. How is it that approximately 6,000 people control virtually all of the agenda for the Western nations? Your typical conservative probably would believe this with respect to the internationalist connections of the elite. They would blame the impotent UN. But they seem to feel that this elite did not begin the screening process of the present leaders of both political parties three decades or four decades earlier. These people say that they do not trust the Ivy League, yet it never occurs to them that virtually everybody they are asked to vote for as President is a graduate of one of two or possibly three Ivy League universities. It never occurs to them that there is cause and effect in education. It never occurs to them the Ivy League universities are really, truly as good as the critics think they are with respect to their ability to set the terms of discussion, meaning the exclusion of the fringes on both the right and left, among those people who graduated from the system.

So, the political charade goes on. It will continue to go on until the day that the federal government does not have the ability to write the checks any longer. At that point, all over the world, the superclass will find that they have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and they have lost the ability to control what happens at the local level.

The key to this is a combination of money and intellectual screening at the university and graduate school level. The elite defines the extreme limits of acceptable discussion. The elite leaders do not attempt to tell people what they ought to believe inside these limits. They do define what constitutes extremism and therefore what constitutes an unacceptable list of assumptions and policies within the network of the good old boys. Communism is out. It has always been out. Libertarianism is obviously out. Conservatism was out until Reagan was elected. There were a few early conservatives who got inside the gates, the most famous being William F. Buckley. Buckley got inside the gates early. He got into Yale, and he was tapped to join Skull and Bones. Then he went into the CIA. So, he was vetted very early.

To get into the inner sanctum, you have to abandon extremism. Whether you are from the Right or the Left, the extreme positions are not acceptable. People who have spent their lives trying to get into the inner ring understand the limits, and they accept them. This is how the limits of acceptable discourse are imposed on the people who formulate policy, advise presidents, and write for the establishment media outlets. None of this is understood by the average conservative in the Republican Party. I think it is much more understood by the far left members of the Democratic Party. People on the far left believe in politics, and they learn how the game is played early in their lives. Conservatives do not.

So, it is easier for the CFR to control the terms of discourse on the Right than on the Left, or so it seems most of the time. The far Left did get sucked in by Obama's rhetoric in 2008. It is highly unlikely that they will be sucked in again. They will probably vote for him. I doubt that they will vote for Romney. They will not vote the same enthusiasm this time. Voting to keep Guantanamo Bay filled with prisoners for another four years is probably not high on their list of political mobilization.

Conservatives think Guantanamo is great. So, anybody who thinks Guantanamo should be shut down, as I do, is perceived automatically as somebody on the Left. This is because there has been a long tradition within the conservative movement to suppress civil rights. People who got into the movement, and have spent time in the movement, assume that the suppression of civil rights is okay. This is why Bush was able to get the Patriot Act passed, when Clinton did not have the courage to introduce it to Congress. It is easier to get conservatives to vote for something like this than it is to get Democrats to vote for it. Of course, in a time of crisis, most politicians will vote for anything that suppresses civil liberties.

CONCLUSION

If the followers of Ron Paul will ever make any difference, they are going to have to spread out and burrow in. They are going to have to go back to their hometowns, get active in local politics, and spend the next 25 years or even 50 years figuring out how the local system runs, and then taking it over. This has to be a bottom-up transformation. There is no possibility of capturing power at the top of either party. To capture control of either party will require fringe people to go to the local county level and to spend at least a generation, and maybe two generations, building a political network that will enable them to control the terms of discourse at the top. They have to do an end run around Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This will not be easy.

September 3, 2012

http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1193.html
 
Old November 14th, 2012 #5
lancsDavid
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i can't work u out. ur signature seems quite hate-filled. i'm guessing u know this & wear it like a badge. trouble is, it makes u seem like ur thinking is very simplistic. which suggests its not worth (me) putting in the time to read ur post (cos its long)

but i caught the end of it - the part about needing a bottom-up transformation of society. i agree with this. i just wouldn't want to live in one where people were mean to jews, black people or anyone else who was different
 
Old February 20th, 2013 #6
Alex Linder
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Reversal of Fortune: Why the Power Elite Will Lose Power

by Gary North

The best description of the reversal of fortune is Mary's Magnificat, recorded in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verses 46-55. "He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree" (v. 52).

This was a fundamental theme in the Old Testament. We are told that those who hold their position by means of political power and corruption always lose their position. They are always overthrown. They look unbeatable. They are always defeated. The prophets of Israel came before kings and commoners with this message. Isaiah 1 is a good example. Isaiah even identified a major technique of the power elite: inflation. "Thy silver has become dross, thy wine mixed with water" (Isa 1:22).

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

THE POWER ELITE

What do I mean by the power elite? The phrase was coined by Leftist sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1956. His book remains a classic. Its main chapter is here. Liberal columnist Richard Rovere in 1956 called it the American Establishment. Conservatives refer to it as the Insiders or the Conspiracy. David Rothkopf, writing from inside, calls them the superclass. Sometimes they are called the PTB: the Powers that Be. I think conservative journalist and historian Otto Scott said it best: the behind-the-scenes fellows who are too clever by half.

Who are they? They are men of influence and wealth who gain a lock on this wealth through political power. They use economic leverage – debt – recklessly because they can protect themselves from losses by means of political leverage: government bailouts. Some of them lose, but as a class they do not.

The key to their economic position is their unseen political manipulation. They are the masters of backroom politics. Theirs is not the backroom politics of the old big city political bosses, who were their class enemies, and whom they had generally replaced by the late 1950s. The novel The Last Hurrah (1956) describes this transfer of power, although it ignores the system that replaced the Catholic power base. The battle of the Boston Brahmins – merchants and lawyers – who had replaced the Boston Puritans by 1700, vs. Boston's Irish Catholics after 1870 is the archetype. The battle lasted for about 90 years. The triumph of Jack Kennedy, which seemed to be the triumph of the Irish Catholics of Boston, was in fact the victory of the Brahmins, by way of Harvard. His father got Jack into Harvard. Then he bought him the Presidency. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald's grandson was the symbol of this transfer of power.

The central battleground has always been the control of the faculty of Harvard, from 1636 until today. This includes the Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. Harvard is both the symbol and the supreme leverage point. The other Ivy League schools are the second tier in this ring of power. So are the late-comers: Stanford University and the University of Chicago, which were created by two very rich capitalists in the late 19th century, who wanted into the circle of social influence, and who created universities to buy their way in. Leland Stanford never quite made it in. John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s son did, by way of Brown University and the Rockefeller Foundation, which he took over in 1917.

New York City and Washington, D.C. – Wall Street and the Beltway – are where the anointed exercise their rule. This mirrors the circles of power in England: Oxford, Cambridge, and the City of London, a legally separate jurisdiction from the city of London.

Bankrolling the American power elite are fewer than a dozen large banks, mostly in New York City. They have an insurance company: the Federal Reserve System. Bankrolling the British power elite – called the Old Boy Network – is a similar system of banks. Their insurance company is the Bank of England, which is the model for the FED.

Note: the transfer of power began in 1660, with the restoration of Charles II to the British throne. Cromwell, the Lord Protector, had died in 1658. The Restoration displaced Cromwell's Puritans. But Cromwell had never consolidated his rule where it mattered: Oxford. He technically ruled over Oxford for almost a decade, but he never made any reforms. Next came the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. This 34-year consolidation of social and economic power – the displacement of Puritan rule – was paralleled in Boston in these same years.

The power elite's members do not sit in the cigar smoke-filled rooms of the history textbooks. Most of them do not smoke these days. Indeed, their non-smoking status is one mark of their superior status. But, just like the old political bosses, they depend on politics for their position. That is their Achilles heel. By becoming dependent on politics to protect themselves from free market competition, they will eventually overplay their hand. They will bet the farm – and ours – on a busted flush. Imploding debt will remove them from the scene.

Why do I believe this?

To answer this, I begin with North's three laws of bureaucracy.

1. Some bureaucrat will inevitably enforce an official rule to the point of imbecility.

2. To fix the mess which this causes, the bureaucracy will write at least two new rules.

3. Law #1 applies to each of the new rules.

This is a convenient way to express the principle set forth by Ludwig von Mises in his essay, "Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism." Each attempt to fix the problems caused by a previous government intervention creates new problems.

Mises also argued that socialism is inherently irrational, because it destroys the market for capital goods. It destroys market pricing. He wrote that in 1920.

Conclusion: all socialist systems must collapse.

Semi-socialist systems move in the direction of bureaucracy. They fall under North's three laws.

Conclusion: The power elite will blow it. Give them time.

Their great temptation is private debt. Their salvation is the federal government. But the government depends on three things: low-interest debt, central banking, and bureaucracy. None of the three is trustworthy. The free market will displace them all. I call this event the Great Default.

THE ECONOMIC CRISIS OF 2008/9

Do you believe that the Insiders engineered the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009? If you believe this, then you are ignoring crucial facts about what happened – well-known facts.

Also, if you believe this, how do you expect to see the replacement of the power elite? If they are that clever, their opponents – you and I – are doomed.

I argue the opposite. Keynesian economics is unsound, fiat money is unsound, massive federal debt is unsound, and there will be a day of reckoning. On that day, the existing establishments will go on the defensive. More than this: they are already on the defensive. This is something new. The crisis of 2008/9 was the tipping point.

I say this as a student of conspiracies in history. I wrote my first essay on this in 1958. In 1985, I wrote the Prologue and Epilogue to Larry Abraham's Call It Conspiracy, which was a revision of the book that he and Gary Allen wrote in 1971, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. I was a friend of Gary Allen. We worked together on a few projects.

I took my Prologue and Epilogue and produced a full-length book. You can read it for free here.

In short, I was not born yesterday. What I am about to tell you, you would be wise to take seriously if you regard yourself as a believer in conspiracies.

KEYNESIANISM PRODUCES DISASTERS

Those conspiracy theorists who think that the conspirators always engineer the economic crises are ignorant of economic theory. They also ignore the obvious. Let me give you an example. Lehman Brothers was a major player in the United States economy in the summer of 2008. That private investment bank had been in operation for over 150 years. It was gigantic. But in the September crisis, it went bankrupt. Why? Because Hank Paulson, who was Secretary of the Treasury, decided not to bail it out with government money or guarantees.

What if the Secretary of the Treasury in the fall of 2008 had been the ex-CEO of Lehman Brothers rather than the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs? Do you think Lehman Brothers would have gone out of business? Or do you think Goldman Sachs might have gone out of business?

The idea that They, with a capital T, engineered the crisis of 2008 raises a question: Who were They? If They did not include Lehman Brothers, then I do not know who They were. The supposed fact that They controlled things, and They engineered things, did no good for Lehman Brothers. That was the largest bankruptcy in the history of finance. If They engineered the crisis, why wasn't Lehman's CEO Dick Fuld invited in on the planning sessions?

I hope you see my point. The idea that conspirators in the American banking world engineered the crisis of 2008, which took down one of their largest organizations, is ludicrous. It assumes that the Keynesians who are in control understand Austrian School economics. Nobody else was predicting a crisis in 2007 except the Austrians. The Austrians were predicting it because they had an analytical system that enabled them to make the forecast. I was one of them.

Austrians are a fringe group. Nobody paid any attention to them in 2008. We are pariahs in the academic community, and we are equally pariahs in the banking community. So, why does anyone believe that the people who were running the system, who were dedicated to the economics of Keynes, Paul Samuelson, and Paul Krugman, were able to figure out that they could precisely manipulate the world economy, taking it to the brink of failure, and then escape at the very end, coming out far wealthier? The suggestion is ludicrous. Yet it is widely believed among conspiracy theorists.

The person who says that the power elite created the crisis are of necessity saying that Keynesians used Austrian School theory to manipulate the economy into a crisis, and then carefully used a doubling of the monetary base in four months to save the system (minus Lehman Brothers). Yet no academic theory of economics prior to this had ever provided an analytical defense of a doubling the monetary base in four months. The decision was 100% ad hoc. There was no theory to justify it.

Then how should we explain what happened? By first abandoning that form on conspiracy theory that declares that nice guys finish last. I hold to the anti-Durocher view of long-term social causation: nice guys finish first. Eventually.

PREDESTINATION BY CONSPIRACY

For over 40 years I have been told by people who have a smattering of knowledge about conspiracies and conspiracy theory that the power elite has engineered every crisis in American history. They believe that the power elite is in fact the functional equivalent of God. They believe that the power elite predestinates the affairs of men.

I am not saying that every conspiracy theorist holds this, but a lot of them do, and I think the vast majority of their followers do. My father-in-law, R. J. Rushdoony, called these people gravediggers. He said that they believe that the conspiracy is the equivalent of God, and the conspiracy is inherently evil. Therefore, the conspiracy has the capability of keeping most people blinded most of the time. The conspiracy – just one – runs the show.

If this is true, then how can it be replaced? How can evil be overturned? Their typical answer is this: education. I ask: Of whom? By whom? At what price? By what means?

Back in the early days of the conservative movement, this answer was obviously hopeless. In 1954, there were only three tiny conservative book publishing firms: Regnery, Devin-Adair, and Caxton. Hardly anyone knew about them. There was no direct-mail system. That came only with Ricard Viguerie's efforts after the election of 1964: the Goldwater donors' list. There was no National Review. There was no Freeman.

In those days, there was no way that a rock-solid conspiracy theorist in the United States had any plausible plan for overturning the conspiracy. He had never heard of the Council on Foreign Relations. That revelation came with Dan Smoot's book, The Invisible Government (1960). What a conspiracy theorist knew was this: he surely had no influence. Nobody he had ever heard of did. Senator Bob Taft had died in July 1953. Also, no one in the conservative movement knew that Taft had been a member of Skull and Bones, just as his father President Taft had been, and his grandfather had been. His grandfather had co-founded it in 1833. No one in the general public in 1954 knew of Skull and Bones. That revelation awaited Ron Rosenbaum's September 1977 Esquire article. That was when I first learned of it. Antony Sutton's books came half a decade later.

Side note: there has never been a comparable exposé of the Harvard secret society that predates Skull and Bones by a generation: Porcellian. Teddy Roosevelt was a member. Franklin Roosevelt could not get in, which was his greatest disapointment in life, he later maintained.

Widespread education is never free of charge, and widespread education is controlled in every country by the government. If the conspiracies control all of the governments, then how can widespread education ever roll back the conspirators?

So, there are two views, sometimes held by the same people: (1) the power elite is collectively God walking on earth; (2) mass education can unseat the power elite, and then never let other evil insiders replace them. We are either to believe in the immovable object of conspiracy or the irresistible force of democracy.

I'm not buying it. I never have.

CONSPIRACIES NEED LEVERAGE TO MOVE THE MASSES

The main idea behind most conspiracy theories is this: the bad guys behind the scenes are fooling the masses, thwarting the good hearts of the masses.

This is an intensely anti-biblical view of social cause and effect. The biblical view is that people get what they deserve politically. Moses warned that evil hearts in the masses would bring corrupt rulers (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28). This was the message of the prophets. In short, ethics has consequences.

So, what are we to make of the power of the conspirators? This: the conspirators share most of the beliefs of the masses. If this were not true, a conspiracy could never be successful.

A conspiracy that believed that space aliens control the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System would be nothing more than a crackpot cult. Hardly anyone would take this group seriously. The group would have no influence. (Note: if space aliens are smart enough to travel through space and then control human minds, how is it that the best they can do is write Ben Bernanke's speeches?)

Conspirators invoke the language and the beliefs of the masses. They tell the masses what the masses want to hear. For instance, they say that the government will protect the people from an economic collapse. The government has the power to eliminate economic crises, we are told, if the politicians will pass new laws. The government will continue to fulfill its promises regarding Social Security and Medicare.

Do the conspirators believe this? Yes. Of the 6,600 richest or most influential people on earth, insider David Rothkopf writes in Superclass, something like 30% attended one of 20 universities (p. 290). The ideology of salvation through legislation is basic to the social science departments of all of those universities. The faculties are overwhelmingly Keynesian in outlook.

This information is nothing new. Bill Buckley made his reputation in 1951 with God and Man at Yale, Regnery's first best-seller. He wrote about Yale's Keynesianism. This has been a constant theme in the conservative movement ever since. The same is true of the libertarian movement. I have never heard a conspiracy theorist suggest otherwise.

If you believe that the power-brokers are Keynesians, you believe correctly. But if you believe this, please follow the logic of your position. The nation's rulers overwhelmingly believe that the central government can produce prosperity.

So do the voters.

Consent is basic to democracy. The masses consent to be ruled over by people they have elected. Their rulers tell them what they want to hear. The fact that an elite screens the two parties' candidates for President does not change the nature of consent by the masses.

The masses are deceived about the political process. This is not the same as saying that the masses are not in agreement with the outcome of this process.

Are the masses deceived about the process? Consider this. The Presidential election in 2004 was between a pair of Skull and Bones members. What are the odds against this in an open system of political screening? The masses have never heard of Skull and Bones.

Would the masses care if they knew? No. They just want their government-funded subsidies.

This is an American tradition. How was it that in 1860, the Presidency was going to be won either by Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer for the Illinois Central Railroad, or by Stephen A. Douglas, a lawyer for the Illinois Central Railroad? Nobody asked. The textbooks still do not ask. How was it that the election of 1864 would see either the election of lawyer Lincoln or his former boss at the Illinois Central Railroad, George McClellan? The voters did not ask in 1864. Neither do not the textbooks. It was just one of those things, just one of those crazy things.

Most historians do not not know or care. Why should the masses care?

THE COST OF EDUCATING THE MASSES

The cost of educating the masses to believe in even the rudiments of a conspiracy theory are vastly more than any private individual or group possesses. The vast majority of the American academic establishment in the social sciences and humanities are officially opposed to conspiracy theories, which is why they have become the pawns of the conspirators. It is a nice arrangement.

Then what can ever change the system? Simple: a change of heart among the masses. There has to be a rethinking of the fundamental presuppositions of the social order, especially the moral presuppositions. In other words, there has to be some kind of religious transformation. Under such conditions, people will re-think what they regard as morally legitimate. In that time of transition, it will be possible to undermine the existing institutional arrangements, because these institutional arrangements are built on the prevailing system of religion, ethics, and presuppositions. The economic doctrine of this religion is Keynesianism.

As long as things are muddling through, nothing fundamental is going to change. Why not? The economist will tell you: because it costs too much to change people's opinions about the present social order when the present social order seems to be delivering the goods. It is only in a time of widespread crisis, when the present social order fails to deliver the goods, that there is an outside possibility of changing the opinions of the public.

It took the Civil War to change the opinions of the voters on abolition, in both the north and south. It took the social upheaval of the 1960s to change white voters' opinions in the South regarding segregation. This is normal. People rarely change their minds after age 30. Neither do millions of people change their minds on a fundamental institution.

People will not change their minds regarding the conspiracy. They do not care. But in a crisis, they can change their minds on the legitimacy of salvation by legislation. They can abandon trust in the promises of politicians.

That will undermine the conspiracies that are dominant today.

Conclusion: don't spend much time exposing conspiracies. Spend time showing why the prevailing outlook favoring the savior state is wrong. The solution is not one more revelation about this or that conspiracy. The solution is to prepare an educational program for a breakdown in the establishment's cherished worldview. We must be able to show why this worldview priduced the disaster.

First things first.

The secret of success of any conspiracy is its ability to leverage the fundamental beliefs of the decision-makers in a society. They extend the influence of a worldview that is already operational. The conspiracy has power only because it is in fundamental agreement with the moral order that presently exists. When that moral order changes, in response to a monumental economic crisis, a different group of decision-makers will come into power, and there will be completely new terms of success for any conspiracy to gain control within this limited group of decision-makers.

DANIEL AND ESTHER

My favorite example of this system of social causation in the Bible is the book of Daniel. Daniel was called as an advisor in the final night of the Babylonian Empire. He wanted no power. He told the king that he had been weighed in the balance and had been found wanting (Daniel 5).

The next that we read about Daniel is that he is an advisor to the victor who overthrew Babylon. Daniel was the source of judicial continuity, and the new social order became favorable to the Jews. The Medo-Persian Empire let the Jews go back to Jerusalem. There was continuity, but it was not the continuity of a conspiracy. There was continuity of advice, but Daniel in no way was a member of a conspiracy. He was a member of a victimized group of the Babylonian conspiracy. He was the victim of a conspiracy: the famous story of the lion's den (Daniel 6).

The conspirators got eaten. This is one of my favorite Bible stories. Young children love it. They get the ethical picture. Bad guys finish last. I wish all conspiracy theorists believed this. Not many of them do.

The Jews were able to get better treatment under the Medo-Persians than under the Babylonians. That was because of a change of opinion at the top of the government regarding the safety of allowing Jews to return to Jerusalem. But it had nothing to do with conspiracy at the top. It had to do with a change of opinion regarding the victims of state power.

In the book of Esther, there was a conspiracy against the Jews, but there was a highly placed person in the government: Esther. She was in a position to overcome the conspiracy against the Jews. It always helps to have somebody with influence whispering in the ear of the decision-maker. We can call them "sweet somethings." Who would not like that? When you are about to be destroyed, you certainly do want that.

Haman ended up being very highly placed. Bad guys finish last.

KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS AND ITS BENEFICIARIES

The decision-makers at the top, as well as the conspirators or insiders who advise them, exercise their control in terms of an existing set of beliefs, institutions, and above all, money. Everything that they have rests on the existing social order.

In our case, influence exists in terms of a particular worldview, and that worldview is Keynesianism. The Keynesians believe that central banking, controlled by experts, and federal deficits, controlled by Congress, can be combined to keep depressions from taking place.

The centralized levers of federal government power over the economy offer tremendous opportunities for insiders to get very rich. They can extend their private power through government privilege. They can and do leverage the existing political and regulatory system, which is a centralized economic system, and in doing so, they maintain their positions.


But what if Keynesianism is theoretically inaccurate? Then the power elite has created an economic system which is like a kind of bomb with a lit fuse. If the Keynesian system is analytically accurate, the rigged game of wealth-redistribution to the largest banks can go on indefinitely. But the Keynesian system is inaccurate. There is going to be a day of reckoning. On that day of reckoning, the entire system of leverage that the conspirators have used to benefit themselves will be shaken to the core. I mean leverage in all senses: financial, intellectual, political, and institutional. It will be like the state dinner of the Babylonian rulers to which Daniel was invited. They will be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

This should be obvious to anyone who understands economic theory. But Conspiracy theorists have little understanding of economic theory. They also do not understand social theory: the theory of social change. They do not offer developed theories of institutional behavior: the transmission of power. They have almost no understanding of who the conspiracy members are or what they do. They do not know how to deal with the questions of economic cause-and-effect, social cause-and-effect, and institutional cause-and-effect.

Here is the choice: Either the Keynesians are in charge or they aren't. Either the Keynesians believe in Keynesian economics or they do not.

If they believe in Keynesian economics, and if they believe that this system will enable them to prosper, they are going to remain committed to it. They dare not believe that Keynesian economics is wrong. That would remove the lever that they have used to feather their nests, to mix metaphors, ever since the 1930s. In fact, if you look at this in terms of basic economic perspective, this battle has been going on since 1694, ever since the creation of the Bank of England. There are two rival views of money that underlie the debate over the issue of central banking. One of them is essentially a pro-gold standard position, and the other is essentially a fiat currency system. This intellectual battle has been going on in earnest for over two centuries, and there are traces of the debate even earlier. But certainly, ever since the early 1800s, the intellectual battle lines have been laid down. The institutional battle lines have reflected this.

Sometimes the bad guys lose. They lost in 1832, when they failed to get the government to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States. The textbooks universally disparage Andrew Jackson for his victory over the Bank. That is because the textbooks are written by Keynesians.

The people who are in control today defend the fiat money position of how prosperity is possible. Those of us who are on the side of the gold standard, especially the gold coin standard, argue that the fiat money position leads to booms and busts. The position of the fiat money people is that they can use fiat money to defer the day of reckoning. They believe that they can achieve something like a full-time economic boom by way of monetary expansion. The Austrian school opposes this.

A minority of people who are conspiracy theorists know a little about Austrian economics. They know that booms and busts take place in terms of fiat money policies. But they have a naïve view that Keynesians, who deny the truth of Austrian economics, have somehow used their understanding of Keynesian economics to deliberately create booms and busts, and to position themselves on the right side of the trade every time. Tell that to Dick Fuld.

I am not buying it. I have never bought it.

FAITH IN THE STATE

The conspirators are not God. They do not predestinate the world. They are temporary possessors of influence, power, and money because they have adopted a particular view of economic intervention which the general public also believes. They believe the state is the Savior in history. The state is the healer. They believe that the state is the closest thing there is to God walking on earth.

So do most of the voters. The voters also believe that the state can intervene to protect them. They are beginning to lose this faith, for good reason, but this is what they still believe. This is what they have been taught in public schools for over 100 years. Why should we expect and believe anything different?

The conspirators and the masses hold the same view of civil government. This view is incorrect. It is going to blow up in the conspirators' faces, and it is going to blow up in the masses' faces. It is a false religion, and it will ultimately produce enormous losses for those who believe in it.

This is why I completely reject the idea that the conspiracy is behind all of the economic slumps. The conspiracy loses money in the slumps, and in some cases, they lose all of their money. I do not mean little conspirators; I mean big boys. Dick Fuld was a big boy. He just was not as big a boy as Hank Paulson was.

I believe that if John Kerry had won the election of 2004, there would have been a different secretary of the treasury in power in 2008. If that been the case, Lehman Brothers probably would have weathered the storm. It makes a difference which Skull and Bones member is elected. It makes a difference which fractionally reserved mega-bank survives.

ENGINEER BEN

The conspirators are not God. They do not predestinate. They do not understand Austrian economics. They are committed to Keynesianism. They are riding on the back of the tiger. We are on the back of the tiger with them.

To shift metaphors, the economic train is racing towards a burning trestle. The conspirators did not start the fire on the trestle deliberately, but it was the inevitable outcome of the Keynesian economic policies which they have adopted. To think that they have engineered past economic crises is to think that they have engineered this one.

They have laid the foundations of this crisis. But they have done so in the Keynesian faith that there will be no crisis. The fact that they have caused past crises does not mean that they planned them.

The bearded engineer in the cab is not deliberately trying to run the train over the burning trestle. He does not believe that the trestle is on fire. When Austrian economists say that it is on fire, and ask the engineer to look at the smoke, he insists that the smoke is coming from a barbecue to which all the people in Trestle City have been invited. They are having a party, and everybody on the train gets to attend.

"Full speed ahead."

I hope you understand this. I fear that not many Tea Party supporters do.

CONCLUSION

Then what is to be done? Individuals must work to develop and master a comprehensive critique of the prevailing establishment's worldview: salvation by legislation.

The correct goal is to shrink the state to where it won't matter much who controls it.

Shrink the power of the power elite by shrinking the establishment's lever: the state. Any other program is a waste of effort. Any program to expose a conspiracy without a program to de-fund it only adds to the prestige of the conspiracy. It makes the conspiracy look smarter than it is.

Never forget this: a conspiracy is no smarter than the tenured bureaucrats who administer the government's legislation. In short, not all that smart.

Final note: If you remain skeptical, please read Numbers 14:1-25. There are always giants. They are always vulnerable.

http://www.garynorth.com/public/10681.cfm

Last edited by Alex Linder; February 20th, 2013 at 11:23 AM.
 
Old August 28th, 2013 #7
Bardamu
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Originally Posted by lancsDavid View Post
i can't work u out. ur signature seems quite hate-filled. i'm guessing u know this & wear it like a badge. trouble is, it makes u seem like ur thinking is very simplistic. which suggests its not worth (me) putting in the time to read ur post (cos its long)

but i caught the end of it - the part about needing a bottom-up transformation of society. i agree with this. i just wouldn't want to live in one where people were mean to jews, black people or anyone else who was different
Someone with this writing style accusing another of the appearance of simplistic thinking.
 
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