A speech from the annual meeting of the EMU – The European Muslim Union – in Vienna, Austria on Sunday 11th September 2011

We, the Muslims of Europe, must be aware of our reality, our circumstances, our environment and the changing trends that affect us directly and indirectly. There are recent developments in which one can observe trends that are hostile towards Islam and Muslims, which were not so established a few years ago even during the Bush ‘War on terror’, and definitely not before that.

The trends are apparently inauspicious for Muslims, but upon deeper, more careful examination they reveal a moment in which it is possible to take the initiative, an opportunity to outdo the mediocre society of individualism and frivolity; the historic moment in which we live is fertile ground in which, with Divine guidance, to restore the greatness of the human being and the right time in which to remind our fellow human beings of the basics of human existence, preserved by the revelation but otherwise so much lost in our time: the fitra and the natural condition of the human being.

The massacre in Oslo on the Island of Utoya in the last month of July set alarms ringing across Europe. With the ongoing financial crisis, voters may feel attracted to far right parties, many of which are building support by opposing immigration and stirring up hatred against Muslims.

During the last Eid al-Fitr I attended salat al-Eid at a Mosque in the Northern German city of Rostock. Looking for the location of the Mosque I saw an electoral banner hanging from many street light-posts with the text: KEIN MOSCHEE IN ROSTOCK – No Mosque in Rostock.

This is a new trend, that is spreading throughout Europe, of political parties promoting a policy that is openly anti-Islam:

1. In Norway, the NDL ‘Norway Defence League’ to which the mass-murderer of Oslo and Utoya Island was affiliated for several years.
2. In the UK, the English Defence League, a movement started in the city of Luton that has gained ground in the last couple of years.
3. In the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders, the racist, zionist and ferocious defamer of Islam who has called for the ban of the Qur’an. His party gained twenty-four seats in the elections of 2010.
4. In Austria, the Freedom party (FPO) that, together with the Alliance for the Future (BZO), secured the votes of almost a third of the electorate in the elections of 2008.
5. In Russia, there are neo-Nazi groups.
6. In Catalonia, Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC, Plataforma por Cataluña) is an openly racist and anti-Islamic party that has already prevented the construction of Mosques in Badalona and is trying to stop mosques being built in other cities.
7. In Germany, the National Democratic Party of Germany – The People’s Union (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands – Die Volksunion, NPD), is an extremist right-wing German nationalist party, and was responsible for the banners I saw in Rostock.

The list goes on and on.

The OIC ‘Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’ published a report of 74 pages last May 2011 (we can send it to whoever wishes to study it) about intolerance and discrimination against Muslims, covering from May 2010 to April 2011.

The report of the OIC Observatory on Islamophobia notes three significant developments:

a) a continuation rather than a reversal of trends from the preceding period, reflected in the ban of mosque construction and the use of Islamophobia as an instrument in electioneering.
b) an exacerbation of these trends, reflected in events such as new legislation clearly hostile to Muslims, high profile statements against multiculturalism and the reprinting of the stupid cartoons.
c) a new and growing element of statements from politicians condemnatory of Muslim communities and Islam itself.

There are specific media and websites completely dedicated to promoting unfounded fears, mistrust and rejection of Islam and Muslims.

Using ‘guilt by association’ or ‘collective guilt’, there are groups that use a virulent discourse condemning Islam and promoting discrimination against and harassment of Muslims, in some cases even encouraging violence against Muslims.

In recent months, the political leaders of major western European countries have participated in a chorus of disappointment about the model they call multiculturalism, launching a policy overtly against Muslims.

When during the Reunification Celebration in October 2010, Christian Wulff the German President made positive remarks about the immigrant Muslim population of Germany and their valuable contributions to the development of the German economy and society, he did not expect the negative reaction his words were going to spark. At the end of that month, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared coexistence with immigrant Muslim communities ‘a complete failure’. In February 2011, David Cameron made headlines in the media worldwide by affirming that multiculturalism in Britain, a policy of which the country had been proud for many decades, was ‘a failure’. In the same month, Nikolas Sarkozy, the French president, affirmed that the country had given ‘too much attention to protect the identity of the person arriving and not enough attention to protect the identity of the person who was receiving him’. Even the former Spanish primer Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, lent his voice to this chorus declaring that ‘multiculturalism divides and debilitates western societies’. In his book Germany Dismantles Itself, published in August 2010, and widely publicised by specific powerful media groups in Germany, the former governor of the Deutsch Bank, Tilo Sarrazin, openly criticised Turkish and Arab immigrants in Germany accusing them of being economic parasites, an extremely unjust and biased analysis.

The Muslim communities of Europe are being targeted. We must understand the situation in which we live and where we are establishing our families, our communities and our Deen.

Muslims are instructed by Allah and His Messenger to be steadfast and not be overpowered by fear of the changing circumstances and the growing hostility of their enemies. Allah is sufficient for us. These attacks and this hostility are a test for us, an examination of our sincerity, our patience and our determination.

Another fact that has been proving very decisive in recent times, a continuing phenomenon that is affecting the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims alike deeply, is the financial crisis. The financial crisis is the collapse of a system. In the middle of the continuing collapse of a financial model that cannot be sustained, because it is, as Ezra Pound put it in his Cantos, ‘contra natura’ – completely contrary to the laws of nature, and to the laws of God, the Muslim communities have to excel in conveying our message and in demonstrating it in action. We have now the chance to offer alternatives and solutions to the financial order based on usury. The time is ripe. People of reflection and understanding all over the world are expecting this news. The revival of the lost pillar of zakat, and the practice of halal trade. The restoration of a legitimate means of exchange with intrinsic value. A new economic order where inflation, monopoly and speculation are not permitted.

The matter may seem too big for us but we have the ability to limit the usury power and eventually to dry up the sources of the banking system by abandoning it and turning to the forms of halal trade and economics that are free from usury. The clear and indisputable prohibition of usury in all its manifestations renders the Qur’an, and the message of Islam, enormously important in this time. This is the right moment to remind ourselves and others that Allah has forbidden usury and made trade legitimate, that our Deen is mu‘amalah, not only ‘ibadah, and that ethics must return to the market place.

So, the crisis, or rather the collapse, of the usurious model, represents a tremendous opportunity.

***

In contrast to this bleak picture, a complete set of new trends must be recognised and these are all signs of the real opportunity before us.

All of these signs have been present in this conference:

1. More and more people in Europe are embracing Islam.
2. Young Muslims, second and third generations of the early Muslim immigrants, are becoming educated Europeans, professionals, committed members of their societies and yet proud of their Deen and sure of their Muslim identity.
3. The growing number of indigenous Europeans who have become Islamic scholars of high calibre (Abdal Hakim Murad Winter, Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley, Aisha Bewley, Yahya Michot, Abdulghani Melara… ) in western Europe, speaking native European languages as their mother tongues.
4. The Muslim population is growing at a much higher rate than the non-Muslim birth rate in Europe. The most frequent name in the Municipality of Brussels among new born babies during the year 2009 was Muhammad.
5. Muslims and Muslim communities are gradually becoming a natural part of the neighbourhoods and the cities of Europe. Open days in hundreds of mosques and public iftars in many, Muslim cultural activities all over Europe are full of non-Muslims. Public iftars have become a common practice of many municipalities, heads of State and non-Muslim Embassies, including the US Embassy.
6. The increasing number of Muslim institutions with high standards in education, and foundations, publishing houses, humanitarian and relief organisations, as well as some Muslim communities which are models of good management, unity and knowledge. We can cite as examples: the Austrian Muslim community, the Islamic Community in Spain, Islamic Relief, some of the best private schools in the UK, Al Hijrah School in Birmingham, the Karimia Institute of Dr. Musharraf Hussein, in Nottingham, the Islamic University of Rotterdam, the Islamia schools of Yusuf Islam, to mention just a few, and many, many other local Muslim communities all over the continent led by honest and committed leaders.
7. The approach towards Islam, its belief, its history and its cultural achievements has changed in every country and is broadly positive in universities, museums, publications, exhibitions and cultural foundations such as Cambridge University, Legado Andalusi in Spain, the Prince of Wales Trust …etc.

On August 11, exactly one month ago, the whole world was astonished by the voice of a single man, Tariq Jahan, a Muslim from the city of Birmingham, in England, whose son had been killed along with two other young Muslims as a result of ​the riots that swept the UK in Ramadan. Less than 24 hours after the brutal murder of his 21 year old son Harun Jahan, Tariq Jahan, overcoming his grief, affirmed with serenity in front of the cameras his belief in Allah and in the Divine decree and asked everyone to behave correctly, to keep calm and to respect their neighbours. The words of Tariq Jahan showed dignity, manliness and a sense of social responsibility that embodied the self-control and wisdom the Muslims need to show in the present circumstances. This individual embodied the confirmation that Islam in Europe is already a decisive factor of balance and sanity in the present and will play a key role in the future.

Islam will be the ark of Noah, safinatu Nuh, in the times of great confusion and degradation of the society that we are already witnessing.

We the Muslims of Europe must be aware of our strengths, our formidable energy and vitality, and always keep a clear vision of our highest aspirations in front of us. We are the community of the last of the Messengers, the bearers of the last revelation.

The historic role of the Islamic community is clear in the ayat of Surat al Baqara:
وَكَذَلِكَ جَعَلْنَاكُمْ أُمَّةً وَسَطًا لِّتَكُونُواْ شُهَدَاءَ عَلَى النَّاسِ وَيَكُونَ الرَّسُولُ عَلَيْكُمْ شَهِيدًا
In this way We have made you a middlemost community, so that you may act as witnesses against mankind and the Messenger as a witness against you. (Surat Al Baqarah, 143)

This role of witnessing means that the community of Islam must be exemplary. It must set the highest standards of behaviour and performance and be the reference point for others.
This is the historic mission of the Muslims. And it is this very criterion that qualifies the Muslims as the best human community that has ever appeared on the face of the earth.
It is in these moments when we are reminded of the need for unity, and the need to support one another to hold on firmly to our Din and to obey Allah and His Messenger as the formula for success. We the Muslims of Europe must be aware of our reality, our environment and the changing trends. We must recognise our blessings, and remind ourselves of our highest aspirations and have gratitude to Allah.

You are the best nation ever to be produced before mankind. You enjoin the right, forbid the wrong and believe in Allah. If the People of the Book were to believe, it would be better for them. Some of them are believers but most of them are deviators. (Al Imran 3:110 )

***
The Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Norwegian murderer Anders Breivik are one type, one model of a decaying, marginal minority of Europeans. They represent one trend.

Tariq Jahan, the ordinary Muslim father of Birmingham, embodies the other trend of a growing Muslim reality in Europe, one of gratitude to Allah for the gift of Islam and the many, innumerable gifts of life and the struggle to be a khalifa of Allah on Earth.

To summarise, yes, there are many challenges ahead of us, and we will be confronted by enemies. We must not be naive about it, but they are not our main concern; we are not obsessed by them or the danger they pose. They desire to extinguish Allah’s Light with their mouths (with their discourse of hatred), but Allah will perfect His Light, though the unbelievers hate it. (Qur’an 61,

On the contrary, we recognise the blessings we enjoy and are thankful to Allah for them. Then we look at our shortcomings and our weaknesses and act to put them right.

Our main concern is, on our part, to do our best, look at our own shortcomings and put them right. We do not complain, and we do not fear our adversaries for Allah is our friend. But we must act and struggle with sincerity and with knowledge. Each one of us individually has a task in establishing worship of Allah – ibada, and the mu‘amalat, our transactions – in our selves first, and in our families and communities, individually and collectively.

The presence of Islam in Europe is not, as they want to misrepresent, a danger or a source of problems for European societies. On the contrary, the growing presence of Muslim communities in the cities of Europe is a source of sanity, a healing for decaying European societies. Fresh air to breath, pure water to drink and clarity to see.

Surat At Tawbah 105
Say: ‘Act, for Allah will see your actions, and so will His Messenger and the believers. You will be returned to the Knower of the Unseen and the Visible and He will inform you regarding what you did.’

I carefully avoided using the word “march” in the title, though I had thought of using it. Perhaps I have entered into a fallacy, now? But I didn’t want that association with war. With “the troops”, with their horrible, official uniforms, arms, and incitement of murder. I hate war. I hate governments, too. Governments are aggressors. An aggressor, we would all agree, is somebody who tries to control the actions of another; and they do this through force, most often violent; only rarely is the threat of violence not followed up upon. This is true of Governments; but Governments are far worse. Governments enforce their aggressorship through the terrorist organization known as the police. A terrorist organization is a group of people whose job it is to scare people into doing what they want. The policemen and policewomen do this by wearing guns to scare you into obeying them. The police, being linked with Governments (the police is the terrorist arm of the aggressor Governments; they are there merely to ensure that the will of Governments is carried out), are therefore aggressors, too.
People go to prison for minor things. Prison as an institution is as wrong, corrupt, and pointless as those of the police and of Governments. Prison cannot and does not work for the simple fact that recidivism is at an all-time high; in other words, people who come out of prison more often than not end up back there again shortly afterwards. Prisons provide books and educational materials so that criminals can be smarter upon release. Prisons also provide gyms and provide mandatory exercise, so that criminals can be bigger and stronger upon release. Do you see something happening here? To return back to my point of people going to prison for minor things: for example, if a poor man stole a loaf of bread, this would be seen as breaking “the law” (an act of rebellion against the tight rules of Government). For breaking “the law”, he would go to prison. “The law” (I refuse to view it as anything more than a temporary measure; this cannot surely last, for reasons I will go into later), made by Government, also mentions that it is wrong to steal, wrong to kill. The man who stole a loaf of bread because he was poor is sitting in prison. Yet the real criminals are enjoying trips all over the world; the real criminals work in Government, and they sanction theft and extortion through taxes; they sanction murder through acts of war and the army. Some say that the army is necessary to maintain the peace. But why should I continually believe in war to achieve peace? This is wrong, and is self-apparent. Having an army is also likely to increase the likelihood of going to war, too; and it is the countries with the biggest armies that wage the bloodiest wars. The army is nothing more than a factory which trains once-ordinary people that it is okay for them to kill people. “To protect the peace,” or “To help others who need it.” Even if there were no enemies, the army would have to invent some, because otherwise they’d not be able to justify their existence. And, to me, it is by making up so-called threats that forces many people into believing that an army is necessary. “They’ll protect me if we go to war.” But this sounds as if going to war is not a prerogative taken by the army; when, in fact, it evidently is. The army is not interested in protecting citizens like you or me. The army is interested only in protecting its cause, and as I said, does so by creating threats that make people think they need to depend upon the army. Wrong!
The law-making system is supposed to have a sense of justice. Many people do have faith in their law systems, in their courts, in their bureaucracy of bullshit. But, as we already know, governments are aggressors: they want to control all the people who live under their rule. Governments don’t just make law; they are the law. And the police act out the will of Government, necessarily by wearing guns to scare you into obeying them. It is clear, then, that “justice” in relation to Governments really means a wanting to set up and rule over man; necessarily dividing them. This isn’t justice. Justice should be a thing between equals: between those who do not have rulers, and those who do not rule. That the system of today involves rulers, and that it involves those being ruled (the second class is far bigger than the first: a relatively tiny minority rule over a huge majority), isn’t and can never be justice. Even if Governments (“the law”) say that it is what exists.
If anarchism is not on the increase, then party dealignment certainly is. For example, in the UK, in the decade 1950, voter turnout of those eligible to vote in the General Election was higher than 85%. By 2001, 85% had plummeted to 56% turnout of all of those eligible to vote in the General Election. This is just in the UK. Probably most countries that have had for a long time the so-called “gift” of being able to vote have suffered a decline in voter turnout. As I said: anarchism may not be on the increase (there are no statistics for this), but party dealignment certainly is (there are figures, and plenty of them, for this; huge money is made by people who write books about General Elections, and they have all of the statistics required for your knowledge in them). As for those countries where voting isn’t a “gift”, e.g. where it is “forced” upon them, it’s a similar thing. And in any case, any vote for a Government is a vote for enslaving yourself, if, indeed, you vote (or even if you don’t; it is inevitable that, somewhere, somebody will vote to enslave you “on your behalf”; and they’ll call it “democracy”, not “slavery”, because “slavery”, they claim, has been abolished in the West for many years, and is deemed unacceptable; we’ve just got a new system of slavery, which under the guise of ballot-boxes and slips of paper and people rolling around in battle-busses, is apparently a thing that is okay).
Some people consider anarchism to be unrealistic–a “pipe dream”. Some people say that “Governments are necessary”. And so they are!–if you believe it is necessary to make peaceful people do what they don’t want to. As we know, laws exist to make them do so. But laws are pointless; as Ammon Hennacy said: “Oh, Judge, your damn laws! The good people don’t need them, and the bad people don’t follow them, so what use are they?” How are Governments necessary for freedom? They’re not. They’re necessary to coerce, to make you do what you don’t want to. How can laws serve justice? They can’t, because first of all, simply by there being laws, justice is killed and replaced with the same word: “justice” . . . and if the second word sounds phoney, that’s exactly because it is. If anybody can persuade me otherwise, then I’ll give up my right to call myself an anarchist.
The truth is so simple that people tend to overlook it or miss it completely. Armies are pointless. Simply by being in existence, they encourage war. When they’re actually doing something, they’re killing. Governments coerce people into doing what they do not want to do; and they make sure you do it by having policemen and policewomen, who wear guns to scare you into obeying them, enforce their will. People go to prison for minor things, while the biggest criminals (the heads of State, Government) enjoy trips all over the world on chartered jets. These biggest criminals steal from and extort people through taxes, and permit murder through war and having an army; and the voters tell them through their vote that this is okay. I don’t think it is. I am a human being, and I want what is rightfully mine: freedom. I wrote this essay because of that.
by Jamie Poole

“[T]he drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he noted, “they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people.” Time and again, resolving any confusion as to what propels them toward destruction, terrorists have pointed out “U.S. terrorizing [of] the Muslim nations and the Muslim people,” describing their violence in terms of retaliation.

Fully aware of the practical implications of statements like Shahzad’s, the US government focuses its obscurantism on ensuring that Americans see terrorists as an enigmatic other — the faceless enemy in an us versus them.

This week, the US state enjoyed another opportunity to distort the causal interplay at issue when, as reported by NBC news, “[t]he Yemeni branch of al-Qaida on Friday claimed responsibility for the two mail bombs sent from Yemen …” The White House, eager to capitalize on the foiled attack, swiftly went to work congratulating themselves and the Yemeni government for their “ongoing cooperation,” stoking the fear and beating the drum for the security state.

Even prior to al-Qaida’s Arabian Peninsula branch taking credit for the bombs, the group had kindled the United States’s interest in Yemen. According to the Associated Press, Saudi Arabia’s southern neighbor could see up to $250 million in military aid next year, an increase of almost $100 million over this year’s apportionment. The irony of the plan, bearing in mind what inspires terrorists, is the palpable dissonance between the stated goal of quelling al-Qaida and the likely result of increasing the US dole to the Yemeni regime.

Nothing better serves the recruitment programs or enhances the appeal of groups like al-Qaida than the continued interference of the US, whether in actual military presence or in the dispensation of blood money. The word “terrorism” is itself misleading, representative of the state’s deceptive definitional approach.

In the statist lexicon, the United States, with its state of the art machinery of death, is a righteous force for freedom while the panicky strains of subdued people fighting against occupation are “terrorism.” The methodical devastation of an entire region of the world is regarded as morally legitimate, while a victimized population’s admittedly wrong and misguided attempts at self-defense are rebuked as the maniacal savagery of evil subhumans who “hate us because we’re free.”

The murder of innocents is, of course, always morally abominable, but it is critical that we ask why groups like al-Qaida are so intent on killing Americans. The proper aim of that inquiry, rather than exonerating terrorists, is recognizing that their crimes are a reaction to those of the United States, the premier global terrorist. Our censure of terrorist attacks like those planned by al-Qaida and Shahzad ought to come with a parallel condemnation of the United States’ murder missions, communicating to the rest of the world that we too are occupied by our own government.

This cycle of violence is what the unrelenting slaughter campaign of US military imperialism delivers us — death, replicated over and over for the bonanza of the ruling class. Does anyone really think that Washington cares if civilians die in terror attacks in the United States? They’ll just use those deaths to justify their spying, their killing, their favors to defense contractors, their theft, their rape of everything good and productive in society.

The state itself is a continuing war on humanity, reincarnated in every year, in every moment, since the first conscienceless gang of muggers decided it suited them to set a conflagration to fruitful, voluntary society. To extinguish that fire, we must denounce aggression in all of its forms, not just when darker-skinned people in strange garb lash out against American military colonization.

http://c4ss.org/content/4768

Exclusive to STR

The empirical evidence that power corrupts goes a long way in explaining the inevitable one-way course to tyranny trod by all governments. Having a monopoly on force, corruption within the government monopoly cannot be effectively checked, and growing corruption and its attendant increasing power eventually congeal into absolute power and absolute corruption.

Tyranny.

Kurt Vonnegut turned a slightly more colorful phrase in articulating the association of power and corruption by claiming that human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. It must be pretty heady stuff indeed to be in a position within the U.S. government in which you effectively are part of the controlling mechanism of over 3.8 million square miles and 350 million human lives, not to mention the power projected out over the rest of the entire globe.

The most dangerous aspect of our “democratic” government, though, is the fact that the reg’ler folks are made to feel that they are part of the system. Shareholders, as it were. “We” is thrown around a lot, even when the government seems to be spinning out of control. The situation is rarely articulated as “us versus them,” but rather “we are the government and we are doing it to ourselves,” and “we have to work within the system to fix the system.”

This is an extremely dangerous perspective for the subjects to have, because as the government slides into tyranny, it is encouraged and pushed along by millions of petty little tyrants—a vast multitude of power-drunk chimpanzees.

What should “we” do in Afghanistan? Wow, what a power-tie-wearing question! “We” must decide. It is up to “us.” They are “our” troops. What should be “our” objective?

See what’s happening here? The chimpanzees have been given a powerful intoxicant, and they love it. Oh, look, they want some more!

The citizen, being part of the government, feels that the 3.8 million square mile empire with its 350 million subjects is his to play with. By exiting his mother’s birth canal within certain ranges of latitude and longitude, he has acquired property and innate power over other fellow human beings. Good for him and his kind, and tough luck for the others. The power-drunk chimpanzee slumps down on his couch in his 800 square-foot apartment and is lord over all he surveys through his television set, tuned to CNN.

How are the troops doing? Are illegals trying to get in? Are there people not paying taxes? Why is there salmonella in the spinach? Who needs to get bailed out? Who’s running in the next election?

Important questions requiring his considered opinions.

Isn’t it just mind-boggling amazing? Invite a person from Mexico to your house, and someone in North Dakota has an opinion on it and also has the guns to back his opinion up. Homeschooling children where it is not permitted? Moe from Oklahoma says lock up the parents and take the kids! Busybodies with opinions on all sorts of things that shouldn’t concern them, but it’s “our” country and so “we” have to be involved in everything that happens.

Queens of Hearts residing in every domicile, rendering judgments on events occurring many hundreds of miles away, involving people they never have met and never will meet. The kingdom is large. Off with their heads!

You see? The citizen is not pitted against the government, he is a part of it. And he is willingly a part when he feels that he has a hand on one of the controls that guide Leviathan. Play by Leviathan’s rules, and you, too, can rule. You can join the army of the righteous and fight the good fight against the pot smoking, non-voting, raw-milk-drinking hooligans. Here’s your gun and brown shirt—go git ‘em!

Like the international scene better? Well, you can participate in the killing of hundreds of thousands of brown people in remote parts of the world and suffer no consequences! How can you beat that deal? Power of the gods in your very own hands! What does it matter if you cannot write a complete sentence, read an entire book, or pinpoint on the globe just where those unfortunate brown people with targets on their foreheads live? Willful ignorance in exchange for power, heck, even just for the illusion of power, is a pretty sweet deal, my friend.

Besides, the Average American Citizen is not really responsible for any of the bad stuff his government may be doing. Although he is part of it by way of the democratic process, he is not really part of the stuff he may find reprehensible, right? Or maybe he subconsciously accepts that he is responsible, but also knows he is addicted to the power associated with it, and so cannot or will not admit to himself what he is advocating in exchange for this intoxicating power.

This is not a new mindset. George Orwell saw it and dubbed it “doublethink” in his novel 1984:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink…”

Let us not forget that fear is the ultimate basis for such a paradoxical mindset, even though other justifications are claimed in order to avoid the admission of cowardice. Justify the actions of the bully and join his gang so as not to receive a bloody pug yourself.

War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Ignorance is strength. And now another: To be ruled over is to rule.

When a democratic nation becomes tyrannical, this is a description of the majority of the population, not just the elected officials. Power-drunk chimpanzees, all. Everyone is tying them on, and it’s a long, lost weekend filled with blackout drinkers. C’mon, another round for everyone!

Wuzzat? Hey, buddy, just love it or leave it pal, OK? Stupid hippie pinko commie. People died so you could be here, so just kiss my red, white, and blue butt.

These chimps have absolutely nothing over the syphilitic, inbred monarchs of old in their deft wielding of might-makes-right wisdom. These newfangled enablers of power who are themselves enabled by their betters with the illusion of power—all are tightly clusterstuck together in a death spiral right on down to the cold, hard ground. The crash will not be pretty, but for now, it’s full steam ahead. It just feels too good to stop.

So pardon me while I leave you now, as I must go and decide upon the proper inflation rate necessary for a healthy economy. It’s not all glitz and glamour running the most powerful empire the world has ever seen, you know. My input is needed on a wide range of issues.

After all, I am large and in charge: I am the government. *Hic*

Millions of petty tyrants
Issuing proclamations.
The mucilage that binds together
democratic nations.

What you do is my concern
And what you own is mine.
If you don’t like the way it works
Then hit the road, Sunshine.

CAN GADAHN PULL THIS OFF, THE “NEW AND IMPROVED” 9/11?
A call to arms, demanding Muslims in America and elsewhere begin a terror campaign, was spread around the world. The message, we are told, was found on a “secret website” by an Israeli company who put it in a press release.
There is no evidence any American Muslim has ever been on the website referred to, no American intelligence agency could find it, not the CIA or the FBI or Homeland Security. There was only one way the 300,000 Muslims of Detroit could hear call to terrorism, from an Israeli company that passes on such messages for profit.
Does it create them too? You be the judge.
Let’s look at a possible analogy. If you were to capture a vicious rabid dog in the wilderness and turned it loose in a children’s playground, would you be a terrorist?
This is essentially what is being admitted to.
What is in question, another analogy, is whether you purposefully infected the dog with rabies in the first place. Either way, you are a terrorist.
Adam Gadahn, the “American Taliban,” the lisping, overweight bungler continually calling for the murder of Americans is really named Adam Perlman from a family highly influential in the Anti-Defamation League. The group distributing his threats, SITE Intelligence, contracted to the American government, is run by a former IDF member whose father was executed in Iraq as a Mossad terrorist. SITE Intelligence is the source of the Osama bin Laden tapes long proven to be, not only the wrong voice, but to resemble bin Laden so little as to have become a joke.

Adam Gadahn
Gadahn came on the scene when tapes of Osama bin Laden claiming credit for 9/11 failed forensic examination. They were counterfeits. The CIA’s own version had bin Laden denying any involvement. (See APPENDIX below for official CIA transcript)
This was late 2001 and Americans hadn’t been told that the story about Tora Bora, the many stories about Tora Bora, warlords covering for bin Laden, American troops being pulled back at the last minute by presidential order or the Delta Force being betrayed, were all lies. Osama bin Laden, already dying from kidney failure, was murdered by one of his own men on December 14, 2001.
Pakistan’s ISI had informants there, it was leaked to the newspapers and was widely reported. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto even announced it in an interview with BBC’s David Frost.
With a 9/11 denial “on the books” and bin Laden dead, there would be no invasion of Iraq, no new leader was “in place” to bring out for the American people, no new “boogeyman.”
The very real conspiracy, covering up the sickening truth about 9/11, the treasonous intelligence doctoring leading to the disaster in Iraq and the upcoming years of building a drug empire in Afghanistan, stealing billions in oil from Iraq, the thinly disguised martial law decrees in America and the planned attack on Iran, was threatened unless, somehow, Osama bin Laden could be brought back to life.
Nearly a decade later, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, General Pasha does everything but scream it from rooftops, when he carefully hints to a dull witted ABC interviewer that bin Laden is dead. Journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave of UPI and Washington Times fame, makes it as clear as possible when he says “Bin Laden is as dead as Elvis.” Even CIA director Leon Panetta confirms there is no evidence of bin Laden since “late 2001.”
With bin Laden dead, it all falls apart, Al Qaeda, 9/11, and the continual accusations made against Pakistan. Still, we hear it. Bin Laden touring Afghanistan or as with last weeks report, “living in luxury” in Iran.
Not only is bin Laden dead but when he was alive, the BBC confirmed that he had absolutely no terrorist organization of any kind, masterminded no plots, controlled no organizations and had no more involvement on the world stage other than, at one time, helping the CIA raise money to fund refugee organizations during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

YouTube – Veterans Today -
Contrary to what has been reported, bin Laden never raised money for weapons. That task was left to Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, the CIA paymaster who received $800,000,000 in US funds. Today we are told Hikmatyar may be in Iran. However, we have verified that he is actually in Pakistan, working directly with the CIA as “go between” with the Taliban, taking an active role in the current talks with the Karzai government. Few in Afghanistan trust Hikmatyar, long a favorite with CIA and Pakistan “hard liners.”
If anything, the myth of Osama bin Laden is actually Hikmatyar. What is said bin Laden did in Afghanistan was always Hikmatyar, CIA “moneyman” and terrorist. Problem is, he is still a CIA moneyman and terrorist, flying on American planes, going on and off American bases but listed with the Department of Homeland Security as one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. The truth, Hikmatyar is seen by the US as their “dealmaker” in Afghanistan, something many in Afghanistan find both frightening and delusional.
Perhaps one of the most frightening issues of the ‘war on terror’ or, more appropriately, ‘the phony war on terror’ has been the use of ‘terrorist clones’ like Adam Perlman, the Israeli actor playing a Taliban leader on videos distributed by Israeli intelligence. The real insanity is that the videos aren’t produced to just fool Americans into rebuilding the coalition of Islamophobics and paranoids typified by the subscribers of www.familysecuritymatters.org. Please, visit this website. See if everything on it doesn’t just scream
“Look out, the boogeyman is coming, quick, hide under your bed!”

Things aren’t that innocent. Much of the message is going to the Islamic community worldwide and is reaching people who are angry and looking for someone to blame. Those funding Adam Gadhan, those magically finding his mysterious broadcasts and those distributing them to the world are giving material support to terrorism. They are, in fact, terrorists.
The message they, our friends, you know exactly who I mean, are spreading is clear:
“Attack and kill Americans, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but anywhere you can find them in the world. They are the real enemy, not Israel.”

Does anyone wonder why Gadahn never calls for attacks on Israel? In fact, Al Qaeda doesn’t seem to know Israel exists. They never threaten Israel. They never attack Israel. They never even mention Israel, never. All those Osama bin Laden and Adam Perlman, sorry, “Adam Gadahn” tapes have one thing in common.
Israel doesn’t exist. Get the picture? Here is what Perlman, lets be straight about it, his name is Perlman, his family is Jewish, Zionist, and very active in the ADL. This is what he or is it ‘they” are advocating in this statement released yesterday:
“emigrant communities like those which live on the margins of society in the miserable suburbs of Paris, London and Detroit, or are from those arriving in America or Europe to study in its universities or seek their daily bread in the streets of its cities….you have an opportunity to strike the leaders of unbelief and retaliate against them on their own soil, as long as there is no covenant between you and them”

Clear and simple, we are hearing what Israel is telling the world, the Muslim world, is the voice of Al Qaeda. What is Israel, or rather “Al Qaeda” telling us?
Please attack Britain, France and the United States but leave Israel alone.

Detroit has Muslim population of 300,000 yet, the one terrorist attack there was done by a mentally incompetent Nigerian national. Do you remember the “crotch bomber?” Do you wonder why the story disappeared from the news so quickly? When two Detroit attorneys caught airport officials putting the terrorist on a plane, airport officials working for an Israeli company, things fell apart. When Veterans Today discovered from intelligence sources in both Nigeria and Ghana that the boy’s family was not only tied directly to the CIA but the father was a business partner in an Israeli defense firm, it came apart further. When this came out, a news “blackout” fell and the story died.
When the government of Yemen found laptop computers belonging to “Al Qaeda” that showed a clear record of daily contacts with “handlers” in Israel, the story died totally.
The Detroit bombing told us two things:
The vast majority of American Muslims are Americans and have no loyalty to religious extremists or any other country. That is “those other guys.” American Muslims are mostly, not only Republicans but politically active in the party and very conservative.
Terrorists can’t move around the world without help, either visas, real or phony, passports, security”walk arounds” and more. If a grandmother with a knitting needle and an American passport could never, under any imaginable circumstances, get on a plane in Schipol Airport, how did a single male, Nigeria, Muslim, no passport at all…he wasn’t carrying any identification of any kind and, this is the best part, a bomb strapped to his genitals get seated on a plane ahead of the rest of the passengers. Remember, you first have to get into a country with no passport, around immigration, then you have to go through airport security and prove you have proper immigration documents then you are checked again before boarding. Abdul Mohammed, without Mossad help, stood a better chance of winning the Irish Sweepstakes than getting on that plane.
Is that a bomb in your pants or are you just glad to see me?

THE PERLMAN/WIKILEAKS “NON-EVENT”
For years, Perlman, masquerading as a spokesman for Al Qaeda, has put out childish videos, all time to help certain political races, influence arms sales to Israel, or as with yesterday’s treat, to reinforce the Wikileaks fiasco, another attempt to con America. Last time Wikileaks tried to get the US to cut all aid to Pakistan, an act which would have made the war in Afghanistan even worse than it is now, if that’s possible. This one is time to a Wikileak “custom crafted” to blame the world’s ills on Iran, target number one for Israel. As a “three fer,” the New York Times and MSNBC went after Iran for “secretly” buying off President Karzai of Afghanistan.
We knew Karzai was aligned with India and Israel against Pakistan. Now he is “owned” by Iran? How many sides can one person be on?
When I was in Pakistan earlier in the year, Gadahn was said to be hiding in an apartment building in Karachi. The building was stormed, “Gadahn” was captured, a “Gadahn,” not “the Gadahn.” It seems that a “look alike” had been used to leave a false trail, the real Adam Perlman was safe and sound elsewhere, some place with video studios. The individual recruiting real terrorists to kill real Americans with real bombs is a real Israeli, no question about that, and not the first time.
It is also believed that the new “Al Qaeda” operations chief, Adnan Shukrijumah of Brooklyn, New York and Miami Beach is another Israeli creation, a phony terrorist, an actor, much like the phony “bin Ladens” of every shape and size used to scare small children after the death of the real bin Laden in December 2001.

YouTube – Veterans Today -
During comprehensive briefings with Pakistans ISPR, the group that briefs people like, well, Secretary Clinton, it was made clear to me that we were all on the same page, Osama bin Laden is dead. There was much discussion, some of it humorous, as how to let people know. After short discussions on this with ISPR DG General Athar Abbas I was summoned to a “mysterious” meeting.
This was General Ahmed Shurja Pasha, Director General of Pakistan’s intelligence service known as the ISI. During a private lunch with the director, his top aide, Commodore Zafar Iqbal and author Jeff Gates, who was accompanying me on a lecture tour, one of the areas of discussion was dishonesty in journalism. An interview with a very prominent American journalist that General Pasha had held had been falsified. Statements regarding Pakistan and Mumbai were simply invented. This wasn’t the first time I had run into this. A widely published interview between the editor of a Washington newspaper and former ISI Chief General Hamid Gul was similarly fabricated.
When I made reference to the Gul interview in an article, he phoned me. Gul, an editor at Veterans Today, a co-worker and good friend, pointed out that the interview never happened and was entirely made up. Another “famous journalist” with an agenda simply invented a story, had it published around the world, and the real truth would be lost forever. Between video editing, phony interviews and released audio and video tapes of dead or non-existent “terrorists,” the media has ended up being as strong a force promoting extremism and conflict as the real issues, which, frankly, none of us are that sure about anymore.
People like Pakistan’s Imran Khan, who talk about extremism in realistic terms are seldom listened to. How can I prove this? Do you know who Imran Khan is? There is your answer.
IF THESE PLOYS DON’T WORK, CAN WE EXPECT ANOTHER 9/11?
This week, something surprising happened in Australia. In a world where you can’t tun on a television without hearing how crazy people are who question the 9/11 cover story, even though Fox News seems to have changed sides on this issue, what you don’t see are public opinion polls on 9/11. If Bill Maher or Jon Stewart, the “liberal progressives” of American television, with their continual attacks on “the right” show us one thing it is that, no matter how much you may find government a pack of useless liars, the magic “boxcutter and pancaking building” story on 9/11 must be adhered to. Even though those the 9/11 Truth movement blame, the Americans anyway, are you most vile political enemies, when it comes to 9/11, you attack anyone who questions the Bush/Cheney doctrine like a rabid field mouse.
There is a reason for this. The ability to repeat 9/11, contain an investigation, keep press assets focused on a cover story few take seriously anymore, is vital. Without the ability to blow up an American city and blame Iran or an imaginary terrorist group, the “Masters of the Universe” will lose their ability to control the fate of the human race.
Thus, everything we have seen since 9/11 has been done to prepare us for the next 9/11. The last one finished Saddam, looted the American economy and imposed martial law on the United States. Iran and Pakistan still stand. With all the terror warnings, phony stories about imaginary nuclear programs, the threats, the sanctions and even Wikileaks, it all isn’t going to be enough.
America is sick of war and not very likely to believe the media, not anymore. Big problem here, when you attack anyone’s credibility, the Bush administration, Obama, Tony Blair, eventually people begin to question you too.
Watch Wikileaks dribble away into nothing. Watch the news try to pump air into this story and spin it against Iran.
When that fails, maybe it will be time to hide under your bed after all.
APPENDIX

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY FOREIGN BROADCASTING INTERNATIONAL SERVICE:

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Website of Doha Al-Jazirah Satellite Channel Television in Arabic [FBIS Report] Website of Doha Al-Jazirah Satellite Channel Television in Arabic,independent television station financed by the Qatari Government, which can be accessedat URL: http://www.aljazeera.net, carries at 2011 GMT on 24 September the text of the following letter by Usama Bin Ladin “to the Pakistani people.”
“We hope that these brothers would be the first martyrs in Islam’s battle in this age against the new Jewish crusade that is being led by the biggest crusader, Bush, under the banner of the cross. This battle is one of Islam’s immortal battles.”
“We beseech God to grant him victory against the forces of infidelity and arrogance, and to crush the new crusader-Jewish campaign on the land of Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
“I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.”
“Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. . Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people. Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle.”
“All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel.”
“Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the US Government has stated.
“The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive.”
“They can be any one, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia.”
“Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.”
“Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these (FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 180) agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usama and Taliban and then this incident happened.”
“Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the US secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the US Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat.”
“President Bush or any other US President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who made the attacks.”
“Supporting the US act is the need of some Muslim countries and the compulsion of others. However, they should think as to what will remain of their religious and moral position if they support the attack of the Christians and the Jews on a Muslim country like Afghanistan.”
“I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom.”
“This system is totally in control of the American Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States. It is simply that the American people are themselves the slaves of the Jews and are forced to live according to the principles and laws laid by them. So, the punishment should reach Israel.”
”The Western media is unleashing such a baseless propaganda, which make us surprise but it reflects on what is in their hearts and gradually they themselves become captive of this propaganda. They become afraid of it and begin to cause harm to themselves.”
“Terror is the most dreaded weapon in modern age and the Western media is mercilessly using it against its own people. It can add fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media is doing that. You can understand as to what will be the performance of the nation in a war, which suffers from fear and helplessness.”
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY END OF OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Lawrence White
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Lawrence White (left).

Introduction: Lawrence H. White is a professor of economics at George Mason University. Prior to position at George Mason, he was the F. A. Hayek Professor of Economic History in the Department of Economics, University of Missouri-St. Louis. He has been a visiting professor at the Queen’s School of Management and Economics, Queen’s University of Belfast, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Professor White is the author of The Theory of Monetary Institutions (Blackwell, 1999), Free Banking in Britain (2nd ed., IEA, 1995), and Competition and Currency (NYU Press, 1989). He is the editor of several works, including The History of Gold and Silver (3 vols., Pickering and Chatto, 2000), The Crisis in American Banking (NYU Press, 1993), African Finance: Research and Reform (ICS Press, 1993), and Free Banking (3 vols., Edward Elgar, 1993). His articles on monetary theory and banking history have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and other leading professional journals.

Daily Bell: Give us some background on yourself.

Lawrence White: I became interested in Austrian economics by reading Murray Rothbard’s, Man, Economy and State in the summer before college. I went to Harvard where they were teaching Keynesian economics but I was already anti-Keynesian and baffled that they were still teaching it. My first job was at New York University and from there to the University of Georgia. In 2000, I went to the University of Missouri/St. Louis and was offered the Hayek chair of economic history. Who wouldn’t want that? I came to George Mason last year to work with good graduate students and it’s keeping me very busy.

Daily Bell: How did you become interested in free banking?

Lawrence White: When I was in college I wrote a paper about an American newspaper editor named William Legget who was one of the more sophisticated thinkers on economic issues in the US at the time. I discovered a piece praising the free banking system of Scotland as the model the United States ought to adopt; he was writing in the 1830s. I had never heard of free banking in Scotland and he made wonderful claims. I didn’t have a chance to investigate it then but when I got to graduate school, I took a course in monetary economics at UCLA from Axel Leijonhufvud and for my term paper I wrote a paper about the free banking system in Scotland. That’s what turned into my doctoral dissertation when Axel encouraged me to expand it.

Daily Bell: What is free banking and why has it been controversial with Austrians?

Lawrence White: A free banking system means a monetary system where private, competitive, unregulated banks are responsible for providing all kinds of payment instruments and intermediation. So generically it means the absence of restrictions on banking and – in other words laissez-faire banking. An implication is banks and not the government will provide currency as well as transferrable deposits. It implies the absence of the central bank and central banks are everywhere in the world today. That’s the big difference from the status quo. F.A. Hayek was somewhat ambivalent — and I wrote a paper about that – about free banking, out of the concern that banks might be inherently unstable pro-cyclically.

Some people questions deny that free banking would or should be allowed to function with fractional reserve accounts. Murray Rothbard was the leader of the point of view that fractional reserve banking ought to be outlawed. He thought the fractional-reserve bank was inherently defrauding the customer. Some of his followers have switched to some other kinds of objections. I don’t hear the fraud argument as often these days, but I do hear the argument that there is something absurd about a fractional reserve generally because it implies that two people are exclusive owners of the same coin; which is I think is the misunderstanding of the arrangement between the bank and its customer. Another objection is that it reduces the value of gold held by third parties, but there are all kinds of changes in the value of your property that come about through market forces, and we can’t outlaw those consistent with properties property rights.

Daily Bell: Do you consider yourself an Austrian Economist?

Lawrence White: Yes. If Austrian means heavily influenced by Ludwig von Mises and Hayek, then certainly yes. And on my CV, you will see that I was part of the Austrian Economics program at NY University and I am now part of the Austrian economics program at George Mason. I was on the committee that wrote and evaluated the Austrian economics field exams. So I don’t think I can deny being an Austrian.

Daily Bell: Is free-banking the freest kind of money association available?

Lawrence White: Well that’s how I think of it. It’s a system based on a free contract without third- party legal interference between banks and customers. Various kinds of contracts are available. The ones we observe historically are the ones that we presume would prevail if free banking were re-established today. So it’s usually described as being based a gold or silver standard, which we saw historically before governments began to interfere.

Daily Bell: The idea is to let the market decide on the amount of reserves?

Lawrence White: Yes, in the sense that there would be competition among banks. Banks have a trade- off to consider between earning more interest and holding more reserves. Holding more reserves makes the bank safer. Being safer may be important for attracting customers. Not all banks may follow the same policy but people will sort themselves among banks according to how safe they think the banks are versus how big a return the bank pays. Most people want a very safe bank, so there is a market force that compels banks to act prudently. Remember deposits would not be guaranteed in a free banking system, so banks have to convince potential customers that they are trustworthy.

Daily Bell: Murray Rothbard believed the Central Bank of England had a role to play in the Scottish experiment. Can you expand?

Lawrence White: Rothbard wrote a review of my first book, Free Banking in Britain. Rothbard argued that the Bank of England, which was the central bank in England, played the central banking role toward the banks in Scotland and that we shouldn’t regard Scotland as a good example of a free banking system.

There were cases in which Scottish banks maintained a credit line at the Bank of England, and but the Bank of England actually cut off the credit line when it was needed, so it acted the opposite from the way a lender of last resort is supposed to operate. In that sense the Bank of England was not providing any protection or privileges to the Scottish bank. In general the Bank of England did not take any notice of what was going on in Scotland and did not supervise or restrict the Scottish system. I think Scotland is a good example of free banking.

Daily Bell: Can you give us a brief history of free banking?

Lawrence White: Numerous books have been written on this topic and I recommend a book edited by Kevin Dowd, entitled, The Experience of Free Banking. There are a dozen chapters and each chapter deals with free banking in a different country. Basically free banking is what arises naturally through market forces until government steps in to try to restrict banking. In countries with restricted banks we by and large see weak banking systems. In England for example, the Bank of England, we see monopoly privileges, which weakens the other banks in the system. In the United States, government restricted the chartering banks and the branching of banks and the note issuance of banks in ways that weakened the banks. By contrast, if you look at countries where banking is the freest – those countries like, say, Scotland before 1844, you have a system where you have large well capitalized banks, well branched, well diversified, very competitive, providing all the payment services and currency.

Daily Bell: Is the American experiment one of free banking?

Lawrence White: The United States had decentralization, but it did not have free banking. That is, state governments rather than the federal government performed the licensing and regulation of the banks. There was a ban on interstate branch banking. So you have to look at each state to get the whole picture. The area of the country that was closest to free banking was New England, where bank charters were given out fairly liberally; in other parts of the US, you had very strict restrictions on banks that created monopoly privileges or weakened banks in other ways. In some states, big government created a state-owned monopoly bank and didn’t allow any other banks. That is certainly not free banking. In the state of Illinois they banned all bank notes; that’s certainly not free banking.

Daily Bell: Could you have a private central bank within a free-banking system?

Lawrence White: That is an interesting question. A former colleague of mine at the University of Georgia, named Richard Timberlake, created wrote a paper on “the central banking role of clearing house associations.” So, we have to define what a central bank means before we can answer whether a central bank would arise within a free banking system. The best I can do is to list the major functions associated with central banking. There isn’t any one defining role of central banking. Some of the major roles are serving as the banker’s bank, regulating commercial banks, serving as the lender of last resort and all of those are things that private commercial bank clearing houses did. So you can think of those clearing house associations in the major cities as private central banks, in the sense that they served as banker’s banks, that is, banks pay each other by transferring money on the books of the Clearing House Association.

The Clearing House Association had membership standards, so in that sense it regulated the capital within a bank; banks had to have a certain amount of capital to be a member of the association and that’s because the members want assurance the other banks in the system wouldn’t default on their obligation. Occasionally in the United States, the Clearing House Association acted as lenders of last resort. They issued more currency when more currency was needed; they expanded the quantity of bank reserves temporarily when there was a temporary shortage of bank reserves during a financial panic. They did all those things. Now they weren’t central banks in two other senses. That is they did not have a monopoly of note issue, which is characteristic of central banks, and they did not conduct the monetary policy. They did not try to control the quantity of money in pursuit of economic growth or low inflation or low unemployment; they did not have a macro economic policy. But in respect to serving the interests of member banks, doing what banks want done on a joint basis, they served as central banks.

Daily Bell: Is it important to back money with gold and silver?

Lawrence White: The answer is yes if you want to have a non-political, self-regulating monetary system. Fiat money inherently is in the hands of the government and not self-regulating. A system based on gold or silver provides self-regulation of the quantity of money, because ultimately the quality of money isn’t going to grow any faster than the stock of gold or silver and that depends on the economics of gold mining.

So it’s market forces that determine the quantity of the most basic money and then it’s the banks themselves based on what the consumers are demanding that determine the quantity of bank- issued money. So it’s market forces that are prevailing both in the basic money and the bank- issued money rather than political influences. If you want a system that is self-regulating rather than politically restricting, yes, it’s important to back it with gold and or silver.

Daily Bell: Doesn’t a private gold and silver standard work hand-in-hand with a private, free banking model?

Lawrence White: Yes. One of the talks I gave as a very young man has recently re-surfaced on the Internet – on free banking and the gold standard. I believe it was 1983 when I gave this lecture. But that was my argument, yes, that the two of them work hand in hand. A private free banking model works when the quantity of reserves is determined by market forces rather than being subject to the whim of a central bank and vice versa. So they do work hand in hand.

Daily Bell: How do modern (mercantilist) central bankers know when they have printed enough money?

Lawrence White: Well it’s a problem for them; they don’t know. In a free-banking system, a bank that printed too much money would start losing its commodity reserves. That’s immediate feedback. Modern central banks don’t have to redeem bank notes with gold and or silver. Thus, they have no decentralized immediate feedback as to whether they have issued too much or too little. The best a central bank can do is look at macroeconomics indicators: the price level, the interest rate, the exchange rates, but those things often give conflicting indications. Central banks also have political pressures to try to pursue multiple inconsistent objectives, so there isn’t any unambiguous feedback as to when they have printed enough money or too much money. It’s an application of the Mises/Hayek argument against central planning that if you don’t have feedback from genuine market prices you are just fumbling in the dark.

Daily Bell: They always print too much?

Lawrence White: (Laughing). There is a chronic tendency to expand the quantity of money under fiat standards. It’s a source of revenue for the government to have the central banking printing money to either give it to them to spend or for purposes of indirectly buying federal government debt and thereby making it cheaper for the federal government to borrow money. So I think there’s a fiscal motive as why you see chronic inflation under fiat standards.

Daily Bell: Why hasn’t free banking caught on in the 21st century? Will it catch on yet?

Lawrence White: Well there are two meanings it your questions could have. One is to catch on intellectually and the other is that governments themselves dismantle restrictions on banking and move toward a free banking. There’s a certain amount of intellectual interest amongst some people. But in America, the Federal Reserve’s influence is very great. Many academic economists who are not Fed employees are nonetheless part-time employees or are consultants or present papers at Federal Reserve conferences.

This is a problem that Milton Friedman identified. If the major employer in the field has a certain point of view, you are not doing your career any good by antagonizing that potential employer. So there’s a tendency to not rock the boat, and the Fed is an enterprise that tries to engage them. The Fed has influence on the terms of the debate. The people who are editing the major journals in academic monetary economics have Fed linkages. They want to remain on good terms with their friends who are in the upper echelon of the Fed. The Federal Reserve Board itself is appointing more and more academic economists as governors, and of course Ben Bernanke was an academic economist before he was Chairman. So there is a kind of “go along to get along” tendency, which means you are not going to see a lot of eagerness to challenge the status quo.

Daily Bell: Is the Internet important in this resurgence of interest in private money?

Lawrence White: That’s a good question. I think one of the things that constrain bank regulations at the margins is the availability of offshore banking. And the Internet makes transferring money to and from an offshore bank account a little easier. So in that sense it helps to put a limit on the restriction of banks. Of course offshore banking is considered a loophole so there’s the battle on their part to try to shut it down.

Paypal, which of course is an Internet phenomenon, was started by a bunch of libertarians who thought they were wanted to come up with a payment mechanism that would compete with the Federal Reserve System. It turns out it was in their interest to make it more of an adjunct; a standard dollar transfer system instead, of creating their own currency. It’s very difficult to create your own currency in a world where people want to be paid with the stuff that they can turn around and spend; it’s a chicken- and or-egg problem. It’s hard to introduce a new currency until you get a critical mass but how do you get a critical mass? There is also E-Gold that provides gold- denominated accounts, transferable from account- holder to account- holder denominated in gold, but they are very small at this point and hassled by the authorities.

Daily Bell: It is true that private banks were the main issuers of paper currency in the United States and Canada a century ago, and were the sole issuers in virtually every country two centuries ago.

Lawrence White: Yes and this sound like a paraphrase of something I wrote. It’s true that the idea of the government issuing paper money only came along after government thought it deserved to get in on the act, or even monopolize the act, which they have done now. But before this happened, private institutions introduced this innovation. We are actually not sure when the first bank note was but sometime in the 1400s in Italy; then it takes off in the 1700s in England in a big way.

Daily Bell: Are private commercial banks more reliable than the current system?

Lawrence White: A system of laissez-faire private commercial banking would be more reliable than the current system. The current system is nominally private and based on commercial banks but the commercial banks are restricted by the government in many ways. I think a fully private system would be more reliable than the current system. The moral hazard problem, government guarantees on nominally private banks, the chickens come back to roost. Eliminating those kinds of guarantees, where everybody lives at the expense of everybody else, would be important in creating a more reliable system.

Daily Bell: Isn’t it true that a central bank enjoys “sovereign immunity” from claimholder lawsuits?

Lawrence White: Well that’s right. In a free banking system if you think your bank is acting in a way that makes it more likely to fail, you move your money across the street to a bank you perceive as safer. In a central banking system if you think your government is about to devalue, you can try to move some of your money into other currencies but it’s hard to move your checking account into another currency if you still want to write checks to people in your domestic economy.

There’s a limit to how much people can discipline the central bank by voting with their feet, and you can’t sue a bank that devalues currency. If they devalue the currency tomorrow, tough luck to you; whereas, under free banking if this note says it is redeemable for a silver dollar then they have to give you a silver dollar. But central banks don’t have contracts with their customers; their customers are captive in that way.

Daily Bell: You have written, “If domestic citizens want high-quality redeemable currency, they are better served by privatization of note-issue than by a central bank dollar peg.” Explain this, please.

Lawrence White: I was writing about developing countries in particular where the local central bank often takes pegs the local currency to the US dollar. In some places, it’s the euro. So the question is can the holders of those currencies rely on ‘the peg’? Can they be sure they are going to get as many dollars tomorrow as they are getting today for each unit of local currency? The answer is they can’t rely on it; they can’t sue the central bank if it devalues. By contrast if those countries would allow private commercial banks to issue dollar denominated currency, then and the courts would enforce those contractual obligations, and then they could rely on the forces of reputation among the competing banks to keep the currencies at par.

Daily Bell: You have written, “State bank notes weren’t nearly as bad as the older accounts make out, and their suppression by the Federal government wasn’t really motivated by quality concerns.” Can you explain this, please?

Lawrence White: That was in reference to the legislation test passed during the US Civil War to provide federally chartered system of banks that would issue what was called a uniform currency. One of the arguments for imposing federal charters and later for suppressing the issue of notes by state chartered banks was that the state chartered bank notes were unreliable and this legislation would provide a more uniformed system of currency.

I think it was a very disingenuous argument at the time. The real motive was the federal government wanted to finance the Civil War. It wanted to force- feed their federal debt to the banks and the way they did that was by saying to the banks you have to have federal debt in order to back your bank notes. They were particularly worried that the new federally chartered banks notes were going to add to the stock of money, together with the state bank notes and cause too much inflation, so they put a prohibitive tax on state bank notes and basically taxed them out of existence.

If the federal government had really wanted to raise the quality of the currency, it would have emulated the Canadian banking system where the banks were allowed to branch nation wide and thereby there was par acceptance nation wide. I think the talk about providing a uniform currency was just talk and it was really a revenue measure.

Daily Bell: Is it true that by the outbreak of the Civil War, sound state bank currencies were the norm?

Lawrence White: Well they were the norm in New England, which I said earlier was most like a free banking system. By and large most of the banking systems had been reformed and many of them had adopted what they called free banking laws, which weren’t laissez-faire but rather freer entry into banking. The notes available in other parts of the country weren’t close to 100 cents in New York or in Chicago.

Daily Bell: Is it true that the counterfeiting of state bank notes was generally less profitable than the counterfeiting of today’s central bank currencies, because private bank notes don’t stay in circulation long?

Lawrence White: I am not sure about the counterfeiting of state bank notes but I do know about the counterfeiting of notes in private free banking systems like Scotland. Namely that it wasn’t a big problem. By the way, this is the subject on which I was called to testify before a congressional committee, the only time in my life. This was at the invitation of Ron Paul back when they were redesigning the Federal Reserve notes and he wanted to insert somewhere into the discussion something about the character of the currency and not just the technical problems of counterfeiting.

Someone on his staff noticed that I my book Free Banking in Britain had this discussion of how counterfeiting was not a problem under free banking and so I came in and explained that to several congressman. (I think there were three in the room.) I said counterfeiting is not just a technical problem. One of the things that eases counterfeiting is how long it is between the time the note is printed and somebody spots it, because if it’s been traded through dozens and dozens of hands, the trail is going to be very cold at that point and it’s going to be a lot harder to trace it back to the originator.

But in free banking systems notes behave more like checks, that is they go into circulation and came out of circulation fairly frequently. Scottish bankers estimated it was about a week on average between the issuing of a note and its return to the clearinghouse. A note would be put into circulation; it would be spent at a shop, and the shopkeeper would take the notes at the end of the day and put them in his own bank. His own bank would sort them out and run them through the clearing system and back to the banks that issued them.

The notes would be under the scrutiny of the banks that issued them and they would be able to spot counterfeiting pretty quickly. The Scottish banks had a policy that if someone came to the counter with a counterfeit note or a fake note, they would accept it at face value, providing the customer could tell them where he or she got it. Then they would go back and trace it to the counterfeiter. the origin.

Daily Bell: Is it true that today’s central bank currency monopolies from government’s appetite for revenue?

Lawrence White: I think that is basically true. If you look at arguments for why the government should issue currency, there are people who’ve tried to argue there is some kind of market failure. Either private issuers are unreliable, and so there endemic fraud and the government can provide a more reliable currency, or there’s some kind of natural monopoly and so the government can more efficiently be the sole currency issuer.

I think there really isn’t any historical merit or empirical content to either of those arguments; I think they are both wrong. So what is left is the revenue motive for monopolizing the issue of currency; it’s a way of generating revenue for the central government and especially it’s a way of raising revenue in a hurry when there’s an emergency need. If you have a government monopoly central bank and are on a gold standard, you suspend the gold standard, if you are not, then issue as much money as you need to finance the emergency expenditures. You can’t do that as directly if the money is in private hands.

Daily Bell: Please comment on Real Bills and how they work.

Lawrence White: “Real bills” are simply the short-term IOUs of firms who are financing real goods in the process of production. For example Joe the Baker might buy flour from a grain mill and pay the miller with a bill that says: “Joe the Baker will pay $1000 in 90 days.” He figures to repay after he’s baked the flour into bread and sold the bread. The miller can either wait for the bill to mature, or he can sell it immediately to a banker, who will discount the bill, that is, pay him something less than $1000, the present discounted value of $1000 due in 90 days. Bills of this sort were an important source of business credit in the nineteenth century, and a major category of assets in a typical bank’s asset portfolio. They had low default risk, low interest-rate risk, and were very easy to re-sell in case the bank needed to replenish its reserves.

The “Real Bills Doctrine” has been important in the history of monetary theory. It is the mistaken idea that if the banking system lends only by discounting real bills, it can’t over-expand. It’s a dangerous idea when applied to a central bank, because limiting a central bank to real bills discounting doesn’t actually prevent it from over-issuing, and following the Real Bill Doctrine will lead a central bank to over-expand money – rather than letting interest rates rise to reach their new equilibrium level – whenever the business demand for credit rises.

Daily Bell: Have you done all you intend to do regarding free banking?

Lawrence White: Oh, I doubt it. There are still so many interesting questions out there. I have students working on research on free banking and I’m working on a paper with George Selgin and a third economist named Bill Lastrapes, which is not directly on free banking but is critical of the record of the Federal Reserve System. It’s connected to the idea that government control of the monetary system has not given us better results. There are lots of historical and theoretical issues that remain interesting to try to examine in more detail.

Daily Bell: What books do you recommend on the topic.

Lawrence White: On the topic of free banking, the Von Mises’ book, Theory of Money and Credit and his book Human Action. Also Adam Smith’s, Wealth of Nations; Barris Vera Smith’s book, The Rational of Central Banking. My books, too, and the books of George Selgin, who was a student of mine, not that I taught him anything. He knew everything before I met him.

Daily Bell: Professor White thank you for being so generous with your time today.

Lawrence White: You are welcome.

There is a wealth of knowledge in this interview, and we are pleased to be able to pro-offer it to those who stop by the Daily Bell. Lawrence White is indeed a gracious and generous man to share his time and knowledge so freely. Once can see that simply by reading his words. He certainly doesn’t duck controversial issues, either. In fact, the issues he addresses lie at the center of an ongoing controversy in the ranks of Austrian Economics. They have to do with whether fractional-reserve (gold and silver) banking is inherently fraudulent. We come down on side of free-markets and have urged that the debate center on letting the market decide – once free-banking is legal again. This seems to us a rational conclusion.

In business, as we have often pointed out, there are many instances where customers are promised fulfillment in one form or another while the business itself does not have requisite supply. Airlines do this all the time with seats, promising too many of them because they know from past experience that not all passengers will show up. Additionally, just-in-time manufacturing relies on ordering certain goods as the contract is signed. Some companies will not make a suit, a car, even a house, until the goods are paid for partially or in full. We can see in many instances that business receives money and yet does not have the promised product in house.

Professor White also does us a service by simplifying the Real Bills debate. The Real Bills debate has raged for some time and his perspective clarified matters in our view. Ultimately, what we come away with is that the market itself can easily sort out these issues. Real bills, fractional reserve (private banking) even private central banks (clearing houses, really) all can likely work (and probably did) within a private environment that uses the invisible hand of competition to discipline the system and separate what works from what doesn’t.

Even though Professor White was doing his best to simplify free-banking issues, they remain complex for most people because they are theoretical constructs and not part of daily life, as they once were. However, (leaving aside Professor White’s fine work) we want to point out that Austrian finance is not an arcane, desolate or indecipherable backwater, or not anymore. The Ludwig von Mises Institute – especially – has helped make Austrian economics available to anyone who wanted to learn about the way the world really works. (And we can acknowledge this even though on some issues, like free-banking, we and others have perceived different solutions.)

Though some of the texts are complex, and some of the issues seem formidable, Austrian economics does NOT rely on econometrics or other fanciful projective analyses to prove its points (or not yet anyway). Additionally, from what we can tell, Austrian economics has not, at least in the 20th century, focused zealous on the microeconomics – an economic discipline that tends in our view to isolate various concepts and thus make the whole more difficult to discern.

What Murray Rothbard (and Lew Rockwell, and even Lawrence White in his own way) have shown us over and over again is that Austrian economics is NOT the property of an academically literate few but the heritage of every thinking man and woman who wants to build a better life and create a better future. We would urge people who want to fully understand how free-markets work to push through the complexities of Austrian economic texts by reading the many simple annotations now available on the ‘Net generally or at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Austrian economics is about the heart and soul of human beings. You can apply it to any part of human activity and come away with a better idea of how the world REALLY works. One reason why Austrian economics has succeeded in the 21st century is because it is truly comprehensible to most people, once they start reading the literature (when it was finally available on the ‘Net). Not only is it comprehensible, but it is truthful and shows us how we can live better lives in a communal (free-market) aggregate. Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chavez, in one of his more memorable quotes, said, “Socialism is love.” He had it wrong. “Austrian economics is love.” And free market. And freedom.

It has none. A democratic majority or an oligarchic minority are themselves composed of only individuals and have no right to steal from any other individual.

If a group has no right to do such ‘redistribution’ (theft), then by doing so, that group goes against the natural law.

If an individual or group of individuals goes against the natural law and steal from you, then you as a natural person, are obligated by nature/god to defend yourself and to fight against it.

These groups however, know you might go against them, so they offer to give you a ‘cut’ of the stolen loot. This amounts to a bribe, and if you take such bribes and go along, then you yourself are guilty of theft.

How long can such theft go on? It cannot last as people are innately greedy and will continue to steal more and more. Furthermore, thieves are never good at managing wealth. For a thief it is always “easy come, easy go”. They have no respect for hard work and the effort it takes to really create something, so they spend without regard to the difficulty of real production.

Eventually those who work the hardest shall be in shackles to those who can keep them working the hardest. But even that has limits. The fact is, collectivism is an unsustainable concept that always ends in collapse.

2010, Jun, 27 – 1:33 AM
Post by Tyler Jordan

If you follow U.S. cable news and mainstream editorial pages, you’ve probably learned that some arguments don’t have to be answered. They just have to be quoted or paraphrased, with an eye roll, and summarily dismissed.

So you get Keith Olbermann treating suggestions that the federal government might become tyrannical, and have to be disobeyed or resisted, as entertaining lunacy on the same order as David Ickes’ “space lizard” talk. And establishment liberals on CNN give pretty much the same treatment to Noam Chomsky’s views on the corporate nature of American foreign policy.

You see, the critics of federal law enforcement’s tyranny, or of America’s frequently democidal corporate foreign policy, are “extremists.” The unspoken implication is that the way things are represents some sort of mainstream consensus, something that “we as a society agree on,” about the way things ought to be.

If you stop to think about it, the words “extremist” and “moderate” are really meaningless. They classify an assertion about reality based not on its truth value, but on where it lies on the bell curve of public opinion.

But the thing is, the extremists are usually right on the facts. If you don’t know it, it’s only because you’re ignorant.

If you think the anti-government paranoids of right and left are “extremists,” it’s a safe bet you don’t know much of anything at all about the actual historical record of federal law enforcement, the content of legislation like the 1996 Counter-Terrorism Act or USA PATRIOT, or the broad range of “national security” powers claimed by the Executive in the event of martial law proclaimed unilaterally by … wait for it … the Executive.

If you think Noam Chomsky’s a raving anti-American lunatic, it’s a safe bet that you don’t know anything about the role of the U.S. government after WWII in setting up provisional governments staffed by former Axis collaborators, about the things the U.S. government did in Guatemala in 1954 and Jakarta in 1965, about Operation Condor, or about the School of the Americas.

What it comes down to is that the “mainstream consensus” is manufactured — manufactured by the very institutions that depend on it for their survival. One of the most important functions in any society is the cultural apparatus, whose job is to reproduce a population that accepts the system of power as legitimate and as the only natural or inevitable way of doing things. The range of “mainstream” or “moderate” policy proposals, by definition, encompasses only those policies that can be carried out within the existing framework of dominant institutions, by the kinds of people currently running them. Any proposal that requires fundamental changes in the institutional framework or structure of power is, by definition, “extremist.”

You should also bear in mind that the fundamental structure of power itself did not, in fact, come about through a general public consensus in which “we as a society agreed” that things ought to be this way. It came about as a radical change, imposed from above, by the consensus of a small minority of society. The corporate economy that emerged in the Gilded Age was brought about by a tiny minority of plutocrats who exercised unaccountable control of the government. The transformation of the corporate economy into the full-blown managerial state capitalism of the 20th century, likewise, was brought about by a tiny fraction of the population with no real debate in society at large.

American foreign policy throughout the 20th century, right up to the present, has been driven by considerations of these tiny plutocratic and managerial elites. But the average American uncritically accepts a view of the world, absorbed through the media and the publik skools, in which the United States has pursued a foreign policy of promoting “freedom,” “feeds the world,” and has never started a war for sordid reasons of money or power. Far from learning the real nature of the power elite that controls the American corporate state (as described by sociologists C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff), the average American learns that our society is governed by some sort of interest group pluralism, in which government shifts back and forth over time between Democrats and Republicans as the majority consensus changes.

If you’re not an extremist, it’s because the cultural reproduction apparatus is doing its job. As George Carlin put it in his “It’s a Big Club and You Ain’t in It” routine (unfortunately there’s no way to quote it at length and still get this printed on a newspaper op-ed page), the “real owners” of America need a population that’s just smart enough to keep doing their jobs — but too stupid to look at the man behind the curtain.

Exclusive to STR

It is interesting to read what St. Augustine had to say about what we now call government:

A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renunciation of aggression, but by the attainment of impunity.

One is tempted to paraphrase the poet: When plunder doth succeed, none dare call it plunder.

Indeed, the plunder has become so common, and the plunderers so smug and self-confident, that their predations are taken for granted, and the thieves themselves treated with extraordinary deference! It is something akin to the Stockholm syndrome. You encounter the same mugger at the same spot every day, and eventually establish a sort of bizarre relationship with him—-even, eventually, thanking him for not taking more. When you are given the opportunity to replace him with another mugger, you vote for the incumbent—sticking with the devil you know, unless his opponent offers to share more of his loot with you.

What brought these thoughts to mind involves the bailouts and other forms of stimuli now being inflicted upon us. I have not counted the times when some pundit on television has bemoaned these extravagances, saying something like, “And our children and their children will have to pay for all this,” or “pity the poor taxpayer, who must pay for all this,” but they must be legion. Wait a minute! What do they mean, “HAVE to pay for all this,” or “MUST pay for all this?” If productive Americans accept the idea that they must accept financial responsibility for government largess to its cronies, then what can be the objection to the bailouts?

How refreshing it would be to hear those same pundits who bemoan the absurdity of government bailouts bemoan with equal logic and passion the idea that we, the people who produce this country’s wealth, can be saddled with the debts of strangers! I assume they fail to notice the injustice of it because it has become so common that, as St. Augustine pointed out, the hapless victims have become subdued and demoralized, and the thieves, now well-established and empowered, have assumed the roles, if not the titles, of nobility.

When you think about it (and wouldn’t it be wonderful if people did!), you can only be struck numb with amazement. Can you go into a store, order thousands of dollars worth of goods, and then tell the clerk to send the bill to assorted strangers? Obviously, you cannot do such a thing, and, in fact, it would probably never even occur to you to attempt such a preposterous act. Yet your elected “representatives” do it regularly, with impunity, spending not thousands, but billions, based upon the power which, we are told, we have delegated to them, although in fact they somehow gave themselves the power they use.

But not to worry! Everything is entirely legal and above-board. Overlook, please, the fact that the plunderers themselves write the “laws” which enable them to plunder! While you’re at it, overlook as well the fact that when existing laws might hamper their activities, those laws are disregarded. Indignant victims could sue, of course, but the issue would be settled in a court owned and operated by your opponent, with one of his gang–with a vested interest in the outcome–on the bench. All entirely legal, of course!

So: what to do? One could learn a lesson from the experience of Prohibition. Massive civil disobedience overwhelmed the rulers, although in that instance, the massive disobedience involved the public doing something it wanted to do–drink alcohol. True, today’s public no doubt wants to hold onto its earnings, but merely being allowed to retain a portion of those earnings, by a government much more powerful than that of Prohibition, satisfies many. It’s that Stockholm syndrome, again.

Perhaps state legislators might be persuaded to question how the states (and the citizens thereof, of course) can be made parties to the debts of the federal government that is, after all, to be the servant of the people and the states. State government is closer to the people, and, perhaps, less intimidating than the federal government. If the states still consider themselves sovereign, how can they stand by while the residents of those states are impoverished by the federal government? Somebody call the sheriff!

Simplest of all, surely, would be the simple “I’ve had enough” uttered by the poor, beleaguered citizens. It wouldn’t take a majority of fed-up victims to put the fear of the voter (they don’t fear the Lord) into the houses of Congress.

A few days ago I saw a TV news program showing thousands of people lined up to get applications for federal housing assistance. What they wanted, of course, was to use the government to obtain your money for their benefit. They didn’t seem at all ashamed of their demands, and the reporters at the scene found nothing remarkable about it except the large numbers at the turnout, which reflected, they said, the sad state of the economy. Unfortunately, they didn’t equate the sad state of the economy with precisely the sort of activity being documented.

If the tax-feeders can congregate in the thousands to demand more benefits from the productive, surely the productive can do the same thing to demand that the plunder cease!

WHO IS ALLAH?

“Allah” is the exclusive and greatest name of the one God that the great Prophets Abraham,
Noah, Moses, the Messiah Jesus, and Muhammad all worshipped, served, and invited others to
obey. Allah is neither body, nor mind, nor spirit; neither a man nor a woman; neither male nor
female; neither black nor white; and neither confined nor defined by time or space. We refer to
Allah using “He” and “Him” only because He has referred to Himself using these masculine
pronouns in His revealed books not because He is male. Nothing is like Him; and He hears and
sees all things.

Know (may Allah guide us and you) that Allah (glorified and exalted is He) is one in His
dominion and the Creator of the entire universe, the Heavenly Throne, the Heavenly Chair, the
heavens, the Earth, and all that is in them. All creatures are subdued by His absolute power.
There is no atom that moves except with His permission. There is neither any manager of
creation nor partner in dominion along with Him. He is the Living, the One who Sustains and
Administers all creation, and neither drowsiness nor sleep can overcome Him.

The Knower of the Seen and Unseen, nothing in the heavens or the Earth is hidden from Him.
He knows all that is in the land and sea. Not a leaf drops except that He is aware of it. There is
not a seed buried in the darkness of the ground, or anything moist or dry except that He has
recorded its existence in a Clear Book.

He encompasses all things with His knowledge and He knows their exact number. He is the Doer
of what He pleases and Able to bring into existence whatever He wills.

To Him alone belongs the dominion and absolute independence from others; to Him alone
belongs utter power and eternal permanence; to Him alone belongs praise and glorification; and
to Him alone belongs the most beautiful names.

There is none who can avert what He has predestined, or withhold what He has freely given. He
does whatever He wants in His dominion. He rules in His creation however He wills, He does
not hope for any reward nor fear any punishment.

There is no right that He owes, nor any judgment upon Him, so every blessing from Him is but
generosity and every punishment from Him is but justice. He cannot be questioned regarding
what He does but we shall be questioned.

His existence preceded creation. He has neither “before” nor “after”, neither “above” nor
“below”, neither “right” nor “left”, neither “in front of” nor “behind”, and neither “all-ness’’ nor
“some-ness”.

And it cannot be asked regarding Him, “When was He?” or “Where is He?” or “How is He?” He
creates all beings and controls time. He neither needs time nor space.

His reality cannot be grasped by deluded imaginations, He cannot be understood by the intellect,
He cannot be limited by the mind, He cannot be envisioned by the soul, He cannot be conceived
by the imagination, He does not conform to your understanding, and He cannot be comprehended
through thought and contemplation. He is exalted beyond having any likeness or equal. There is
nothing like Him; and He is the All-Hearing and All-Seeing.

KNOW YOUR CREATOR!

Exclusive to STR

The view of the government as the savior of mankind, the organizer of society and the progenitor of morality, is in present times “profoundly integrated into the depths of our consciousness” (Ellul, 216). Keen observers, since Nietzsche, have recognized the overwhelming degree to which citizens of the West are afflicted with what we can call a “political mentality.” This disorder dulls the mind, immobilizes the spirit and narrows the vision of its host. Effectively, it makes men into submissive creatures, ignorant of even the possibility of alternatives to a politicized life. Every issue, no matter how personal, is raised to the level of politics. Today in the West we find that the state has succeeded in its total conquering of man by infiltrating every aspect of his character. Rousseau famously recognized that if the state is to ascend to ultimate authority, it must train its subjects from an early age to “consider their individual selves only in relation to the body of the state, and to see their own existence only as a part of its existence” and only then “may they finally come to identify themselves . . . with the greater whole” (Social Contract, 2.7: 163). In our age, public education, mass media, public intellectuals and government officials function as the shapers of the minds of citizens.

Nevertheless, many men in the West are not merely passive political subjects; they are impassioned defenders of state power; they religiously believe that the state is the ultimate source of all justice and that it is an omnipotent force capable of cleanly transforming society into a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. If the state is tasked by its faithful to “immanentize the eschaton,” then it must be reflexively believed by nearly everyone that providing the state with its means of existence is a moral imperative. This translates to the belief that everyone who earns an income or has some level of wealth is obligated to pay taxes unless the state beneficently grants him an exception. Such a widespread belief is the legitimating source of the state’s power to viciously punish and morally condemn tax evaders. In fact, the masses, fully imbued with the spirit of equality, are thoroughly convinced that anyone who deviates from the uniform code of ethics founded on equality is an enemy of justice and is deserving of harsh treatment.

The mass-man, blinded by the mystical vision of the state, believes that civilization is a gift from the state and thus taxes are what all citizens owe in exchange. For the mass-man, people who refuse to pay taxes are refusing to sacrifice for the public good, are challenging the very essence of the mass-man’s world-vision, and are leveling an assault on the social order. It is even claimed by many that tax evasion is tantamount to stealing from the public.

In the masses’ equalitarian vision of the world, there is no room for individuality; the individual is denigrated as a pariah, which can be seen in the vitriolic attacks the masses and their leaders regularly make on profits, wealth and capitalism. The individual is deemed the most immoral character in our society, because he is unwilling to develop the highly exalted virtue of obedience; instead he follows his own conscience and will. The envious hatred of individuals is so strong that those who commit the crime of benefiting financially from improving the human condition are regularly sacrificed on the altar of the state in a process called “progressive taxation.”

These beliefs concerning the moral imperative of paying taxes are so widespread that even those few who do not believe in either the myth that “the state is god” or that the state is necessary are too terrified to openly defy the state. Those who do evade taxes do so in a very clandestine manner, in order to ensure that they are not punished by the full force of public opinion, as embodied in the state.

It’s pretty much standard for the chattering classes — both liberal and conservative — to refer to something called “our free market system,” also known as “free market capitalism.” To the extent that the right-wingers at Fox and CNBC or on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal advocate some purer form of “free markets” in contrast to the existing economy, what they mean is essentially the present model of corporate capitalism without the regulatory or welfare state.

But the form taken by the existing capitalist system that we live under owes precious little to free markets. From its beginnings in the late Middle Ages, it has been shaped by massive and ceaseless intervention and enforcement of privilege — much of it breathtakingly brutal — by the state. To adapt a phrase from Orwell, the past has been a boot stamping on a human face.

The state played a central role in creating the defining characteristic of capitalism as we know it: the wage system. Had free markets been allowed to develop peacefully, with the peasant majorities remaining in control of their land and with free access to the means of subsistence, labor markets would likely have taken a much different form. Employers would have had to compete with the possibility of self-employment, available to the vast majority of the population. But thanks to Enclosures and similar land expropriations over a period of several centuries, the majority of the population was turned into a landless proletariat totally dependant on wage labor for its subsistence.

As if this weren’t enough, the British state imposed totalitarian social controls on the working class in the early days of the Industrial Revolution to reduce the bargaining power of labor. The Laws of Settlement, for example, acted as a sort of internal passport system, forbidding workers to leave their parish of birth in search of better terms of employment without permission. The Poor Law authorities then came to the rescue of employers in the underpopulated industrial North, by auctioning off laborers — cheaply — from the parish workhouses of London.

Over a period of several centuries the European powers brought most of the Earth under their subjection and imposed similar land expropriations and social controls on the peoples of the Third World, and looted the mineral resources and raw materials of most of the world.

A wide range of thinkers, from the free market anarchist Lysander Spooner to the Marxist Immanuel Wallerstein, have pointed out historic capitalism’s continuities with feudalism. Capitalism, as a historic system of political economy, was really just an outgrowth of feudalism with markets grafted in and allowed to operate in the interstices to a limited extent.

The state also played a central role in the rise of corporate capitalism from the late 19th century on. The railroad land grants created a single national market in the U.S., externalizing the costs of long-distance distribution on the taxpayer, and led to industrial firms and markets far larger than would otherwise have existed. Patent law and assorted regulations passed during the Progressive Era served to cartelize markets under the control of a handful of oligopoly firms.

In the twentieth century, the state played a growing role in absorbing the surplus output of overbuilt industry or guaranteeing an overseas market for it. The leading industrial sectors were state creations: the automobile-highway complex, civil aviation, the miliitary-industrial complex and outgrowths like miniaturized electronics and industrial automation.

The neoliberal economy of the past twenty years is overwhelmingly dependent on the draconian enforcement of “intellectual property” law. The dominant sectors in the corporate global economy — software, entertainment, biotech, pharma, agribusiness, electronics — are all almost entirely dependent for their profits either on “intellectual property” or direct subsidies from the state. The central function of the U.S. national security state since WWII has been to make the world safe for corporate power through the overthrow of unfriendly governments.

Both the statist right and the statist left, for their own reasons, equate the “free market” to corporate capitalism, and promote the myth that corporate capitalism as we know it is what would naturally have emerged from a free market absent state intervention to prevent it. The statist right want to defend the legitimacy of big business, and the statist left want to make you think you need them to defend you against big business.

But the exact opposite is true. Big business has been a creature of the state from the beginning. And genuinely free markets would operate as dynamite at the foundations of corporate power.

And that’s exactly what those of us on the free market left want to do.

New York state may soon become the first state to restrict employment opportunities for nannies.

The state Senate passed a bill this week that would prohibit New York’s approximately 200,000 household workers from accepting any position that does not include paid holidays, overtime pay and sick days.

Opponents say the step will bring unnecessary hardship to thousands of women—and some men—who have found employment because of labor markets that operate freely, except for constraints imposed by the federal minimum wage.

Yes, if only they wouldn’t pass this minimum wage law, we could get back to the free market. As Kevin Carson might say, “Jesus, vulgar much?”:

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because “that’s not how the free market works”–implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of “free market principles.”

[...]

See, laborers just happen to be stuck with this crappy set of options–the employing classes have absolutely nothing to do with it. And the owning classes just happen to have all these means of production on their hands, and the laboring classes just happen to be propertyless proletarians who are forced to sell their labor on the owners’ terms. The possibility that the employing classes might be directly implicated in state policies that reduced the available options of laborers is too ludicrous even to consider.

In the world the rest of us non-vulgar libertoids inhabit, of course, things are a little less rosy…

…the general legal framework (as Benjamin Tucker described it) restricted labor’s access to its own capital through such forms of self-organization as mutual banks. As a result of this “money monopoly,” workers were forced to sell their labor in a buyer’s market on terms set by the owning classes, and thus pay tribute (in the form of a wage less than their labor-product) for access to the means of production.

Charles Johnson understands the effects the state has on the labor market:

government-imposed distortions of the markets in labor, capital, land, and ideas (inter alia) artificially constrain opportunities for people to make a living for themselves, distorting the labor market to keep disproportionate power in the hands of a small and privileged class of rentiers. Without those market distortions, a law against paying workers $4 an hour would matter about as much as a law against selling pork-chops in Mecca — objectionable on principle, but mainly negligible as a strategic matter, due to a dearth of identifiable victims.

But none of this is to imply that I disagree with Landsburg about the destructiveness of the minimum wage. I’m nuanced like that. Charles again:

But as long as those coercive distortions are substantially in place, we do have to keep in mind how bosses will predictably react to additional coercive counter-distortions that are piled on top to correct for the predictable effects of the first distortion, without actually changing anything about the root causes. And with the predictable patterns of reaction in mind, and their current position of power within the labor market, I don’t think we have to turn into a bunch of vulgar Friedmaniacs or Misoids to agree with them that the effects of keeping, or worse, raising legally-enforced price floors on labor are going to be generally quite destructive, and most destructive to those who need most badly to find a place to sell their labor…

…in spite of fact that the anti-minimum-wage argument has mainly been promulgated with a vulgar libertarian tone, the thing for left libertarians to do in response is not to kick it back down to the bottom of the priorities ladder, but rather to take it up themselves and re-conceptualize the debate — to treat minimum wage laws and the rest of coercively protective labor legislation as of a piece with government licensure cartels, zoning laws, the health and building codes favored by the Public Interest and Private Property Values racket, etc., as an integral part of the corporate liberal system of coercive power, which coercively ratchet up poor folks’ fixed costs of living while coercively ratcheting down their opportunities to scratch up a living.

So, yes, Steve, it ain’t a good thing. But can’t we say so without also saying completely ridiculous things like “except for constraints imposed by the federal minimum wage,” labor markets “operate freely”?

The smirky caller asked, “You really believe Barack Obama is a socialist?” He went on to assert that the President is pro-business, a capitalist.

The show’s host—amazingly, one of talk radio’s Big Three—stuttered and stammered inarticulately, never really answering the caller’s question, until he was finally rescued by the next commercial break. The fact is, even if he’d known exactly what socialism is, and how to spot it in the people all around you, he wouldn’t have dared to say so, because Republicans, conservatives, have a dirty little secret.

Just like Barack Obama, they are socialists, too.

I don’t know whether anybody tries, these days, to teach school kids about such things. I was in grade school at the beginning of the Cold War, and I was the son of an officer in Strategic Air Command. Herbert Philbrick (look him up) was very big back then, as was a little book called What We Must Know About Communism, by Harry A. Overstreet and Bonaro Wilkins Overstreet. You can still find it at Amazon.com.

Despite several years spent reading extensively about communism, for school and on my own, and studying the lives and works of self- described socialists like H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, I remained as ignorant as that radio talk show host, and for a very good reason: not one of the “experts” I was reading had any clearer an idea what socialism is than I had. Most of them still don’t, to this very day.

Once you get past all the mystical gobbledegook of the Hegelian Dialectic—inserted as a smokescreen, to elevate common thievery, rape, and murder to a level of nobility—what you saw then, what you still see even now, is a boring and inaccurate economic definition, of socialism, all about who gets to own and control “the means of production”.

Economics is, at best, a secondary or tertiary concern to folks who think about such matters. It is necessarily a product, in the proper order of things, of a whole lot of thinking that has to come before it. You must begin with metaphysics—which tries to answer the question, “What is the nature of reality?”—or better yet, you can start with epistemology, which asks us, “How do I know what I know?”

Between epistemology and economics, there’s ethics, which asks the question, “What is the good?” or, more pertinently, “What should I do?” The order in which you approach this is critical. If you try to base your ethics on your economics, you’ll end up organizing Death Panels.

It is the ethical definition of socialism that’s critical here—and dangerous to conservatives. Socialists believe that the needs and wants of society are more important than the rights of the individual. (Individualists will argue that there is no such thing as “society” in an ethical sense, since it consists of nothing more than individuals.)

“Society” can also be defined as “the group” or “the collective”, manifesting itself in various different ways, as your community, your race, your school, your fraternity, your military unit or the military in general, your corporation, your union, your party, your government, your nation, your family, your lodge, or your church, each claiming to be, in some sense, larger than the individual and for that reason more important.

To socialists, who are inclined to perceive other people as bees or ants, eternally and unquestioningly loyal to hive or hill, size matters. And yet when you examine all of these august entities closely, and observe that they are comprised of nothing more than the individuals who make them up, such a point of view becomes absurd and pathetic.

A word about family. Of all the groups that sometimes claim to own your life, family is the hardest to defend your individual sovereignty from. For the most part, we love our families. Although there are occasional exceptions, not everyone experienced a terrible childhood or suffered nightmarish parents, the way it’s often portrayed on television.

Our first job in life is to grow up, achieve autonomy, make our own decisions without regard to whether our parents may approve or not. If we have the right parents, they’ll want us to do exactly that. At the other end, as parents, we owe it to our kids to help them along the same path to independence, even if it’s sometimes difficult or painful.

As a husband and father, what I do with my life remains my choice. While I would willingly give my life to protect my wife and daughter, this doesn’t mean that they own me or that they have more rights—as a group—than I do. It simply reflects their inexpressibly high value to me. Among billions of husbands and fathers, I am obviously far from alone in this outlook. And in the natural world, where the operating system is evolution by natural selection, it makes good sense.

Individual family members share with one another freely, without regard to the ability of any one of them to pull his own weight. (For a surprisingly long period after she was born, my daughter was unable to deliver newspapers.) That’s just the way it is, and the way it has to be. I believe it was Ludwig von Mises who pointed out that socialism is a misguided attempt to apply what happens in the family to society at large, an attempt that usually ends in privation and violence.

But I have digressed.

Go back and look over that list of things that you’re expected to give your loyalty to and even sacrifice your life for. Over the centuries, they’ve learned to make it all sound wonderful and noble. However when you begin to see these institutions as nothing more than bunches of individuals, each with no more rights in the natural world than you have (and no extra, or bonus rights miraculously obtained by claiming to be something other than what they are, nothing more than a bunch of individuals), they start to look like tribes of cannibals or vampires, eagerly anticipating the tasty sacrifice of another deluded victim.

And when you suddenly notice that, of all these institutions—community, race, school, fraternity, military, corporation, union, party, government, nation, family, lodge, church—more than half are treasured by conservatives, their dirty little secret is exposed by the hot, bright light of the truth: your rights, provided they exist at all, come in a distant second to the needs and wants of these aggregations.

Conservatives—Republicans—are socialists.

True, they may desire to hold you down atop the stone altar and cut your still-beating heart out with an obsidian knife for a set of entirely different reasons—national security, Judaeo-Christian traditions, “common” decency—than the liberals or “progressives” or Democrats do, but to you, the important part is cutting your heart out with an obsidian knife, not whatever excuse they may offer for doing it.

This is why, no matter which political party happens to be in power, ordinary people—whose thinking and hard work maintain this civilization each and every day—never seem to get an even break with regard to their individual liberty or holding onto the fruits of their labor. It’s why the late philosopher Robert LeFevre referred to Democrats and Republicans as “Socialist Party A” and “Socialist Party B”.

Never forget that it was a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, who freed not a single, solitary slave, but merely nationalized slavery in the form of income taxation and conscription, who presided over the violent deaths of 620,000 Americans to preserve a political abstract, to retain his political and military power, to enrich his mercantilist friends, and to suppress the basic human right of an entire region of the country to associate—or disassociate—with whomever they wished.

Never forget that it was a Republican, Richard Nixon, who imposed wage/price controls on what had been a relatively free economy, kept an enemies list, and quit when his minions were caught in a criminal act.

Never forget that it was a Republican, George W. Bush, who created the massively unconstitutional Department of Homeland Security, the no-fly lists, pushed through and signed the Constitution-shredding USA Patriot Act, plunged the country into two unnecessary wars, and created trillion-dollar deficits surpassed only by those of Barack H. Obama.

When we are forced to obtain and carry national identification, it will be Republicans who did it, in the name of eliminating illegal immigration.

Vote for the socialist of your choice.

As with any other socialist culture, “some animals are more equal than others” in Sovietized America. Its elected nomenklatura in the House and Senate are paid between $165,200 and $212,100 every year, can look forward to pensions considerably larger than most of their constituents’ salaries, and enjoy endless additional privileges and benefits.

Socialists, every one of them.

Let’s talk about fascism. When it became obvious as early as the 1920s that socialism doesn’t work—the instant it’s adopted, the economy heads for the toilet, people begin starving, and leaders, self-convinced that their failures are caused by stiff-necked, selfish bastards who refuse to become New Soviet Man, start putting people up against a wall and shooting them—a modified system was devised under which, instead of owning the means of production, government allows the productive class to believe they own them, while it controls them through regulations and siphons off the profits as taxes.

Other common names for fascism are “crony capitalism”, “state capitalism”, “corporate socialism” and “mercantilism”. Sometimes members of the mercantile class become partners with the state and, in certain circumstances, even end up controlling it. The whole thing looks like a different system than ordinary socialism until you apply the ethical definition. What’s more important in a fascist society, the needs and wants of the group, or the rights of the individual? As Mr. Spock once famously observed (in the original James Blish novel Spock Must Die), “a difference that makes no difference is no difference.”

Or was it the other way around?

Fascism, then, is a variety of socialism, nothing more, nothing less. The genuine opposite of fascism is a completely voluntary society.

Completely.

Voluntary.

That means no coercion of any kind is tolerable. No censorship. No zoning. No conscription. No taxation. Government deserves no more money than it can raise with bake sales. Anything else involves setting the value of the individual’s rights at something less than the needs or wants of the group. Or as Robert LeFevre put it, “To any extent that you have a ‘public sector’, to that extent, you have socialism.”

16 Mar 2010

Statists say that people can’t be trusted to interact with each other without someone lording over them. They view the state as a solution for inevitable problems of human relations. In reality people often work with each other, without rulers, to solve the problems created by rulers and statists.

Recently the number and size of homeless encampments has risen dramatically, creating scenes reminiscent of Great Depression era Hoovervilles—shanty towns named for the first president to administer over the Depression, Herbert Hoover.

Austrian School economists including Murray Rothbard have chronicled the government policies that led to the Great Depression. The short of it is the Federal Reserve greatly increased the supply of money, lowering interest rates and encouraging a boom of unsustainable investments. This led to a bust when it had to be paid for and the money supply was contracted.

Of course, a system designed to safeguard power and privilege through force, favoritism, regulation, and outright theft and murder is bound to get caught up at some time.

Herbert Hoover, a progressive with a history of supporting government intervention, believed that government should be an active player in economic recovery. His administration raised taxes, tariffs, and subsidies, and pushed for the creation of government programs and industrial cartels.

This of course failed. Government cannot create wealth, but can only redistribute it. And since government responds to the political pull of the powerful interests it serves, not to the demands of numerous actors of the market, it will disrupt, rather than encourage the creation of wealth.

If government can’t save us, who will? We will save each other through mutual aid, solidarity, and other enterprising activity.

House sharing is one response to rising housing expenses. Just having access to a solid structure and indoor plumbing can greatly increase living quality. One organization that works to connect people who need housing with people who are willing to share space (often to help meet expenses) is HomeSharing, Inc., which has operated in New Jersey for over 25 years. Craigslist and similar networks now connect people for whatever housing arrangements they might work out.

Free economies built from the ground up can enable more choice and accountability than the state-controlled economy. And they will enable people to be less vulnerable to the failures of state capitalism. Connecting with people via the internet and face-to-face communication can make this a viable option. Some opportunities include barter networks (including those that involve commodities like DelValley Silver), Really Free Markets where people give and take items as they want, local gardens, and the numerous examples of free exchange found in Kevin Carson’s Center for a Stateless Society paper “Society After State Capitalism” [.pdf].

When people do things without asking permission, they might break laws. But mutual aid and solidarity can be used as weapons against authority. Working around the system to alleviate the problems it creates can build a strong position to challenge the system from.

“Counter-economics” is a term coined by Samuel Konkin to describe the economics of acting counter to the establishment. He advocated trading risk for profit to build non-coercive underground markets. Eventually organizations forming in these markets would be able to overcome the state, as the loss of economic control and popular support severely weakened state power.

Counter-economics is most useful as a strategic concept when it is not described as simply doing what is counter to the state’s commands (a reaction to the state), but is instead seen as actively building an economy that helps people live counter to authority. It is the economic basis for networks of free individuals resisting the imposition of authority.

Practicing solidarity and mutual aid can make the counter-economy a more attractive choice than the state-controlled economy. If you need help becoming autonomous then other people, knowing it is in their interest to include more people in libertarian action, will help you.

This is better than the statist system, in which most people are at best just another file for some bureaucrat trying to get through the day, another annoyance for some cop trying to do his job, another resource for some politician looking for glory—and at worst a target for thugs with government privilege or trash to be removed when in the way.

Liberty and solidarity can help people flourish better than statism and authority. When people assist each other without some lord stealing from them and giving only commands in return, the aid is mutual.

Darian Worden is an individualist anarchist writer with experience in libertarian activism. His fiction includes Bring a Gun To School Day and the forthcoming Trade War. His essays and other works can be viewed at his personal website. He also hosts an internet radio show, “Thinking Liberty”, on PatriotRadio.com.

Generally speaking, people tend to break down into two broad categories when it comes to “the rules.”

There are the people who view “the rules” as something made as a well-intentioned, good faith effort, by “society” or “all of us,” so that “we can all get along together”; it follows that “we all” have an obligation either to follow the rules “we all” live under, or to change them.

And then there are people like me.

I just don’t understand the rules-trusters. It’s not that they’re necessarily bad people.

Some of them are probably just Type-A authoritarians like Archie Bunker, people who think society will degenerate into “anarchy” if we don’t all unite under the alpha-males and defend the in-group’s mores against out-groups and internal rebels.

But most of them probably just come from positive family backgrounds that have predisposed them toward trust and generosity. It’s people like this who read “Why Mommy is a Democrat,” and think society is just like a big family where the rules are there to keep us all happy and safe and make sure the same person doesn’t always grab the last drumstick off the plate.

In a society made up entirely of genuinely consensual associations, with rules actually made by voluntary members, this trusting and generous attitude would be entirely appropriate—just the sort of personality type needed to keep things going.

But society isn’t a big family, with government as Mommy. Government is run by people who rig the game to make sure they can take the drumstick off the plate every time.

You frequently hear, in this age of soccer mom politics, complaints that people “work hard and play by the rules” and still get screwed.

Well, of course people get screwed when they work hard and play by the rules. Who do you think is making the rules? You might as well complain that you don’t get rich in Vegas when you play by the rules of the house.

The only people who get rich playing by the rules are the people who make the rules. And just look at the people sitting around the table, the people who make the rules you live by: the “too big to fail” banks; the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft; Cargill and ADM; Merck and Pfizer; Boeing and McDonnell Douglass. Do these look like people who want you to get rich playing by the rules? No. They want you to play by the rules, while they get rich.

You’ll succeed by working hard and playing by the rules about as fast as an Egyptian slave would have got to be Pharaoh by working hard building a pyramid.

There’s an old saying about the definition of a liberal, as opposed to a radical: a liberal is someone who thinks the system is broken and needs to be fixed, whereas a radical understands it’s working the way it’s supposed to.

A scene in Freedom, by Daniel Suarez, reminded me of that. Most of the debate on torture in the mainstream press revolves around whether it’s a “mistake,” because of allegations that it doesn’t “work” as a way of extracting confessions. A character in Freedom, known only as The Major (his real name was classified) put the debate in perspective.

The Major was a thirty year veteran of America’s dirty little wars, representing the people who own the world, the real government you never read about in the civics textbooks: finance capitalists, torturers, death squads, narcotraffickers, and all the people we mentioned above sitting around that little table making “the rules.” In the scene, The Major was preparing to torture a member of the kind of decentralist resistance movement that John Robb likes to write about: local economies of soil-intensive horticulturists, micromanufacturers and renewable energy, organized through a global darknet.

As his assistants bustled about readying their pliers, snips and cauterizing torches, The Major held forth in good cheer on the real purpose of torture: of course torture is useless for extracting information, he said. No one here is so naive as to believe otherwise. But it’s quite useful for terrorizing subject populations. You mutilate people, break them, and release what’s left of them into the general population as a warning sign written in flesh and blood: “This is what happens when you resist.” If you torture a thousand people, you can keep five million working quietly and obediently, with their heads down and mouths shut, doing what they’re told and not asking questions.

A liberal who doesn’t think the system is working, doesn’t understand what it’s supposed to do.

Kevin Carson is a research associate at the Center for a Stateless Society, contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective. Mr. Carson has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

“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:

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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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.

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?

“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.

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.

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.

In truth this world is an amazing place. We see all these contrasts and we are all heading towards our inevitable death…this should lead us to question the purpose of everything we do. What is the meaning of it?

Atheists declare that they are free, but it seems they are not, they have debts, and mortgages. They toil and labor. They feel regret that they have not got the good job, the big house, the recognition they deserve. Some immerse themselves into acquiring these things.

Life is a journey, here we display our true characters and souls for us to bear witness to and for others to see who we are. The recognition of death allows us to make sense of life and to know that the unpleasant things we feel are in fact given to us by Allah the Exalted as a gift. It is the soul recognizing that this is not our home, and that we should occupy ourselves with our eternal home, purify our souls by following the Shariah and to hopefully find eternal grace in the Company of Allah the Exalted the, the highest Angels, Prophets and Messengers and their best of followers.

The Sharia is a revealed path, at once the road and a scale (to measure oneself against) which when applied leads to Allah the Exalted, Eternity and the purification of the heart. Shariah is a gift, it can also be misused by man, to impose it on others and to cause tyranny of course.

“We must realize that our party’s most powerful weapon is racial-tension. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races, that for centuries they have been oppressed by the whites, we can move them to the program of the communist party. In America; we will aim for subtle victory. While inflaming the Negro minority against the whites; we will instill in the whites a guilt-complex for their exploitation of the Negroes. We will aid the Negroes to rise to prominence in every walk of life, in the professions, and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this prestige; the Negro will be able to intermarry with the whites and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause.” Record of June 7, 1957; by Representative Thomas G. Abernethy.