“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population…. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
George Kennan, secret U.S. State Department memo, 1948
Feminism is Key to the “Making of a Slave”
November 4, 2009
by Henry Makow Ph.D.
When a reader tipped me to a talk delivered by a slave owner in 1712, entitled “The Making of a Slave,” I decided to compare past and present.
Past methods of enslavement were highly sophisticated, and closely resemble modern feminist social engineering.
Willie Lynch was a British slave owner in the West Indies. He was invited to the colony of Virginia in 1712 to teach his methods to slave owners there.
He advised slave owners to foster division, “fear, envy and distrust for control.” Pit young versus old, light skinned versus dark skinned and most importantly, male versus female.
In a section called “The Breaking Process of the African Woman,” he advocated shifting her dependency from the African male to the slave owner. This is achieved by beating and humiliating the male in front of the female. Then, beating the female if she doesn’t get the message. This instills a kind of frigidity.
“We reversed nature by burning and pulling a civilized nigger apart, and bull whipping the other to the point of death, all in her presence. By her being left alone, unprotected, with the male image destroyed, the ordeal caused her to move from her psychological dependent state to a frozen independent state. In this frozen psychological state of independence, she will raise her male and female offspring in reverse roles.”
“For fear of the young male’s life she will psychologically train him to be mentally weak and dependent, but physically strong. Because she has become psychologically independent, she will train her female offspring to be psychologically independent. What have you got? You’ve got the nigger woman out front and the nigger man behind and scared. This is a perfect situation of sound sleep and economic.”
She will teach her female offspring “to be like herself, independent and negotiable (…we negotiate her at will.)” She will raise her “nigger male offspring to be mentally dependent and weak, but physically strong, in other words body over mind.”
“We will mate and breed them and continue the cycle. This is good and sound and long range comprehensive planning.”
Sound familiar? We recognize these patterns in the US Black community, and, thanks to the hidden agenda of feminism, increasingly in the White.
AVOIDING SELF CORRECTION
“Willie Lynch” starts to sound like the Cabalist author of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
“By reversing the positions of the male and female savages, we created an orbited cycle that turns on its own axis forever..” But “our experts” warned us of the danger that the mind might correct itself “if it can touch some substantial historical base.” They advised us to “shave off the brute’s mental history and create a multiplicity of phenomena of illusions, so that each illusion will twirl in its own orbit, sometimes similar to floating balls in a vacuum.”
I haven’t heard our society described better. Our collective identity (race, religion,nation and family) is being systematically erased and replaced by air. “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas…” G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health.
Lynch goes on to promote interracial breeding so the slaves are different shades of color befitting different levels of labor “and different values of illusion at each connecting level of labor.”
“Cross breeding niggers means taking so many drops of good white blood and putting them into as many nigger women as possible, varying the drops by the various tones that you want, and then letting them breed with each other until another cycle of color appears as you desire.”
In Orwellian fashion, Lynch concludes by stressing the importance of creating a new language befitting slavery. “We must completely annihilate the mother tongue of the new nigger…”
Again sounding like a Cabalist, he says, “language is a peculiar institution. It leads to the heart of a people. The more a foreigner knows about the language of a country the more he is able to move through all levels of that society. Therefore if the foreigner is an enemy, the country is vulnerable to attack or invasion of a foreign culture.”
For example, the slave should learn the term “hog pen” but never “house.”
CONCLUSION
Some people think this speech is apocryphal. The language has been modernized. Was the term “nigger” used in 1712?
However, Blacks seem to think the speech is genuine. It is on many Black websites.
The point is that we are being socially engineered to be slaves in much the same way as Blacks were, and by the very same people.
The modern female has been “frozen psychologically” and now depends on the slave owner (government, corporation) for her security. The modern male is emasculated, strong in body but not in mind, grateful to be allowed to serve a master, often a woman.
–
Related–Makow “The Cabalist Plot to Enslave Humanity”
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=8081
Tolerance is a Guise for Social Engineering
Jews in the Slave Trade
From Gareth in South Africa:
I’m a “Coloured” male from South Africa and my forefathers also come from history of slavery and colonialism. Ours is the best example of pitting different skin tones, male/female against each other.
I’ve been following your site for a few months and recognized that ‘they’ are basically trying to achieve with white people what was done to us through slavery. I see many white men maybe disillusioned with white women because of the effects of Feminism opt to go for coloured women. Maybe cause they feel they getting an old-fashion traditional wife. What they don’t know is that they’re getting the same “psychologically frozen” and “independent and negotiable” woman. The coloured woman opts for white males because her psychological dependancy on “the slaveowner” and ineffectiveness of coloured men.
From what I read, the same is happening in America with African American females and white men. I believe the objective in creating this interracial union is to destroy language and culture because the woman of color and their off-spring will adopt the her white male’s culture/customs and forget her own. This is how many indigenous cultures (including my own) were diluted around the world, by colonial men raping/marrying indigenous women after their own indigenous men has been rendered ineffectual.
—
Just to give you an outline of us ‘coloured’ people here in South Africa. We are basically the result of a mixture between colonial men and indigenous and slave women imported from Asia and other parts of Africa.
Those ‘Lynch methods’ were very much employed amongst us. The result of it all is that we are a “nation” with no cultural identity (because of our extensive mixture), no socio-economic or political foothold. We are like a political whore being passed around, putting our trust in every and anyone accept ourselves.
I suspect that this is what the Illuminati has in store for everyone. The destruction of culture, race and religion as you’ve outlined in your articles. But ours is a classical example of it if you want to study and see it first hand. Strides are being made forward though and we are positive about our future. Many are rediscovering their previous cultural identities.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_Special_Forces_Foreign_Internal_Defense_Tactics_Techniques_and_Procedures_for_Special_Forces%2C_FM_31.20-3%2C_2003
The manual directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and (under varying circumstances) the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates employing terrorists or prosecuting individuals for terrorism who are not terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of subterfuge and “psychological operations” (propaganda) to make these and other “population & resource control” measures more palatable.
This week the Communication Workers Union (CWU) announced that 120,000 postal workers at the Royal Mail have voted to go on a two day strike over “outstanding problems of job security, work levels, bullying, and reward”. A persistent belligerence on behalf of management, such as the rejection of CWU proposed compromises earlier this week, led to strike action being confirmed.
Furthermore, a leaked Royal Mail document makes clear that if management does not get what it wants then things have already been “positioned [..] in such a way as there is shareholder, customer and internal support for implementation of changes without agreement”. It should be noted here that the Royal Mail is a nationalised industry and so the word ’shareholder’ actually means ’state’.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am a believer in the free market and do not want to see the continued existence of state-owned firms – even if they treated their workers like kings. But Socialist ideals run just as deep in my veins as Libertarian ones, and as such, I will defend to the hilt any attempt by my peers to collectively organise for improved conditions regardless if those attempts take place by workers within state ran enterprises.
These beliefs however, put me at odds with conventional wisdom, and I have been told many times by traditional right/left statists that it is impossible to reconcile Socialism with the free market. But conventional wisdom is founded on a number of incorrect assumptions and claims.
To demonstrate how a libertarian society is in complete accordance with the interests of organised labour, I shall go over a few of the claims made by the statist left/right regarding industrial disputes, and shine light on where they are going wrong.
Claim 1: The strike only serves to damage ordinary people/customers. By disrupting public services, strikes hit the small businessman, cooperative enterprise, and self employed tradesman the hardest. Think of all those Ebay and Bargain Pages traders who will suffer by this action.
Response: The key to understanding why this might be the case is to pay attention to the word ‘public’ – i.e. state ran. By subsidising, or fully owning, an industry, the state creates a monopoly which restricts alternatives to that organisation.
In a free market, setting up alternative structures of service provision becomes far easier. Without government regulations, taxes and zoning laws etc, the start-up costs are far lower and so within the reach of individuals/community organisations. Without the unfair advantage that government subsidy provides, a newly formed small enterprise would have an even playing field to compete on.
Minus a state cartelised economy, alternatives to the postal system in times of industrial dispute would be freely available, and the damage to the independent trader would be barely perceptible.
Claim 2: Striking only hurts the strikers because it causes damage to the company that employs them. This could eventually lead to the business failing or employees being laid off. Unionism hurts the working class.
Response: This is half true, striking favours working people but does indeed cause damage to the company that employs them – thats the point! I do not say this because I enjoy watching people lose their livelihood, I say this because I am a Libertarian who wants to see the people that create wealth receiving that wealth back – i.e. those that operate the sorting machines, deliver the parcels, clean the floors and run the canteens etc.
Let us consider for a second what a market economy actually is. It is essentially a system of comparing efficiencies – those forms of organisation that provide services in the most efficient manner are the ones that will prevail. A company that routinely craps on its employees would, in an economy that permits freedom to unionise, face many more disruptions to its production than a company that treats its employees well.
The most efficient form of organisation would therefore be the one that has the happiest workers, and research shows that implementing participatory practices in the workplace is the most successful route to achieving this. So genuine free markets favour employee-controlled business, and the prospects of a company failing due to strike action only really persists in our current system of restricted unionism – in a genuine free market it is unlikely that these exploitative business models would even be set up, let alone survive long enough to cause serious damage when they fall by the wayside.
Claim 3: These strikers only ever have power when a government monopoly exists. Just look at the low rate of unionisation in the private sector, that demonstrates how organised labour could never survive in a free market and is at root a statist construct.
As mentioned above, we do not have complete freedom to organise for collective action. For example, it is illegal for workers to engage in solidarity striking, there is a ban on closed-shops, and there are legal requirements to vote before a strike takes place. Unions then, are not statist in nature. In reality their powers are curtailed by state legislation that encourages a balance of power in favour of hierarchical capital.
Claim 4: Unionism is anti free-market because is disrupts commerce. I remember the 1970’s when unions had so much power that the economy went down the pan. These union types are all Commies. Bring back Thatcher!
The situation in the 1970’s was that the state had co-opted the power of organised labour. The nature of a statist union is completely different to the nature of a free-market union, which is the natural expression of an unmet need. In this context, collective bargaining is a process akin to the interplay of supply and demand in which needs and abilities are matched through the market mechanism.
It does not matter who is at the controls of the state apparatus or who they claim to be controlling it for. The Soviet Union was no more worker-owned than corporatist Italy under Mussolini, or current day China. The state will always operate in its own interests, and in the interests of a ruling minority. Thatcher was similar in this respect to a soviet apparatchik, the only difference is that she chose the capitalist class to be the ruling elite rather than the union bosses.
The limits that she imposed on union activity created a situation of ’sticky contracts’ that are analogous to the notion of ’sticky prices’. For markets to operate freely, there needs to be real-time flexibility for labour to renegotiate the terms of employment at any given moment (similar to the way that there needs to be a responsive price mechanism to prevent unequal exchange).
Without this flexibility, the equal exchange of payment for labour is replaced by the exploitative exchange of payment for labour power. That is to say, an ability for an employer to refuse to pass on gains in productivity to the worker – hence the extraction of surplus value. The Thatcher/Reagan model of a ‘free-market’ is no more about genuine free-markets than a state-socialist model.
Given all these points I hope it is a little clearer why I believe that the only route to genuine Socialism is via the genuine free-market. The value that organised labour can provide for a society is as vast as the value provided by free enterprise. Given the current system in which the power of labour is suppressed by the state, support for striking workers is an anti-statist position and so should be encouraged by anyone with a Libertarian streak.
From notches in split pieces of wood to the fractional reserve system and fiat money. Money is the most abstract yet the most sought after commodity.
Let’s Go Forward
Tell someone you are going to a convention of accountants and you might get a few yawns, yet money and how it works is probably one of the most interesting things on earth.
It is fascinating and almost magical how money appeared on our planet. Unlike most developments we enjoy, which can be traced back to a source, civilisation or inventor, money appeared in places then unconnected all over the world in a remarkably similar way.
Consider the American Indians using Wampum, West Africans trading in decorative metallic objects called Manillas and the Fijians economy based on whales teeth, some of which are still legal tender; add to that shells, amber, ivory, decorative feathers, cattle including oxen & pigs, a large number of stones including jade and quartz which have all been used for trade across the world, and we get a taste of the variety of accepted currency.
There is something charming and childlike imagining primitive societies, our ancestors, using all these colourful forms of money. As long as everyone concerned can agree on a value, this is a sensible thing for a community to do.
After all, the person who has what you need might not need what you have to trade. Money solves that problem neatly. Real value with each exchange, and everyone gaining from the convenience. The idea is really inspired which might explain why so many diverse minds came up with it.
But all is not well
“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”
President James Madison
Money, money, money, it’s always just been there, right? Wrong.
Obviously it’s issued by the government to make it easy for us to exchange things. Wrong again!
Truth is most people don’t realise that the issuing of money is essentially a private business, and that the privilege of issuing money has been a major bone of contention throughout history.
Wars have been fought and depressions have been caused in the battle over who issues the money; however the majority of us are not aware of this, and this is largely due to the fact that the winning side became and increasingly continues to be a vital and respected member of our global society, having an influence over large aspects of our lives including our education, our media and our governments.
While we might feel powerless in trying to stop the manipulation of money for private profit at our expense, it is easy to forget that we collectively give money its value. We have been taught to believe printed pieces of paper have special value, and because we know others believe this too, we are willing to work all our lives to get what we are convinced others will want.
An honest look at history will show us how our innocent trust has been misused.
Let’s start our exploration of money with:
Jesus Flips (many coins) 33 A.D.
Jesus was so upset by the sight of the money changers in the temple, he waded in and started to tip over the tables and drive them out with a whip, this being the one and only time we ever hear of him using force during his entire ministry.
So what caused the ultimate pacifist to become so aggressive?
For a long time the Jews had been called upon to pay their temple tax with a special coin called the half shekelshekel. It was a measured half ounce of pure silver with no image of a pagan emperor on it.
It was to them the only coin acceptable to God.
But because there was only a limited number of these coins in circulation, the money changers were in a buyers market and like with anything else in short supply, they were able to raise the price to what the market would bear.
They made huge profits with their monopoly on these coins and turned this time of devotion into a mockery for profit. Jesus saw this as stealing from the people and proclaimed the whole setup to be. “A den of thieves”. 1
Once money is accepted as a form of exchange, those who produce, loan out and manipulate the quantity of money are obviously in a very strong position. They are the “Money Changers”.
1. King James NT, Mt 21:13, Mr 11:17, Lu 19:46
Medievel England (1000 – 1100 A.D.)
Here we find goldsmith’s offering to keep other people’s gold and silver safe in their vaults, and in return people walking away with a receipt for what they have left there.
These paper receipts soon became popular for trade as they were less heavy to carry around than gold and silver coins.
After a while, the goldsmith’s must have noticed that only a small percentage of their depositor’s ever came in to demand their gold at any one time. So cleverly the goldsmith’s made out some receipts for gold which didn’t even exist, and then they loaned it out to earn interest.
A nod and a wink amongst themselves, they incorporated this practice into the banking system. They even gave it a name to make it seem more acceptable, christening the practice ‘Fractional Reserve Banking’ which translates to mean, lending out many times more money than you have assets on deposit.
Today banks are allowed to loan out at least ten times the amount they actually are holding, so while you wonder how they get rich charging you 11% interest, it’s not 11% a year they make on that amount but actually 110%.
The Tally Sticks (1100 – 1854)
King Henry the First produced sticks of polished wood, with notches cut along one edge to signify the denominations. The stick was then split full length so each piece still had a record of the notches.
The King kept one half for proof against counterfeiting, and then spent the other half into the market place where it would continue to circulate as money.
Because only Tally Sticks were accepted by Henry for payment of taxes, there was a built in demand for them, which gave people confidence to accept these as money.
He could have used anything really, so long as the people agreed it had value, and his willingness to accept these sticks as legal tender made it easy for the people to agree. Money is only as valuable as peoples faith in it, and without that faith even today’s money is just paper.
The tally stick system worked really well for 726 years. It was the most successful form of currency in recent history and the British Empire was actually built under the Tally Stick system, but how is it that most of us are not aware of its existence?
Perhaps the fact that in 1694 the Bank of England at its formation attacked the Tally Stick System gives us a clue as to why most of us have never heard of them. They realised it was money outside the power of the money changers, (the very thing King Henry had intended).
What better way to eliminate the vital faith people had in this rival currency than to pretend it simply never existed and not discuss it. That seems to be what happened when the first shareholder’s in the Bank of England bought their original shares with notched pieces of wood and retired the system. You heard correctly, they bought shares. The Bank of England was set up as a privately owned bank through investors buying shares. Even the Banks resent nationalisation is not what it at first may appear, as its independent resources unceasingly multiply and dividends continue to be produced for its shareholder’s.
These investors, who’s names were kept secret, were meant to invest one and a quarter million pounds, but only three quarters of a million was received when it was chartered in 1694.
It then began to lend out many times more than it had in reserve, collecting interest on the lot.
This is not something you could just impose on people without preparation. The money changers needed to created the climate to make the formation of this private concern seem acceptable.
Here’s how they did it.
With King Henry VIII relaxing the Usury Laws in the 1500’s, the money changers flooded the market with their gold and silver coins becoming richer by the minute.
The English Revolution of 1642 was financed by the money changers backing Oliver Cromwell’s successful attempt to purge the parliament and kill King Charles. What followed was 50 years of costly wars. Costly to those fighting them and profitable to those financing them.
So profitable that it allowed the money changers to take over a square mile of property still known as the City of London, which remains one of the three main financial centres in the world today.
The 50 years of war left England in financial ruin. The government officials went begging for loans from guess who, and the deal proposed resulted in a government sanctioned, privately owned bank which could produce money from nothing, essentially legally counterfeiting a national currency for private gain.
Now the politicians had a source from which to borrow all the money they wanted to borrow, and the debt created was secured against public taxes.
You would think someone would have seen through this, and realised they could produce their own money and owe no interest, but instead the Bank of England has been used as a model and now nearly every nation has a Central Bank with fractional reserve banking at its core.
These central banks have the power to take over a nations economy and become that nations real governing force. What we have here is a scam of mammoth proportions covering what is actually a hidden tax, being collected by private concerns.
The country sells bonds to the bank in return for money it cannot raise in taxes. The bonds are paid for by money produced from thin air. The government pays interest on the money it borrowed by borrowing more money in the same way. There is no way this debt can ever be paid, it has and will continue to increase.
If the government did find a way to pay off the debt, the result would be that there would be no bonds to back the currency, so to pay the debt would be to kill the currency.
With its formation the Bank of England soon flooded Britain with money. With no quality control and no insistence on value for money, prices doubled with money being thrown in every direction.
One company was even offering to drain the Red Sea to find Egyptian gold lost when the sea closed in on their pursuit of Moses.
By1698 the national debt expanded from £1,250,000 to £16,000,000 and up went the taxes the debt was secured on.
As hard as it might be to believe, in times of economic upheaval, wealth is rarely destroyed and instead is often only transferred. And who benefits the most when money is scarce? You may have guessed. It’s those controlling what everyone else wants, the money changer’s.
When the majority of people are suffering through economic depression, you can be sure that a minority of people are continuing to get rich.
Even today the Bank of England expresses its determination to prevent the ups and downs of booms and depressions, yet there have been nothing but ups and downs since its formation with the British pound rarely being stable.
One thing however has been stable and that is the growing fortune of:
The Rothschilds (1743)
A goldsmith named Amshall Moses Bower opened a counting house in Frankfurt Germany in 1743. He placed a Roman eagle on a red shield over the door prompting people to call his shop the Red Shield Firm pronounced in German as “Rothschild”.
His son later changed his name to Rothschild when he inherited the business. Loaning money to individuals was all well and good but he soon found it much more profitable loaning money to governments and Kings. It always involved much bigger amounts, always secured from public taxes.
Once he got the hang of things he set his sights on the world by training his five sons in the art of money creation, before sending them out to the major financial centres of the world to create and dominate the central banking systems.
J.P. Morgan was thought by many to be the richest man in the world during the second world war, but upon his death it was discovered he was merely a lieutenant within the Rothschild empire owning only 19% of the J.P. Morgan Companies.
“There is but one power in Europe and that is Rothschild.”
19th century French commentator (1)
We will explore a little more about the richest family a little later, after we’ve had a look at:
(1) Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848
The American Revolution (1764 – 1781)
By the mid 1700’s Britain was at its height of power, but was also heavily in debt.
Since the creation of the Bank of England, they had suffered four costly wars and the total debt now stood at £140,000,000, (which in those days was a lot of money).
In order to make their interest payments to the bank, the British government set about a programme to try to raise revenues from their American colonies, largely through an extensive programme of taxation.
There was a shortage of material for minting coins in the colonies, so they began to print their own paper money, which they called Colonial Script. This provided a very successful means of exchange and also gave the colonies a sense of identity. Colonial Script was money provided to help the exchange of goods. It was debt free paper money not backed by gold or silver.
During a visit to Britain in 1763, The Bank of England asked Benjamin Franklin how he would account for the new found prosperity in the colonies. Franklin replied.
“That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Script. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers.
In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.”
Benjamin Franklin (1)
America had learned that the people’s confidence in the currency was all they needed, and they could be free of borrowing debts. That would mean being free of the Bank of England.
In Response the world’s most powerful independent bank used its influence on the British parliament to press for the passing of the Currency Act of 1764.
This act made it illegal for the colonies to print their own money, and forced them to pay all future taxes to Britain in silver or gold.
Here is what Franklin said after that.
“In one year, the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed.”
Benjamin Franklin
“The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the PRIME reason for the Revolutionary War.”
Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography
By the time the war began on 19th April 1775 much of the gold and silver had been taken by British taxation. They were left with no other choice but to print money to finance the war.
What is interesting here is that Colonial Script was actually working so well, it became a threat to the established economic system of the time.
The idea of issuing money as Franklin put it “in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry” and not charging any interest, was not causing any problems or inflation. This unfortunately was alien to the Bank of England which only issued money for the sake of making a profit for its shareholder’s.
(1) Congressman Charles G. Binderup of Nebraska, Unrobing the Ghosts of Wall Street
The Bank of North America (1781-1785)
If you can’t beat them, join them, might well have been his argument when arms dealer, Robert Morris suggested he be allowed to set up a Bank of England style central bank in the USA in 1781.
Desperate for money, the $400,000 he proposed to deposit, to allow him to loan out many times that through fractional reserve banking, must have looked really attractive to the impoverished American Government.
Already spending the money they would be loaned, no one made a fuss when Robert Morris couldn’t raise the deposit, and instead suggested he might use some gold, which had been loaned to America from France.
Once in, he simply used fractional reserve banking, and with the banks growing fortune he loaned to himself, and his friends the money to buy up all the remaining shares. The bank then began to loan out money multiplied by this new amount to eager politicians, who were probably too drunk with the new ‘power cash’ to notice or care how it was done.
The scam lasted five years until in 1785, with the value of American money dropping like a lead balloon. The banks charter didn’t get renewed.
The shareholder’s walking off with the interest did not go unnoticed by the governor.
“The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will… They will have the same effect here as elsewhere, if we do not, by (the power of) government, keep them in their proper spheres.”
Governor Morris (1)
(1) The Constitutional Convention of 1787, 7/2
First Bank of The United States (1791-1811)
It worked once, it will work again. It’s been six years. There are a lot of new hungry politicians. Let’s give it a try. And so there it was, in 1791, the First Bank of the United States (BUS). Not only deceptively named to sound official, but also to take attention away from the real first bank which had been shut down.
Its initials however gave a clear indication that Americans were once again being taken for a ride. And true to its British model, the name of the investors was never revealed.
Having gotten away with it a second time, some of them probably wished Amshall Rothschild had picked a different time to make his pronouncement from his private central bank in Frankfurt.
“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790
Not to worry, no one was listening, the American government borrowed 8.2 million dollars from the bank in the first 5 years and prices rose by 72%. This time round the money changer’s had learned their lesson, they had guaranteed a twenty year charter.
The president, who could see an ever increasing debt, with no chance of ever paying back, had this to say.
“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution – taking from the federal government their power of borrowing.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1798
While the independent press, who had not been bought off yet, called the scam “a great swindle, a vulture, a viper, and a cobra.”
As with the real first bank, the government had been the only depositor to put up any real money, with the remainder being raised from loans the investors made to each other, using the magic of fractional reserve banking. When time came for renewal of the charter, the bankers were warning of bad times ahead if they didn’t get what they wanted. The charter was not renewed.
Five month later Britain had attacked America and started the war of 1812.
Meanwhile a short time earlier, an independent Rothschild business, the Bank of France, was being looked upon with suspicion by none other than:
Napoleon (1803 – 1825)
He didn’t trust the bank saying:
“When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes… Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”
Napoleon Bonaparte, 1815
For both sides of a war to be loaned money from the same privately owned Central Bank is not unusual. Nothing generates debt like war. A Nation will borrow any amount to win. So naturally if the loser is kept going to the last straw in a vain hope of winning, then the more resources will be used up by the winning side before their victory is obtained more resources used, more loans taken out, more money made by the bankers; and even more amazing, the loans are usually given on condition that the victor pays the debts left by the loser.
In 1803, instead of borrowing from the bank, Napoleon sold territory west of the Mississippi to the 3rd President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson for 3 million dollars in gold; a deal known as the Louisiana Purchase.
Three million dollars richer, Napoleon quickly gathered together an army and set about conquering much of Europe.
Each place he went to, Napoleon found his opposition being financed by the Bank of England, making huge profits as Prussia, Austria and finally Russia all went heavily into debt trying to stop him.
Four years later, with the main French army in Russia, Nathan Rothschild took charge of a bold plan to smuggle a shipment of gold through France to finance an attack from Spain by the Duke of Wellington.
Wellington’s attack from the south and other defeats eventually forced Napoleon into exile. However in 1815 he escaped from his banishment in Elba, an Island off the coast of Italy, and returned to Paris.
By March of that year Napoleon had equipped an army with the help of borrowed money from the Eubard Banking House of Paris.
With 74,000 French troops led by Napoleon, sizing up to meet 67,000 British and other European Troops 200 miles NE of Paris on June 18th 1815, it was a difficult one to call. Back in London, the real potential winner, Nathan Rothschild, was poised to strike in a bold plan to take control of the British stock market, the bond market, and possibly even the Bank of England.
Nathan, knowing that information is power, stationed his trusted agent named Rothworth near the battle field.
As soon as the battle was over Rothworth quickly returned to London, delivering the news to Rothschild 24 hours ahead of Wellington’s courier.
A victory by Napoleon would have devastated Britain’s financial system. Nathan stationed himself in his usual place next to an ancient pillar in the stock market.
This powerful man was not without observers as he hung his head, and began openly to sell huge numbers of British Government Bonds.
Reading this to mean that Napoleon must have won, everyone started to sell their British Bonds as well.
The bottom fell out of the market until you couldn’t hardly give them away. Meanwhile Rothschild began to secretly buy up all the hugely devalued bonds at a fraction of what they were worth a few hours before.
In this way Nathan Rothschild captured more in one afternoon than the combined forces of Napoleon and Wellington had captured in their entire lifetime.
The 19th century became known as the age of the Rothschild’s when it was estimated they controlled half of the world’s wealth.
While their wealth continues to increase today, they have managed to blend into the background, giving an impression that their power has waned.
They only apply the Rothschild name to a small fraction of the companies they actually control.
Some authors claim that the Rothschild’s had not only taken over the Bank of England but they had also in 1816 backed a new privately owned Central Bank in America called The Second Bank of The United States, causing huge problems to the American president.
Andrew Jackson (1828 – 1836)
When the American congress voted to renew the charter of The Second Bank of The United States, Jackson responded by using his veto to prevent the renewal bill from passing. His response gives us an interesting insight.
“It is not our own citizens only who are to receive the bounty of our government. More than eight millions of the stock of this bank are held by foreigners… is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country?… Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence… would be more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy. If government would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favour alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.”
Andrew Jackson (1)
In 1832 Jackson ordered the withdrawal of government deposits from the Second bank and instead had them put into safe banks.
The Second Banks head, Nicholas Biddle was quite candid about the power and intention of the bank when he openly threatened to cause a depression if the bank was not re-chartered, we quote.
“Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on Congress… Our only safety is in pursuing a steady course of firm restriction – and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and the re-charter of the bank.”
Nicholas Biddle 1836
By calling in existing loans and refusing to issue new loans he did cause a massive depression, but in 1836 when the charter ran out, the Second Bank ceased to function. It was then he made these two famous statements: “The Bank is trying to kill me – but I will kill it!” and later “If the American people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system – there would be a revolution before morning…”
Andrew Jackson
When asked what he felt was the greatest achievement of his career Andrew Jackson replied without hesitation “I killed the bank!”
However we will see this was not the end of private financial influence passing itself off as official when we look at…
(1) Andrew Jackson, Veto of the Bank Bill, to the Senate, (1832)
Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (1861 – 1865)
With the Central Bank killed off, fractional reserve banking moved like a virus through numerous state chartered banks instead causing the instability this form of economics thrives on.
When people lose their homes someone else wins them for a fraction of their worth. Depression is good news to the lender; but war causes even more debt and dependency than anything else, so if the money changers couldn’t have their Central Bank with a license to print money, a war it would have to be.
We can see from this quote of the then chancellor of Germany that slavery was not the only cause for the American Civil War.
“The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the US, if they remained as one block, and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world.”
Otto von Bismark chancellor of Germany 1876
On the 12th of April 1861 this economic war began.
Predictably Lincoln, needing money to finance his war effort, went with his secretary of the treasury to New York to apply for the necessary loans. The money changers wishing the Union to fail offered loans at 24% to 36%. Lincoln declined the offer.
An old friend of Lincoln’s, Colonel Dick Taylor of Chicago was put in charge of solving the problem of how to finance the war.
His solution is recorded as this.
“Just get Congress to pass a bill authorising the printing of full legal tender treasury notes… and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also.”
Colonel Dick Taylor
When Lincoln asked if the people of America would accept the notes Taylor said.
“The people or anyone else will not have any choice in the matter, if you make them full legal tender. They will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution.”
Colonel Dick Taylor (1)
Lincoln agreed to try this solution and printed 450 million dollars worth of the new bills using green ink on the back to distinguish them from other notes.
“The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers…..
The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity.
By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges. The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.”
Abraham Lincoln (2)
From this we see that the solution worked so well Lincoln was seriously considering adopting this emergency measure as a permanent policy.
This would have been great for everyone except the money changers who quickly realised how dangerous this policy would be for them. They wasted no time in expressing their view in the London Times. Oddly enough, while the article seems to have been designed to discourage this creative financial policy, in its put down we’re clearly able to see the policies goodness.
“If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”
Hazard Circular – London Times 1865
From this extract its plan to see that it is the advantage provided by the adopting of this policy which poses a threat to those not using it.
1863, nearly there, Lincoln needed just a bit more money to win the war, and seeing him in this vulnerable state, and knowing that the president could not get the congressional authority to issue more greenbacks, the money changers proposed the passing of the National Bank Act. The act went through.
From this point on the entire US money supply would be created out of debt by bankers buying US government bonds and issuing them from reserves for bank notes.
The greenbacks continued to be in circulation until 1994, their numbers were not increased but in fact decreased.
“In numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.”
John Kenneth Galbrath
The American economy has been based on government debt since 1864 and it is locked into this system. Talk of paying off the debt without first reforming the banking system is just talk and a complete impossibility.
That same year Lincoln had a pleasant surprise. Turns out the Tsar of Russia, Alexander II, was well aware of the money changers scam. The Tsar was refusing to allow them to set up a central bank in Russia.
If Lincoln could limit the power of the money changers and win the war, the bankers would not be able to split America and hand it back to Britain and France as planned. The Tsar knew that this handing back would come at a cost which would eventually need to be paid back by attacking Russia, it being clearly in the money changers sights.
The Tsar declared that if France or Britain gave help to the South, Russia would consider this an act of war. Britain and France would instead wait in vain to have the wealth of the colonies returned to them, and while they waited Lincoln won the civil war.
With an election coming up the next year, Lincoln himself would wait for renewed public support before reversing the National Bank Act he had been pressured into approving during the war.
Lincoln’s opposition to the central banks financial control and a proposed return to the gold standard is well documented. He would certainly have killed off the national banks monopoly had he not been killed himself only 41 days after being re-elected.
The money changers were pressing for a gold standard because gold was scarce and easier to have a monopoly over.
Much of this was already waiting in their hands and each gold merchant was well aware that what they really had could be easily made to seem like much much more.
Silver would only widen the field and lower the share so they pressed for…
(1) Lincoln By Emil Ludwig 1930, containing a letter from Lincoln, also reprinted in Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy A Manuscript Collection of the Letters of Charles H. Lanphier compiled by Charles C. Patton.
(2) Abraham Lincoln. Senate document 23, Page 91. 1865.
The Return of the Gold Standard (1866 – 1881)
“Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln’s brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution.”
W.Cleon Skousen.
Even after his death, the idea that America might print its own debt free money set off warning bells throughout the entire European banking community.
On April 12th in 1866, the American congress passed the Contraction Act, allowing the treasury to call in and retire some of Lincoln’s greenbacks, With only the banks standing to gain from this, it’s not hard to work out the source of this action.
To give the American public the false impression that they would be better off under the gold standard, the money changers used the control they had to cause economic instability and panic the people.
This was fairly easy to do by calling in existing loans and refusing to issue new ones, a tried and proven method of causing depression. They would then spread the word through the media they largely controlled that the lack of a single gold standard was the cause of the hardship which ensued, while all this time using the Contraction Act to lower the amount of money in circulation.
It went from
$1.8 billion in circulation in 1866 allowing $50.46 per person,
to $1.3 billion in 1867 allowing $44.00 per person,
to $0.6 billion in 1876 making only $14.60 per person and down
to $0.4 billion only ten years later leaving only $6.67 per person
and a continually growing population.
Most people believe the economists when they tell us that recessions and depressions are part of the natural flow, but in truth the money supply is controlled by a small minority who have always done so and will continue to do so if we let them.
By 1872 the American public was beginning to feel the squeeze, so the Bank of England, scheming in the back rooms, sent Ernest Seyd, with lots of money to bribe congress into demonetising silver.
Ernest drafted the legislation himself, which came into law with the passing of the Coinage Act, effectively stopping the minting of silver that year. Here’s what he said about his trip, obviously pleased with himself.
“I went to America in the winter of 1872-73, authorised to secure, if I could, the passage of a bill demonetising silver. It was in the interest of those I represented – the governors of the Bank of England – to have it done. By 1873, gold coins were the only form of coin money.”
Ernest Seyd
Or as explained by Senator Daniel of Virginia “In 1872 silver being demonetized in Germany, England, and Holland, a capital of 100,000 pounds ($500,000.00) was raised, Ernest Seyd was sent to this country with this fund as agent for foreign bond holders to effect the same object (demonetization of silver)”. 1
Within three years, with 30% of the work force unemployed, the American people began to harken back to the days of silver backed money and the greenbacks.
The US Silver Commission was set up to study the problem and responded with telling history:
“The disaster of the Dark Ages was caused by decreasing money and falling prices… Without money, civilisation could not have had a beginning, and with a diminishing supply, it must languish and unless relieved, finally perish. At the Christian era the metallic money of the Roman Empire amounted to $1,800,million. By the end of the fifteenth century it had shrunk to less than $200,million. History records no other such disastrous transition as that from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages…”
United States Silver Commission
While they obviously could see the problems being caused by the restricted money supply, this declaration did little to help the problem, and in 1877 riots broke out all over the country. The bank’s response was to do nothing except to campaign against the idea that greenbacks should be reissued.
The American Bankers Association secretary James Buel expressed the bankers attitude well in a letter to fellow members of the association. He wrote:
“It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers, especially the Agricultural and Religious Press, as will oppose the greenback issue of paper money and that you will also withhold patronage from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the government issue of money.
To repeal the Act creating bank notes, or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders. See your congressman at once and engage him to support our interest that we may control legislation.”
James Buel American Bankers Association 2
What this statement exposes is the difference in mentality between your average person and a banker. With a banker ‘less really is more’ and every need an opportunity to exploit.
James Garfield became President in 1881 with a firm grasp of where the problem lay.
“Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce… And when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
James Garfield 1881
Within weeks of releasing this statement President Garfield was assassinated.
The cry from the streets was to…
(1) Senator Daniel of Virginia, May 22, 1890, from a speech in Congress, to be found in the Congressional Record, page 5128, quoting from the Bankers Magazine of August, 1873
(2) from a circular issued by authority of the Associated Bankers of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston signed by one James Buel, secretary, sent out from 247 Broadway, New York in 1877, to the bankers in all of the States
Free Silver (1891 – 1912)
Fleecing of the flock is the term the money changers use for the process of booms and depressions which make it possible for them to repossess property at a fraction of its worth. In 1891 a major fleece was being planned.
“On Sept 1st, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept 1st we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well, at our own price… Then the farmers will become tenants as in England…”
1891 American Bankers Association as printed in the Congressional Record of April 29, 1913
The continued gold standard made this possible.
William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic candidate for president in 1896, campaigning to bring silver back as a money standard. (free Silver)
“We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
William Jennings Bryan
Of course the money changers supported his opposition on the Republican side so long as he wanted the gold standard maintained. The factory bosses were somehow convinced to tell their work force that business would close down if Bryan was elected, and everyone would lose their jobs.
The Republicans won by a small margin.
Bryan tried again in 1900 and in 1908 but lost both times. He became secretary of state under Wilson in 1912 but became disenchanted and resigned in 1915 under suspicious circumstances connected with the sinking of the Lusitania which drove America into the First World War
J.P. Morgan and the Crash of 1907
If you want to work out the cause of the crash of 1907, checking who benefited is where you might like to look first.
With the stock market slump causing most of the over extended banks to falter, in steps J.P. Morgan offering to save the day. People will do strange things when in a panic, and this might explain why Morgan was authorised to print $200 million from nothing, which he then used to prop things up.
Some of the troubled banks with less than 1% in reserve had no choice. It was accept this solution or go under. Even if they had worked out that their problems had been caused by the same people now offering the solution, there is not a lot they could have done about it.
J.P.Morgan was hailed a hero.
“All this trouble could be averted if we appointed a committee of six or seven men like J.P.Morgan to handle the affairs of our country.”
Woodrow Wilson
But not everyone was fooled.
“Those not favourable to the money trust could be squeezed out of business and the people frightened into demanding changes in the banking and currency laws which the Money Trust would frame.”
Rep. Charles A. Lindbergh (R-MN)
Apart from making a small number rich at the expense of the many, in this case the instability also served the second purpose of encouraging the public to believe that they would be better off living under a Central Bank and a Gold Standard.
Desperate people have little time for logic.
Lincoln Watches
In Washington the statue of Lincoln sitting in his chair is facing a building called the Federal Reserve Headquarters.
This institution would not be there if Lincoln’s monetary policy had been adopted by the USA.
It is not Federal and it has doubtful reserves. The name is an open deception designed to give this private bank the appearance that it is operating in the public’s interest, when in fact it is run solely to gain private profit for its select stock holders. It came into being as the result of one of the slickest moves in financial history.
On 23rd December 1913 the house of representatives had past the Federal Reserve Act, but it was still having difficulty getting it out of the senate. Most members of congress had gone home for the holidays, but unfortunately the senate had not adjourned sene die (without day) so they were technically still in session. There were only three members still present. On a unanimous consent voice vote the 1913 Federal Reserve Act was passed. No objection was made, possibly because there was no one there to object.
Charles Lindbergh would have objected.
“The financial system has been turned over to… the federal reserve board. That board administers the finance system by authority of… a purely profiteering group. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other peoples money.”
Rep Charles A, Lindbergh (R-MN)
Louis T. McFadden would have objected.
“We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board… This evil institution has impoverished… the people of the United States… and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through… the corrupt practice of the moneyed vultures who control it.”
Rep. Louis T, McFadden (R-PA)
Barry Goldwater would also have objected.
“Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders… The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and… manipulates the credit of the United States.”
Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)
Most Americans would object if they knew.
The Federal Reserve is the largest single creditor of the United States Government, and they are also the people who decide how much the average persons car payments are going to be, what their house payments are going to be, and whether they have a job or not.
The three people who passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, knew exactly what they were doing when they set up this private bank, modelled on the Bank of England and the fact that The Bank of England had been operating independently unopposed since 1694 must have given them a great deal of confidence.
Where There’s War There’s Money
War uses up more materials more quickly than most anything else on earth. In war expensive equipment doesn’t wear out slowly, it gets blown up.
(It’s interesting to note that during the 119 year period from the founding of the Bank of England to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, England had been at war for 56 years, while the rest of the time preparing for it. In the process the money changers had been getting rich.)
So there it was, the newly formed Federal Reserve poised to produce any money the U.S. Government might need from thin air with each dollar standing to make a healthy interest.
Nine days after its formation the Federal Reserve founders were wishing each other a Happy New Year. What good fortune might 1914 bring?
World War I (1914-1918)
The Germans borrowed money from the German Rothschilds bank, the British from the British Rothschilds bank, and the French from the French Rothschilds.
American super banker J.P. Morgan was amongst other things also a sales agent for war materials. Six months into the war his spending of $10 million a day made him the largest consumer on the planet.
The Rockefeller’s and the head of president Willson’s War Industries Board, Bernard Baruch each made some 200 million dollars while families contributed their sons to the bloody front lines, but profit was not the only motive for involvement.
Russia had spoiled the money changers plan to split America in two, and remained the last major country not to have its own central bank.
However, three years after the start of the war the entire Russian Royal Family was killed and Communism began.
You might find it strange to learn that the Russian Revolution was also fuelled with British money. Capitalist businessmen financing Communism?
Author Gary Allen gives his explanation:
“If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth programme, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super-rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead, it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs.
Communism or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite.”
Gary Allen, Author
W.Cleon Skousen wrote in his book ‘The Naked Capitalist’.
“Power from any source tends to create an appetite for additional power… It was almost inevitable that the super-rich would one day aspire to control not only their own wealth, but the wealth of the whole world.
To achieve this, they were perfectly willing to feed the ambitions of the power-hungry political conspirators who were committed to the overthrow of all existing governments and the establishments of a central world-wide dictatorship.”
W.Cleon Skousen
Extreme revolutionary groups were controlled by being financed when they complied and cut off, with money sometimes being given to their opposition, when they didn’t.
If you find this hard to believe, listen to what the so called dictator of the new Soviet Union had to say.
“The state does not function as we desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.”
Vladimir Lenin (1)
Rep. Louis T. McFadden, chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee throughout the 1920-30s explained it this way.
“The course of Russian history has, indeed, been greatly affected by the operations of international bankers… The Soviet Government has been given United States Treasury funds by the Federal Reserve Board… acting through the Chase Bank. …
England has drawn money from us through the Federal Reserve Banks and has re-lent it at high rates of interest to the Soviet Government… The Dnieperstory Dam was built with funds unlawfully taken from the United States Treasury by the corrupt and dishonest Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks.”
Rep. Louis T.McFadden (D-PA) (2)
Even when Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin revealed that most of the foreign aid was ending up, we quote. “straight back into the coffers of western banks in debt service.”
(1) Wurmbrand, “Marx and Satan,” p. 49
(2) United States Congressional Record, June 15, 1934
World Domination
With Russia down the money changers now had control of every major national economy. Like a steam roller moving and a wolf gathering its pack, there was only one thing left to do and that was to go global. The first attempt was the proposal at the Paris Peace Conference after WWI to set up the League of Nations. Old habits die hard, and even what they called ‘the war to end all wars’ was not enough to convince nations to dissolve their boundaries. The League died.
If politicians really were being controlled, you would think at least one would break ranks and cry out against it. Many did. One was no less than former New York City Mayor John Haylan
“These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government….
The warning of Theodore Roosevelt has much timeliness today, for the real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over City, State, and nation… It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection…
To depart from mere generalisations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interest and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes.
They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organisations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business…
These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country.”
John Hylan, Mayor of New York 1927 (1)
These warnings fell on deaf ears, drowned out by the music and excitement of the roaring 20’s. People don’t tend to complain much in times of prosperity, so the money changers used this boom time they had created to defuse any complaints about their growing control.
(1) (Former New York City Mayor John Haylan speaking in Chicago and quoted in the March 27, 1927, New York Times)
Depression in 1929
Stack in front of you the biographies of all the Wall Street giants, J.P. Morgan, Joe F. Kennedy, J.D Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, and you’ll find they all marvel at how they got out of the stock market and put their assets in gold just before the crash.
Non mention a secret directive, since revealed, sent by the father of the Federal Reserve, Paul Warburg, warning of the coming collapse and depression.
With control of the press and the education system, few Americans are aware that the Fed caused the depression. It is however a well known fact among leading top economists.
“The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one-third from 1929 to 1933.”
Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist
“It was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence… The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all.”
Rep. Louis T.McFadden (D-PA)
“I think it can hardly be disputed that the statesmen and financiers of Europe are ready to take almost any means to re-acquire rapidly the gold stock which Europe lost to America as the result of World War I.”
Rep. Louis T.McFadden (D-PA)
40 billion dollars somehow vanished in the crash.
It didn’t really vanish, it simply shifted into the hands of the money changers. This is how Joe Kennedy went from having 4 million dollars in 1929 to having over 100 million in 1935.
During this time the Fed caused a 33% reduction of the money supply, causing deeper depression.
How the Fed Creates Money
We’ve been talking about how the privately owned Federal Reserve can produce money from thin air. Here’s how it’s done.
1. The purchase of bonds is approved by the Federal Open Market Committee.
2. The Fed buys the bonds which it pays for with electronic credits made to the sellers bank. These credits are based on nothing.
3. The receiving banks then use these credits as reserves from which they can loan out ten times the amount.
To reduce the amount of money in the economy they simply reverse the process.
The Fed sells bonds to the public and money is drawn from the purchasers bank to pay for them.
Each million withdrawn lowers the banks ability to loan by 10 million.
The Federal bank in this way has overall control of the US money supply, as each country’s central bank does in the same way. The bankers, through the magic of fractional reserve banking have been delegated the right to create 90% of the money supply. This control makes a mockery of any elected government. It places so called leaders behind a toy steering wheel, like the plastic ones, set up to amuse small children.
Or as Rep.Charles Lindbergh father of famous aviator Lucky Lindy puts it when commenting on the Federal Reserve Act:
“This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalised.
The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed… The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill.”
Rep. Charles Lindbergh (R-MN)
Or as Woodrow Wilson put it:
“We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled governments in the civilised world – no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by… a vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.
Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organised, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
Woodrow Wilson
In order to clearly establish that this is not a conspiracy theory, but is actually how things are controlled, we further quote Charles Lindbergh. From the house of representatives, Lindbergh was well placed to see exactly what was happening back then and continues to happen today.
“To cause high prices all the federal reserve board will do will be to lower the re-discount rate…, producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when… business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check… prosperity in mid-career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest.
It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down.
This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed.
The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people’s money.
They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance…”
Rep. Charles Lindbergh (R-MN)
Adolf’s Bankers
Most all will be aware of Hitler’s rise to power. What they probably don’t know is that he was almost completely financed by money drawn from the privately owned American Federal Reserve.
“After WWI, Germany fell into the hands of the international bankers. Those bankers bought her and they now own her, lock, stock, and barrel. They have purchased her industries, they have mortgages on her soil, they control her production, they control all her public utilities.
The international German bankers have subsidised the present Government of Germany and they have also supplied every dollar of the money Adolph Hitler has used in his lavish campaign to build up threat to the government of Bruening.
When Bruening fails to obey the orders of the German International Bankers, Hitler is brought forth to scare the Germans into submission…
Through the Federal Reserve Board over $30 billion of American money has been pumped into Germany. You have all heard of the spending that has taken place in Germany…
Modernistic dwellings, her great planetariums, her gymnasiums, her swimming pools, her fine public highways, her perfect factories. All this was done on our money. All this was given to Germany through the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve Board has pumped so many billions of dollars into Germany that they dare not name the total.”
Congressman Louis T.McFadden (D-PA) who served twelve years as Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency.
Fort Knox
In 1933 new President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill forcing all the American people, to hand over all their gold at base rate. With the exception of rare coins. He disowned himself from the bill claiming to not have read it and his secretary of the treasury claimed this was “what the experts wanted”.
Bought at bargain basement price with money produced from nothing by the Federal Reserve, the gold was melted down and stacked in the newly built bullion depository called Fort Knox. Once collected in 1935 the price of gold was raised from $20.66 up to $35 per ounce, but only non American gold qualified to be sold. This meant those who had avoided the crash by investing in gold they had shipped to London could now nearly double their money while the rest of America starved.
But that’s not all folks. By the end of WWII Fort Knox did hold 70% of the world’s gold, but over the years it was sold off to the European money changers while a public audit of Fort Knox reserves was repeatedly denied.
Rumours spread about missing gold.
“Allegations of missing gold from our Fort Knox vaults are being widely discussed in European circles. But what is puzzling is that the Administration is not hastening to demonstrate conclusively that there is no cause for concern over our gold treasure – if indeed it is in a position to do so.”
Edith Roosevelt
Finally in 1981 President Ronald Reagan was convinced to have a look into Fort Knox with a view to re-introducing the Gold Standard. He appointed a group called The Gold Commission. They found that the US Treasury owned no gold at all.
All the Fort Knox gold remaining is now being held as collateral by the Federal Reserve against the national debt. Using credits made from nothing. The Fed had robbed the largest treasure of gold on earth.
World WarII (1939-1945)
World War II saw the US debt increased by 598%, while Japan’s debt went up by 1,348%, with France up by 583% and Canada up by 417%.
When you hear this, what is your first impression? Do you automatically think this is bad or this is good? Most of us feel a well programmed sense of desperation when we hear figures like this, but remember, to the money changers, this is music to their ears.
With the hot war over, the cold war began, the arms race causing more and more borrowing. Now the money changers could really concentrate on global domination.
Step one, the European Monetary Union and NAFTA.
Step two, centralise the global economy via the World Bank, the IMF and GATT (now the WTO).
The World Central Bank (1948 – Present)
In Washington, the headquarters of both the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) face each other on the same street. What are these organisations, and who controls them?
To find out we need to look back to just after WWI. At this point the money changers were attempting to consolidate the central banks under the guise of peacemaking. To stop future wars they put forward the formation of a world central bank named the Bank of International Settlements, a world court called the World Court in the Hague, and a world executive for legislation called the League of Nations.
In his 1966 book entitled Tragedy and Hope, president Clinton’s mentor Carroll Quigley writes about this.
“The powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching [plan], 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 meetings and conferences.
The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.
Each central bank… Sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”
Carroll Quigley, Professor, Georgetown University
They got 2 out of 3. The league of nations failed largely owing to the suspicions of the people and while opposition concentrated on this, the other two proposals snuck their way through.
It would take another war to wear the public resistance down. Wall street invested heavily to rebuild Germany, as the Chase bank had propped up the Russian revolution.
Now the Chase merged with the Warburg’s Manhattan Bank to form the Chase Manhattan which would later merge with the Chemical Bank to become the largest bank on Wall Street.
In 1944 the US approved its full participation in the IMF and the World Bank. By 1945 the second League of Nations was approved under the new name ‘The United Nations’. The war had dissolved all opposition. The methods used in the National Banking Act of 1864 and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 were now simply used on a Global scale.
The Federal Reserve Act allowing the creation of Federal Reserve notes is mirrored by the IMF’s authority to produce money called Special Drawing Rights (SDR’s). It is estimated the IMF has produced $30 billion dollars worth of SDR’s so far. In the United States SDR’s are already accepted as legal money, and all other member nations are being pressured to follow suit. With SDR’s being partially backed by gold, a world gold standard is sneaking its way in through the back door, which comes with no objection from the money changers who now hold two-thirds of the worlds gold and can use this to structure the worlds economy to their further advantage.
We have gone from the goldsmith’s fraud being reproduced on a national scale through the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, to a Global level with the IMF and the World Bank. Unless we together stop giving these exchange units their power by our collective faith in them, the future will probably see the Intergalactic Bank and the Federation of Planets Reserve set up in much the same way.
This radical transfer of power has taken place with absolutely no mandate from the people.
Nations borrow Special Drawing Right from the International Monetary Fund in order to pay interest on their mounting debts. With these SDR’s produced at no cost, the IMF charges more interest. This contrary to bold claims does not alleviate poverty or further any development. It just creates a steady flow of wealth from borrowing nations to the money changers who now control the IMF and the World Bank.
The permanent debt of Third World Countries is constantly being increased to provide temporary relief from the poverty being caused by previous borrowing.
These repayments already exceed the amount of new loans. By 1992 Africa’s debt had reached $290 billion dollars, which is two and a half times greater than it was in 1980. A noble attempt to repay it has caused increased infant mortality and unemployment, plus deteriorating schools, and general health and welfare problems.
As world resources continue to be sucked into this insatiable black hole of greed, if allowed to continue the entire world will face a simular fate.
As one prominent Brazilian politician, Luis Ignacio Silva,Y´put it.
“Without being radical or overly bold, I will tell you that the Third World War has already started – a silent war, not for that reason any the less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying there are children, instead of millions of wounded there are millions of unemployed; instead of destruction of bridges there is the tearing down of factories, schools, hospitals, and entire economies . . . It is a war by the United States against the Latin American continent and the Third World. It is a war over the foreign debt, one which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam . .” (1)
If a group or organisation had used its hard earned money to help these developing nations, then we might sympathise that there should be a real effort to repay these loans. But the money used was created from fractional reserve banking. The money loaned to the Third World came from the 90% the banks allow themselves to loan on the 10% they actually held. It didn’t exist, it was created from nothing, and now people are suffering and dying in an effort to pay it back.
This has gone beyond clever financing, it’s whole sale murder and it’s time we stopped it. We can!
(1) Luis Ignacio Silva, at the Havana Debt Conference in August 1985, quoted by Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Death p 238
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.
The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously — or maybe not — all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.
The alternative to work isn’t just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it’s never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called “leisure;” far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.
I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it’s done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or “communist,” work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually — and this is even more true in “communist” than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee — work is employment, i.e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In Cuba or China or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions — Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey — temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.
But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who — by any rational-technical criteria — should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.
The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as “discipline.” Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.
Such is “work.” Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the “suspension of consequences.” This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that’s why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as gameplaying or following rules. I respect Huizinga’s erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel—these practices aren’t rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other’s control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called “insubordination,” just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?
The demeaning system of domination I’ve described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it’s not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or — better stil l— industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are “free” is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they’ll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They’re used to it.
We are so close to the world of work that we can’t see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the “work ethic” would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism — but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.
Let’s pretend for a moment that work doesn’t turn people into stultified submissives. Let’s pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let’s pretend that work isn’t as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don’t do that. Lathes and typewriters don’t do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, “Work is for saps!”
Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed “to regain the lost power and health.” Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to “St. Monday” — thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration — was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancien régime wrested substantial time back from their landlords’ work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants’ calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia — hardly a progressive society — likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants’ days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.
To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes’ compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life—in North America, particularly—but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climbed the Berlin Wall from the west.) The “survival of the fittest” version — the Thomas Huxley version — of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor in Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist — a geographer — who’d had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled “The Original Affluent Society.” They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that “hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.” They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were “working” at all. Their “labor,” as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller’s definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full “play” to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: “The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity.” (A modern version — dubiously developmental — is Abraham Maslow’s counterposition of “deficiency” and “growth” motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that “the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required.” He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work—it’s rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work—but we can.
The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy George’s England in Transition and Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell’s essay “Work and Its Discontents,” the first text, I believe, to refer to the “revolt against work” in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell’s end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that “the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved,” only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquillity of Harvard.
As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith’s modern epigones. As Smith observed: “The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding… He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW’s report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist — Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner — because, in their terms, as they used to say on Lost in Space, “it does not compute.”
If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don’t count the half-million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year. What the statistics don’t show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work — which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 50’s. Consider all the other workaholics.
Even if you aren’t killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indirectly, to work.
Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing — or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.
State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Chernobyl and other Soviet nuclear disasters covered up until recently make Times Beach and Three Mile Island—but not Bhopal—look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won’t help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that—as antebellum slavery apologists insisted—factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious implementation of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don’t even try to crack down on most malefactors.
What I’ve said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves, is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.
I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand — and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure — we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn’t make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
I don’t suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn’t worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Thirty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done — presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now — would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.
Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the “tertiary sector,” the service sector, is growing while the “secondary sector” (industry) stagnates and the “primary sector” (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last sixty years?
Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pest-holes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.
Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called “schools,” primarily to keep them out of Mom’s hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid “shadow work,” as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they’re better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.
I haven’t as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they’ll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they’ll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn’t care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don’t want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven’t saved a moment’s labor. Karl Marx wrote that “it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.” The enthusiastic technophiles — Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner — have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than skeptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let’s give them a hearing.
What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a “job” and an “occupation.” Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won’t be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.
The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don’t want coerced students and I don’t care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.
Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they’d get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they’re just fueling up human bodies for work.
Third — other things being equal — some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don’t always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, “anything once.” Fourier was the master at speculating about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in “Little Hordes” to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don’t have to take today’s work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed.
If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It’s a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that there’s no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything, it’s just the opposite. We shouldn’t hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.
The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris—and even a hint, here and there, in Marx — there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers’ Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists — as represented by Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life and in the Situationist International Anthology — are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers’ councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though, than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, whom would the left have to organize?
So the abolitionists will be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater’s problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.
Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not — as it is now—a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.
Workers of the world… relax!
I said I would come back to Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work. In his essay, Black also discusses the contradiction between capitalist work, which he sees as uncreative, and any pretense of freedom:
The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other’s control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called “insubordination,” just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation.
…People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias.
Creativity is undesirable in our capital-democratic societies, because their good functioning is predicated on class subservience, and creative action is at best a nuisance in that regard (if only insofar as it gives people the idea that they’re actually able to accomplish something of their own). But creativity is necessary for the survival of a free society, because without it there can be no development of our capacity to relate with each other and the world as a whole. In a capital-democratic society, progress is the realm of technocrats, who in their wisdom or grant money determine the optimal means to accelerate production, produce new weapons, or justify their existence. In a free society, progress is an evolutionary tree of possibilities.
Although there may not be any apparent connection, the concept of the true self is very relevant here, since it is mainly through our social roles that our free will is bent or occluded. They instill in us routines of thoughts and actions, indoctrinate us with numerous norms and rules, all of which force us to converge in singular directions and to conform to a specific model (to be normalized for the reigning institutions and systems). The role of creativity in such a society is to break out of these social roles and try to make people realize that there are other ways to live.
Unfortunately such attempts are vastly unsuccessful because most people are too personally aberrated to seriously consider social change of such magnitude. One example of this is the movement for homosexual relationships. Michel Foucault pointed out the problem with simply expanding the norm:
[I]f you ask people to reproduce the marriage bond for their personal relationship to be recognized, the progress made is slight. We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric.
The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will, p38
His point applies not only to the relational world, but also to the economic world, the political world, the religious world, the emotional world, and any other world of interactions within the individual, between individuals, or between individuals and the rest of the world. The necessary consequence of the imposition of social roles is a general impoverishment of all dynamics of society. We should fight against it, but we can’t, because our capital-democratic blinders prohibit us from even being able to imagine a pluralistic society.
Anarchists and other radicals also have a tradition of publicly breaking social roles and showing some of the possibilities that exist under the “solid ground” of shared models. They are therefore well familiar with creativity as a tool of deconstruction. But in this necessary deconstruction we are also made to see the possibilities.
The Diggers, just to take one example, were deconstructing consumeurism and the social roles associated with it, but at the same time their Free Stores and their other radical “theatrical” actions showed the viable possibilities that lie beyond capitalism, because they were actually implementing these ideas and integrating them to the larger social context. Radical revolutions (such as the Spanish Revolution or the ‘68 Revolution) have provided living instances of whole societies, with all the facets that this implies, exploring the alternatives, pushing beyond the margins of discourse and actually creating a better world.
It does not surprise anyone that creative people tend to be non-conformists. Since creativity can only exist when people are open to possibilities and open to themselves, it’s natural for creative people to reject that which seeks to stamp out those possibilities and stamp out self-awareness. And of course the exploration of the vast margins of mainstream thought is always bound to offend.
In the courageous individual, creativity manifests itself as heroism, taking action against legitimized oppression and exploitation. We rightly say that people like Oskar Schindler, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi are heroes because they dared to stand up to widely accepted injustice, because they dared to stand up against mainstream conformity and complicity with the crimes of the power elite and its elaborate mechanisms of compliance. Heroism is highly creative because it requires one to not only imagine an ideal, but to create ways to bring it about.
Any organization, movement or society which seeks to improve the lives of its members, but suppresses creativity, is bound to failure. Any organization, movement or society which seeks to control people must ruthlessly suppress creativity at all levels in order to survive. It must ruthlessly suppress it in the infant, in the student, in the worker, in the believer, in the mainstream, in the marginalized. It must ruthlessly suppress any new center of creativity wherever it finds them, whenever possible, and whatever survives must be co-opted and absorbed in the existing system.
The concept of creativity has wide-ranging social importance, affecting areas like work (obviously), education, public spaces, child-raising, relationships, religion, self-criticism, polycentric norms, attire and attitude, and so on. So the natural question is, what would a society based on creativity look like? What principles should it be based on?
It’s really hard to tell what such a society would be like, because we really have no idea what being free would be like in the first place. As I’ve pointed out before, our points of reference are so aberrated that we can have no more a definite concept of freedom than an ant can have a definite concept of “human being.” All they can do is point in its direction (”up”). The same is true for us. We can give basic principles that can lead us closer to it, but anything more is pure speculation at best, and self-serving utopianism at worse.
If we started by raising an entirely new group of children, with no hierarchical parenting or normalizing indoctrination, what would the resulting society, a whole society composed of people who have no aberrations and are innately loving and compassionate, look like? Probably very much different from our own. For instance, it’s hard to imagine that a whole society made of people whose instincts have been nurtured instead of suppressed, and have naturally learned to detect honesty and dishonesty, would put up with the politics game. So their discourse on social issues would be most likely far more pragmatic and down-to-earth than our own.
As Eric Hoffer points out in his book The True Believer, it is when a totalitarian regime starts to loosen up its grip that rebellion is its most fierce. A little bit of freedom to be creative, just feeling free to imagine new possibilities, is enough to engender more of itself. The more creativity that already exists and is nurtured, the more there will be.
From a state of linear logic, creativity is encouraged by breaking up normality, and giving everyone some power over a given area. The Internet is a good example of both, since it gives people a power of communication which they never had before, and also breaks down the normal logic by which we relate to each other.
The principle of distributing power is also applicable to any new society, obviously. The general principle of giving everyone an area of influence and giving everyone a say in the general workings of the society as a whole are no-brainers. The mutualist agenda is very much in line with this principle: by abolishing the profit motive as well as the land and money monopolies, mutualists want to make it possible for everyone to participate in the economy (or to isolate themselves from it, if they so choose) in the way they desire, creating new possibilities beyond the immoral, single-minded profit-making optimization paradigm.
I think we have to go away from ideologies which define freedom as a passive idea of “non-coercion,” and realize that freedom is an active process of creation, whether it be the creation of ways to fight the current capital-democratic system or the creation of new ways to live. Without this process of creation, any pretense of freedom is akin to a cult’s brainwashed believers claiming they are free to leave at any time: a claim that can only be true because one has been indoctrinated to believe it is true.
Thucydides’ Law
“Ultimately, there are only two ways to organize society, either by voluntary action on the part of individuals or by force. If the latter is chosen, the only entity that has the capacity to exert that magnitude of force is the state. If you believe that voluntary action is the principled way to order markets and associations in a manner consistent with natural liberty, then you have no choice but to oppose state coercion.” Column by Duane Colyar.
Book of the Week: Thomas Greco on the End of Money
via P2P Foundation by Michel Bauwens on 6/7/09
Thomas Greco, who came to visit us twice in Thailand, has written his fourth book, the culmination of a life of research dedicated to the nature of money, and how we can achieve a fairer exchange system.
Book: Thomas Greco. The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. Chelsea Green, 2009
We conducted an email interview, that gives extra detail about this important book.
1. General Presentation of the book
First of all, Thomas: Why did you write this book?
TG: “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization is my fourth book in which I address what I refer to as “the money problem.” My intensive focus on the particular realm of money, banking and finance, which spans a period of more than three decades, has been motivated by an early realization of the crucial role it plays in determining the world order and the course of human events.
The simple facts are that money and banking have been politicized and structured to achieve the centralization of power and the concentration of wealth, to circumvent democratic processes, and to manipulate the populace. The substance of modern money is simply credit and we have allowed our credit to be privatized and monopolized. Money makes the material world go round, and whoever controls money/credit are in a position to control everything else—our economy, our politics, our technologies, our entertainment and news media, and our culture.
I strongly believe that if we are to achieve peace, justice, personal freedom, environmental regeneration, a sustainable economy, and a dignified life for all, it is essential that we reclaim “the credit commons” from the money monopoly. That is the key to empowerment of communities and the way toward government of the people, by the people and for the people.
My choice of title for this book is not at all based on wishful thinking. It expresses what is actually happening NOW. The recent emergence of commercial “barter” exchanges, mutual credit clearing associations, private voucher systems and community currencies represent the early stages of a process of power devolution that will inevitably lead to the end of POLITICAL moneyand the emergence of economic democracy. But the end of money does not refer ONLY to the end of political money. It refers also to the evolutionary process by which the essential nature of money has changed over the past two or three centuries—from commodity money, to symbolic (redeemable paper) money, to credit money. Of course, the reciprocal exchange process will continue, but in a different way from before, a way that does not require the use of conventional money or banks. The ultimate stage in the evolution of money and the exchange process is the offset of purchases against sales, i.e., direct credit clearing amongst buyers and sellers, and the widespread application of this process does indeed mean, in a very real sense, the end of money.
The word evolution may connote passivity, but in the realm of human-contrived systems, it involves the application of creativity, intelligence, and will. This particular evolution depends upon responsible ACTION on our part to assert our own credit power by organizing and promoting the rapid deployment of distributed (non-monopoly) credit clearing circles in ways that maintain local control within globally useful networks.”
2. Additional Questions
1. There seems to be a fast-growing monetary reform and transformation but there are also a confusing number of different approaches being proposed. How can one find one’s way in these various proposals and how do you specifically position yourself in this field.
TG: That is precisely the kind of question my book answers in detail. First of all, one needs to clearly distinguish between two basic approaches to solving what I broadly term “the money problem,” then secondly to consider the architecture of the various exchange systems and currencies that have been tried or proposed.
The dysfunctional nature of the dominant global system of money and banking has for a long time been apparent to anyone who has cared to look at it. Now, in light of the present financial meltdown, it has become painfully obvious to virtually everyone.
Monetary reformers have always been around. They have been warning that the system needs to be fixed, and some of them have even had some good ideas about how to fix it, but their voices have mostly been ignored or drowned out by the vested interests who have promoted an orthodox doctrine that works to their advantage. During periods of severe financial or economic distress, such as the present one, some reformers are able to get space in the media, so today we are hearing calls for a variety of political solutions—abolition of the Fed, direct issuance of money by the government (the “greenback” solution), a return to the gold standard, tighter regulation of banks and financial institutions, etc.
Some of these might have a short-run salutary effect, if they could be achieved. But in my view, statist and political approaches are at best futile and at worst inclined to take us further in the wrong direction toward more centralized control and still greater concentration of wealth. They are futile in that the political process in most countries of the world has long since been removed beyond our grasp. If the people are to regain political control, we will need to first assert our economic power, especially our “money power” by organizing ourselves to mediate the exchange process apart from the banking cartel and without the use of politicized national currencies. Putting the money monopoly under new management will not solve the fundamental dysfunctions that are inherent in it. The “greenback solution,” for instance, does nothing to eliminate deficit spending and inflation, which are enabled by legal tender laws. So long as political currencies, however issued, are legally forced to circulate at face value, the abusive issuance of money, the debasement of national currencies, and the centralization of power will continue, and the empowerment of communities, relocalization, and the shift to a steady-state economy will be thwarted.
People need to disengage from the systems and structures that disempower communities and enable a small elite to use the present centralized control mechanisms to their own advantage and purpose. Primary among these is the global monetary and financial regime (the structures of money, banking and finance). I favor an approach that is based on voluntary, free market and community-based initiatives which enable people to transcend the money monopoly and the “war machine.” Socially responsible businesses and social entrepreneurs have a crucial role to play in organizing these parallel systems that can shift enough power to achieve greater measures of independence and self-determination and bring enormous benefits across the board—social, political, economic, environmental, and cultural.
With regard to the various alternative exchange systems and community currencies that have been tried, almost all have been designed to solve secondary problems, or have been lacking in scalability. I devote several entire chapters to exploring those deficiencies as well as highlighting the specific characteristics necessary in a truly empowering exchange system. The primary objective of an exchange alternative should be to utilize the credit of local producers to mediate the exchange of goods and services locally. The bottom line is that non-bank exchange system credits and community currencies must be issued in ways that monetize the value inherent in goods and services being exchanged. This means they must be “spent” into circulation, not “sold” into circulation.
2. Your book’s title suggests the end of money, yet you also advocate a ‘credit commons’, which most people would associate with lending money to each other. So, could you specify: do you advocate the abolition of money, or not, and if a credit commons is not about lending money, what is it?
TG: See the general description above for the first part of my answer, but I’d like to add this:
Reciprocal exchange and finance are necessary aspects of any developed economy. As I explained above, money is nothing but credit. It is our common or collective credit that supports any generally used payment medium, including political money. We have allowed the credit commons to be privatized. What I advocate is the reclamation of the credit commons from the money and banking monopoly. We have seen how that can be, and is being done within cashless trading systems like LETS and the commercial “barter” exchanges that provide credit clearing services. Of the existing examples, the Swiss WIR cooperative trading circle (now called the WIR Bank) has been the most impressive for its longstanding success. These systems involve the allocation of credit, but they do not require the use of money as we have known it. However, the collective credit balances in the accounts of such a system can be thought of as a kind of internal currency. But it is one that is not “loaned” into existence, but comes into being in the course of trade among the members. If properly organized, it provides credit on a more honest, transparent, and democratic basis.
3. How do we get from the current financial system, via all the current experiments with local money, to a fundamentally different system .Do you have any concrete proposals for a transition?
TG: Yes, the book contains multiple proposals and prescriptions addressed to various entities including individuals, businesses, social entrepreneurs, and various levels of government. These cover both system designs and implementation strategies. Perhaps the most promising and easily attainable is the bioregional development plan that I outline in Chapter Sixteen.
This is a multi-stage plan involving diverse segments of the community. It is designed to accomplish the following:
1. Institute measures that promote import substitution
2. Provide an alternative payment medium, independent of any political currency and banking establishment
3. Issue a supplemental regional currency
4. Develop basic support structures that strengthen the local economy and enhance the community’s quality of life
5. Develop an independent value standard and unit of account
The keystone of this plan is the organization of a mutual credit clearing association in the second stage.
I also describe the emergent web based exchange systems and slight modifications that are required to make them fully functional as non-governmental exchange and finance alternatives.
4. How do you reply to the traditional critique of the left, which says that money is just an external phenomena of our economic system of capitalism, and that changing just the money won’t effect any fundamental change?
TG: If that is, indeed the “traditional critique” then I must conclude that the “left” is both lacking in imagination and does not understand the real basis of power. What is capitalism, and what is the basis of power within a capitalist system? As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details.” Why get bogged down in ideological debates when there is an obvious “elephant in the living room?”
To cut through all of the obfuscatory rhetoric, the main problems with the political money and banking system (and the relevant principles that need to be applied) are as follows:
1. The issuance of money on improper bases, mainly government debt, real estate, and assets of questionable value. Principle: Money should be issued on the basis of goods and services already in the market or shortly to arrive there. All other needs (capital formation and consumer spending) should be financed out of savings.
2. Legal tender laws that force acceptance at par of debased political currencies. Principle: Legal tender laws should be abolished. Only the issuer of a currency should be required to accept it at par. In the absence of legal tender, debased currencies will either be refused or pass at a discount in the market.
3. The charging of interest on credit money that is created as “loans.”
Principle: Money should be created interest free as a generalization of trade credit that facilitates the exchange of goods and services.
If the system cannot be reformed, then new systems need to be created that apply the correct principles.
5. Your book seems very inspired by U.S. history and developments, and also seems to share a strong libertarian critique of the state, while audiences in Europe would be a lot more sympathetic if not nostalgic for the welfare state and its social protections. How international and global do you think your prescriptions are? What kind of reactions have you gotten in other continents that the U .S., say Europe and Asia?
TG: The prescriptions that I offer in my book are both comprehensive and global. The story of power in modern history has been pretty much the same throughout the world. The central banking, political money system has been established in virtually every country and in fact originated in Europe. What most people have failed to recognize is that, regardless of the nominal form of their government, their political power has been neutralized and exhausted by the privatization and misallocation of credit money.
Up to now, Europeans have managed better than Americans to preserve their hard won state benefits, but there too, these benefits are steadily being eroded and that trend will surely continue. My argument is not with government-sponsored social programs, per se, and certainly not with “social protections.” There is a legitimate role for governments but people seem confused about what that role should be or at what level the various government functions should be carried out. But it would be a digression for me to speak about general political philosophy. My objections are to the centralized control of credit money, whether that be by the state directly or by a nominally independent central bank. It is undemocratic, corrupting, and fraudulent. It misallocates credit, making it both scarce and expensive for the productive private sector while enabling central governments to circumvent, by deficit spending, the natural limits imposed by its above-board revenue streams.
All government programs, including social programs, need to be funded by legitimate state revenues, not by the underhanded means of monetary debasement. Centralized control of credit money and the imposition of legal tender laws enables the hidden tax called inflation.
Further, that system creates a small privileged class that is able to dominate economics, politics, and virtually everything else in the material realm. If we desire to have a peaceful world that can provide a dignified life for all, power must devolve to the people and their communities. That cannot happen so long as we allow the money power to be privatized and undemocratically allocated. Fortunately, we the people have in our hands the means of our own liberation. It is the power to allocate our credit directly without the use of banks or political forms of money. How to effectively assert that power is the main theme of my book.”
Corporations would not be able to acquire irrigation water and other products of ‘the commons’ without the state drafting up the necessary legislation to permit such theft, for instance.
We have not experienced a laissez-faire system. Government has intervened in ‘the market’ to an absolutely extraordinary extent for every decade that I’ve been alive.
Some excerpts from ‘Global Reach’ (Richard Barnet and Robert Muller 1974):
” the biggest global giants, such as ITT and IBM, grew to their present proportions with substantial help from the Pentagon…”[p.60]
….”During the 25 years in which the United States was the most powerful nation on earth [the period 1939-1974 appears to be referred to here] the tighter and more notorious were the links between Washington, Wall Street, and Detroit, the better it was for US companies. When the CIA removed Mohammed Mossadeq (Iran), an obstrperous Iranian premier who “irrationally” tried to interfere with Gulf’s and Standard Oil’s prospects for taking over his country’s oil, or when the same agency rescued Guatemalan banana land from United Fruit from a popularly-elected “subversive” nationalist, these were US patriotic initiatives applauded by businessmen. …The readier the Pentagon and CIA were to bring down or raise up governments in underdeveloped countries, the better the investment climate for US corporations. US military power was used to establish the ground rules within which American business could operate. The US Government acted as consultant for rightist coups in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Greece and Indonesia [to name a few] and their generals opened their countries to US investment on the most favorable terms. Wherever the flag has been planted around the world, in some 500 major military and naval bases and in the command posts of over a dozen [as of 1974] military interventions, US corporations have moved in….”
US multinational corporations are supported by the US State to benefit the ruling classes, not all US citizens evenly, they are just taken along on the ride, and their minds are shaped by ruling class Propaganda.
An interesting quote; makes a lot of sense with some of the headlines we see today.
“The world Zionist movement should not be neglectful of the dangers of Pakistan to it. And Pakistan now should be its first target, for this ideological State is a threat to our existence. And Pakistan, the whole of it, hates the Jews and loves the Arabs. “This lover of the Arabs is more dangerous to us than the Arabs themselves. For that matter, it is most essential for the world Zionism that it should now take immediate steps against Pakistan.
“Whereas the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula are Hindus whose hearts have been full of hatred towards Muslims, therefore, India is the most important base for us to work there from against Pakistan. “It is essential that we exploit this base and strike and crush Pakistanis, enemies of Jews and Zionism, by all disguised and secret plans.”
-David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister.His words, as printed in the Jewish Chronicle,9 August 1967:
Chapter XVI: Distributism and Industrial Policy
via The Distributist Review by John Médaille on 3/19/09
Can the Patient be Saved?
It is clear to everyone that the world economy is undergoing a deep crisis. The question on everybody’s mind is whether this is just a “normal” part of the so-called “business cycle,” or whether it represents something more profound, perhaps even the end of that form of capitalism as it has existed for the better part of the last century. That is, have we just caught a cold, or do we have cancer? I hope the answer is the former; I fear it is the latter.
If it is the former, then it is likely that some form of government stimulus is the proper remedy, and as much as all sides may debate the particulars, they all agree on the medicine. There is good reason to believe in this medicine: it has worked well and often since the end of World War II; indeed, our economy has become dependent on huge government expenditures to remain in balance, and these temporary imbalances can be cured as they have been cured: by a little jiggling of the monetary and fiscal policy levers. If this is the case, then we will soon recover and go on as we have.
But there is a stronger reason to believe that it will not work as it has in the past, namely because it hasn’t worked for the past eight years. The fact is, the economy has been operating under an extraordinary stimulus package since 2001. Think on this: George W. Bush took all the debt we accumulated between the time of Andrew Jackson (the last time the debt was paid off) up through Bill Clinton, and doubled it! He added $5 trillion to the national debt, a considerable stimulus by any measure.
Throughout it all, the economy remained anemic. Indeed, the “economy” was driven mainly by a housing bubble created not by any real growth, but by a compliant Fed and greedy financiers. An expansion of housing should be driven by an increase in wages, but median wages in this period actually fell. Hence, I think it reasonable to believe that what hasn’t worked won’t work; that another $800 billion, or even another $5 trillion will not do the trick. The old reliable system will not work any longer, and no amount of medicine can revive it. The system must change or die, or must change after it dies. Change is inevitable; death is optional.
The problem lies not with the banking system, although that system has its problems, but with the industrial and farming systems, the systems that actually create wealth. All other economic enterprises depend on these. Without fixing the industrial system, all other fixes will be either meaningless or, at best, temporary. Here we will look at the problems of the current system, and how distributism responds to these problems.
The “Supply-Push” Industrial System
While we may think of the current industrial system as a natural or eternal part of capitalism, it is in fact of relatively recent vintage. Indeed, when Adam Smith wrote about “the invisible hand” in the 18th century, he assumed an economy of small and mostly local producers, none of which had any market power, and hence no way to substantially alter the competitive outcomes. Most firms, save a few dealing with commodities that were traded internationally, had an incentive to remain small and employ as little fixed-capital as possible.1 But all that began to change in the 19th century, and especially in the second half of that century, with the development of the railroads. For the first time mass marketing over large areas became practical. The best way to take advantage of this new system was with highly expensive, special-purpose machinery. This made the capital employed in production very large indeed, which meant that finance became more critical to the economy than ever before; those without access to large amounts of capital had little chance of competing. By the late 19th century, a new form of organization had appeared, the “M-form corporation” (“M” for multi-divisional) which spread all phases of production, often for very diverse products, across many divisions of the firm, while imposing a hierarchical structure to keep track of so many diverse functions.
All of this resulted in firms of tremendous power, both economic and political. This power replaced the invisible hand of Adam Smith with the all-too-visible hand of managers and government. Firms were now not price-takers, as in Smith’s model, but price-makers. They could drive out smaller competitors, to be sure, but they could also drive down the price of labor. But when you drive down the price of labor, while increasing its productive capacity, you run into the problem that is usually called “overproduction” but is really “underpayment.” By 1890, the system was already plagued with constant “overproduction” problems.
This structure is often called the “Sloanist” model, because it was perfected by Alfred Sloan, the legendary chairman of General Motors from 1923-1946. Kevin Carson describes the model this way:
The only way to keep the unit costs of such machinery down is large-batch production to utilize full capacity, and then worrying about making people buy it only afterward (commonly known as “supply-push distribution.”) So Sloanist industry, under “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles,” produces goods to sell to inventory, regardless of whether there are orders for it or even of whether the product works, and has an astronomical recall rate. It follows a business model based on consumer credit and planned obsolescence to keep the wheels running. As Ralph Borsodi described it, the push distribution system … amounted to making water run uphill. The overall logic of the system is that instilled by hypnopaedic suggestion in Brave New World: “Ending is better than mending.” “The more stitches, the less riches.”2
In other words, what the system actually manufactures is landfill, objects that spend as little time as possible in the hands of consumers as useful products while on their journey to the dump as useless garbage. Thus, the production model requires a consumerist model; we must be constantly taught, through expensive, manipulative, and unrelenting propaganda (advertising) that our happiness lies not in persons, but in things, and not merely in things, but in constantly new things. The old is icky; worse, it is unfashionable. Only by constantly buying what we don’t need or already have can the system sustain itself; the size of the garbage dump becomes the true measure of our “wealth.”
To solve the problem of overproduction, governments have resorted to growing the public sector to supplement demand. This is has been the greatest impetus behind not only the growth in government in the 20th century, but also for the extension of its imperialist and globalist reach in an effort to find, and force our way into, ever-new markets, as well as to guarantee sources of cheap labor and raw materials.
After World War II, the system reached some balance as the forces of the corporations, the government, and unions tended to balance each other out, and were sufficient, for a time, to keep wages high enough to absorb all the production, with some help from government spending. Since the 70’s, however, productivity has exploded while median wages have stagnated. A vast gap opened up between the goods available for sale and the purchasing power necessary to absorb them. Markets could not be cleared. The obvious way to solve this problem is to fix the wage system. Without a just wage, without the worker getting a fair claim to his portion of the output through his wages, there is insufficient purchasing power to clear the markets. But rather than fix the wage system, the economy has relied on consumer credit; those with too much money simply lend it to those with too little, and at usurious rates. This solves the problem in the short term, but it makes the long-term problem worse. Because of high interest, more and more capital gathers at the top, and the day of reckoning is deferred, but not deterred.
The consumer’s problem becomes the investor’s dilemma; without sufficient purchasing power in the mass of men, the pool of good investments shrink, and the investor is forced to turn to pure speculation. He finds his portfolio full of exotic instruments he no longer understands. And what he primarily doesn’t understand is that these instruments are not “investments”at all; that is, they do not provide funds to businesses to expand production. Rather, they are pure bets on the direction of some market, such as the housing market. Further, the excess capital tends to encourage leveraging; that is, investors lend huge amounts to other investors who place it in speculative instruments which are themselves dependent on an increasingly troubled productive sector. What you have is a dense network of highly leveraged bets that depend on other bets that depend on an increasingly shaky productive sector. The bets are so highly intertwined that a failure in one sector endangers every other sector. That is how a failure in a relatively minor market, like sub-prime mortgages, can bring down the entire credit system.
Meanwhile in the productive sectors of the economy, the combination of an oversupply of capital and an underfunded consumer makes it difficult for businesses to increase their profits. In an effort to improve their margins, they start by firing their workers and end by firing their machinery; more and more, the productive sectors move actual production overseas, leaving only a shell in the home country responsible for accounting, coordination, and marketing. Production is distributed, but legal control remains centralized. They invest their capital not in expanding production, since the consumer can’t absorb any more production anyway, but in acquiring other companies to eliminate competition. The result is that ownership is increasingly concentrated in vast collectives known as corporations, even as production is distributed around the globe.
The argument infavor of the M-form mega-corporation has centered around the “economies of scale” that such large organizations can obtain. However, while there are some economies of scale, these are vastly outweighed by the dis-economies of scale; mere size brings great problems. But mere size also brings great power, and it is this power that interferes with the free market and hides the inefficiencies. Corporations can command the resources of government to obtain subsidies and favorable tax treatment, and they can raise barriers to competition through regulations whose main purpose is to raise the entry cost to small and more efficient competitors. Without the subsidies to hide the dis-economies and the barriers to keep out competition, the mega-corporation would not be a viable enterprise.
The Corporation as a Planned Economy
Economic literature is full of critiques of the socialist planned economies, all of which highlight the difficulties of trying to bureaucratically allocate resources in absence of a real market. But as it happens, all of these critiques can be applied equally to the modern corporation. After a certain size, the M-form corporation becomes indistinguishable from a planned economy, and convert what should be “free market” enterprises into bureaucratic structures that suffer from all the problems of a socialist state, with none of the benefits. To see how this happens, let us examine these problems in more detail.
Lack of an Internal Market. In a corporation of any size, there is an enormous internal trade in goods and services. The outputs for one division are the inputs to another, and services such as accounting, computing, and marketing are offered across divisional boundaries.4 But there is no market for these goods and services. In general, each division does not have a choice about which products and services to purchase and to whom they will sell their product. Yet, without a market, how does one know how to price products or how to allocate resources? The answer is that products are priced, and resources allocated, bureaucratically, by administrative decisions. Managers often find that their main job is to constantly fight the “battle of the budget” since it is the administrative process, and not the market, that determines their success. Readers will recognize this as the primary critique of a socialist economy, but one that fits equally the corporate economy. But a bureaucrat, public or private, can only make decisions as good as the information he receives. And here we encounter another problem endemic to both systems.
Information costs. In a large organization with a highly complex structure, there is a separation of of knowledge from work and a distribution of information spatially across many offices that may be separated by thousands of miles. But before any decisions can be made, this information must be gathered, processed, assimilated, and judged. Further, the separation removes the information from any context, and as the people who must use the information have little knowledge of the work they remotely supervise, the ability to judge information gets lost. It is not that such organizations lack information; quite the contrary, they are inundated by it. But it is like doing a Google search and coming up with millions of sites, only a few of which are relevant. It is impossible to know in advance which sites have the needed content. Unfortunately, in a hierarchical structure, power relationships tend to determine the content; there is always the danger that a “rank-based” logic will prevail. Managers, intent on advancement, tend to supply the information they know their superiors want to hear, rather then the information they ought to hear. Large organizations tend, therefore, to become systematically stupid.
All of this imposes high information costs. But no matter how many resources are devoted to information gathering and analysis, there is no way to ensure the completeness, accuracy, or relevance of the information.
Agency Problems. In a socialist economy, the officers of the state are supposed to run an economy that is “owned” by the people and act as their agents. But in practice, the socialist managers become the effective owners of the system, constituting a privileged group with their own interests. No matter how democratic the political system, the public at large generally lacks the information necessary to manage large enterprises. The same critique, however, applies to corporate management. The board of directors is supposed to act as the agents of the stockholders, and the managers as agents of the board. But as with the socialist collective, the managers of corporate collectives become the de facto owners.
John Bogle, the founder and former president of the Vanguard Funds, has documented the ways in which the top managers have constituted themselves as a new class that appropriates to itself all the privileges of ownership without any of the risks. They appropriate to themselves outsized rewards that should, by right, go to the owners and the workers. How can they do this? Ownership of a business once designated active control of that business, but now, as John Bogle notes,
The position of ownership has changed from that of an active to that of a passive agent. The owner now holds a piece of paper representing a set of rights…but has little control. The owner is practically powerless to affect the underlying property through his own efforts…the “owner” of industrial wealth is left with a mere symbol of ownership while the power, the responsibility and the substance which have been an integral part of ownership in the past are being transferred to a separate group in whose hands lies control.6
In other words, “ownership” itself no longer has the meaning in the corporation that it does with any other form of property. “Ownership” has been attenuated to a mere claim to whatever portion of the profits that the directors care to distribute, and the right to vote for these directors. However, this “right,” from the standpoint of the average shareholder, is more formal than actual. In practice, the costs of running a campaign against board members is prohibitively high, and the right to vote means little to the average stockholder, who rarely exercises it. In absence of active owners, the executives become the de facto owners of the firm. The corporation becomes, in effect, a mass of unowned capital appropriated by the managers. This new class tends to push the burdens and risks of work downward, and the rewards upwards.
The Divorce of Technical from Entrepreneurial Knowledge. Socialist planners prided themselves on their technical expertise and their deference to engineering talent. However, as their critics point out, while technology provides us with an endless range of production possibilities, it is impossible to evaluate these possibilities without knowing the price of the inputs. Since so many of the inputs are internal to the corporation, and since the corporation benefits from so many public subsidies, it is impossible to say that one system is more “efficient” than another. One can easily point to engineering marvels, but one cannot say that they are economically efficient. For example, the distribution system built by WalMart is certainly a technical achievement, but it depends on subsidized transportation costs. Without these subsidies, would the system aid or bankrupt the company? Neither the engineer nor the entrepreneur can answer such a question in absence of market prices.
Regarding this phenomenon, Kevin Carson notes:
Fully rational decisions are possible only if the knowledge of the relative value of inputs is combined with knowledge of how those inputs are to be used internally. The separation of ownership of capital from the knowledge of the production process leads to decisions divorced from reality. The same is true of the separation of management from the direct involvement in the production process, and the accountability of management to absentee owners rather than to workers.7
For these reasons—and for many others—the modern corporations form, in the words of David Friedman, “indigestible lumps of socialism” in what is supposed to be a free-market system. Like any socialism, the system becomes increasingly dependent on state power and subsidies.
The Distributist Alternative
This critique would be pointless if distributism had no alternatives to offer. And the distributist alternatives would not be credible unless they were on the ground and working, and working in both large- and small-scale manufacturing. As it turns out, the distributist is offering not abstract panaceas, but systems which are on the ground and functioning; systems which any interested party may examine for their effectiveness. One such system is the distributive economy of Emilia-Romagna (Bologna) in Italy. As Kevin Carson describes it:
The closest existing model for sustainable manufacturing is Emilia-Romagna. In that region of 4.2 million people, the most prosperous in Italy, manufacturing centers on “flexible manufacturing networks” of small-scale firms, rather than enormous factories or vertically integrated corporations. Small-scale, general-purpose machinery is integrated into craft production, and frequently switches between different product lines. It follows a lean production model geared to demand, with production taking place only to fill orders, so there’s no significant inventory cost. Supply chains are mostly local, as is the market. The local economy is not prone to the same boom-bust cycle which results from overproduction to keep unit costs down, without regard to demand. Although a significant share of Emilia-Romagna’s output goes to the export market, its industry would suffer far less dislocation from a collapse of the global economy than its counterparts in the United States; given the small scale of production and the short local supply chains, a shift to production primarily for local needs would be relatively uncomplicated. The region’s average wage is about double that of Italy for a whole, and some 45% of its GDP comes from cooperatively owned enterprises.8
The salient points of this analysis concern distributed and flexible manufacturing, the use of small-scale, general-purpose machinery, the gearing of production to demand (“demand-pull” rather than “supply-push”), local supply chains, and widespread worker ownership. Let us look at these points in turn.
Flexible Manufacturing, This allows for the quick movement among different product lines as demands shift. This is difficult in the M-form corporation, where a new product line often involves setting up a new division complete with its own capital requirements, not to mention management overhead. Moreover, it is easier to integrate this sort of manufacturing with craft production, bringing about the best of both worlds. “Craft” no longer has to mean a trade-off between quality and price, between single-piece and mass production.
General-Purpose Machinery. The use of general-purpose machinery means that the factory can shift easily from product line to product line, as demand dictates, without excessive re-tooling costs. The current system which relies on product-specific machinery cannot match this advantage. Moreover, such general-purpose machinery is already widespread. Most households already own quite a bit of it, and if you canvass any neighborhood, you are likely to discover a wealth of capital which can be joined together to produce a variety of products cheaply, efficiently, and locally.
Demand-Pull Production. Demand-pull manufacturing has a number of both economic and social consequences. Economically, it lowers the need for inventories, encourages the localization of those supply lines, and lessens the “boom-bust” cycle. But socially, it relies less on advertising to move goods. Currently, consumers are the victims of non-stop propaganda which appeals to their basest instincts. It is no more than commercial pornography, but it is necessary to the supply-push problem. This propaganda is especially directed at children, who must be socialized to the culture of consumerism if the current system is to survive.
Local Supply Chain. Local supply chains greatly lower costs and increase the utility of any firm to its own region. We have convinced ourselves that it is more “efficient” to ship a tomato 2,000 miles before we eat it, or to ship parts from the other side of the world. But obviously, there is something wrong with that equation, and even the most dedicated “flat-earther” would concede that local supply is better than remote, all other things being equal.
Since the manufacturing is divided up among largely local firms that are selling to one another and to the public, the system is free-market and all the inputs are priced at their market price. This means that correct engineering, product, and marketing decisions can be made and resources allocated much more efficiently than in the internal socialism of the M-form corporation.
Widespread Worker Ownership. Finally, widespread ownership overcomes the problems of the division of capital, management, and labor, and of the division between technical and entrepreneurial knowledge. Workers are no longer commodified cogs in an economic machine, but in control of their own destiny because they are the owners of their own properties, be it property in land, machinery, or skills. The problems associated with the division of ownership from work and management from knowledge of the production process are overcome. Moreover, a sense of community is encouraged and strengthened. And in the last analysis, this is the real purpose of an economy. It is never about just making piles of money, but creating real wealth that supports real families and real communities.
Scalability. The M-Form corporation depends on gargantuan size to achieve its power, and thereby opens up a gap between “business” and big business, two very different kinds of enterprises with two very different effects on the market. The distributed model has also shown itself to be effective in large-scale manufacturing (as we shall see in the next chapter) but it is also scalable down to the level of the family firm, or even the single individual. Indeed, the distributed model allows people to take advantage of the capital they have, but is currently unused. For example, one can use one’s own kitchen and spare room to open up a small restaurant. Indeed, it is only the oppressiveness of zoning laws, regulations, and the need for extensive tax accounting that keeps this from being more common than it is.
Now, one can debate as long as one wishes the efficacy of the distributive system. However, there is one group that has decided in favor of distributism, and that is the manufacturers themselves. For the past 20 years, they have been busy creating a perverse simulacrum of a distributed system. They have realized that it is no longer profitable to hold expensive machinery, and have distributed their plants throughout the world, relying on cheap transportation and legal ownership of the patents to maintain control of the end product. In today’s industrial system, it is considered somewhat vulgar to actually own a factory when all that is needed is to own the brand.9 This is the “Nike” system, where the “product” is not the shoe but the “swoosh” on the shoe. Indeed, Nike itself makes nothing but patents and advertisements; actual shoes are made in sweatshops. But the advertising allows Nike to sell a shoe with a dollar in direct labor costs for $100.
This sounds like a good business, but actually the company sows the seeds of its own destruction. Management guru Thomas Peters gushes that some 90% of a product’s value is not in material or labor costs, but in “intellectual property.” What this means is that the corporation is able to exercise control through the patent laws. However, it will not take much for the actual factories to decide that the patent has no moral or economic justification. They will tear off the swooshtika and discover that they can sell their product locally for one-tenth of the price while paying their workers three times the exploitative wage. As the current economic order disintegrates, the corporations are likely to find that they have set in place everything necessary for their own replacement.
And that is good news.
1Pankaj Ghemawat, “How Business Strategy Tamed the “Invisible Hand” — HBS Working Knowledge,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, July 22, 2002, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3019.html.
2Kevin Carson, “Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles.”
3Throughout Throughtout this discussion, I am highly indebted to Kevin Carson, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (Booksurge, 2008).
4I should note here, in passing, that goods sold internally do not have a sales tax, giving the corporation a government-sponsored advantage over other forms of organization.
5J.C. Bogle, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), xix.
6Ibid., 31-2.
7Carson, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, 198.
8Carson, “Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles,” 4.
9Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), 3
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The world is full of egos, rules, conventions and protocols they function through a system of reward and punishment. Comply and you will get praise, and you will fear criticism. You will fear going against the rules because you fear criticism. They will break you down.
You will be angry, frustrated, and bored with mediocrity, which is what is required from you. Unhappiness piled upon unhappiness. You can move, but because there is a ‘depression’ on and unemployment is rising you cannot, besides other work places take the same institutional form and function, different faces, the same mediocrity, the same rules and protocols. You human spirit will be crushed. Happy are the blissfully ignorant, unaware of the problems…they have been programed to love their servitude and to accept the system of reward and punishment (fear). Not to see the flaws and injustices, or to immerse themselves into distracting worlds. Be really good at some computer game, follow a TV show or sport religiously or even be
passionate about your job. Do not think about the institutional form, politics, economics, the social hierarchy it is normal, background….your job is to fit in and to enjoy the servitude and the rewards and of course fear the possible loss of those rewards, a real life game of Snakes and Ladders, except the game is pre-stacked against you, you must accept it.
Liberty is to think, to know what is going on. To reject the matrix and its dehumanizing values. To try and wake others up and to sabotage the matrix in strategically important ways. Not by planting a terrorist bomb on a train, killing civilians and giving strength to the system. This is not only useless, it plays right into the hands of the controllers of the matrix if they have not actually planned and instigated it themselves.
No What is needed is a transvaluation of all matrix values, a rejection of its ethos, a refusal to follow protocol. This will breakdown the edifice.
Working or having a salaried job is generally the norm in the so called developed world. The working environment is structured and hierarchical. Managers and directors and people at the bottom who follow orders.
We have been ‘educated’ to believe this is ‘how it should be’. Do not rock the boat, take orders, do what is asked within your narrow sphere of operation, get paid or promoted, make money, pay the bills, consume and you will have success.
Think too much, see the flaws, injustices, and private tyrannies and you will be on your own, sacked, vilified, punished, without money and without an income. A LOSER.
Lets say that a person spends 10/11 hours a day either preparing/traveling to work or actually being at work, 8 hours are spent sleeping, 1/2 hours eating, and preparing food. That leaves 4 hours of ‘living’. Is this life?
The anti-semitic paradox
“Anti-Semitism is nothing but the antagonistic attitude produced in the non-Jew by the Jewish group. The Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the antagonism it has forever met in the world…the root cause is their use of enemies they create in order to keep solidarity…” Albert Einstein, quoted in Collier’s Magazine, November 26, 1938
“Fighting anti-Semitism seems to be for some Jews more important than any other expression of Jewishness … The danger appears when one becomes dependent upon them for one’s identity, so that one begins to need anti-Semitism.” Stanislaw Krajewski, (Polish Jew)
“For some Jews and perhaps some of the Jewish leadership, the fear is that if anti-Semitism completely disappears then the Jewish community might erode or dissolve.” Stanley Rothman
“And if real peace does come to Israel, the question will be asked: Can we, and how do we, survive without an external enemy?” Avraham Burg, head of the Jewish Agency
ANTI-SEMITISM is a positive force for Jewish people, a leading Welsh academic claims today. Lampeter University’s Dan Cohn-Sherbok controversially argues that anti-Semitism provides a paradox for the Jewish community – and its demise has left today’s Jews in chaos. Rabbi Professor Cohn-Sherbok says that hatred of Jews has kept Judaism alive for thousands of years.
But he argues that state of affairs is being threatened by the fact that anti-Semitism has gradually disappeared and in the last two centuries – with the exception of Nazi Germany – Jews have integrated into society.
He warned, “There is no solution to this problem. I don’t want anti-Semitism to continue, I want it to disappear but at the moment there is a risk the Jewish people will disappear if anti-Semitism disappears.”
Rabbi Professor Cohn-Sherbok said, “I have taught for more than 30 years and have written a number of books on anti-Semitism….Writing about all this, thinking about all this and experiencing all this, I have seen there is a positive side to it. Anti-Semitism has kept Judaism alive – and that is the paradox.”
“Jews hate anti-Semitism, we all hate it. We don’t believe that racial hatred is a good thing. It’s controversial to say what we hate is good for us. What’s very controversial about the book is that it is saying without anti-Semitism, in the modern world, traditional Judaism has disintegrated. “We have embraced the surrounding world and discarded our traditions because we are no longer hated. That is paradoxical.”
Cardiff Rabbi Mordechai Wollenberg said, “There is a certain truth to this. Whenever you are living under siege you have either got to survive or give in…”
Source
COHEN’S COMMENTARY
Rabbis Cohn-Sherbok and Mordechai Wollenberg make some heartfelt points. We, as Jewish people, have used anti-semitism to support our own ethnocentrism and maintain group cohesion. What will happen to Jews when the last vestige of anti-semitism disappears from the face of this earth?
Even as I read this article, tears rolled down my cheeks. Anti-semitism is all but gone. What will we do now? How will we survive with no enemies? Secretly, I felt compelled to paint a swastika on my own synagogue, then call 911 and report this vandalism as a hate crime committed by virulent anti-semites. Could this be the glue that sticks Jews together? Could I pick up a paint brush and save the Jewish people from the dangers posed by secularism and assimilation, the same way an Austrian painter caused the Holocaust when he put down his paintbrush?
A smile widened on my face as I imagined police handcuffing skinheads (walloping them with clubs as they protested their innocence). Hymm… I also imagined the Plymouth Rock Institute of Research warchest growing with lots and lots of large financial contributions from the Jewish community to help “stop the hate.” This would justify a raise in my PRIR executive salary, and a few other noteworthy perks. Hymm…
But I paused. I couldn’t remember which way the swastika pointed: left or right? A backwards pointed swastika would be a tell-tale sign of a hoax, and I didn’t want to drawl suspicion onto myself. There can’t be any doubts as to who would be evil enough to do such a thing.
In doing a little research, I discovered that I am not the only Jew who has these strange proclivities for survival. This phenomenon appears to be growing in the Jewish community. More and more Jews are inventing anti-semitic attacks as a means to Jewish survival.
Consider the following cases:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3891609.stm
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06001/630907.stm
Claremont College Professor scrawls anti-semtic graffetti on her own car
Jewish man burns Chabad house, blames anti-semites
http://kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1867132
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/04/10/Jewish_hate.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3611764.stm
http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/Racecard/antisemitism16.htm
In the end, I decided this venture was just too risky.
Perhaps–if I’m obnoxious and demanding enough–this problem will take care of itself?
“It is better to deal with a government in difficulties than with one that has luck on its side,” said Mayer Amschel Rothschild. “The best bargains can be found when the streets flow red with blood,” is widely attributed to the Rothschilds as well. Cyclical, traditional European wars of the type funded by the Rothschilds culminated in World War One, once referred to as ‘the war to end all wars’. Many bankers and rapacious industrialists gained fabulous wealth from the death and mutilation of millions. Just think of [Sir] Hiram Maxim who amassed an astronomical fortune from the invention of the machine gun! ‘Build a better killing machine and the world will beat a path to your door’. War is about the monetary profit of Kings and plutocrats.
The fact that this new morality is materialistic, quantifiable, and often merit-based and change friendly is not undesirable. Indeed these qualities are an inevitable consequence of rational social development. Rather, the source of the problem is that the equation here is incomplete. The consumerist, capitalistic value system is circular and self-referential; it fails to include the negative externalities of industrial production, for example. Nor is it able to include intangible qualities such as beauty or friendship. Further, the moral foundation of this value system is based on a tautology in that rich is good and poor is bad, that winners win and the losers lose and the winners are perceived as being inherently better than the losers – a flawed interpretation of Darwinism twisted and perverted to substantiate a preordained conclusion.
The value of money is not being questioned or even being measured in a valid context. People structure their entire lives based on the search for monetary wealth (and the products money can buy), it is the desire for money just to have more money. The effort is pointless because it has no context just as consumers are divorced from meaning and a separate identity outside of the money loop. Consumers are strongly discouraged from finding or forming independent meaning and identity and especially from questioning the established value system of consumer driven capitalism, just as under more traditional moral authority codes.
Taking a grand view of events I have to conclude that the moral values of contemporary consumer driven capitalism are an intermediate stage in the progression towards a system that adequately includes human needs and the needs of the natural environment around us, and the sooner we get to it the better.
Regardless of who you are or what background you come from as soon as you are confronted by any belief or idea-set that opposes debate, refuses questioning and criticism – that indicates a faith, a religion and it should set off every warning alarm and red flashing klaxon in your head. Because religion isn’t just repetitive rituals and praying to some spirit in the sky, religions are fundamentally defined as any idea-set that disallows a public challenge to its validity and that definition extends to include even secular ideologies. To varying degrees of dogmatic fervor other religions enjoy privileged status and are presently shielded from criticism. And despite a contemporary era that prides itself on a sense of enlightened rejection of taboos and jaded pragmatism the number of false idols and sacred values necessitating a closed mind and emotional attack-responses is equal to any dark age of olde. Duopoly democracy, ‘free-trade’ and the ‘free-market’, the six million Jewish holocaust (never mind the Armenian holocaust or the millions of Chinese and Ukrainians starved to death by despots or…), human-caused global warming, and if you think about it I’m sure you can come up with even more. The enemies of free minds and free thought don’t stop at the Church’s door anymore.
Any authority that mandates a belief and punishes public challenge of that belief is an enemy, and as a nihilist and a free-thinking human being any authority demanding allegiance to a faith or mandated ideology is enough to get me not just a trifle indignant. Of course that doesn’t mean that discussion and communication can’t, or shouldn’t, be compartmentalized and organized appropriately, just as within the private and personal arena everyone should be free to say, listen to, and see what they want and exclude what they don’t.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2001/08/15/perception.aspx
The Doors Of Perception: Why Americans Will Believe Almost Anything
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by Dr. Tim O’Shea
We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased.
The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated. Who cares, right?
It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by a thousand media clips per day. In an effort to save time, I would like to provide just a little background on the handling of information in this country.
Once the basic principles are illustrated about how our current system of media control arose historically, the reader might be more apt to question any given story in today’s news.
If everybody believes something, it’s probably wrong. We call that Conventional Wisdom.
In America, conventional wisdom that has mass acceptance is usually contrived: somebody paid for it. Examples:
Pharmaceuticals restore health
Vaccination brings immunity
The cure for cancer is just around the corner
When a child is sick, he needs immediate antibiotics
When a child has a fever he needs Tylenol
Hospitals are safe and clean.
America has the best health care in the world.
And many many more
This is a list of illusions, that have cost billions and billions to conjure up. Did you ever wonder why you never see the President speaking publicly unless he is reading? Or why most people in this country think generally the same about most of the above issues?
How This Set-Up Got Started
In Trust Us We’re Experts, Stauber and Rampton pull together some compelling data describing the science of creating public opinion in America.
They trace modern public influence back to the early part of the last century, highlighting the work of guys like Edward L. Bernays, the Father of Spin. From his own amazing chronicle Propaganda, we learn how Edward L. Bernays took the ideas of his famous uncle Sigmund Freud himself, and applied them to the emerging science of mass persuasion.
The only difference was that instead of using these principles to uncover hidden themes in the human unconscious, the way Freudian psychology does, Bernays used these same ideas to mask agendas and to create illusions that deceive and misrepresent, for marketing purposes.
The Father Of Spin
Bernays dominated the PR industry until the 1940s, and was a significant force for another 40 years after that. (Tye) During all that time, Bernays took on hundreds of diverse assignments to create a public perception about some idea or product. A few examples:
As a neophyte with the Committee on Public Information, one of Bernays’ first assignments was to help sell the First World War to the American public with the idea to “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” (Ewen)
A few years later, Bernays set up a stunt to popularize the notion of women smoking cigarettes. In organizing the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City, Bernays showed himself as a force to be reckoned with.
He organized the Torches of Liberty Brigade in which suffragettes marched in the parade smoking cigarettes as a mark of women’s liberation. Such publicity followed from that one event that from then on women have felt secure about destroying their own lungs in public, the same way that men have always done.
Bernays popularized the idea of bacon for breakfast.
Not one to turn down a challenge, he set up the advertising format along with the AMA that lasted for nearly 50 years proving that cigarettes are beneficial to health. Just look at ads in issues of Life or Time from the 40s and 50s.
Smoke And Mirrors
Bernay’s job was to reframe an issue; to create a desired image that would put a particular product or concept in a desirable light. Bernays described the public as a ‘herd that needed to be led.’ And this herdlike thinking makes people “susceptible to leadership.”
Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to “control the masses without their knowing it.” The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.
Stauber describes Bernays’ rationale like this:
“the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in a democratic society.” Trust Us p 42
These early mass persuaders postured themselves as performing a moral service for humanity in general – democracy was too good for people; they needed to be told what to think, because they were incapable of rational thought by themselves. Here’s a paragraph from Bernays’ Propaganda:
“Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of.
This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”
Here Comes The Money
Once the possibilities of applying Freudian psychology to mass media were glimpsed, Bernays soon had more corporate clients than he could handle. Global corporations fell all over themselves courting the new Image Makers. There were dozens of goods and services and ideas to be sold to a susceptible public. Over the years, these players have had the money to make their images happen. A few examples:
Philip Morris Pfizer Union Carbide
Allstate Monsanto Eli Lilly
tobacco industry Ciba Geigy lead industry
Coors DuPont Chlorox
Shell Oil Standard Oil Procter & Gamble
Boeing General Motors Dow Chemical
General Mills Goodyear
The Players
Though world-famous within the PR industry, the companies have names we don’t know, and for good reason.
The best PR goes unnoticed.
For decades they have created the opinions that most of us were raised with, on virtually any issue which has the remotest commercial value, including:
pharmaceutical drugs vaccines
medicine as a profession alternative medicine
fluoridation of city water chlorine
household cleaning products tobacco
dioxin global warming
leaded gasoline cancer research and treatment
pollution of the oceans forests and lumber
images of celebrities, including damage control crisis and disaster management
genetically modified foods aspartame
food additives; processed foods dental amalgams
Lesson #1
Bernays learned early on that the most effective way to create credibility for a product or an image was by “independent third-party” endorsement.
For example, if General Motors were to come out and say that global warming is a hoax thought up by some liberal tree-huggers, people would suspect GM’s motives, since GM’s fortune is made by selling automobiles.
If however some independent research institute with a very credible sounding name like the Global Climate Coalition comes out with a scientific report that says global warming is really a fiction, people begin to get confused and to have doubts about the original issue.
So that’s exactly what Bernays did. With a policy inspired by genius, he set up “more institutes and foundations than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined.” (Stauber p 45)
Quietly financed by the industries whose products were being evaluated, these “independent” research agencies would churn out “scientific” studies and press materials that could create any image their handlers wanted. Such front groups are given high-sounding names like:
Temperature Research Foundation Manhattan Institute
International Food Information Council Center for Produce Quality
Consumer Alert Tobacco Institute Research Council
The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition Cato Institute
Air Hygiene Foundation
American Council on Science and Health
Industrial Health Federation Global Climate Coalition
International Food Information Council Alliance for Better Foods
Sound pretty legit don’t they?
Canned News Releases
As Stauber explains, these organizations and hundreds of others like them are front groups whose sole mission is to advance the image of the global corporations who fund them, like those listed on page 2 above.
This is accomplished in part by an endless stream of ‘press releases’ announcing “breakthrough” research to every radio station and newspaper in the country. (Robbins) Many of these canned reports read like straight news, and indeed are purposely molded in the news format.
This saves journalists the trouble of researching the subjects on their own, especially on topics about which they know very little. Entire sections of the release or in the case of video news releases, the whole thing can be just lifted intact, with no editing, given the byline of the reporter or newspaper or TV station – and voilá;! Instant news – copy and paste. Written by corporate PR firms.
Does this really happen? Every single day, since the 1920s when the idea of the News Release was first invented by Ivy Lee. (Stauber, p 22) Sometimes as many as half the stories appearing in an issue of the Wall St. Journal are based solely on such PR press releases.. (22)
These types of stories are mixed right in with legitimately researched stories. Unless you have done the research yourself, you won’t be able to tell the difference.
The Language Of Spin
As 1920s spin pioneers like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays gained more experience, they began to formulate rules and guidelines for creating public opinion. They learned quickly that mob psychology must focus on emotion, not facts. Since the mob is incapable of rational thought, motivation must be based not on logic but on presentation. Here are some of the axioms of the new science of PR:
technology is a religion unto itself
if people are incapable of rational thought, real democracy is dangerous
important decisions should be left to experts
when reframing issues, stay away from substance; create images
never state a clearly demonstrable lie
Words are very carefully chosen for their emotional impact. Here’s an example. A front group called the International Food Information Council handles the public’s natural aversion to genetically modified foods.
Trigger words are repeated all through the text. Now in the case of GM foods, the public is instinctively afraid of these experimental new creations which have suddenly popped up on our grocery shelves which are said to have DNA alterations. The IFIC wants to reassure the public of the safety of GM foods, so it avoids words like:
Frankenfoods Hitler biotech
chemical DNA experiments
manipulate money safety
scientists radiation roulette
gene-splicing gene gun random
Instead, good PR for GM foods contains words like:
hybrids natural order beauty
choice bounty cross-breeding
diversity earth farmer
organic wholesome
It’s basic Freudian/Tony Robbins word association. The fact that GM foods are not hybrids that have been subjected to the slow and careful scientific methods of real crossbreeding doesn’t really matter. This is pseudoscience, not science. Form is everything and substance just a passing myth. (Trevanian)
Who do you think funds the International Food Information Council? Take a wild guess. Right – Monsanto, DuPont, Frito-Lay, Coca Cola, Nutrasweet – those in a position to make fortunes from GM foods. (Stauber p 20)
Characteristics Of Good Propaganda
As the science of mass control evolved, PR firms developed further guidelines for effective copy. Here are some of the gems:
dehumanize the attacked party by labeling and name calling
speak in glittering generalities using emotionally positive words
when covering something up, don’t use plain English; stall for time; distract
get endorsements from celebrities, churches, sports figures, street people – anyone who has no expertise in the subject at hand
the ‘plain folks’ ruse: us billionaires are just like you
when minimizing outrage, don’t say anything memorable, point out the benefits of what just happened, and avoid moral issues
Keep this list. Start watching for these techniques. Not hard to find – look at today’s paper or tonight’s TV news. See what they’re doing; these guys are good!
Science For Hire
PR firms have become very sophisticated in the preparation of news releases. They have learned how to attach the names of famous scientists to research that those scientists have not even looked at. (Stauber, p 201)
This is a common occurrence. In this way the editors of newspapers and TV news shows are often not even aware that an individual release is a total PR fabrication. Or at least they have “deniability,” right?
Stauber tells the amazing story of how leaded gas came into the picture. In 1922, General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline gave cars more horsepower.
When there was some concern about safety, GM paid the Bureau of Mines to do some fake “testing” and publish spurious research that ‘proved’ that inhalation of lead was harmless. Enter Charles Kettering.
Founder of the world famous Sloan-Kettering Memorial Institute for medical research, Charles Kettering also happened to be an executive with General Motors.
By some strange coincidence, we soon have the Sloan Kettering institute issuing reports stating that lead occurs naturally in the body and that the body has a way of eliminating low level exposure.
Through its association with The Industrial Hygiene Foundation and PR giant Hill & Knowlton, Sloane Kettering opposed all anti-lead research for years. (Stauber p 92). Without organized scientific opposition, for the next 60 years more and more gasoline became leaded, until by the 1970s, 90% of our gasoline was leaded.
Finally it became too obvious to hide that lead was a major carcinogen, and leaded gas was phased out in the late 1980s. But during those 60 years, it is estimated that some 30 million tons of lead were released in vapor form onto American streets and highways. 30 million tons.
That is PR, my friends.
Junk Science
In 1993 a guy named Peter Huber wrote a new book and coined a new term. The book was Galileo’s Revenge and the term was junk science. Huber’s shallow thesis was that real science supports technology, industry, and progress.
Anything else was suddenly junk science. Not surprisingly, Stauber explains how Huber’s book was supported by the industry-backed Manhattan Institute.
Huber’s book was generally dismissed not only because it was so poorly written, but because it failed to realize one fact: true scientific research begins with no conclusions. Real scientists are seeking the truth because they do not yet know what the truth is.
True scientific method goes like this:
1. Form a hypothesis
2. Make predictions for that hypothesis
3. Test the predictions
4. Reject or revise the hypothesis based on the research findings
Boston University scientist Dr. David Ozonoff explains that ideas in science are themselves like “living organisms, that must be nourished, supported, and cultivated with resources for making them grow and flourish.” (Stauber p 205)
Great ideas that don’t get this financial support because the commercial angles are not immediately obvious – these ideas wither and die.
Another way you can often distinguish real science from phony is that real science points out flaws in its own research. Phony science pretends there were no flaws.
The Real Junk Science
Contrast this with modern PR and its constant pretensions to sound science. Corporate sponsored research, whether it’s in the area of drugs, GM foods, or chemistry begins with predetermined conclusions.
It is the job of the scientists then to prove that these conclusions are true, because of the economic upside that proof will bring to the industries paying for that research. This invidious approach to science has shifted the entire focus of research in America during the past 50 years, as any true scientist is likely to admit.
Stauber documents the increasing amount of corporate sponsorship of university research. (206) This has nothing to do with the pursuit of knowledge. Scientists lament that research has become just another commodity, something bought and sold. (Crossen)
The Two Main Targets Of “Sound Science”
It is shocking when Stauber shows how the vast majority of corporate PR today opposes any research that seeks to protect
public health
the environment
It’s a funny thing that most of the time when we see the phrase “junk science,” it is in a context of defending something that may threaten either the environment or our health.
This makes sense when one realizes that money changes hands only by selling the illusion of health and the illusion of environmental protection. True public health and real preservation of the earth’s environment have very low market value.
Stauber thinks it ironic that industry’s self-proclaimed debunkers of junk science are usually non-scientists themselves. (255) Here again they can do this because the issue is not science, but the creation of images.
The Language Of Attack
When PR firms attack legitimate environmental groups and alternative medicine people, they again use special words which will carry an emotional punch:
outraged sound science junk science sensible scaremongering responsible
phobia hoax alarmist hysteria
The next time you are reading a newspaper article about an environmental or health issue, note how the author shows bias by using the above terms. This is the result of very specialized training.
Another standard PR tactic is to use the rhetoric of the environmentalists themselves to defend a dangerous and untested product that poses an actual threat to the environment. This we see constantly in the PR smokescreen that surrounds genetically modified foods.
They talk about how GM foods are necessary to grow more food and to end world hunger, when the reality is that GM foods actually have lower yields per acre than natural crops. (Stauber p 173)
The grand design sort of comes into focus once you realize that almost all GM foods have been created by the sellers of herbicides and pesticides so that those plants can withstand greater amounts of herbicides and pesticides. (The Magic Bean)
Kill Your TV?
Hope this chapter has given you a hint to start reading newspaper and magazine articles a little differently, and perhaps start watching TV news shows with a slightly different attitude than you had before.
Always ask, what are they selling here, and who’s selling it? And if you actually follow up on Stauber & Rampton’s book and check out some of the other resources below, you might even glimpse the possibility of advancing your life one quantum simply by ceasing to subject your brain to mass media.
That’s right – no more newspapers, no more TV news, no more Time magazine or Newsweek. You could actually do that. Just think what you could do with the extra time alone.
Really feel like you need to “relax” or find out “what’s going on in the world” for a few hours every day? Think about the news of the past couple of years for a minute.
Do you really suppose the major stories that have dominated headlines and TV news have been “what is going on in the world?” Do you actually think there’s been nothing going on besides the contrived tech slump, the contrived power shortages, the re-filtered accounts of foreign violence and disaster, and all the other non-stories that the puppeteers dangle before us every day?
What about when they get a big one, like with OJ or Monica Lewinsky or the Oklahoma city bombing? Do we really need to know all that detail, day after day? Do we have any way of verifying all that detail, even if we wanted to? What is the purpose of news?
To inform the public? Hardly. The sole purpose of news is to keep the public in a state of fear and uncertainty so that they’ll watch again tomorrow and be subjected to the same advertising.
Oversimplification? Of course. That’s the mark of mass media mastery – simplicity. The invisible hand. Like Edward Bernays said, the people must be controlled without them knowing it.
Consider this: what was really going on in the world all that time they were distracting us with all that stupid vexatious daily smokescreen? Fear and uncertainty — that’s what keeps people coming back for more.
If this seems like a radical outlook, let’s take it one step further:
What would you lose from your life if you stopped watching TV and stopped reading newspapers altogether?
Would your life really suffer any financial, moral, intellectual or academic loss from such a decision?
Do you really need to have your family continually absorbing the illiterate, amoral, phony, uncultivated, desperately brainless values of the people featured in the average nightly TV program? Are these fake, programmed robots “normal”?
Do you need to have your life values constantly spoon-fed to you?
Are those shows really amusing, or just a necessary distraction to keep you from looking at reality, or trying to figure things out yourself by doing a little independent reading?
Name one example of how your life is improved by watching TV news and reading the evening paper.
What measurable gain is there for you?
Planet of the Apes?
There’s no question that as a nation, we’re getting dumber year by year. Look at the presidents we’ve been choosing lately. Ever notice the blatant grammar mistakes so ubiquitous in today’s advertising and billboards?
Literacy is marginal in most American secondary schools. Three fourths of California high school seniors can’t read well enough to pass their exit exams. (SJ Mercury 20 Jul 01)
If you think other parts of the country are smarter, try this one: hand any high school senior a book by Dumas or Jane Austen, and ask them to open to any random page and just read one paragraph out loud. Go ahead, do it. SAT scales are arbitrarily shifted lower and lower to disguise how dumb kids are getting year by year.
At least 10% have documented “learning disabilities,” which are reinforced and rewarded by special treatment and special drugs. Ever hear of anyone failing a grade any more?
Or observe the intellectual level of the average movie which these days may only last one or two weeks in the theatres, especially if it has insufficient explosions, chase scenes, silicone, fake martial arts, and cretinesque dialogue.
Radio? Consider the low mental qualifications of the falsely animated corporate simians they hire as DJs — they’re only allowed to have 50 thoughts, which they just repeat at random.
And at what point did popular music cease to require the study of any musical instrument or theory whatsoever, not to mention lyric? Perhaps we just don’t understand this emerging art form, right? The Darwinism of MTV – apes descended from man.
Ever notice how most articles in any of the glossy magazines sound like they were all written by the same guy? And this guy just graduated from junior college? And yet he has all the correct opinions on social issues, no original ideas, and that shallow, smug, homogenized corporate omniscience, which enables him to assure us that everything is going to be fine…
All this is great news for the PR industry – makes their job that much easier. Not only are very few paying attention to the process of conditioning; fewer are capable of understanding it even if somebody explained it to them.
Tea In the Cafeteria
Let’s say you’re in a crowded cafeteria, and you buy a cup of tea. And as you’re about to sit down you see your friend way across the room. So you put the tea down and walk across the room and talk to your friend for a few minutes.
Now, coming back to your tea, are you just going to pick it up and drink it? Remember, this is a crowded place and you’ve just left your tea unattended for several minutes. You’ve given anybody in that room access to your tea.
Why should your mind be any different? Turning on the TV, or uncritically absorbing mass publications every day – these activities allow access to our minds by “just anyone” – anyone who has an agenda, anyone with the resources to create a public image via popular media.
As we’ve seen above, just because we read something or see something on TV doesn’t mean it’s true or worth knowing. So the idea here is, like the tea, the mind is also worth guarding, worth limiting access to it.
This is the only life we get. Time is our total capital. Why waste it allowing our potential, our personality, our values to be shaped, crafted, and limited according to the whims of the mass panderers?
There are many important issues that are crucial to our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. If it’s an issue where money is involved, objective data won’t be so easy to obtain. Remember, if everybody knows something, that image has been bought and paid for.
Real knowledge takes a little effort, a little excavation down at least one level below what “everybody knows.”
References
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Dr. Mercola’s Comments:
One of the main reasons I publish my free health e-newsletter is to provide you, the reader, with the truth — without any connections to any third party organizations, advertisers, etc. — so you can weed through much of the nonsense that the media throws at you and learn what can REALLY help you and your loved ones fight and prevent disease and enhance the quality and length of your life.
So much of what you hear about “healthcare” through the media is manipulated or controlled by the pharmaceutical and other medical giants who have mass profit, not your personal health, as their primary goal. My free health e-newsletter has grown to over 250,000 subscribers because:
A) my vision and passion is to change the current healthcare system to one focused on real prevention and cure versus the current Band-Aid approach of drugs and surgeries that only patches things over, and I am committed to providing you the TRUTH about health and medical news toward that end
B) I am an internationally respected physician with over two decades of experience developing a REAL health and dietary plan that has PROVEN to help tens of thousands of my patients overcome chronic disease. The point is, my passion and lifelong dedication has been to help people, including the millions of readers of Mercola.com (now one of the world’s top-five most visited health websites), improve their health, whether they are confronting some disease, illness, or weight issue or seeking to improve already good health, and motives have EVERYTHING to do with who you should trust with health advice. If you are interested learning more about my dietary and health program, read more about my new book, Dr. Mercola’s Total Health Program, now. All of my profits, as you will read, are going to a new non-profit organization dedicating to changing the healthcare paradigm in the U.S. and beyond to one focused on real prevention and cure versus the current drug-domination model fueling a lot of hype that doesn’t really help you.
April 1, 2008
Debt-based Money: A guarantee to destroy the planet.
Filed under: Uncategorized — gilliganscorner @ 10:02 am
I want to take a moment to explain how money is created and destroyed in our debt based money supply. Environmentalists don’t often look for, let alone see the relationship.
The simplest way is via an example:
1) You go into a bank for a mortgage of 300K. Let’s say that the mortgage is fixed at 6% for 25 years, payable monthly. You will make no early pre-payments or double up your monthly payments. Very simple.
This means at the end of your mortgage (after 300 monthly payments = 25 years). According to this calculator here, this means that you will pay $1,919.00 a month. You will pay back the amount you borrowed (300K) + the interest – a whopping $275,826.00 – almost double the amount you borrowed.
2) The bank puts you through some preliminary hoops to see if they are going to make money off of you. I.e. you have a job, your credit is not maxed out, etc.
3) The bank creates 300K out of thin air. They do NOT take that money from their depositor’s accounts to give to you. Because of the fractional reserve requirements, they only have to keep a very small amount of “money” in the vault to back that loan. I say “money” because that is easier for most of us to understand, rather than the term “capital instruments”.
So if the Fed requires the bank have a reserve requirement of 10%, this means that they have to have $30,000.00 dollars of “money” in the vault. Here in Canada, the reserve requirements for our private chartered banks is 0%. That is not a typo. Our banks, in reality DO keep reserves, but there is no law that requires them to do so.
4) You pay the seller of the house. Be it the builder or the owner, they take that money and (a) pay for all the labour and materials used to build the house and keep a profit, or (b) the owner of the house takes that money and buys a yacht or another house or whatever. That new “money” you borrowed (the 300K) makes its way out into the economy. In otherwords, by you willing to shackle yourself to debt, you allowed the bank to add 300K to the money supply.
By a simple accounting trick, the bank records the loan in two columns in the ledger book. The mortgage goes in the asset column as it is an interest bearing financial instrument. It ALSO goes in the liability column as someone will deposit it into an account and start writing checks against that account. Thus, the books balance.
5) You work for 25 years to pay that back, paying your $1,919 a month.
6) Around year 13 of your 300K mortgage, you would have paid the principle back. You still have 12 years to go to pay the $275K in interest back. Question. Where did the money come from to pay back the interest? What created the $275K and added it to the money supply in order for you to obtain it by working to pay the bank?
Do you see at this point? The bank loan actually reduces the amount of money in circulation over its lifetime! It transfers wealth out of the economy and gives it to the bank for the bank’s unearned work (their right to mint “checkbook money”)! Normally, this system would collapse!
But our system hasn’t collapsed. So what gives?
The answer is simple.
The money comes from people who borrowed AFTER you. They borrowed the money via the same mechanism from their private banks, dumping their newly minted “money” into overall money supply.
7) To sustain the money supply, we need to attract new borrowers into the system as old loans are being paid off. Rate of money created = rate of money disappearing = stable money supply.
If the rate of money creation is higher than the money being destroyed, we are told it is economic “growth” and possibly inflation, which rewards producers/spenders, but hurts consumers.
If the rate of money creation is lower, we have the opposite effect. The money being retired, we are told we have a “recession” and possibly deflation, which rewards consumers, but hurts producers.
This is where the Fed (or any central bank) comes in. These central banks (or cartels of government agents and banking interests) look at a pool of economic data, have the power to artificially raise or lower interest rates. If they see the economy getting “hot” and inflation rising, they raise the interest rates.
This deters people from lining up for new loans. The money supply begins to contract. The economy slows down.
If the economy gets too slow, they lower interest rates, thus enticing people to line up at the loan window of the banks. New money is dumped into the economy. It heats up again.
In other words, the Fed is always looking for the sweet spot where banks can maximize its members profits of the backs of slaves (run as fast as you can on the old hamster wheel = keep up payments), but not kill them (i.e fall off the hamster wheel = bankruptcy). What’s that old saying? “You can’t beat a dead horse.”
9) The bank, believe it or not, does NOT want to foreclose on your house. They hate that. Now they have a non-paper asset they have to pay taxes and maintenance on. They might have to sell it into a market where there is a glut of foreclosed homes on the market = lower prices. They hate that. They just want your payments.
10) That money you paid back to the bank does NOT stay in the bank. Banks record the interest as profit. From that profit, they pay their employees, taxes, shareholders, capital/operational costs, finance business growth, and of course, the obscene bonuses to the CxO’s. Since shareholders are making a profit, they cheer the bank on! Employees are grateful for their jobs! Government relishes the tax revenue!
But all of these people who work at the banks/government/shareholders have loans they have to pay back too.
Since the money is backed by debt and issued by the bank, it’s ultimate destination is always back to the bank.
11) You can see where this is all going right?
Because we have a money supply that demands new loans to be created to keep the money supply stable, this means that we MUST have infinite economic growth.
This is not sustainable. The economy is 100% driven from whatever we can fish out of the sea, farm off the land, or dig out of the earth. It can’t go on forever. The planet will collapse into a smoking hole. I am not a big truther on global warming, but it would be insanity to ignore ALL arguments. The earth is flashing warning signs at us.
And we bicker without understanding the nature of the problem. Their can be no environmental sustainability unless the money supply issue is fixed. We need to have a non-debt based money where we can prosper in a zero-growth economy. This concept is usually pretty foreign to most people.
And as the earth declines, it will be the banking industry and their debt based money standing on our corpses, before they are killed too. All their power won’t save them.
