Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
Nisbett Wrong, Again—No Black Gains In Reading and Mathematics Over Five Decades
By Professor J. Philippe Rushton
In my last VDARE article, I critically examined Richard Nisbett’s book, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, [email him],received the most favorable reviews, not only in the media, but academia as well, for arguing that there has been a 35% Black gain relative to Whites in average IQ test scores and tests of educational achievement. Moreover, Nisbett asserted (incorrectly, it turned out) that cultural factors alone could explain all the Black-White gaps—which he also claimed could be eliminated altogether through educational and social interventions.
All of which was just what the huge sector of the Education Industry devoted to closing the racial “Achievement Gap”�� wanted to hear. But it was wrong.
(My article was based on a longer academic review [PDF] that Arthur Jensen and I contributed to The Open Psychology Review).
Now I want to focus these allegedly improving Black scores in more detail. This article too is based on an academic journal essay by Arthur Jensen and myself: in the March 2010 issue of Intelligence, The rise and fall of the Flynn Effect as a reason to expect a narrowing of the Black-White IQ gap.
When Jensen and I reviewed Nisbett’s book, we noted that his claims of Black IQ gains relative to whites were far too high. But, in common with other race realist scientists, we tended to assume there must have been some improvement.
However, our new analysis finds that from 1954 to 2008 Black 17-year-olds consistently scored at the level of White 14-year-olds on tests of mathematics and reading—i.e. in more than fifty years, there had been no significant change at all.
As I will explain below, a 3+ year gap between Blacks and Whites at age 17 is equal to an IQ for Black 17-year-olds of about 85, the same as that found using standardized IQ tests.
Jensen and I began our analysis with the 1975 to 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long term assessment tests. These are often referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card”�� because they are based on nationally representative samples of over 26,000 students. They comprise the gold standard for educational achievement tests, provide the empirical basis for No Child Left Behind. They assess Mathematics and Reading skills every three or four years for White, Black, and Hispanic 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds.
Figure 1 (below) shows the combined mathematics and reading scores for White, Hispanic, and Black 17-year-olds, along with those for White 13-year-olds. We combined the mathematics and reading scores into composites and focused mainly on 17- year- olds. As can be seen, Black 17-year-olds have not closed the gap on Hispanic 17-year-olds (for many of whom English is a second language), and barely closed it on White 13-year-olds. Black 17-year-olds lag White 17-year olds by over three years.
Combined NAEP Mathematics and Reading Scores for White, Hispanic, and Black 17-Year-Olds and White 13-Year-Olds from 1975 to 2008.
NAEP press releases regularly trumpet improvement i.e. closing the “Achievement Gap”�� in this or that subset of the Black population using this or that subtest. Our more pessimistic conclusions arise because we aggregated the data and looked at the entire period.
This 3+ year education gap between Blacks and Whites was also noted in the Coleman Report back in 1966. This report was authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and carried out under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was a nationally representative survey of nearly 600,000 schoolchildren and 60,000 teachers from 4,000 schools throughout the US, including those from the metropolitan northeast, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Black achievement scores averaged 1.6 years behind those of Whites in grade 6 (at age 12); 2.4 years in grade 9 (age 15); and 3.3 years in grade 12 (age 18).
The Coleman Report even found that Black scores averaged below those of American Indians, despite that group scoring lower on most socioeconomic indicators.
Coleman also found—perhaps surprisingly in 1966—that the educational resources devoted to Blacks and Whites were nearly equal, even in the South. But none of the expected financial or educational “inputs”�� could be correlated with any of the performance “outputs”��.
Instead, the main determinant of a child’s score was his own parents’ socioeconomic status—not the amount of money spent on schools. Going to a good or a bad school, by itself, apparently had little influence on the students’ performance on standardized tests.
The Coleman Report did find, however, that Black students who attended middle-class majority White schools achieved higher than other Black students. Coleman surmised this was due to peer attitudes in such schools. Accordingly, he recommended that Black students be assigned to schools where there was a majority of middle class attitude. This earned Coleman the moniker “the sociologist who inspired busing”��.
Across much of the U.S., court-ordered busing forcibly transferred tens of thousands of White and Black students to each other's schools. But by 1975, Coleman wrote that school busing had simply led to “white flight”�� as parents moved their children to private schools and ever more distant suburbs outside of the court’s jurisdiction. [This was published as Racial Segregation in the Schools: New Research With New Policy Implications, Phi Delta Kappan, October 1975, not online. See Education: Forced Busing and White Flight, Time Magazine, September 25, 1976]
Jensen and I were able to go even further back in time. We examined studies from 1954 to 1965 in the State of Georgia, with data on reading and mathematics from 1,500 White and 800 Black students given the California Achievement Test; and in Virginia, with data on reading from 2,000 Black and White students.
Those studies too showed that by grade 10 (age 16), the average Black–White gap was about three years.
The Georgia and Virginia studies were dismissed at the time as due to “convenience samples”��—that is, a sample that was readily to hand rather than truly representative—and the result of the school segregation that was legally mandated at the time in the South. (Rather than as a reason in support of segregation, as the policy’s defenders argued).
One older way of calculating an IQ score is to use the equation, IQ = MA/CA x 100, where MA = Mental Age, CA = Chronological Age, and with the White mean set at 100. Jensen and I used this formula to calculate that the mean IQ for Black 14-year-olds in the 1954 Georgia study was 86 (12/14 x 100) and in 1965, 81 (11.3/14 x 100).
Similarly, for the Coleman Report, we calculated the mean IQ for Black 15-year-olds was 84 (12.6/15 x 100), and for Black 18-year-olds, 82 (14.7/18 x 100).
For the 1975 NAEP tests, we calculated the mean IQ for Black 13-year-olds was 70 (9/13 x 100) and for Black 17-year-olds, 71 (12/17 x 100). And for the 2008 NAEP tests the mean IQ for Black 13-year-olds was 85 (11/13 x 100) and for Black 17-year-olds, 77 (13/17 x 100).
These Black IQ results did range from 70 to 86. But the overall mean IQ was 80 (median 82), quite in line with an IQ typically found to be 84 or 85 on standardized IQ tests such as the Standard Binet and Wechsler.
The lowest scores in our analysis came from the gold standard NAEP tests (70, 71, and 77). In our review of Nisbett’s book mentioned earlier, Jensen and I noted the possibility that the mean African American IQ might actually be only 78 rather than 85—in part because, even today, test developers and educational researchers seldom get to examine the very lowest scoring segments of the Black population in inner cities.
Taken together, our results indicate no significant Black gain in educational achievement for over 50 years. When evidence in favor of Black gains is presented, it typically rests on insufficient sampling and highly selective reporting.
By contrast, the results in Figure 1 are based on a highly reliable composite based on combining the Reading and Mathematics scores of the NAEP.
Our conclusion: predictions about the Black–White IQ gap narrowing are based on faith rather than evidence, wishful thinking rather than critical analysis.
There is no more reason to expect Black–White differences in IQ to narrow as a result of, say, the secular rise in IQ over time, than to expect male–female differences in height to narrow as a result of secular changes in height due to nutrition. The (mostly heritable) cause of the former is not the (mostly environmental) cause of the latter.
J. Philippe Rushton (E-mail him) is a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada and the author of Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective.
If you want to email or print out, format by clicking on this permanent URL:
http://www.vdare.com/rushton/100723_nisbett.htm
Nisbett Wrong, Again—No Black Gains In Reading and Mathematics Over Five Decades
By Professor J. Philippe Rushton
In my last VDARE article, I critically examined Richard Nisbett’s book, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, [email him],received the most favorable reviews, not only in the media, but academia as well, for arguing that there has been a 35% Black gain relative to Whites in average IQ test scores and tests of educational achievement. Moreover, Nisbett asserted (incorrectly, it turned out) that cultural factors alone could explain all the Black-White gaps—which he also claimed could be eliminated altogether through educational and social interventions.
All of which was just what the huge sector of the Education Industry devoted to closing the racial “Achievement Gap”�� wanted to hear. But it was wrong.
(My article was based on a longer academic review [PDF] that Arthur Jensen and I contributed to The Open Psychology Review).
Now I want to focus these allegedly improving Black scores in more detail. This article too is based on an academic journal essay by Arthur Jensen and myself: in the March 2010 issue of Intelligence, The rise and fall of the Flynn Effect as a reason to expect a narrowing of the Black-White IQ gap.
When Jensen and I reviewed Nisbett’s book, we noted that his claims of Black IQ gains relative to whites were far too high. But, in common with other race realist scientists, we tended to assume there must have been some improvement.
However, our new analysis finds that from 1954 to 2008 Black 17-year-olds consistently scored at the level of White 14-year-olds on tests of mathematics and reading—i.e. in more than fifty years, there had been no significant change at all.
As I will explain below, a 3+ year gap between Blacks and Whites at age 17 is equal to an IQ for Black 17-year-olds of about 85, the same as that found using standardized IQ tests.
Jensen and I began our analysis with the 1975 to 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long term assessment tests. These are often referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card”�� because they are based on nationally representative samples of over 26,000 students. They comprise the gold standard for educational achievement tests, provide the empirical basis for No Child Left Behind. They assess Mathematics and Reading skills every three or four years for White, Black, and Hispanic 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds.
Figure 1 (below) shows the combined mathematics and reading scores for White, Hispanic, and Black 17-year-olds, along with those for White 13-year-olds. We combined the mathematics and reading scores into composites and focused mainly on 17- year- olds. As can be seen, Black 17-year-olds have not closed the gap on Hispanic 17-year-olds (for many of whom English is a second language), and barely closed it on White 13-year-olds. Black 17-year-olds lag White 17-year olds by over three years.
Combined NAEP Mathematics and Reading Scores for White, Hispanic, and Black 17-Year-Olds and White 13-Year-Olds from 1975 to 2008.
NAEP press releases regularly trumpet improvement i.e. closing the “Achievement Gap”�� in this or that subset of the Black population using this or that subtest. Our more pessimistic conclusions arise because we aggregated the data and looked at the entire period.
This 3+ year education gap between Blacks and Whites was also noted in the Coleman Report back in 1966. This report was authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and carried out under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was a nationally representative survey of nearly 600,000 schoolchildren and 60,000 teachers from 4,000 schools throughout the US, including those from the metropolitan northeast, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Black achievement scores averaged 1.6 years behind those of Whites in grade 6 (at age 12); 2.4 years in grade 9 (age 15); and 3.3 years in grade 12 (age 18).
The Coleman Report even found that Black scores averaged below those of American Indians, despite that group scoring lower on most socioeconomic indicators.
Coleman also found—perhaps surprisingly in 1966—that the educational resources devoted to Blacks and Whites were nearly equal, even in the South. But none of the expected financial or educational “inputs”�� could be correlated with any of the performance “outputs”��.
Instead, the main determinant of a child’s score was his own parents’ socioeconomic status—not the amount of money spent on schools. Going to a good or a bad school, by itself, apparently had little influence on the students’ performance on standardized tests.
The Coleman Report did find, however, that Black students who attended middle-class majority White schools achieved higher than other Black students. Coleman surmised this was due to peer attitudes in such schools. Accordingly, he recommended that Black students be assigned to schools where there was a majority of middle class attitude. This earned Coleman the moniker “the sociologist who inspired busing”��.
Across much of the U.S., court-ordered busing forcibly transferred tens of thousands of White and Black students to each other's schools. But by 1975, Coleman wrote that school busing had simply led to “white flight”�� as parents moved their children to private schools and ever more distant suburbs outside of the court’s jurisdiction. [This was published as Racial Segregation in the Schools: New Research With New Policy Implications, Phi Delta Kappan, October 1975, not online. See Education: Forced Busing and White Flight, Time Magazine, September 25, 1976]
Jensen and I were able to go even further back in time. We examined studies from 1954 to 1965 in the State of Georgia, with data on reading and mathematics from 1,500 White and 800 Black students given the California Achievement Test; and in Virginia, with data on reading from 2,000 Black and White students.
Those studies too showed that by grade 10 (age 16), the average Black–White gap was about three years.
The Georgia and Virginia studies were dismissed at the time as due to “convenience samples”��—that is, a sample that was readily to hand rather than truly representative—and the result of the school segregation that was legally mandated at the time in the South. (Rather than as a reason in support of segregation, as the policy’s defenders argued).
One older way of calculating an IQ score is to use the equation, IQ = MA/CA x 100, where MA = Mental Age, CA = Chronological Age, and with the White mean set at 100. Jensen and I used this formula to calculate that the mean IQ for Black 14-year-olds in the 1954 Georgia study was 86 (12/14 x 100) and in 1965, 81 (11.3/14 x 100).
Similarly, for the Coleman Report, we calculated the mean IQ for Black 15-year-olds was 84 (12.6/15 x 100), and for Black 18-year-olds, 82 (14.7/18 x 100).
For the 1975 NAEP tests, we calculated the mean IQ for Black 13-year-olds was 70 (9/13 x 100) and for Black 17-year-olds, 71 (12/17 x 100). And for the 2008 NAEP tests the mean IQ for Black 13-year-olds was 85 (11/13 x 100) and for Black 17-year-olds, 77 (13/17 x 100).
These Black IQ results did range from 70 to 86. But the overall mean IQ was 80 (median 82), quite in line with an IQ typically found to be 84 or 85 on standardized IQ tests such as the Standard Binet and Wechsler.
The lowest scores in our analysis came from the gold standard NAEP tests (70, 71, and 77). In our review of Nisbett’s book mentioned earlier, Jensen and I noted the possibility that the mean African American IQ might actually be only 78 rather than 85—in part because, even today, test developers and educational researchers seldom get to examine the very lowest scoring segments of the Black population in inner cities.
Taken together, our results indicate no significant Black gain in educational achievement for over 50 years. When evidence in favor of Black gains is presented, it typically rests on insufficient sampling and highly selective reporting.
By contrast, the results in Figure 1 are based on a highly reliable composite based on combining the Reading and Mathematics scores of the NAEP.
Our conclusion: predictions about the Black–White IQ gap narrowing are based on faith rather than evidence, wishful thinking rather than critical analysis.
There is no more reason to expect Black–White differences in IQ to narrow as a result of, say, the secular rise in IQ over time, than to expect male–female differences in height to narrow as a result of secular changes in height due to nutrition. The (mostly heritable) cause of the former is not the (mostly environmental) cause of the latter.
J. Philippe Rushton (E-mail him) is a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada and the author of Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective.
If you want to email or print out, format by clicking on this permanent URL:
http://www.vdare.com/rushton/100723_nisbett.htm
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
July 22, 2010
Race Played Role in Obama Car Dealer Closures
By William Tate
The Obama administration, already under fire for unprecedented allegations of racial bias, faces a new bias claim from a most unlikely source: one of the administration's own inspectors general.
Decisions on which car dealerships to close as part of the auto industry bailout -- closures the Obama administration forced on General Motors and Chrysler -- were based in part on race and gender, according to a report by Troubled Asset Relief Program Special Inspector General Neal M. Barofsky.
Dealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships.
Thus, to meet numbers forced on them by the Obama administration, General Motors and Chrysler were forced to shutter other, potentially more viable, dealerships. The livelihood of potentially tens of thousands of families was thus eliminated simply because their dealerships were not minority- or woman-owned.
As has been widely reported, the Inspector General's study skewered the Obama Gang for strong-arming the companies into closing 2,000 dealerships, costing an estimated 100,000 people their jobs during a recession.
But the news media has ignored key elements of Barofsky's report -- elements that are far more damaging, if possible, to Obama. As we reported earlier in the week, a top Obama official, manufacturing czar and "Auto Team" leader Ron Bloom admitted that the dealerships could have been kept open, saving those jobs, "but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President's mandate for 'shared sacrifice.'"
Barofsky says the administration insisted on the closings even though a GM official told him
that GM would usually save 'not one damn cent' by closing any particular dealership. ... Furthermore, a GM official stated that removing a dealership from the network does not save money for GM -- it might even cost GM money -- and that savings cannot be attributed or assigned to any one dealership.
And a reading of the IG's study makes plain that some dealership closings forced by the administration were based largely on politics.
The report is highly critical of how dealerships were selected for closure, or termination. Barofsky notes that
experts said that while metro areas were oversaturated with GM and Chrysler dealerships and reductions were needed in these areas, this was not the case in rural areas where GM and Chrysler had an advantage over their import competitors. [...]
Although sales volume in small towns may be lower, the cost of operating dealerships in small towns is lower as well. In addition, closing dealerships in small towns could ruin the "historic relationship" that GM has had with residents in small towns and force buyers to drive to metro areas, where there are more competitors. In the worst case, the loss of market share in small and medium-sized markets could "jeopardize the return to profitability" for GM and Chrysler, the (the Center for Automotive Research) representative said. Representatives from the National Automobile Dealers Association also concurred that dealership terminations would cause GM and Chrysler to lose market share in rural areas. [Emphasis added.]
Nevertheless, as Barofsky notes, "ultimately close to half of all of the GM dealerships identified for termination were in rural areas."
That is where raw, hard, sewage-filled Chicago politics came into play.
Records indicate that in 2008, Obama lost the vote totals in the nation's 1,300 rural counties by nearly 80%.
The Obama administration's insistence on radical numbers of closures ended up shuttering dealerships in those rural areas disproportionately, while dealerships and jobs in metro areas -- Obama's geographical base -- were left open.
Additionally, it has been widely theorized that dealers targeted for closure as a result of Obama's interference were predominantly those who donated campaign contributions to Republicans. Although evidence to date is largely anecdotal, given what we've already reported about the Obama administration's handling of the auto bailout, such speculation does have considerable grounds for support.
While that last point is leaves room for debate, the details contained in the Barofsky report are not. As Barofsky points out, the Obama administration was given an advance copy, and "Treasury [the Obama Treasury Department] might not agree with how the audit's conclusions portray the Auto Team's decision making or with the lessons that SIGTARP has drawn from those facts, but it should be made clear that Treasury has not challenged the essential underlying facts upon which those conclusions are based."
Included among those undisputed facts:
-"[D]ealerships were retained because they were ... minority- or woman-owned dealerships";
-Thousands of jobs were lost, unnecessarily, due specifically to Obama's "mandate for shared sacrifice";
-A disproportionate number of Obama-forced closings were of rural dealerships, in areas unfriendly to Obama, even though such closures could "jeopardize the return to profitability" for GM and Chrysler.
The media, of course, remain mute about these serious allegations in the Barofsky report. They have limited their coverage to the job loss numbers and tried to place the blame on Treasury Secretary Turbo-Tax Tim Geithner.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/...obama_car.html
July 22, 2010
Race Played Role in Obama Car Dealer Closures
By William Tate
The Obama administration, already under fire for unprecedented allegations of racial bias, faces a new bias claim from a most unlikely source: one of the administration's own inspectors general.
Decisions on which car dealerships to close as part of the auto industry bailout -- closures the Obama administration forced on General Motors and Chrysler -- were based in part on race and gender, according to a report by Troubled Asset Relief Program Special Inspector General Neal M. Barofsky.
Dealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships.
Thus, to meet numbers forced on them by the Obama administration, General Motors and Chrysler were forced to shutter other, potentially more viable, dealerships. The livelihood of potentially tens of thousands of families was thus eliminated simply because their dealerships were not minority- or woman-owned.
As has been widely reported, the Inspector General's study skewered the Obama Gang for strong-arming the companies into closing 2,000 dealerships, costing an estimated 100,000 people their jobs during a recession.
But the news media has ignored key elements of Barofsky's report -- elements that are far more damaging, if possible, to Obama. As we reported earlier in the week, a top Obama official, manufacturing czar and "Auto Team" leader Ron Bloom admitted that the dealerships could have been kept open, saving those jobs, "but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President's mandate for 'shared sacrifice.'"
Barofsky says the administration insisted on the closings even though a GM official told him
that GM would usually save 'not one damn cent' by closing any particular dealership. ... Furthermore, a GM official stated that removing a dealership from the network does not save money for GM -- it might even cost GM money -- and that savings cannot be attributed or assigned to any one dealership.
And a reading of the IG's study makes plain that some dealership closings forced by the administration were based largely on politics.
The report is highly critical of how dealerships were selected for closure, or termination. Barofsky notes that
experts said that while metro areas were oversaturated with GM and Chrysler dealerships and reductions were needed in these areas, this was not the case in rural areas where GM and Chrysler had an advantage over their import competitors. [...]
Although sales volume in small towns may be lower, the cost of operating dealerships in small towns is lower as well. In addition, closing dealerships in small towns could ruin the "historic relationship" that GM has had with residents in small towns and force buyers to drive to metro areas, where there are more competitors. In the worst case, the loss of market share in small and medium-sized markets could "jeopardize the return to profitability" for GM and Chrysler, the (the Center for Automotive Research) representative said. Representatives from the National Automobile Dealers Association also concurred that dealership terminations would cause GM and Chrysler to lose market share in rural areas. [Emphasis added.]
Nevertheless, as Barofsky notes, "ultimately close to half of all of the GM dealerships identified for termination were in rural areas."
That is where raw, hard, sewage-filled Chicago politics came into play.
Records indicate that in 2008, Obama lost the vote totals in the nation's 1,300 rural counties by nearly 80%.
The Obama administration's insistence on radical numbers of closures ended up shuttering dealerships in those rural areas disproportionately, while dealerships and jobs in metro areas -- Obama's geographical base -- were left open.
Additionally, it has been widely theorized that dealers targeted for closure as a result of Obama's interference were predominantly those who donated campaign contributions to Republicans. Although evidence to date is largely anecdotal, given what we've already reported about the Obama administration's handling of the auto bailout, such speculation does have considerable grounds for support.
While that last point is leaves room for debate, the details contained in the Barofsky report are not. As Barofsky points out, the Obama administration was given an advance copy, and "Treasury [the Obama Treasury Department] might not agree with how the audit's conclusions portray the Auto Team's decision making or with the lessons that SIGTARP has drawn from those facts, but it should be made clear that Treasury has not challenged the essential underlying facts upon which those conclusions are based."
Included among those undisputed facts:
-"[D]ealerships were retained because they were ... minority- or woman-owned dealerships";
-Thousands of jobs were lost, unnecessarily, due specifically to Obama's "mandate for shared sacrifice";
-A disproportionate number of Obama-forced closings were of rural dealerships, in areas unfriendly to Obama, even though such closures could "jeopardize the return to profitability" for GM and Chrysler.
The media, of course, remain mute about these serious allegations in the Barofsky report. They have limited their coverage to the job loss numbers and tried to place the blame on Treasury Secretary Turbo-Tax Tim Geithner.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/...obama_car.html
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?p=345932#post345932
Saddened ?
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?p=345932#post345932
Saddened ?
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
July 31, 2010
Let Them Eat Cake
By Paul Craig Roberts
It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.
When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.
Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.
Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.
The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.
Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?
How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?
These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.
While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.
The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”��
Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.
The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.
US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.
Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps.
The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.
The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.
And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
July 31, 2010
Let Them Eat Cake
By Paul Craig Roberts
It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.
When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.
Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.
Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.
The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.
Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?
How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?
These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.
While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.
The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”��
Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.
The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.
US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.
Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps.
The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.
The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.
And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
Bed Bugs Take Bite Out of the Big Apple
Friday, July 30, 2010 9:52 AM
http://www.newsmaxhealth.com/health_...30/337095.html
In the city that never sleeps, there is one increasingly busy nocturnal resident that New York wants to evict — the bedbug.
The city announced plans to spend $500,000 raising awareness of the tiny bloodsucking mites in a bid to kill them off after bedbug complaints grew by 40 percent in the past three years.
The bedbugs aren’t just biting in the Big Apple, according to a survey sponsored by the National Pest Management Association, reports WebMD. The survey discovered that exterminators across the country have seen an 81 percent increase in bedbug calls over the past 10 years and 57 percent more calls since 2005.
"Everyone wants to come to New York, including bedbugs," said New York City Councilwoman Christine Quinn. "But we have a message for them ... drop dead."
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has battled an outbreak at his Harlem office, along with lingerie outlet Victoria's Secret, teen clothing store Hollister, and countless hotels who have lost thousands of dollars in revenue fighting the bedbug.
New York has been hard hit by bedbugs — who like to nestle in furniture and suck the blood of humans and animals — in part because of the high density living and the millions of tourists who visit the city each year, Quinn said.
Last year more than 33,000 people called the city's bedbug complaint line to ask for help in dealing with the mites.
Bedbugs don't carry disease, but they can be difficult and expensive to get rid of and cause "emotional, psychological, and economic anguish," said Councilwoman Gale Brewer
Bed Bugs Take Bite Out of the Big Apple
Friday, July 30, 2010 9:52 AM
http://www.newsmaxhealth.com/health_...30/337095.html
In the city that never sleeps, there is one increasingly busy nocturnal resident that New York wants to evict — the bedbug.
The city announced plans to spend $500,000 raising awareness of the tiny bloodsucking mites in a bid to kill them off after bedbug complaints grew by 40 percent in the past three years.
The bedbugs aren’t just biting in the Big Apple, according to a survey sponsored by the National Pest Management Association, reports WebMD. The survey discovered that exterminators across the country have seen an 81 percent increase in bedbug calls over the past 10 years and 57 percent more calls since 2005.
"Everyone wants to come to New York, including bedbugs," said New York City Councilwoman Christine Quinn. "But we have a message for them ... drop dead."
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has battled an outbreak at his Harlem office, along with lingerie outlet Victoria's Secret, teen clothing store Hollister, and countless hotels who have lost thousands of dollars in revenue fighting the bedbug.
New York has been hard hit by bedbugs — who like to nestle in furniture and suck the blood of humans and animals — in part because of the high density living and the millions of tourists who visit the city each year, Quinn said.
Last year more than 33,000 people called the city's bedbug complaint line to ask for help in dealing with the mites.
Bedbugs don't carry disease, but they can be difficult and expensive to get rid of and cause "emotional, psychological, and economic anguish," said Councilwoman Gale Brewer
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
"emotional, psychological, and economic anguish," said Councilwoman Gale Brewer
"emotional, psychological, and economic anguish," said Councilwoman Gale Brewer
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?p=346850#post346850
Are you saddened ?
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?p=346850#post346850
Are you saddened ?
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?p=346921#post346921
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?p=346921#post346921
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
Chapter 5 of 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II”��
Kevin MacDonald
August 1, 2010
Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 5 (“After the Murder of Alexander II”��) recounts the important period after the assassination of Tsar Alexandar II in 1881. (See here. Donations for the translators are much needed.) The assassination inaugurated a period of anti-Jewish pogroms, restrictions on Jews, and an upsurge of Jewish involvement in revolutionary activities.
Solzhenitsyn’s treatment is highly reminiscent of Albert Lindemann’s treatment in Esau’s Tears and in his The Jew Accused in its dismissal of the apologetic accounts written by Jewish historians and in his portrayal of the very real difficulties faced by the Russian government in dealing with its Jewish population. In general, the tensions between Jews and non-Jews recounted here reflect traditional anti-Jewish themes, particularly Jewish economic domination, but there are also themes peculiar to the rise of the Jews as an educated elite that were widespread in Europe at the time. We also see here the theme of Jewish involvement in revolutionary political radicalism which culminated in the revolution of 1917.
Apologetic accounts of the period by Jewish activist historians and organizations have painted the Russian government as the epitome of evil. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration that the entire organized Jewish community in Western Europe and America acted to thwart Russian interests throughout the entire period from 1881 to 1917—most notably the role of Jacob Schiff in financing the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.
Solzhenitsyn points out that there was no government complicity in the anti-Jewish actions, although the government response was limited by the small number of Russian police at the time. Indeed, the official government view was that pogroms were the result of agitators bent on revolution and therefore naturally viewed negatively by the government. Alexander III is quoted in [reaction] a report of leniency toward [anti-Jewish] pogromists by the authorities that “This is inexcusable.”�� Records unearthed after 1917 revealed that Alexander III “demanded an energetic investigation.”��
Nevertheless, the myth that the Russian government had organized the pogroms was propagated and can still be found in Jewish publications — along with the slander that Alexander personally hated the Jews.
Jewish sources also exaggerated the number of victims — one “frequently published”�� source claiming the “rape of women, murder, and maiming of thousands of men, women, and children.”�� These sources claimed that “these riots were inspired … by the very government [that] had incited the pogromists and hindered the Jews in their self-defense.”��
Goldwin Smith
Goldwin_Smith Goldwin_Smith
, a prominent 19th-century historian with decidedly anti-Jewish views (not cited by Solzhenitsyn), noted that a publication distributed by the Jewish community in England contained claims of many atrocities for which there was no evidence. (The publication was influential in swaying British opinion.) These alleged crimes included roasting infants alive and mass rapes, including some in which Christian women held down Jewesses being raped by Christian men. The leaflet claimed that entire streets had been razed and entire Jewish quarters put to the torch. Smith states that based on reports of British consuls in the area, “though the riots were deplorable and criminal, the Jewish account was in most cases exaggerated, and in some to an extravagant extent. The damage to Jewish property at Odessa, rated in the Jewish account at 1,137,381 rubles, or according to their higher estimates, 3,000,000 rubles, was rated, Consul-General Stanley tells us, by a respectable Jew on the spot at 50,000 rubles, while the Consul-General himself rates it at 20,000”�� (Goldwyn Smith (1894). Essays on Questions of the Day, 1894, 2nd ed. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press; reprinted in 1972, p. 243).
The agitators were motivated by Jewish economic domination. A well-known leaflet from 1881 read:
Who seized the land, forests, and taverns?—The Yid—From whom, muzhik (peasant), do you have to ask for access to your land, at times hiding tears?...From yids.—Wherever you look, wherever you ask—the yids are everywhere. The Yid insults people and cheats them; drinks their blood”��…and it concludes with the appeal: “Honest working people! Free yourselves!
Another leaflet explained that the pogroms were “not against the Jews as Jews, but against Yids; that is, exploiter peoples.”�� Rather than simply rejecting this explanation, Solzhenitsyn presents a sympathetic portrayal of I. S. Aksakov, a contemporary defender of the pogromists, who ascribed their actions as stemming from “a kind of simple-hearted conviction in the justness of their actions”��; the question is “not about Jews enjoying equal rights with Christians, but about the equal rights of Christians with Jews, about abolishing factual inequality of the Russian population in the face of the Jews.”��
A government minister,
Nikolay. Ignatyev" target="_blank">Nikolay. Ignatyev
Nikolay_Pavlovich_Ignatyev Nikolay_Pavlovich_Ignatyev
, described the problem:
“Recognizing the harm to the Christian population from the Jewish economic activity, their tribal exclusivity and religious fanaticism, in the last 20 years the government has tried to blend the Jews with the rest of the population using a whole row of initiatives, and has almost made the Jews equal in rights with the native inhabitants.”�� However, the present anti-Jewish movement “incontrovertibly proves, that despite all the efforts of the government, the relations between the Jews and the native population of these regions remain abnormal as in the past”��, because of the economic issues: after the easing of civil restrictions, the Jews have not only seized commerce and trade, but they have acquired significant landed property.
“Moreover, because of their cohesion and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed all their efforts not toward the increase of the productive strength of the state, but primarily toward the exploitation of the poorest classes of the surrounding population.”�� And now, after we have crushed the disorders and defended the Jews from violence, “it seems ”�’just and urgent to adopt no less energetic measures for the elimination of these abnormal conditions…between the native inhabitants and the Jews, and to protect the population from that harmful activity of the Jews.’”��
This is an excellent encapsulation of the traits of Jewish groups in traditional societies: Tribal exclusivity, religious fanaticism, and group cohesion (ethnic networking) resulting in economic domination, especially over the poorer classes and often in collusion with elites. Together these traits amount to a group evolutionary strategy. In this case, however, the Russian government refused to ally itself with the Jews and attempted "to protect the population from that harmful activity of the Jews." Hence the conflict between the Russian government and the international Jewish community from 1881 to 1917.
Notice too the claim that Jews "directed all their efforts not toward the increase of the productive strength of the state, but primarily toward the exploitation of the poorest classes of the surrounding population.”�� As I noted elsewhere,
many examples of historical anti-Semitism involved animosity resulting from the oppressive nature of economic relationships between the ethnic groups—from a perceived need for greater reciprocity and less exploitation. Having merchants and moneylenders may be necessary, but lowering the fraction of total income of moneylenders and their aristocratic patrons would be in the interests of debtors and may also conform to normative notions of economic justice (especially if these are well-paid occupations). Historically, Jews were often concentrated in ethnic niches such as moneylending, tax farming, and estate management—occupations that were exploitative. In traditional societies these activities were not part of a market economy but an aspect of exploitation by elites. ... In the Middle Ages and down to the twentieth century in much of Eastern Europe, the great majority of loans were made to people living at or near subsistence, and they were made at exorbitant rates. There was often no free market in moneylending; typically, moneylenders obtained the right to engage in these activities as a result of being granted a franchise by a nobleman or a city which received a portion of the profits. The moneylenders then charged whatever they thought they could obtain from their customers, with the exception that interest rates were sometimes capped because of complaints by ruined debtors.
Loans made at interest rates common in the Middle Ages (oftentimes 33%–65%) are simply exploitative, and there is little wonder that they caused hatred on the part of ruined debtors and deep concern on the part of the Church. Moneylending under these circumstances did indeed benefit moneylenders and their aristocratic backers, but, as with loan-sharking today, it simply resulted in destitution for the vast majority of the customers—especially the poorer classes—rather than economic growth for the society as a whole. Loans were made to the desperate, the unintelligent, and the profligate rather to people with good economic prospects who would invest their money to create economic growth; they were made “not to the prosperous farmer...but the farmer who could not make ends meet; not the successful squire, but the waster; the peasant, not when his crops were good, but when the failed; the artisan, not when he sold his wares, but when he could not find a market. Not unnaturally, a century of such a system was more than any community could stand, and the story of Jewish usury is a continuous alternation of invitation, protection, protestation and condemnation.”��19
Another exploitative Jewish economic niche was the arenda system in Eastern Europe, in which Jewish estate managers were motivated to exploit their subjects as much as possible during the period of the lease. In the arenda system, a Jewish agent would lease an estate from a nobleman. In return for a set fee, the leaseholder would have the right to all the economic production of the estate and would also retain control of the feudal rights (including onerous forced labor requirements) over its inhabitants:
In this way, the Jewish arendator became the master of life and death over the population of entire districts, and having nothing but a short-term and purely financial interest in the relationship, was faced with the irresistible temptation to pare his temporary subjects to the bone. On the noble estates he tended to put his relatives and co-religionists in charge of the flour-mill, the brewery, and in particular of the lord’s taverns where by custom the peasants were obliged to drink. On the church estates, he became the collector of all ecclesiastical dues, standing by the church door for his payment from tithe-payers, baptized infants, newly-weds, and mourners. On the [royal] estates..., he became in effect the Crown Agent, farming out the tolls, taxes, and courts, and adorning his oppressions with all the dignity of royal authority.20
Such a system approximates slavery, the only difference being that serfs are tied to the land while slaves can be freely bought and sold. In such systems, there is little motivation to work, and productivity is relatively low.21
Solzhenitsyn vigorously defends the claim that the motive of the government was to protect the rural population from the Jews. The May Regulations instituted in the wake of the pogroms prevented further settlement of Jews in non-Jewish towns (the ones already there could remain) and restricted Jewish economic activity, particularly the wine trade. The government’s protective motive is clear: “The government stood before a difficult choice: to expand the wine industry in the face of peasant proneness [to drunkeness] and thus to deepen the peasant poverty, or to restrict the free growth of this trade by letting the Jews already living in the villages to remain while stopping others from coming. And that choice—restriction—was deemed cruel.”�� Indeed, “today these May Regulations are portrayed as a decisive and irrevocably repressive boundary of Russian history.”��
Notice particularly the claim by the minister (and supported by Solzhenitsyn) that Jewish economic activity was exploitative and destructive, resulting in impoverishing the peasants and exploiting their weakness for alcohol. A common Jewish attitude is that Jews made great contributions to the economic well-being of the society wherever there were large numbers of Jews. Whatever the plausibility of such a view in different times and places, it was certainly not the case here.
These laws resulted in Jewish hatred toward the government and an upsurge in Jewish revolutionary activity culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution. “Although the pogroms originated mainly with the Ukrainian population, the Russians have not been forgiven and the pogroms have always been tied with the name of Russia.”�� Jewish organizations in the rest of the world therefore opposed Russia, often resulting in charges of disloyalty because the Jewish desire to improve the treatment of Russian Jews conflicted with the national interests of several countries, particularly France, which was eager to develop an anti-German alliance in the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In England during World War I, Jews who had immigrated from Russia often refused military service because England was allied with Russia (see here, p. 67). Loyalty issues, which in our own day are centered on the neocon push for wars in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, are certainly not simply canards, as typically claimed by Jewish organizations.
Solzhenitsyn also points out that the government wanted more control over the Jewish population because of the “constant shortfall of Jewish conscripts for military service; it was particularly noticeable when compared to conscription of Christians.”��
Although Jews avoided the draft, they were highly overrepresented in higher education, and the government was concerned about the rise of revolutionary sentiments among students, especially Jewish students. Quotas of 5–10% were established in universities, motivated partly by concern about Jewish revolutionary activity.
In conclusion, Solzhenitsyn’s views are well-documented and fit well with the work of historians like Albert Lindemann. There is definitely an edge to his views. He portrays Jews as an exploitative class over the peasantry, defends government actions, and notes that Jews presented invidious portraits of Russian actions which they used to rally their own people and influence Western governments against Russia. In taking on the biased statements by Jewish commentators, the emotion comes through, as in his reaction to the idea that Jews were forced to emigrate because of the May Regulations:
Wait a second, how did they throw the Jews out and an entire million at that? Didn’t they apparently only prevent new arrivals? No, no! It was already picked up and sent rolling: that from 1882 the Jews were not only forbidden to live in the villages everywhere, but in all the cities, too, except in the 13 guberniyas; that they were moved back to the shtetls of “the Pale”��—that is why the mass emigration of Jews from Russia began!
Well, set the record straight. …
Like his intellectual opponents, Solzhenitsyn is an ethnic nationalist — but one with the facts on his side.
Yu. Larin. The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR, p. 52-53.
Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.
Chapter 5 of 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II”��
Kevin MacDonald
August 1, 2010
Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 5 (“After the Murder of Alexander II”��) recounts the important period after the assassination of Tsar Alexandar II in 1881. (See here. Donations for the translators are much needed.) The assassination inaugurated a period of anti-Jewish pogroms, restrictions on Jews, and an upsurge of Jewish involvement in revolutionary activities.
Solzhenitsyn’s treatment is highly reminiscent of Albert Lindemann’s treatment in Esau’s Tears and in his The Jew Accused in its dismissal of the apologetic accounts written by Jewish historians and in his portrayal of the very real difficulties faced by the Russian government in dealing with its Jewish population. In general, the tensions between Jews and non-Jews recounted here reflect traditional anti-Jewish themes, particularly Jewish economic domination, but there are also themes peculiar to the rise of the Jews as an educated elite that were widespread in Europe at the time. We also see here the theme of Jewish involvement in revolutionary political radicalism which culminated in the revolution of 1917.
Apologetic accounts of the period by Jewish activist historians and organizations have painted the Russian government as the epitome of evil. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration that the entire organized Jewish community in Western Europe and America acted to thwart Russian interests throughout the entire period from 1881 to 1917—most notably the role of Jacob Schiff in financing the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.
Solzhenitsyn points out that there was no government complicity in the anti-Jewish actions, although the government response was limited by the small number of Russian police at the time. Indeed, the official government view was that pogroms were the result of agitators bent on revolution and therefore naturally viewed negatively by the government. Alexander III is quoted in [reaction] a report of leniency toward [anti-Jewish] pogromists by the authorities that “This is inexcusable.”�� Records unearthed after 1917 revealed that Alexander III “demanded an energetic investigation.”��
Nevertheless, the myth that the Russian government had organized the pogroms was propagated and can still be found in Jewish publications — along with the slander that Alexander personally hated the Jews.
Jewish sources also exaggerated the number of victims — one “frequently published”�� source claiming the “rape of women, murder, and maiming of thousands of men, women, and children.”�� These sources claimed that “these riots were inspired … by the very government [that] had incited the pogromists and hindered the Jews in their self-defense.”��
Goldwin Smith
Goldwin_Smith Goldwin_Smith
, a prominent 19th-century historian with decidedly anti-Jewish views (not cited by Solzhenitsyn), noted that a publication distributed by the Jewish community in England contained claims of many atrocities for which there was no evidence. (The publication was influential in swaying British opinion.) These alleged crimes included roasting infants alive and mass rapes, including some in which Christian women held down Jewesses being raped by Christian men. The leaflet claimed that entire streets had been razed and entire Jewish quarters put to the torch. Smith states that based on reports of British consuls in the area, “though the riots were deplorable and criminal, the Jewish account was in most cases exaggerated, and in some to an extravagant extent. The damage to Jewish property at Odessa, rated in the Jewish account at 1,137,381 rubles, or according to their higher estimates, 3,000,000 rubles, was rated, Consul-General Stanley tells us, by a respectable Jew on the spot at 50,000 rubles, while the Consul-General himself rates it at 20,000”�� (Goldwyn Smith (1894). Essays on Questions of the Day, 1894, 2nd ed. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press; reprinted in 1972, p. 243).
The agitators were motivated by Jewish economic domination. A well-known leaflet from 1881 read:
Who seized the land, forests, and taverns?—The Yid—From whom, muzhik (peasant), do you have to ask for access to your land, at times hiding tears?...From yids.—Wherever you look, wherever you ask—the yids are everywhere. The Yid insults people and cheats them; drinks their blood”��…and it concludes with the appeal: “Honest working people! Free yourselves!
Another leaflet explained that the pogroms were “not against the Jews as Jews, but against Yids; that is, exploiter peoples.”�� Rather than simply rejecting this explanation, Solzhenitsyn presents a sympathetic portrayal of I. S. Aksakov, a contemporary defender of the pogromists, who ascribed their actions as stemming from “a kind of simple-hearted conviction in the justness of their actions”��; the question is “not about Jews enjoying equal rights with Christians, but about the equal rights of Christians with Jews, about abolishing factual inequality of the Russian population in the face of the Jews.”��
A government minister,
Nikolay. Ignatyev" target="_blank">Nikolay. Ignatyev
Nikolay_Pavlovich_Ignatyev Nikolay_Pavlovich_Ignatyev
, described the problem:
“Recognizing the harm to the Christian population from the Jewish economic activity, their tribal exclusivity and religious fanaticism, in the last 20 years the government has tried to blend the Jews with the rest of the population using a whole row of initiatives, and has almost made the Jews equal in rights with the native inhabitants.”�� However, the present anti-Jewish movement “incontrovertibly proves, that despite all the efforts of the government, the relations between the Jews and the native population of these regions remain abnormal as in the past”��, because of the economic issues: after the easing of civil restrictions, the Jews have not only seized commerce and trade, but they have acquired significant landed property.
“Moreover, because of their cohesion and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed all their efforts not toward the increase of the productive strength of the state, but primarily toward the exploitation of the poorest classes of the surrounding population.”�� And now, after we have crushed the disorders and defended the Jews from violence, “it seems ”�’just and urgent to adopt no less energetic measures for the elimination of these abnormal conditions…between the native inhabitants and the Jews, and to protect the population from that harmful activity of the Jews.’”��
This is an excellent encapsulation of the traits of Jewish groups in traditional societies: Tribal exclusivity, religious fanaticism, and group cohesion (ethnic networking) resulting in economic domination, especially over the poorer classes and often in collusion with elites. Together these traits amount to a group evolutionary strategy. In this case, however, the Russian government refused to ally itself with the Jews and attempted "to protect the population from that harmful activity of the Jews." Hence the conflict between the Russian government and the international Jewish community from 1881 to 1917.
Notice too the claim that Jews "directed all their efforts not toward the increase of the productive strength of the state, but primarily toward the exploitation of the poorest classes of the surrounding population.”�� As I noted elsewhere,
many examples of historical anti-Semitism involved animosity resulting from the oppressive nature of economic relationships between the ethnic groups—from a perceived need for greater reciprocity and less exploitation. Having merchants and moneylenders may be necessary, but lowering the fraction of total income of moneylenders and their aristocratic patrons would be in the interests of debtors and may also conform to normative notions of economic justice (especially if these are well-paid occupations). Historically, Jews were often concentrated in ethnic niches such as moneylending, tax farming, and estate management—occupations that were exploitative. In traditional societies these activities were not part of a market economy but an aspect of exploitation by elites. ... In the Middle Ages and down to the twentieth century in much of Eastern Europe, the great majority of loans were made to people living at or near subsistence, and they were made at exorbitant rates. There was often no free market in moneylending; typically, moneylenders obtained the right to engage in these activities as a result of being granted a franchise by a nobleman or a city which received a portion of the profits. The moneylenders then charged whatever they thought they could obtain from their customers, with the exception that interest rates were sometimes capped because of complaints by ruined debtors.
Loans made at interest rates common in the Middle Ages (oftentimes 33%–65%) are simply exploitative, and there is little wonder that they caused hatred on the part of ruined debtors and deep concern on the part of the Church. Moneylending under these circumstances did indeed benefit moneylenders and their aristocratic backers, but, as with loan-sharking today, it simply resulted in destitution for the vast majority of the customers—especially the poorer classes—rather than economic growth for the society as a whole. Loans were made to the desperate, the unintelligent, and the profligate rather to people with good economic prospects who would invest their money to create economic growth; they were made “not to the prosperous farmer...but the farmer who could not make ends meet; not the successful squire, but the waster; the peasant, not when his crops were good, but when the failed; the artisan, not when he sold his wares, but when he could not find a market. Not unnaturally, a century of such a system was more than any community could stand, and the story of Jewish usury is a continuous alternation of invitation, protection, protestation and condemnation.”��19
Another exploitative Jewish economic niche was the arenda system in Eastern Europe, in which Jewish estate managers were motivated to exploit their subjects as much as possible during the period of the lease. In the arenda system, a Jewish agent would lease an estate from a nobleman. In return for a set fee, the leaseholder would have the right to all the economic production of the estate and would also retain control of the feudal rights (including onerous forced labor requirements) over its inhabitants:
In this way, the Jewish arendator became the master of life and death over the population of entire districts, and having nothing but a short-term and purely financial interest in the relationship, was faced with the irresistible temptation to pare his temporary subjects to the bone. On the noble estates he tended to put his relatives and co-religionists in charge of the flour-mill, the brewery, and in particular of the lord’s taverns where by custom the peasants were obliged to drink. On the church estates, he became the collector of all ecclesiastical dues, standing by the church door for his payment from tithe-payers, baptized infants, newly-weds, and mourners. On the [royal] estates..., he became in effect the Crown Agent, farming out the tolls, taxes, and courts, and adorning his oppressions with all the dignity of royal authority.20
Such a system approximates slavery, the only difference being that serfs are tied to the land while slaves can be freely bought and sold. In such systems, there is little motivation to work, and productivity is relatively low.21
Solzhenitsyn vigorously defends the claim that the motive of the government was to protect the rural population from the Jews. The May Regulations instituted in the wake of the pogroms prevented further settlement of Jews in non-Jewish towns (the ones already there could remain) and restricted Jewish economic activity, particularly the wine trade. The government’s protective motive is clear: “The government stood before a difficult choice: to expand the wine industry in the face of peasant proneness [to drunkeness] and thus to deepen the peasant poverty, or to restrict the free growth of this trade by letting the Jews already living in the villages to remain while stopping others from coming. And that choice—restriction—was deemed cruel.”�� Indeed, “today these May Regulations are portrayed as a decisive and irrevocably repressive boundary of Russian history.”��
Notice particularly the claim by the minister (and supported by Solzhenitsyn) that Jewish economic activity was exploitative and destructive, resulting in impoverishing the peasants and exploiting their weakness for alcohol. A common Jewish attitude is that Jews made great contributions to the economic well-being of the society wherever there were large numbers of Jews. Whatever the plausibility of such a view in different times and places, it was certainly not the case here.
These laws resulted in Jewish hatred toward the government and an upsurge in Jewish revolutionary activity culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution. “Although the pogroms originated mainly with the Ukrainian population, the Russians have not been forgiven and the pogroms have always been tied with the name of Russia.”�� Jewish organizations in the rest of the world therefore opposed Russia, often resulting in charges of disloyalty because the Jewish desire to improve the treatment of Russian Jews conflicted with the national interests of several countries, particularly France, which was eager to develop an anti-German alliance in the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In England during World War I, Jews who had immigrated from Russia often refused military service because England was allied with Russia (see here, p. 67). Loyalty issues, which in our own day are centered on the neocon push for wars in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, are certainly not simply canards, as typically claimed by Jewish organizations.
Solzhenitsyn also points out that the government wanted more control over the Jewish population because of the “constant shortfall of Jewish conscripts for military service; it was particularly noticeable when compared to conscription of Christians.”��
Although Jews avoided the draft, they were highly overrepresented in higher education, and the government was concerned about the rise of revolutionary sentiments among students, especially Jewish students. Quotas of 5–10% were established in universities, motivated partly by concern about Jewish revolutionary activity.
In conclusion, Solzhenitsyn’s views are well-documented and fit well with the work of historians like Albert Lindemann. There is definitely an edge to his views. He portrays Jews as an exploitative class over the peasantry, defends government actions, and notes that Jews presented invidious portraits of Russian actions which they used to rally their own people and influence Western governments against Russia. In taking on the biased statements by Jewish commentators, the emotion comes through, as in his reaction to the idea that Jews were forced to emigrate because of the May Regulations:
Wait a second, how did they throw the Jews out and an entire million at that? Didn’t they apparently only prevent new arrivals? No, no! It was already picked up and sent rolling: that from 1882 the Jews were not only forbidden to live in the villages everywhere, but in all the cities, too, except in the 13 guberniyas; that they were moved back to the shtetls of “the Pale”��—that is why the mass emigration of Jews from Russia began!
Well, set the record straight. …
Like his intellectual opponents, Solzhenitsyn is an ethnic nationalist — but one with the facts on his side.
Yu. Larin. The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR, p. 52-53.
Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?t=185167
If four White men had committed this fiendish crime do you think the Alphabet police forces and the media would have screamed this story Nation Wide out as a hate crime ?
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?t=185167
If four White men had committed this fiendish crime do you think the Alphabet police forces and the media would have screamed this story Nation Wide out as a hate crime ?
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?t=185109
Yes, I am saddened indeed.
http://www.newnation.co/ forums/showthread.php?t=185109
Yes, I am saddened indeed.
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Re: saddened
Before these days of P.C. insanity things could be joyful not sad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Bvvt7sUA4&NR=1
The cememtery has a interesting close up hmmm, Hollywood always slipped in their stuff.
Before these days of P.C. insanity things could be joyful not sad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Bvvt7sUA4&NR=1
The cememtery has a interesting close up hmmm, Hollywood always slipped in their stuff.
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Rita Harper (white, female, looks to be in her late 40s or early 50s) is the principal of Stone Mill Middle School in DeKalb County. She was assaulted by a 15-year-old Black male as she was coming to work at 6:45 EDT Monday morning, 9 August 2010.
During the attack, the nigger ran up from behind Ms. Harper and threw her to the pavement, causing her to suffer a broken arm, a mild concussion, and a black eye. She hit her head on the pavement hard enough that she didn't remember going into the school building after the robber had run off with her purse. A teacher reported that Ms. Harper kept asking whether she'd been picked up off the ground and carried inside.
The 15-year-old bandit looted Ms. Harper's credit cards, cash, and a cellular telephone out of her purse and discarded the remaining items.
Afterward, the mugger and a 13-year-old accomplice went over to an apartment complex to do a little break-and-enter to steal some bling. Police caught and arrested the two youthful criminals, recovered Ms. Harper's cell phone (along with somebody's flatscreen TV), and charged them both with burglary.
Possibly due to their ages, photos of the perpetrators have not been released. Maybe the media will show them if they can do that white haze trick again.
THE WHITE HAZE TRICK. Media photos showing a bunch of niggers engaging in illegal or morally dubious activities are often fuzzed to protect the guilty, but another common trick is to overlay the photo with a white haze, like fog or dirty-window glare, that makes it difficult to tell that every person in the crowd is dark-skinned.
You should see the size of the cast she's wearing! Her arm must have swelled up a lot.
Jerry Abott
Un-quote
During the attack, the nigger ran up from behind Ms. Harper and threw her to the pavement, causing her to suffer a broken arm, a mild concussion, and a black eye. She hit her head on the pavement hard enough that she didn't remember going into the school building after the robber had run off with her purse. A teacher reported that Ms. Harper kept asking whether she'd been picked up off the ground and carried inside.
The 15-year-old bandit looted Ms. Harper's credit cards, cash, and a cellular telephone out of her purse and discarded the remaining items.
Afterward, the mugger and a 13-year-old accomplice went over to an apartment complex to do a little break-and-enter to steal some bling. Police caught and arrested the two youthful criminals, recovered Ms. Harper's cell phone (along with somebody's flatscreen TV), and charged them both with burglary.
Possibly due to their ages, photos of the perpetrators have not been released. Maybe the media will show them if they can do that white haze trick again.
THE WHITE HAZE TRICK. Media photos showing a bunch of niggers engaging in illegal or morally dubious activities are often fuzzed to protect the guilty, but another common trick is to overlay the photo with a white haze, like fog or dirty-window glare, that makes it difficult to tell that every person in the crowd is dark-skinned.
You should see the size of the cast she's wearing! Her arm must have swelled up a lot.
Jerry Abott
Un-quote
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
08/11/10 - A Reader Objects To Indians (And Others) Banging On The Imperialist Door
An Upstate New York Reader Reads American Indian History—Including A Book You Can't Get From The Library
From: An Anonymous Reader: [Email him]
Re: A “Native American Rights Activist”�� Demands James Fulford Be Fired; He Replies
I am a reader of (and financial contributor to) VDARE.COM. I read the letter calling for James Fulford’s firing by the "Native American Activist." Here's a couple of books recently written providing history of Native Americans’ treatment of each other, and, especially, whites. One, The Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne is a non-PC and comprehensive look at the white settlement of the western plains, but particularly, Texas, and records the horrific tactics of the Comanche in opposing expansion. This book I was able to get through my public library. (It is apparently quite popular, as there was quite a wait.)
The other book is A Fate Worse Than Death; Indian Captivities in the West, 1830-1885, by a husband and wife team, Gregory and Susan Michno.
This was NOT available, and I had to purchase it. I guess the subject is REALLY not PC.
An Upstate New York Reader Reads American Indian History—Including A Book You Can't Get From The Library
From: An Anonymous Reader: [Email him]
Re: A “Native American Rights Activist”�� Demands James Fulford Be Fired; He Replies
I am a reader of (and financial contributor to) VDARE.COM. I read the letter calling for James Fulford’s firing by the "Native American Activist." Here's a couple of books recently written providing history of Native Americans’ treatment of each other, and, especially, whites. One, The Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne is a non-PC and comprehensive look at the white settlement of the western plains, but particularly, Texas, and records the horrific tactics of the Comanche in opposing expansion. This book I was able to get through my public library. (It is apparently quite popular, as there was quite a wait.)
The other book is A Fate Worse Than Death; Indian Captivities in the West, 1830-1885, by a husband and wife team, Gregory and Susan Michno.
This was NOT available, and I had to purchase it. I guess the subject is REALLY not PC.
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Roots coverup
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.aim.org/publications/brie...11feb2002.html
In a recent special celebrating the 25th anniversary of the epic miniseries "Roots," NBC continued a long media tradition of refusing to acknowledge the plagiarism and fabrication perpetrated by Alex Haley, author of the book on which the miniseries was based.
The anniversary special, "Roots- Celebrating 25 Years: The Saga of an American Classic," perpetuated the myth that Haley chronicled the history of seven generations of his family, going all the way back to his purported African ancestor Kunta Kinte.
Contrary to popular belief, historians and journalists discovered years ago that much of Haley's genealogical research was falsified.
Journalist Philip Nobile, who examined Haley's private papers for a 1993 Village Voice cover piece, has written, "In fact, virtually every genealogical claim in Haley's story was false.
Haley's account of his African fieldwork, particularly his encounter with the griot -- the heart and soul of Roots, was complete fiction.
Documents and tapes in Haley's University of Tennessee archives… reveal that Haley's family history was fabricated from the beginning."
Historical experts who have checked Haley's work agree, with one noting, "About 182 pages have no basis in fact."
In addition to Haley's fabrications, large parts of the book, including the plot, main character, and sometimes even whole passages, were taken from Hal Courlander's 1967 novel, The African.
When Courlander sued him over the issue, Haley was forced to acknowledge his plagiarism and pay Courlander $650,000 to settle out of court.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Roots is not the historical document it claims to be, however, many still treat it as such.
The Pulitzer Prize board has refused to reconsider taking away the Pulitzer that Haley was awarded for Roots in 1977, and when the BBC produced a documentary in 1997 to expose Haley's work all U.S. networks banned the show.
Likewise, the news media, instead of setting the record straight, continue to treat Haley as a hero.
Most articles fail to even acknowledge Haley's deceit and plagiarism, and the few that do always find excuses for dismissing the seriousness of the charges.
For example, Askia Muhammad wrote in a recent MSNBC article, "Maybe Alex Haley did make it all up. I don't give a damn.
He was a great, great story-teller, no matter where the stories came from, and I wish I could grow up to be half as good at it as he was."
The media's general unwillingness to recognize Haley's deception for what it is, however, may have less to do with their respect for the man and more to do with the fact that he has become an African-American hero.
While it is perfectly acceptable to criticize the mistakes of men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, it is political incorrect to mar the reputation of a man like Haley, no matter how strong the evidence is that he acted dishonestly.
There is no question that Alex Haley was a captivating storyteller, or that his writings have inspired millions.
However, the fact remains that instead of acknowledging that his work, while powerful, was fiction, Haley lied and tried to pass it off as historically factual.
It creates an unfortunate double standard to say that Haley's deceit does not matter simply because, as the NY Post's Eric Fettmann puts it, "It's heart is in the right place," but others who plagiarize and falsify their writings should be held to a higher standard because their books were not transformed into epic miniseries that millions of people watched.
Angela Zemla is an intern at Accuracy in Media.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Steiner never turned up, these guys did! Read their story! a few hundred against over a million Russian troops - more worthy of a film than poxy private Ryan made up crap.
Vivre La France!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmL5hVgeJb4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZrxZ3cyoPw&feature=related
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.aim.org/publications/brie...11feb2002.html
In a recent special celebrating the 25th anniversary of the epic miniseries "Roots," NBC continued a long media tradition of refusing to acknowledge the plagiarism and fabrication perpetrated by Alex Haley, author of the book on which the miniseries was based.
The anniversary special, "Roots- Celebrating 25 Years: The Saga of an American Classic," perpetuated the myth that Haley chronicled the history of seven generations of his family, going all the way back to his purported African ancestor Kunta Kinte.
Contrary to popular belief, historians and journalists discovered years ago that much of Haley's genealogical research was falsified.
Journalist Philip Nobile, who examined Haley's private papers for a 1993 Village Voice cover piece, has written, "In fact, virtually every genealogical claim in Haley's story was false.
Haley's account of his African fieldwork, particularly his encounter with the griot -- the heart and soul of Roots, was complete fiction.
Documents and tapes in Haley's University of Tennessee archives… reveal that Haley's family history was fabricated from the beginning."
Historical experts who have checked Haley's work agree, with one noting, "About 182 pages have no basis in fact."
In addition to Haley's fabrications, large parts of the book, including the plot, main character, and sometimes even whole passages, were taken from Hal Courlander's 1967 novel, The African.
When Courlander sued him over the issue, Haley was forced to acknowledge his plagiarism and pay Courlander $650,000 to settle out of court.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Roots is not the historical document it claims to be, however, many still treat it as such.
The Pulitzer Prize board has refused to reconsider taking away the Pulitzer that Haley was awarded for Roots in 1977, and when the BBC produced a documentary in 1997 to expose Haley's work all U.S. networks banned the show.
Likewise, the news media, instead of setting the record straight, continue to treat Haley as a hero.
Most articles fail to even acknowledge Haley's deceit and plagiarism, and the few that do always find excuses for dismissing the seriousness of the charges.
For example, Askia Muhammad wrote in a recent MSNBC article, "Maybe Alex Haley did make it all up. I don't give a damn.
He was a great, great story-teller, no matter where the stories came from, and I wish I could grow up to be half as good at it as he was."
The media's general unwillingness to recognize Haley's deception for what it is, however, may have less to do with their respect for the man and more to do with the fact that he has become an African-American hero.
While it is perfectly acceptable to criticize the mistakes of men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, it is political incorrect to mar the reputation of a man like Haley, no matter how strong the evidence is that he acted dishonestly.
There is no question that Alex Haley was a captivating storyteller, or that his writings have inspired millions.
However, the fact remains that instead of acknowledging that his work, while powerful, was fiction, Haley lied and tried to pass it off as historically factual.
It creates an unfortunate double standard to say that Haley's deceit does not matter simply because, as the NY Post's Eric Fettmann puts it, "It's heart is in the right place," but others who plagiarize and falsify their writings should be held to a higher standard because their books were not transformed into epic miniseries that millions of people watched.
Angela Zemla is an intern at Accuracy in Media.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Steiner never turned up, these guys did! Read their story! a few hundred against over a million Russian troops - more worthy of a film than poxy private Ryan made up crap.
Vivre La France!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmL5hVgeJb4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZrxZ3cyoPw&feature=related
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Quote:
As far as the U.S. is concerned, the financiers will have used us for a century, then thrown us in the trash. The U.S. may well be replaced by China, which the financiers seem to be grooming as the world’s next military enforcer. China has the advantage of an absolutist one-party system which has achieved remarkable success in terrorizing its huge population into obedience and passivity. The financiers would not hesitate to sacrifice hordes of Chinese to fight both Russia and what may remain of the U.S. By this time, the European Union will likely have its own unified nuclear deterrent to protect the financial centers. The time may come when there will be Chinese bases in the U.S. as occupiers/military police.
The wisest and safest course for U.S. foreign policy could be a new alliance with Russia that would rekindle our affinity with that nation from over a century ago. But how likely is this in a world ruled by the financiers where the destruction of the two nations is a long-term goal?
http://whatreallyhappened.com/
As far as the U.S. is concerned, the financiers will have used us for a century, then thrown us in the trash. The U.S. may well be replaced by China, which the financiers seem to be grooming as the world’s next military enforcer. China has the advantage of an absolutist one-party system which has achieved remarkable success in terrorizing its huge population into obedience and passivity. The financiers would not hesitate to sacrifice hordes of Chinese to fight both Russia and what may remain of the U.S. By this time, the European Union will likely have its own unified nuclear deterrent to protect the financial centers. The time may come when there will be Chinese bases in the U.S. as occupiers/military police.
The wisest and safest course for U.S. foreign policy could be a new alliance with Russia that would rekindle our affinity with that nation from over a century ago. But how likely is this in a world ruled by the financiers where the destruction of the two nations is a long-term goal?
http://whatreallyhappened.com/
Smedley Butler
Senior Reporter
Quote:
Much has been written about whether a worldwide plan exists to control events and steer them in the direction profitable to an elite of the rich and powerful. Is this a “conspiracy theory”��? While it is difficult to be specific about who exactly may be behind such a conspiracy, if it exists, it is at least clear that the privately-managed system of global financial capitalism gives ample opportunity for the world’s richest people to combine for their mutual benefit. Further, global financial capitalism itself is based on the monopolization of money-creation by a world banking system that is largely privately owned, even while working through the central banks of the largest and most prosperous nations.
This article postulates the existence of a coordinated and longstanding matrix set up by the controllers of money to dominate the movements of history. The article focuses particularly on what seems to have been an attack that has been going on for over a century against the independence of the nations of Russia and the U.S. The article also suggests a series of monetary reforms whereby the U.S. , or any other nation, can regain its economic identity and preserve its political freedom. The article was written a short distance from the reconstructed colonial capitol building in Williamsburg , VA. On this site on May 15, 1776, the Fifth Virginia Convention voted unanimously to instruct its delegation at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to enter a motion for independence. It may be time to do that again.
Extraordinary Times, Intentional Collapse, and Takedown of the U.S.A.
by Richard C. Cook
Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) wrote, “It is a mistake to think the times we are living in are like any other. These are extraordinary times.”��
Ouspensky, with his mentor, G.I. Gurdjieff, escaped from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, during the Russian Civil War. Though academia has failed to acknowledge it, this epochal convulsion was financed in part through the monetary resources of the international financial elite operating out of London, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Hamburg, and Frankfurt.
It was this elite, acting through Western banks, which appears to have surreptitiously provided the wherewithal for Lenin and Trotsky to destroy the Russian nation after the fall of the Tsarist regime at the end of World War I. Support by the Western financiers is discussed by Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson in his revisionist history, The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism & Orthodoxy. (The Foundation for Economic Liberty , Washington , D.C., 2003)
The present analysis postulates that the takeover of Russia, whose backbone was the alliance among the House of Romanov, the Orthodox Church, the land-owing nobility, and thousands of self-governing peasant communes, was one of two major projects which the financiers set out to accomplish early in the 20th century in a longer-range plan to dominate the globe. The other was the control and eventual destruction of the United States of America. That project may be reaching fruition through the ongoing and seemingly purposeful financial meltdown of 2008.
Why Russia and the U.S.?
Events affecting nations have their roots in history, and people underestimate how what happens today is conditioned by the past. The respective fates of Russia and the U.S. have been linked for a long time.
The two countries had a close relationship during the American Civil War, when the Russian fleet anchored in New York and San Francisco harbors. In 1867, Russia sold the huge expanse of Alaska to the U.S. Later, the U.S. provided engineering support for Russian industrial development.
The two continental giants were, during the latter part of the 19th century, becoming the greatest land powers in the world. With Germany , Great Britain ’s chief rival for economic might, added to the mix, the hegemony of the financiers’ power base in Britain and northern Europe was threatened in a way not seen since Napoleon.
Both Russia and the U.S. were largely Christian nations, with a sizeable portion of the American population, especially recent immigrants, being members of the Roman Catholic faith. For centuries nothing had been a greater obstacle to the financial control of nations through war and finance than the Christian religion and its teachings against usury.
Plus neither the U.S. nor Russia had a central privately-owned bank. The U.S. had long since gotten rid of its own central banks, the First (1791-1811) and Second (1816-1836) Banks of the United States . The whole concept of commercial banking having control of a nation’s economy was alien to the Russian and U.S. mindset.
Instead, wealth came from work. This was expressed by President Abraham Lincoln in a December 3, 1861, address to Congress when he said, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”��
Lincoln could make such a statement because the U.S. economy, as was the Russian, was deeply rooted in the soil. The backbone of the two cultures was the Russian peasant and the American yeoman farmer, as Thomas Jefferson called him. The merchant and artisan economies of the towns and cities in both nations were founded upon the wealth of the countryside which was derived from human and animal labor and from working the land. Even when industrialization began to flourish in the latter part of the 19th century, it was fueled in both countries largely through savings and retained earnings, not bank credit created “out of thin air”�� through fractional reserve lending.
Banker Domination
By the early 20th century, the bankers of Europe had a mission before them. If Russia and the U.S. could be controlled, nothing would stand in the way of the rule of humanity by the materialistic pseudo-religion of power and wealth by which the financiers were obsessed. As Max Weber (1864-1920) wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the acquisition of wealth was viewed as a sign that a person was one of the “elect.”�� The financiers’ sphere of influence was centered in northern Europe , where the anti-usury doctrines both of the Roman Catholic Church and Martin Luther (1483-1546) had been undermined through the teachings of John Calvin (1509-1564).
As is well known, banking in Europe began in the medieval period with store-front gold merchants who invented fractional reserve banking by lending certificates against a gold reserve held for their customers on deposit. By the time of the Renaissance, banking was centered in Italy and Germany, then spread north and west to the Netherlands, France, and England.
By this time the Catholic prohibition against usury was well-developed. Pope Sixtus V (1585-90) said charging of interest was “detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred canons and contrary to Christian charity.”�� Theological historian John Noonan wrote that “the doctrine [of usury] was enunciated by popes, expressed by three ecumenical councils, proclaimed by bishops, and taught unanimously by theologians.”�� (“Development of Moral Doctrine,”�� 54 Theological Studies, 662, 1993)
Lending of money at interest was often left to the European Jews, where statements in various scriptures, such as the Talmud, appeared to allow the practice when dealing with non-Jews. Some argue that the Vatican worked behind the scenes by using Jews as fronts for their own lending operations.
In England , the Tudor and Stuart monarchs made a stand against the rise of bankers as issuers of currency. As Susan Boskey writes in her book The Quality Life Plan: 7 Steps to Uncommon Financial Security, “the Mixt Moneys Case of 1604 in England determined money as a public measure to be regulated by the state.”�� According to Alexander Del Mar, head of the U.S. Department of Weights and Measures in the late 19th century and author of the book, History of Money in America From the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Constitution, the Mixt Moneys Case determined that “the state alone had the right to issue money.”��
Boskey continues: “For over half a century, this ruling alarmed the merchants of London who attempted to defeat the Mixt Moneys decision. The East India Company was the main instigator in the effort, because they were eager to turn a profit by shipping silver to India in exchange for gold. Success was achieved with the British Free Coinage Act of 1666, which, according to Del Mar, ”�’altered the monetary systems of the world.’ He wrote: ”�’The specific effects of this law were to destroy the royal prerogative of coinage, nullify the decision in the Mixt Moneys case, and inaugurate a future series of commercial panics and disasters which to that time were totally unknown.’ Moneylenders known as ”�’strong room keepers’ began the practice of making interest-bearing loans that were not backed one-hundred percent by the gold reserves remaining in their strong room.”��
“The British Free Coinage Act of 1666,”�� continues Boskey, “marked a turning point in the role of currency creation as a public measure to one dominated by moneylenders. No longer was the act of putting money into circulation directly connected to the actual, existing material riches of a nation.”��
About this time, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was writing his now-famous Diary. According to Canadian monetary expert Martin Hattersley, Pepys “was describing in surprised delight the new institution of banking, by which the smart investor, instead of paying the goldsmith for warehousing his valuables, opened an account, and was actually paid interest for having his money looked after!”��
Pepys was captivated by the familiar but pernicious notion that, instead of working for a living, a person could have his money “work for him.”�� Aristotle had spoken against this concept 2,000 years earlier: “The most hated sort of wealth getting and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural.”�� (1258b Politics)
Hattersley continues: “Who paid for Samuel Pepys' remarkable new service? Basically, the public did. Pepys, leaving his gold with the banker, enabled the latter to lend it out to a third party. Pepys had his ”�’money in the bank,’ and the borrower took the gold. The borrower naturally paid interest on the loan. Pepys received interest on his deposit. The same money being (notionally) in the possession both of Pepys and of the borrower meant an increase in the monetary mass of the nation. All the holders of money in the nation, therefore, had the value of their holdings very slightly diluted. There was a profit to the banker on the ”�’spread’ between borrowing and lending rates. There was a profit to Mr. Pepys, who at one and the same moment had both money in the bank and an interest bearing investment. Yet the borrower also profited. His loan would be at a lower interest rate than that on capital that had had to be saved up. ”�’Smart’ bank financing put him ahead of conventionally financed competitors. All three parties gained, at the expense of the general public, the value of whose money was diluted through inflation of the monetary mass.”��
Finally, concludes Hattersley, “Skipping forward three centuries (past events such as the South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, the railway boom and the 1929 market crash) we find that the little spot of inflation that Mr. Pepys indulged in has become a universal way of life. The extensive capital development of Canada (and the U.S.) in the post-World War II boom has been largely financed, not by personal savings and investment, but by the inflation of the money supply. This has left the thrifty who invested their little savings from the hard times of the Great Depression in mortgages, bonds, and life insurance deprived of most of the rewards of their thrift, and has caused the profits of inflation to benefit all who could borrow, build, and then repay their capital in deflated dollars later on.”��
Hattersley captures the essence of the modern usury-based economy. No longer is life based on honest human labor and the resources of nature, but on financial manipulation. This is why religious people have always viewed usury as a crime. Aristotle placed the usurer in the same category as others who “ply sordid trades,”�� such as pimps.
Returning to the march of history, in 1688, James II, who had become a Catholic, fled the British throne. Through the “Glorious Revolution,”�� he was replaced by the Protestants William and Mary of the Dutch House of Orange. The main instrument of power of the financiers who supported them was the Bank of England, founded in 1694.
The next two centuries saw the financiers’ control of world commerce spread through the instrumentality of the British Empire . The bedrock of British policy was “free trade,”�� which allowed British manufacturers who paid their workers a pittance to undersell their competitors elsewhere. This was aided by having the British pound become the world’s trading currency.
With the First Zionist Congress of 1897, one of the financiers’ geopolitical goals became to support the creation of the nation of Israel , at least partly to dominate the world’s crossroads in the oil-rich Middle East . The oil was needed to fuel the British navy.
The nature and origins of Zionism have been hotly debated in recent years, as the role of Israel on the world stage has grown. One thing seems certain: The Jewish religion is by no means monolithic. But its followers, many of whom opposed the philosophy of Zionism, would now be drawn into the financiers’ power game. From this point on, anyone who even questioned Zionism would be labeled “anti-Semitic.”��
As the 20th century advanced, the financier elite became heavily involved in getting rich off world war and the manufacture of the new weapons of mass destruction that modern technology made possible. Warfare and weaponry, combined with control of credit manufactured through the leveraging of industrial production, were to be the primary means of putting nations and their populations into debt. A materialistic slave society was being created, which books like 1984 warned against. Humanity was lured into compliance through the fantasy world brought about by the mass media by means of advertising, cinema, and television. Another enticement was the growing availability of mass-produced consumer goods.
How It Was Done
While World War I and the Russian Revolution still lay a few years in the future, the international financiers quietly took control of the U.S. economic system in 1913 through the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment to the Constitution which provided for the federal income tax. The purpose of this tax was to use citizens’ earnings to pay the interest on the “funded”�� national debt. As with the debt owed by the British people to the Bank of England, this would be one so large the principle could never be paid off.
Russia was allied with Britain and France during World War I (1914-18). But the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary had reached a stalemate until the tide was turned by entry of the U.S. on the side of the Allies. Fighting on the eastern front between Germany and Russia was savage. By the end of the war the Russian Revolution broke out, and, after a terrible Civil War, the Soviet Union came into being.
It was the financier-controlled press which goaded President Woodrow Wilson into taking the nation into World War I on the side of England and France. But it was also part of the financiers’ plan to shift the apparent focal point of their financial power from London to New York . This was done through the financing of the war by loans made to the European combatants by the New York banks.
It seemed to be in accord with a plan spelled out decades earlier by Cecil Rhodes, whereby the U.S. would not only be “recovered”�� for the British Empire, but would appear to become the senior partner in the enterprise. By the start of the 1920s, this objective had been accomplished. German, English, French, and other European taxpayers were all deeply in debt to the U.S. banks for the costs of the war.
Also during the war years the financiers had secured the issuance of the Balfour Declaration signaling British support for the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine. The 1917 Declaration was made in a letter from Arthur James Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, to Walter Rothschild, Second Baron Rothschild, for transmission to the Zionist Federation.
During and after World War I, world financial power shifted to the New York banks through which, however, it would be the London-based elite exerting de facto control. It might also be said that starting with U.S. entry into World War I, once you look past the patriotic slogans, the U.S., its vast productivity, and the blood of its population have been used in making this country the worldwide military enforcer of international financier domination.
World War II became the means of consolidating financier control. Prior to that, during the years of the Great Depression, both Russia —aka the Soviet Union—and the U.S. were slipping away from the fold. Stalin had shown his “Bonapartist”�� tendencies by favoring “Socialism in one country,”�� as well as by his deadly purges of the financier-controlled Trotskyite faction and his shocking rapprochement with Hitler in 1939 that seemed to foil the financiers’ intent to play off Nazi Germany and the Soviets against each other.
In the U.S., President Franklin Roosevelt had taken steps during the Great Depression to rebuild the U.S. economy by exerting an unaccustomed degree of control over the Federal Reserve System and providing credit at low rates of interest to homeowners, farmers, and businessmen. This made Roosevelt seem to many wealthy Americans “a traitor to his class.”��
Roosevelt saw that a healthy and self-sustaining domestic economy is essential for the well-being of a sovereign nation. But instead of looking for ways to create a monetary system based on the productivity of the economy, as Lincoln had done with the Greenbacks during the Civil War, Roosevelt left intact the debt-based system overseen by the Federal Reserve. He added to this system the Keynesian idea of government deficit spending for public works to create employment. This was essentially a system whereby government would try to pay its debts by engendering inflation, a policy that has continued until today.
But World War II thwarted even these stirrings of nationalism in both countries. In both the Soviet Union and the U.S. , the financiers worked the levers of debt to build massive war machines. They were also working through the Western banks, including Brown Brothers Harriman in New York, to achieve the same ends in Nazi Germany. Eventually Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and the U.S. entered the war. Both during and after the war, operatives from the international financial elite centered in London were the linchpins of a worldwide matrix of spying, assassination, terrorism, industrial espionage, psy ops, media manipulation, and monetary control. This included financing the founding of Israel as the Western bridgehead in the Middle East in 1948.
Despite the creation of an appearance of conflict between the West and the Soviet Union through the Cold War, the financiers continued to work both sides of the fence through their London-based operatives. In the U.S. they created the modern national security state with both the National Security Agency and the CIA firmly under their control. Then, after President John F. Kennedy moved to forestall the neocolonialist Vietnam conflict and replace the Federal Reserve with a U.S. system of silver-backed Treasury currency, he was shot dead in Dallas ’s Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.
In charge of convincing the public that the Warren Commission was correct in concluding that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, supposedly a lone deranged gunman, were figures associated with the financier elite from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Yale Law School . (See The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up Revisited by Donald Gibson, 2005.) But in 1979, a report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations stated that Kennedy was killed by a “probable conspiracy.”��
It has been thoroughly documented that since World War II the Western intelligence agencies, all with close ties to the financial world, particularly the New York and London investment banks, have been responsible for engendering wars, revolutions, and mayhem in countries around the world, causing the deaths of millions of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and southeastern Europe.
Meanwhile, the worldwide arms industry, also under financier control, have produced the greatest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction ever seen. After Kennedy was killed, the U.S. moved to arm Israel as the leading military power of the region. Today nuclear weapons have proliferated, with Israel, Pakistan, and India becoming nuclear powers in addition to the U.S., Russia, Britain, China, and France.
But warfare and weapons cost money, and by the late 1960s the Vietnam War was sinking the U.S. deeper into debt. The U.S. war machine was to be the main tool for financier enforcement of their worldwide plan of domination, but the nation was going broke. The problem was made worse by heavy federal expenditures for the poor and elderly through such programs as Medicare and Medicaid.
But President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had a plan. The government worked out an arrangement whereby Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC nations would gradually increase the price of oil, with the profits to be used by the oil-producing nations to buy U.S. Treasury debt securities. By 1980 the cost of oil would be ratcheted up from about $3.50 a barrel to $39.50.
The drastic increase of the price of gasoline at the pump acted as a de facto tax on the U.S. economy. But the plan worked. The “petrodollar”�� and “dollar hegemony”�� were born, with the dollar becoming the world’s reserve currency. Dollars could flood the world only because in 1971 the Nixon administration had abandoned the dollar’s gold peg as a basis for international currency exchange. Now currencies floated freely in world markets with speculation and inflation rampant. The economies of the world were no longer based on production, but on financial manipulation. It was also the start of the era of monetarism, where the Federal Reserve thought it could regulate the economy by the raising and lowering of interest rates.
The Kissinger plan also made the U.S. dependent on Middle Eastern oil and turned it into the muscle behind the financiers’ ambition for Israel to dominate the region. So now Americans, who had liberated Europe from the Nazis, had to fight and die for the financiers in the Middle East . The final conquest of Iraq , starting in 2003, and the planned war against Iran are the latest phases.
Meanwhile, through the financiers’ control of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, the producing economy was shattered through the Fed-induced recession of 1979-83, where interest rates were raised to the highest in history to combat the inflation the financiers had themselves caused by the oil price shocks. By this time, as some allege, the controversial concept of “peak oil”��—whether it really existed or not—was being used as a cover for financier manipulation of oil markets by limiting production in order to maintain prices.
By 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the U.S. producing economy had been devastated by the shutdown of factories and the export of jobs. The work of wrecking the economy was completed by Clinton ’s embrace of NAFTA, which has largely eliminated family farming in favor of financier-controlled agribusiness in the U.S. , Canada , and Mexico . Deregulation of the financial industry began in earnest during the Reagan years from 1981-89 and accelerated under Clinton.
By this time, the U.S. economy was being kept afloat only through financial bubbles that allowed the purchase of consumer goods to take place through more family and household debt. We had the merger-acquisition bubble of the 1980s, followed by the George H.W. Bush recession which led to Clinton ’s election in 1992. During the 1990s we had the dot.com bubble fueled by foreign investment. Capital gains taxes on stock price inflation and counting trust funds like Social Security as budgetary assets allowed Clinton to balance the federal budget the last three years of his presidency.
But the dot.com bubble also burst with the loss of $7 trillion of wealth through the crash of 2000-2001. Next came the Bush bubbles—in housing, equity funds, commercial real estate, and hedge funds that have been deflating while threatening to destroy altogether the economic viability of what was once the world’s greatest industrial democracy.
After this, the only bubble left for an economy that appears to be entering terminal depression may be the current fuel/food bubble that could result in the starvation of millions worldwide. Now the longstanding ambition of the financier elite for the destruction of the American republic may finally be realized—with a lot of help, of course, from their American friends.
“End Times”��
Can it be that the last stage of the U.S. takedown is “The Project for the New American Century”��? Is this ambitious plan for “global leadership”�� through military might that was seemingly invented by the “neocons”��—many with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship—a Trojan Horse?
It certainly appears that with 9/11 as a pretext, the neocons suckered the U.S. into the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as a means of military occupation of the Middle East . Certainly 9/11 and the Iraq invasion benefited Israel, as some Israeli politicians have frankly stated.
Were the neocons also acting on behalf of the financial controllers in London and elsewhere? And was one reason the neocons were so eager to engage in a “clash of civilizations”�� against the Islamic world the Koranic prohibition of usury which states, “Those who charge Usury are in the same position as those controlled by the devil's influence. This is because they claim that Usury is the same as commerce. However, God permits commerce, and prohibits Usury.”�� (Koran, Al-Baqarah 2:275)
Prior to 9/11, the Bush administration got Congress to cut taxes for the highest income brackets, reversing Bill Clinton’s budget surpluses. The tax cut remained in effect, even as the massive expenditures on the Middle Eastern wars mounted. The consequence has been to bring the federal government to the brink of bankruptcy.
The last official act of this phase could well be the ultimate insanity of a U.S. attack on Iran . If successful, this would complete the Western conquest of the Middle East but may start a larger conflict that could eventually force the U.S. to withdraw its forces once the money runs out. Israel would then be at liberty to sweep in to dominate a region that U.S. military power had devastated.
Whatever may happen overseas, the U.S. economy at home is on the verge of collapse. It if does, we will have to retreat to our own shores and face here the edifice of a ruined nation with no manufacturing base, a crumbling infrastructure, an aging population, insufficient food, poorly developed resources, and the collapse of the dollar. Of course the prophets of doom who claim that overpopulation must inevitably lead to Malthusian scarcity will take all this as justification of their prejudices. The rumored North American Union, with its currency the amero, could then follow, both under the control of the financiers.
Meanwhile in Russia, things took a surprising turn when the Russian people threw out their communist controllers in 1991 and established a Russian republic. The financiers immediately took over through the government of Boris Yeltsin and began to divide up the nation’s resources through their local allies, the “oligarchs.”�� But the Russian people refused to comply. Despite desperate poverty, they elected Vladimir Putin, a nationalist leader who moved quickly to establish a self-governing Russian state that the financiers and the Western press clearly intend to take down. Russia is now back on the world scene, and a revival of the Orthodox Church is taking place. The drama in that country has not been entirely played out it seems.
As far as the U.S. is concerned, the financiers will have used us for a century, then thrown us in the trash. The U.S. may well be replaced by China, which the financiers seem to be grooming as the world’s next military enforcer. China has the advantage of an absolutist one-party system which has achieved remarkable success in terrorizing its huge population into obedience and passivity. The financiers would not hesitate to sacrifice hordes of Chinese to fight both Russia and what may remain of the U.S. By this time, the European Union will likely have its own unified nuclear deterrent to protect the financial centers. The time may come when there will be Chinese bases in the U.S. as occupiers/military police.
The wisest and safest course for U.S. foreign policy could be a new alliance with Russia that would rekindle our affinity with that nation from over a century ago. But how likely is this in a world ruled by the financiers where the destruction of the two nations is a long-term goal?
One of the tools of financier domination in the meantime will likely be worldwide famine engineered by artificial shortages. This has already started and may cause hundreds of millions of people to die and their resources to be seized. The smokescreens for this will not only be peak oil but also global warming as a means of dealing with the world’s “surplus eaters.”�� Numerous non-profits and NGOs are greasing the skids with their insistent lobbying against even responsible economic development.
Now in the U.S. we will likely see riots, panic, martial law, plagues, epidemics, and prison camps, much of which has already begun with police crackdowns, anti-terrorist exercises, declining public health, erosion of civil liberties, and the world’s largest prison population.
It is likely that the “American Century”�� is over and that the “New American Century”�� will really be the “No American Century.”�� Outside of select pockets of prosperity around financial centers, resorts, and military installations, the U.S. is being destroyed. As an example, the residents of once-prosperous towns in Michigan have turned to the illegal manufacture of meth-amphetamine now that the jobs are gone.
We have been used and abused, though often suckered into it by our own stupidity and greed. We have allowed ourselves to serve the will of an alien force—the world’s financial elite. Our payback now appears to be a looming national catastrophe.
Economic Restructuring
Economically, what is left of America must be rebuilt from the ground up. The flaw is not in the productivity of nature, the availability of resources, our ingenuity, nor our ability to work. The flaw has been in the capitalist financial system.
We must now rebuild three things: American family farming, since a nation that cannot feed itself cannot long exist; then infrastructure and manufacturing, which will require energy conservation and redevelopment of our energy resources; then income security tied to productivity but not always to employment—a basic guaranteed income for all. The best available treatment of the history and benefits of a guaranteed income may be found in Steven Shafarman’s new book, Peaceful, Positive Revolution, Tendril Press, 2008.
The concept of a guaranteed income as a benefit of a modern industrial economy has been around for a long time. But it is often confused with job-creation. As indicated earlier, during the 1930s, British economist John Maynard Keynes came up with the idea of using government deficits to try to out-run unemployment through government-controlled pump priming. But in the long run his methods were doomed to fail as debt-based economic growth eventually reached its limits due to inflation. This is where we are today, with President George W. Bush now the largest deficit spender in history.
The most successful attempt to define a rationale for an honest and democratic monetary system, one based on human labor and not financial chicanery, was the Social Credit movement founded by British engineer C.H. Douglas (1879-1952). He first set forth his ideas in his book Economic Democracy in 1918 and continued to teach his system for the next thirty years, attracting a considerable following in Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Douglas explained the dynamic whereby the incredible productivity of modern technology can readily be harnessed to provide the material sustenance for all members of society, but fails to do so because there is a chronic shortage of purchasing power from the cumulative societal income realized through wages, salaries, and dividends. The main reasons income cannot keep pace with prices is that the latter include retained earnings for savings and reinvestment, along with depreciation of capital—i.e., the tools and facilities of production.
But the “gap”�� between prices and earnings (what Keynes was to call “aggregate demand”��) was viewed by Douglas as a benefit of a modern industrial economy rather than the curse which in the Depression was causing farmers to dump their milk in the fields because consumers lacked the money to purchase it.
Douglas saw this gap as the natural appreciation of the potential producing economy to which everyone in society was entitled as monetized shares. He said this appreciation should manifest in regular payments of a National Dividend by government from a calculated credit account not dependent on taxation or government borrowing. The National Dividend could be paid by a combination of regular stipends to citizens and/or through a system of price subsidies. And it would be non-inflationary.
Douglas went further by explaining that in real life the price-income gap was in fact filled—nature abhors a vacuum—but by bank lending at usury. This was why the banks got richer, while everyone else struggled just to survive. Banks also use their credit creating ability to acquire securities, such as Treasury bonds, with the government paying interest that is compounded because the debt is constantly being re-financed. Interest on the U.S. national debt is expected to exceed $500 billion in fiscal year 2009. To pay it, many social programs will be cut.
The technical explanation is provided by Canadian Social Credit expert Wallace Klinck, “Expanding interest charges being paid on exponentially compounding debt accumulates due to an industrial cost accountancy error related to allocating capital charges in retail prices which do not distribute equal incomes within the same production cycle. The growing disparity between prices and incomes is progressively worsened by the replacement of human labor by capital (technology).”��
Under the current system, the banks steal the fruits of economic wealth which properly belong to the public as a whole, both workers and non-workers, and while the financiers were well aware of Douglas ’s system, they hated it. Word went out in the 1920s that his name was never to be mentioned in the British press. John Maynard Keyes was said to have developed his own deficit-spending theories as a means to counter Douglas ’s influence. And when Douglas visited the U.S. in the late 1930s, he was told to his face that he would never be allowed to introduce his ideas in this country.
Next Steps
To accomplish a program of real reform will require a strong president but possibly a political revolution to get one. Congressman Ron Paul has made history as the first major presidential candidate to call for the abolishment of the Federal Reserve. He is right. The first thing a president worthy of the name should do is eliminate the Federal Reserve as a bank-of-issue, get rid of our debt-based monetary system, and depose the bankers and Wall Street financiers from the seats of power. Ron Paul is also right that the U.S. should withdraw its military from overseas and stop trying to control the world.
What Ron Paul’s candidacy proves is that in the internet age, with financial crises jumping from the headlines every day, and authorities such as Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson manifestly having no intention of making real changes, the public is ready to listen to new ideas. But even progressive analysts are so locked into outmoded concepts that they fail to realize an entirely new type of monetary system is needed.
The basic concept that must be understood, as expressed repeatedly by this author in past articles, is that credit is a power of nature that is part of the human “commons.”�� Credit allows society to materialize value by drawing from future potential productivity into present actualized reality. Credit therefore should be treated legally as a public utility, like water or electricity.
Credit is not a mathematical abstraction that should be manipulated into building pyramids of debt. Such practices are suicidal for an economy. Rather credit is organic, deriving ultimately from human labor (including mental labor, as in the application of technology), along with the sun, the soil, natural resources, and the rain. Thus we have gone full circle to the beginning of this article, where Russia and the U.S. were cited as the two nations that best understood where real wealth comes from.
The management of credit may be licensed to responsible private parties who are accountable to public authority, but it should never be given away or “privatized”�� to individuals or corporations who manipulate it mainly for their own profit, as banks do today. It is the privatization of credit through the banking systems of the world which has loaded humanity with debt, rendered short-term profits the highest priority of all business endeavor, and made modern industrialization as much a curse as a blessing.
Note that credit differs in this discussion from the legitimate investment of capital derived from profits or savings whereby an individual risks a portion of his wealth through a contract with a producing entity. Capital markets that facilitate this type of investment fall under the category of commerce, not usury.
A national monetary system should reflect the treatment of credit as a public utility and thereby make possible responsible economic activity and the fair distribution of wealth. Some of the measures which should be implemented are contained in the American Monetary Institute’s draft American Monetary Act. (www.monetary.org/) The resulting currency could be issued, not in the form of debt instruments like Federal Reserve Notes, but silver-backed Treasury certificates as in President Kennedy’s program of 1963.
Features of a new monetary system could be as follows:
1. A guaranteed income, followed by a National Dividend, should be paid directly to citizens from a Treasury credit account without recourse to either taxation or government borrowing. (C.H. Douglas’s theory of the National Dividend as the monetization of the net appreciation of the productivity of a modern industrial economy is set forth in this author’s Global Research article entitled, “An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States ,”�� April 26, 2007.) The National Dividend, currently estimated at over $12,000 per capita annually, could be distributed in a variety of ways, in addition to a subsistence stipend. This could include price subsidies for consumer purchases, taking over existing Social Security payments, universal health insurance, or payments to women with young children. Another way to issue a National Dividend would be to monetize food production, whereby anyone who delivers food products to wholesalers receives a government payment as a producer’s subsidy, thereby discounting food at the consumer point-of-sale.
This would work in a similar fashion to farm parity pricing programs of bygone days. As explained by Wallace Klinck, “Social Credit policy is to compensate retail prices at the point-of-sale. It is not, however, to subsidize production which would be subject to consumer choice and fully supported by consumers having at all times financial income adequate to fully liquidate the costs of production. That is, production policy is to be determined essentially by consumers—this being the Social Credit concept of genuine economic democracy with maximum decentralization, or dispersion, of power over production policy. Price controls under the present financial cost-accountancy system, where continued economic activity is dependent upon an inflationary expansion of credit to meet rising costs arising consequent to flawed accountancy, is demonstrably impossible. Price regulation, however, would appear to be both necessary and realistic under a self-liquidating Social Credit system of finance. Although not generally recognized, prices are ”�’controlled,’ (or manipulated) under the present system of finance in a most deleterious manner.”��
2. The government should also spend money directly into circulation, as it did with Greenbacks in the 19th century, both for operating expenses and for infrastructure projects at the federal, state, and local levels. A national infrastructure bank could be capitalized by state and local infrastructure bonds without any impact on the federal budget. Such spending would again be without recourse to borrowing or taxation. Infrastructure spending could be either through grants or low-interest loans. As with Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s current proposed infrastructure bank legislation, the program could specify that a requisite proportion of funding be spent on American-made products such as steel.
3. We should reform banking by eliminating the catastrophic privately-controlled fractional reserve system. Instead, the government should lend money at a low rate of interest to banks, then use the proceeds to help pay for legitimate government expenditures in the areas of regulation or services. Use of the proceeds, combined with the new Greenbacks and savings from no longer having to pay interest on an unnecessary national debt, would eliminate the need for the federal income tax, allowing the 16th Amendment to be repealed. In fact, under a monetary system such as the one described herein, probably three-fourths or more of the current societal tax burden could be eliminated.
4. In order to clear the way for these reforms, bankruptcy reorganization of the entire $50 trillion of existing debt in the U.S. should be undertaken, with debt being restructured and paid down over time or simply written off. Bank lending for speculation, such as for mergers and acquisitions, equity and hedge fund speculation, and purchase of securities on margin has been explosively enabled through bankers’ ability to move massive amounts of funds electronically. These leveraging practices should be outlawed, as they are abuses of the public interest. (According to the London Times, one John Paulson made $3.7 billion in hedge fund trading last year. “Mr. Paulson’s firm, Paulson & Co, made a fortune from shorting America ’s sub-prime mortgage markets.”��) A national fuel conservation program with real teeth should also be instituted. And at least half of the U.S. military budget should be eliminated, with half of the remainder devoted to energy R&D and domestic public works. Employees of the military-industrial complex will find many new career opportunities as the domestic economy revives.
As these measures are taken, the United States will no longer be dancing to the financiers’ tune. We would be helping prepare a future where man’s inhumanity to man as expressed through war and financial exploitation is no longer glorified. Such a future would be a milestone in the eventual enlightenment of the human race. But these are measures that must be implemented now, before it is too late.
While we await these epochal changes, more modest steps may be in order. The author is often asked for personal financial advice. His advice is to invest in yourself and in other people. Plant a robust home garden. Learn new skills. Start community food co-ops that buy local products. Establish local currencies and barter networks. Join or form a union. Raise bees. Put kids through school. Get out of debt. Pray and meditate. Become politically active. Demand change.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=8854
Much has been written about whether a worldwide plan exists to control events and steer them in the direction profitable to an elite of the rich and powerful. Is this a “conspiracy theory”��? While it is difficult to be specific about who exactly may be behind such a conspiracy, if it exists, it is at least clear that the privately-managed system of global financial capitalism gives ample opportunity for the world’s richest people to combine for their mutual benefit. Further, global financial capitalism itself is based on the monopolization of money-creation by a world banking system that is largely privately owned, even while working through the central banks of the largest and most prosperous nations.
This article postulates the existence of a coordinated and longstanding matrix set up by the controllers of money to dominate the movements of history. The article focuses particularly on what seems to have been an attack that has been going on for over a century against the independence of the nations of Russia and the U.S. The article also suggests a series of monetary reforms whereby the U.S. , or any other nation, can regain its economic identity and preserve its political freedom. The article was written a short distance from the reconstructed colonial capitol building in Williamsburg , VA. On this site on May 15, 1776, the Fifth Virginia Convention voted unanimously to instruct its delegation at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to enter a motion for independence. It may be time to do that again.
Extraordinary Times, Intentional Collapse, and Takedown of the U.S.A.
by Richard C. Cook
Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) wrote, “It is a mistake to think the times we are living in are like any other. These are extraordinary times.”��
Ouspensky, with his mentor, G.I. Gurdjieff, escaped from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, during the Russian Civil War. Though academia has failed to acknowledge it, this epochal convulsion was financed in part through the monetary resources of the international financial elite operating out of London, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Hamburg, and Frankfurt.
It was this elite, acting through Western banks, which appears to have surreptitiously provided the wherewithal for Lenin and Trotsky to destroy the Russian nation after the fall of the Tsarist regime at the end of World War I. Support by the Western financiers is discussed by Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson in his revisionist history, The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism & Orthodoxy. (The Foundation for Economic Liberty , Washington , D.C., 2003)
The present analysis postulates that the takeover of Russia, whose backbone was the alliance among the House of Romanov, the Orthodox Church, the land-owing nobility, and thousands of self-governing peasant communes, was one of two major projects which the financiers set out to accomplish early in the 20th century in a longer-range plan to dominate the globe. The other was the control and eventual destruction of the United States of America. That project may be reaching fruition through the ongoing and seemingly purposeful financial meltdown of 2008.
Why Russia and the U.S.?
Events affecting nations have their roots in history, and people underestimate how what happens today is conditioned by the past. The respective fates of Russia and the U.S. have been linked for a long time.
The two countries had a close relationship during the American Civil War, when the Russian fleet anchored in New York and San Francisco harbors. In 1867, Russia sold the huge expanse of Alaska to the U.S. Later, the U.S. provided engineering support for Russian industrial development.
The two continental giants were, during the latter part of the 19th century, becoming the greatest land powers in the world. With Germany , Great Britain ’s chief rival for economic might, added to the mix, the hegemony of the financiers’ power base in Britain and northern Europe was threatened in a way not seen since Napoleon.
Both Russia and the U.S. were largely Christian nations, with a sizeable portion of the American population, especially recent immigrants, being members of the Roman Catholic faith. For centuries nothing had been a greater obstacle to the financial control of nations through war and finance than the Christian religion and its teachings against usury.
Plus neither the U.S. nor Russia had a central privately-owned bank. The U.S. had long since gotten rid of its own central banks, the First (1791-1811) and Second (1816-1836) Banks of the United States . The whole concept of commercial banking having control of a nation’s economy was alien to the Russian and U.S. mindset.
Instead, wealth came from work. This was expressed by President Abraham Lincoln in a December 3, 1861, address to Congress when he said, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”��
Lincoln could make such a statement because the U.S. economy, as was the Russian, was deeply rooted in the soil. The backbone of the two cultures was the Russian peasant and the American yeoman farmer, as Thomas Jefferson called him. The merchant and artisan economies of the towns and cities in both nations were founded upon the wealth of the countryside which was derived from human and animal labor and from working the land. Even when industrialization began to flourish in the latter part of the 19th century, it was fueled in both countries largely through savings and retained earnings, not bank credit created “out of thin air”�� through fractional reserve lending.
Banker Domination
By the early 20th century, the bankers of Europe had a mission before them. If Russia and the U.S. could be controlled, nothing would stand in the way of the rule of humanity by the materialistic pseudo-religion of power and wealth by which the financiers were obsessed. As Max Weber (1864-1920) wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the acquisition of wealth was viewed as a sign that a person was one of the “elect.”�� The financiers’ sphere of influence was centered in northern Europe , where the anti-usury doctrines both of the Roman Catholic Church and Martin Luther (1483-1546) had been undermined through the teachings of John Calvin (1509-1564).
As is well known, banking in Europe began in the medieval period with store-front gold merchants who invented fractional reserve banking by lending certificates against a gold reserve held for their customers on deposit. By the time of the Renaissance, banking was centered in Italy and Germany, then spread north and west to the Netherlands, France, and England.
By this time the Catholic prohibition against usury was well-developed. Pope Sixtus V (1585-90) said charging of interest was “detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred canons and contrary to Christian charity.”�� Theological historian John Noonan wrote that “the doctrine [of usury] was enunciated by popes, expressed by three ecumenical councils, proclaimed by bishops, and taught unanimously by theologians.”�� (“Development of Moral Doctrine,”�� 54 Theological Studies, 662, 1993)
Lending of money at interest was often left to the European Jews, where statements in various scriptures, such as the Talmud, appeared to allow the practice when dealing with non-Jews. Some argue that the Vatican worked behind the scenes by using Jews as fronts for their own lending operations.
In England , the Tudor and Stuart monarchs made a stand against the rise of bankers as issuers of currency. As Susan Boskey writes in her book The Quality Life Plan: 7 Steps to Uncommon Financial Security, “the Mixt Moneys Case of 1604 in England determined money as a public measure to be regulated by the state.”�� According to Alexander Del Mar, head of the U.S. Department of Weights and Measures in the late 19th century and author of the book, History of Money in America From the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Constitution, the Mixt Moneys Case determined that “the state alone had the right to issue money.”��
Boskey continues: “For over half a century, this ruling alarmed the merchants of London who attempted to defeat the Mixt Moneys decision. The East India Company was the main instigator in the effort, because they were eager to turn a profit by shipping silver to India in exchange for gold. Success was achieved with the British Free Coinage Act of 1666, which, according to Del Mar, ”�’altered the monetary systems of the world.’ He wrote: ”�’The specific effects of this law were to destroy the royal prerogative of coinage, nullify the decision in the Mixt Moneys case, and inaugurate a future series of commercial panics and disasters which to that time were totally unknown.’ Moneylenders known as ”�’strong room keepers’ began the practice of making interest-bearing loans that were not backed one-hundred percent by the gold reserves remaining in their strong room.”��
“The British Free Coinage Act of 1666,”�� continues Boskey, “marked a turning point in the role of currency creation as a public measure to one dominated by moneylenders. No longer was the act of putting money into circulation directly connected to the actual, existing material riches of a nation.”��
About this time, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was writing his now-famous Diary. According to Canadian monetary expert Martin Hattersley, Pepys “was describing in surprised delight the new institution of banking, by which the smart investor, instead of paying the goldsmith for warehousing his valuables, opened an account, and was actually paid interest for having his money looked after!”��
Pepys was captivated by the familiar but pernicious notion that, instead of working for a living, a person could have his money “work for him.”�� Aristotle had spoken against this concept 2,000 years earlier: “The most hated sort of wealth getting and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural.”�� (1258b Politics)
Hattersley continues: “Who paid for Samuel Pepys' remarkable new service? Basically, the public did. Pepys, leaving his gold with the banker, enabled the latter to lend it out to a third party. Pepys had his ”�’money in the bank,’ and the borrower took the gold. The borrower naturally paid interest on the loan. Pepys received interest on his deposit. The same money being (notionally) in the possession both of Pepys and of the borrower meant an increase in the monetary mass of the nation. All the holders of money in the nation, therefore, had the value of their holdings very slightly diluted. There was a profit to the banker on the ”�’spread’ between borrowing and lending rates. There was a profit to Mr. Pepys, who at one and the same moment had both money in the bank and an interest bearing investment. Yet the borrower also profited. His loan would be at a lower interest rate than that on capital that had had to be saved up. ”�’Smart’ bank financing put him ahead of conventionally financed competitors. All three parties gained, at the expense of the general public, the value of whose money was diluted through inflation of the monetary mass.”��
Finally, concludes Hattersley, “Skipping forward three centuries (past events such as the South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, the railway boom and the 1929 market crash) we find that the little spot of inflation that Mr. Pepys indulged in has become a universal way of life. The extensive capital development of Canada (and the U.S.) in the post-World War II boom has been largely financed, not by personal savings and investment, but by the inflation of the money supply. This has left the thrifty who invested their little savings from the hard times of the Great Depression in mortgages, bonds, and life insurance deprived of most of the rewards of their thrift, and has caused the profits of inflation to benefit all who could borrow, build, and then repay their capital in deflated dollars later on.”��
Hattersley captures the essence of the modern usury-based economy. No longer is life based on honest human labor and the resources of nature, but on financial manipulation. This is why religious people have always viewed usury as a crime. Aristotle placed the usurer in the same category as others who “ply sordid trades,”�� such as pimps.
Returning to the march of history, in 1688, James II, who had become a Catholic, fled the British throne. Through the “Glorious Revolution,”�� he was replaced by the Protestants William and Mary of the Dutch House of Orange. The main instrument of power of the financiers who supported them was the Bank of England, founded in 1694.
The next two centuries saw the financiers’ control of world commerce spread through the instrumentality of the British Empire . The bedrock of British policy was “free trade,”�� which allowed British manufacturers who paid their workers a pittance to undersell their competitors elsewhere. This was aided by having the British pound become the world’s trading currency.
With the First Zionist Congress of 1897, one of the financiers’ geopolitical goals became to support the creation of the nation of Israel , at least partly to dominate the world’s crossroads in the oil-rich Middle East . The oil was needed to fuel the British navy.
The nature and origins of Zionism have been hotly debated in recent years, as the role of Israel on the world stage has grown. One thing seems certain: The Jewish religion is by no means monolithic. But its followers, many of whom opposed the philosophy of Zionism, would now be drawn into the financiers’ power game. From this point on, anyone who even questioned Zionism would be labeled “anti-Semitic.”��
As the 20th century advanced, the financier elite became heavily involved in getting rich off world war and the manufacture of the new weapons of mass destruction that modern technology made possible. Warfare and weaponry, combined with control of credit manufactured through the leveraging of industrial production, were to be the primary means of putting nations and their populations into debt. A materialistic slave society was being created, which books like 1984 warned against. Humanity was lured into compliance through the fantasy world brought about by the mass media by means of advertising, cinema, and television. Another enticement was the growing availability of mass-produced consumer goods.
How It Was Done
While World War I and the Russian Revolution still lay a few years in the future, the international financiers quietly took control of the U.S. economic system in 1913 through the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment to the Constitution which provided for the federal income tax. The purpose of this tax was to use citizens’ earnings to pay the interest on the “funded”�� national debt. As with the debt owed by the British people to the Bank of England, this would be one so large the principle could never be paid off.
Russia was allied with Britain and France during World War I (1914-18). But the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary had reached a stalemate until the tide was turned by entry of the U.S. on the side of the Allies. Fighting on the eastern front between Germany and Russia was savage. By the end of the war the Russian Revolution broke out, and, after a terrible Civil War, the Soviet Union came into being.
It was the financier-controlled press which goaded President Woodrow Wilson into taking the nation into World War I on the side of England and France. But it was also part of the financiers’ plan to shift the apparent focal point of their financial power from London to New York . This was done through the financing of the war by loans made to the European combatants by the New York banks.
It seemed to be in accord with a plan spelled out decades earlier by Cecil Rhodes, whereby the U.S. would not only be “recovered”�� for the British Empire, but would appear to become the senior partner in the enterprise. By the start of the 1920s, this objective had been accomplished. German, English, French, and other European taxpayers were all deeply in debt to the U.S. banks for the costs of the war.
Also during the war years the financiers had secured the issuance of the Balfour Declaration signaling British support for the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine. The 1917 Declaration was made in a letter from Arthur James Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, to Walter Rothschild, Second Baron Rothschild, for transmission to the Zionist Federation.
During and after World War I, world financial power shifted to the New York banks through which, however, it would be the London-based elite exerting de facto control. It might also be said that starting with U.S. entry into World War I, once you look past the patriotic slogans, the U.S., its vast productivity, and the blood of its population have been used in making this country the worldwide military enforcer of international financier domination.
World War II became the means of consolidating financier control. Prior to that, during the years of the Great Depression, both Russia —aka the Soviet Union—and the U.S. were slipping away from the fold. Stalin had shown his “Bonapartist”�� tendencies by favoring “Socialism in one country,”�� as well as by his deadly purges of the financier-controlled Trotskyite faction and his shocking rapprochement with Hitler in 1939 that seemed to foil the financiers’ intent to play off Nazi Germany and the Soviets against each other.
In the U.S., President Franklin Roosevelt had taken steps during the Great Depression to rebuild the U.S. economy by exerting an unaccustomed degree of control over the Federal Reserve System and providing credit at low rates of interest to homeowners, farmers, and businessmen. This made Roosevelt seem to many wealthy Americans “a traitor to his class.”��
Roosevelt saw that a healthy and self-sustaining domestic economy is essential for the well-being of a sovereign nation. But instead of looking for ways to create a monetary system based on the productivity of the economy, as Lincoln had done with the Greenbacks during the Civil War, Roosevelt left intact the debt-based system overseen by the Federal Reserve. He added to this system the Keynesian idea of government deficit spending for public works to create employment. This was essentially a system whereby government would try to pay its debts by engendering inflation, a policy that has continued until today.
But World War II thwarted even these stirrings of nationalism in both countries. In both the Soviet Union and the U.S. , the financiers worked the levers of debt to build massive war machines. They were also working through the Western banks, including Brown Brothers Harriman in New York, to achieve the same ends in Nazi Germany. Eventually Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and the U.S. entered the war. Both during and after the war, operatives from the international financial elite centered in London were the linchpins of a worldwide matrix of spying, assassination, terrorism, industrial espionage, psy ops, media manipulation, and monetary control. This included financing the founding of Israel as the Western bridgehead in the Middle East in 1948.
Despite the creation of an appearance of conflict between the West and the Soviet Union through the Cold War, the financiers continued to work both sides of the fence through their London-based operatives. In the U.S. they created the modern national security state with both the National Security Agency and the CIA firmly under their control. Then, after President John F. Kennedy moved to forestall the neocolonialist Vietnam conflict and replace the Federal Reserve with a U.S. system of silver-backed Treasury currency, he was shot dead in Dallas ’s Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.
In charge of convincing the public that the Warren Commission was correct in concluding that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, supposedly a lone deranged gunman, were figures associated with the financier elite from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Yale Law School . (See The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up Revisited by Donald Gibson, 2005.) But in 1979, a report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations stated that Kennedy was killed by a “probable conspiracy.”��
It has been thoroughly documented that since World War II the Western intelligence agencies, all with close ties to the financial world, particularly the New York and London investment banks, have been responsible for engendering wars, revolutions, and mayhem in countries around the world, causing the deaths of millions of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and southeastern Europe.
Meanwhile, the worldwide arms industry, also under financier control, have produced the greatest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction ever seen. After Kennedy was killed, the U.S. moved to arm Israel as the leading military power of the region. Today nuclear weapons have proliferated, with Israel, Pakistan, and India becoming nuclear powers in addition to the U.S., Russia, Britain, China, and France.
But warfare and weapons cost money, and by the late 1960s the Vietnam War was sinking the U.S. deeper into debt. The U.S. war machine was to be the main tool for financier enforcement of their worldwide plan of domination, but the nation was going broke. The problem was made worse by heavy federal expenditures for the poor and elderly through such programs as Medicare and Medicaid.
But President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had a plan. The government worked out an arrangement whereby Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC nations would gradually increase the price of oil, with the profits to be used by the oil-producing nations to buy U.S. Treasury debt securities. By 1980 the cost of oil would be ratcheted up from about $3.50 a barrel to $39.50.
The drastic increase of the price of gasoline at the pump acted as a de facto tax on the U.S. economy. But the plan worked. The “petrodollar”�� and “dollar hegemony”�� were born, with the dollar becoming the world’s reserve currency. Dollars could flood the world only because in 1971 the Nixon administration had abandoned the dollar’s gold peg as a basis for international currency exchange. Now currencies floated freely in world markets with speculation and inflation rampant. The economies of the world were no longer based on production, but on financial manipulation. It was also the start of the era of monetarism, where the Federal Reserve thought it could regulate the economy by the raising and lowering of interest rates.
The Kissinger plan also made the U.S. dependent on Middle Eastern oil and turned it into the muscle behind the financiers’ ambition for Israel to dominate the region. So now Americans, who had liberated Europe from the Nazis, had to fight and die for the financiers in the Middle East . The final conquest of Iraq , starting in 2003, and the planned war against Iran are the latest phases.
Meanwhile, through the financiers’ control of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, the producing economy was shattered through the Fed-induced recession of 1979-83, where interest rates were raised to the highest in history to combat the inflation the financiers had themselves caused by the oil price shocks. By this time, as some allege, the controversial concept of “peak oil”��—whether it really existed or not—was being used as a cover for financier manipulation of oil markets by limiting production in order to maintain prices.
By 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the U.S. producing economy had been devastated by the shutdown of factories and the export of jobs. The work of wrecking the economy was completed by Clinton ’s embrace of NAFTA, which has largely eliminated family farming in favor of financier-controlled agribusiness in the U.S. , Canada , and Mexico . Deregulation of the financial industry began in earnest during the Reagan years from 1981-89 and accelerated under Clinton.
By this time, the U.S. economy was being kept afloat only through financial bubbles that allowed the purchase of consumer goods to take place through more family and household debt. We had the merger-acquisition bubble of the 1980s, followed by the George H.W. Bush recession which led to Clinton ’s election in 1992. During the 1990s we had the dot.com bubble fueled by foreign investment. Capital gains taxes on stock price inflation and counting trust funds like Social Security as budgetary assets allowed Clinton to balance the federal budget the last three years of his presidency.
But the dot.com bubble also burst with the loss of $7 trillion of wealth through the crash of 2000-2001. Next came the Bush bubbles—in housing, equity funds, commercial real estate, and hedge funds that have been deflating while threatening to destroy altogether the economic viability of what was once the world’s greatest industrial democracy.
After this, the only bubble left for an economy that appears to be entering terminal depression may be the current fuel/food bubble that could result in the starvation of millions worldwide. Now the longstanding ambition of the financier elite for the destruction of the American republic may finally be realized—with a lot of help, of course, from their American friends.
“End Times”��
Can it be that the last stage of the U.S. takedown is “The Project for the New American Century”��? Is this ambitious plan for “global leadership”�� through military might that was seemingly invented by the “neocons”��—many with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship—a Trojan Horse?
It certainly appears that with 9/11 as a pretext, the neocons suckered the U.S. into the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as a means of military occupation of the Middle East . Certainly 9/11 and the Iraq invasion benefited Israel, as some Israeli politicians have frankly stated.
Were the neocons also acting on behalf of the financial controllers in London and elsewhere? And was one reason the neocons were so eager to engage in a “clash of civilizations”�� against the Islamic world the Koranic prohibition of usury which states, “Those who charge Usury are in the same position as those controlled by the devil's influence. This is because they claim that Usury is the same as commerce. However, God permits commerce, and prohibits Usury.”�� (Koran, Al-Baqarah 2:275)
Prior to 9/11, the Bush administration got Congress to cut taxes for the highest income brackets, reversing Bill Clinton’s budget surpluses. The tax cut remained in effect, even as the massive expenditures on the Middle Eastern wars mounted. The consequence has been to bring the federal government to the brink of bankruptcy.
The last official act of this phase could well be the ultimate insanity of a U.S. attack on Iran . If successful, this would complete the Western conquest of the Middle East but may start a larger conflict that could eventually force the U.S. to withdraw its forces once the money runs out. Israel would then be at liberty to sweep in to dominate a region that U.S. military power had devastated.
Whatever may happen overseas, the U.S. economy at home is on the verge of collapse. It if does, we will have to retreat to our own shores and face here the edifice of a ruined nation with no manufacturing base, a crumbling infrastructure, an aging population, insufficient food, poorly developed resources, and the collapse of the dollar. Of course the prophets of doom who claim that overpopulation must inevitably lead to Malthusian scarcity will take all this as justification of their prejudices. The rumored North American Union, with its currency the amero, could then follow, both under the control of the financiers.
Meanwhile in Russia, things took a surprising turn when the Russian people threw out their communist controllers in 1991 and established a Russian republic. The financiers immediately took over through the government of Boris Yeltsin and began to divide up the nation’s resources through their local allies, the “oligarchs.”�� But the Russian people refused to comply. Despite desperate poverty, they elected Vladimir Putin, a nationalist leader who moved quickly to establish a self-governing Russian state that the financiers and the Western press clearly intend to take down. Russia is now back on the world scene, and a revival of the Orthodox Church is taking place. The drama in that country has not been entirely played out it seems.
As far as the U.S. is concerned, the financiers will have used us for a century, then thrown us in the trash. The U.S. may well be replaced by China, which the financiers seem to be grooming as the world’s next military enforcer. China has the advantage of an absolutist one-party system which has achieved remarkable success in terrorizing its huge population into obedience and passivity. The financiers would not hesitate to sacrifice hordes of Chinese to fight both Russia and what may remain of the U.S. By this time, the European Union will likely have its own unified nuclear deterrent to protect the financial centers. The time may come when there will be Chinese bases in the U.S. as occupiers/military police.
The wisest and safest course for U.S. foreign policy could be a new alliance with Russia that would rekindle our affinity with that nation from over a century ago. But how likely is this in a world ruled by the financiers where the destruction of the two nations is a long-term goal?
One of the tools of financier domination in the meantime will likely be worldwide famine engineered by artificial shortages. This has already started and may cause hundreds of millions of people to die and their resources to be seized. The smokescreens for this will not only be peak oil but also global warming as a means of dealing with the world’s “surplus eaters.”�� Numerous non-profits and NGOs are greasing the skids with their insistent lobbying against even responsible economic development.
Now in the U.S. we will likely see riots, panic, martial law, plagues, epidemics, and prison camps, much of which has already begun with police crackdowns, anti-terrorist exercises, declining public health, erosion of civil liberties, and the world’s largest prison population.
It is likely that the “American Century”�� is over and that the “New American Century”�� will really be the “No American Century.”�� Outside of select pockets of prosperity around financial centers, resorts, and military installations, the U.S. is being destroyed. As an example, the residents of once-prosperous towns in Michigan have turned to the illegal manufacture of meth-amphetamine now that the jobs are gone.
We have been used and abused, though often suckered into it by our own stupidity and greed. We have allowed ourselves to serve the will of an alien force—the world’s financial elite. Our payback now appears to be a looming national catastrophe.
Economic Restructuring
Economically, what is left of America must be rebuilt from the ground up. The flaw is not in the productivity of nature, the availability of resources, our ingenuity, nor our ability to work. The flaw has been in the capitalist financial system.
We must now rebuild three things: American family farming, since a nation that cannot feed itself cannot long exist; then infrastructure and manufacturing, which will require energy conservation and redevelopment of our energy resources; then income security tied to productivity but not always to employment—a basic guaranteed income for all. The best available treatment of the history and benefits of a guaranteed income may be found in Steven Shafarman’s new book, Peaceful, Positive Revolution, Tendril Press, 2008.
The concept of a guaranteed income as a benefit of a modern industrial economy has been around for a long time. But it is often confused with job-creation. As indicated earlier, during the 1930s, British economist John Maynard Keynes came up with the idea of using government deficits to try to out-run unemployment through government-controlled pump priming. But in the long run his methods were doomed to fail as debt-based economic growth eventually reached its limits due to inflation. This is where we are today, with President George W. Bush now the largest deficit spender in history.
The most successful attempt to define a rationale for an honest and democratic monetary system, one based on human labor and not financial chicanery, was the Social Credit movement founded by British engineer C.H. Douglas (1879-1952). He first set forth his ideas in his book Economic Democracy in 1918 and continued to teach his system for the next thirty years, attracting a considerable following in Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Douglas explained the dynamic whereby the incredible productivity of modern technology can readily be harnessed to provide the material sustenance for all members of society, but fails to do so because there is a chronic shortage of purchasing power from the cumulative societal income realized through wages, salaries, and dividends. The main reasons income cannot keep pace with prices is that the latter include retained earnings for savings and reinvestment, along with depreciation of capital—i.e., the tools and facilities of production.
But the “gap”�� between prices and earnings (what Keynes was to call “aggregate demand”��) was viewed by Douglas as a benefit of a modern industrial economy rather than the curse which in the Depression was causing farmers to dump their milk in the fields because consumers lacked the money to purchase it.
Douglas saw this gap as the natural appreciation of the potential producing economy to which everyone in society was entitled as monetized shares. He said this appreciation should manifest in regular payments of a National Dividend by government from a calculated credit account not dependent on taxation or government borrowing. The National Dividend could be paid by a combination of regular stipends to citizens and/or through a system of price subsidies. And it would be non-inflationary.
Douglas went further by explaining that in real life the price-income gap was in fact filled—nature abhors a vacuum—but by bank lending at usury. This was why the banks got richer, while everyone else struggled just to survive. Banks also use their credit creating ability to acquire securities, such as Treasury bonds, with the government paying interest that is compounded because the debt is constantly being re-financed. Interest on the U.S. national debt is expected to exceed $500 billion in fiscal year 2009. To pay it, many social programs will be cut.
The technical explanation is provided by Canadian Social Credit expert Wallace Klinck, “Expanding interest charges being paid on exponentially compounding debt accumulates due to an industrial cost accountancy error related to allocating capital charges in retail prices which do not distribute equal incomes within the same production cycle. The growing disparity between prices and incomes is progressively worsened by the replacement of human labor by capital (technology).”��
Under the current system, the banks steal the fruits of economic wealth which properly belong to the public as a whole, both workers and non-workers, and while the financiers were well aware of Douglas ’s system, they hated it. Word went out in the 1920s that his name was never to be mentioned in the British press. John Maynard Keyes was said to have developed his own deficit-spending theories as a means to counter Douglas ’s influence. And when Douglas visited the U.S. in the late 1930s, he was told to his face that he would never be allowed to introduce his ideas in this country.
Next Steps
To accomplish a program of real reform will require a strong president but possibly a political revolution to get one. Congressman Ron Paul has made history as the first major presidential candidate to call for the abolishment of the Federal Reserve. He is right. The first thing a president worthy of the name should do is eliminate the Federal Reserve as a bank-of-issue, get rid of our debt-based monetary system, and depose the bankers and Wall Street financiers from the seats of power. Ron Paul is also right that the U.S. should withdraw its military from overseas and stop trying to control the world.
What Ron Paul’s candidacy proves is that in the internet age, with financial crises jumping from the headlines every day, and authorities such as Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson manifestly having no intention of making real changes, the public is ready to listen to new ideas. But even progressive analysts are so locked into outmoded concepts that they fail to realize an entirely new type of monetary system is needed.
The basic concept that must be understood, as expressed repeatedly by this author in past articles, is that credit is a power of nature that is part of the human “commons.”�� Credit allows society to materialize value by drawing from future potential productivity into present actualized reality. Credit therefore should be treated legally as a public utility, like water or electricity.
Credit is not a mathematical abstraction that should be manipulated into building pyramids of debt. Such practices are suicidal for an economy. Rather credit is organic, deriving ultimately from human labor (including mental labor, as in the application of technology), along with the sun, the soil, natural resources, and the rain. Thus we have gone full circle to the beginning of this article, where Russia and the U.S. were cited as the two nations that best understood where real wealth comes from.
The management of credit may be licensed to responsible private parties who are accountable to public authority, but it should never be given away or “privatized”�� to individuals or corporations who manipulate it mainly for their own profit, as banks do today. It is the privatization of credit through the banking systems of the world which has loaded humanity with debt, rendered short-term profits the highest priority of all business endeavor, and made modern industrialization as much a curse as a blessing.
Note that credit differs in this discussion from the legitimate investment of capital derived from profits or savings whereby an individual risks a portion of his wealth through a contract with a producing entity. Capital markets that facilitate this type of investment fall under the category of commerce, not usury.
A national monetary system should reflect the treatment of credit as a public utility and thereby make possible responsible economic activity and the fair distribution of wealth. Some of the measures which should be implemented are contained in the American Monetary Institute’s draft American Monetary Act. (www.monetary.org/) The resulting currency could be issued, not in the form of debt instruments like Federal Reserve Notes, but silver-backed Treasury certificates as in President Kennedy’s program of 1963.
Features of a new monetary system could be as follows:
1. A guaranteed income, followed by a National Dividend, should be paid directly to citizens from a Treasury credit account without recourse to either taxation or government borrowing. (C.H. Douglas’s theory of the National Dividend as the monetization of the net appreciation of the productivity of a modern industrial economy is set forth in this author’s Global Research article entitled, “An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States ,”�� April 26, 2007.) The National Dividend, currently estimated at over $12,000 per capita annually, could be distributed in a variety of ways, in addition to a subsistence stipend. This could include price subsidies for consumer purchases, taking over existing Social Security payments, universal health insurance, or payments to women with young children. Another way to issue a National Dividend would be to monetize food production, whereby anyone who delivers food products to wholesalers receives a government payment as a producer’s subsidy, thereby discounting food at the consumer point-of-sale.
This would work in a similar fashion to farm parity pricing programs of bygone days. As explained by Wallace Klinck, “Social Credit policy is to compensate retail prices at the point-of-sale. It is not, however, to subsidize production which would be subject to consumer choice and fully supported by consumers having at all times financial income adequate to fully liquidate the costs of production. That is, production policy is to be determined essentially by consumers—this being the Social Credit concept of genuine economic democracy with maximum decentralization, or dispersion, of power over production policy. Price controls under the present financial cost-accountancy system, where continued economic activity is dependent upon an inflationary expansion of credit to meet rising costs arising consequent to flawed accountancy, is demonstrably impossible. Price regulation, however, would appear to be both necessary and realistic under a self-liquidating Social Credit system of finance. Although not generally recognized, prices are ”�’controlled,’ (or manipulated) under the present system of finance in a most deleterious manner.”��
2. The government should also spend money directly into circulation, as it did with Greenbacks in the 19th century, both for operating expenses and for infrastructure projects at the federal, state, and local levels. A national infrastructure bank could be capitalized by state and local infrastructure bonds without any impact on the federal budget. Such spending would again be without recourse to borrowing or taxation. Infrastructure spending could be either through grants or low-interest loans. As with Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s current proposed infrastructure bank legislation, the program could specify that a requisite proportion of funding be spent on American-made products such as steel.
3. We should reform banking by eliminating the catastrophic privately-controlled fractional reserve system. Instead, the government should lend money at a low rate of interest to banks, then use the proceeds to help pay for legitimate government expenditures in the areas of regulation or services. Use of the proceeds, combined with the new Greenbacks and savings from no longer having to pay interest on an unnecessary national debt, would eliminate the need for the federal income tax, allowing the 16th Amendment to be repealed. In fact, under a monetary system such as the one described herein, probably three-fourths or more of the current societal tax burden could be eliminated.
4. In order to clear the way for these reforms, bankruptcy reorganization of the entire $50 trillion of existing debt in the U.S. should be undertaken, with debt being restructured and paid down over time or simply written off. Bank lending for speculation, such as for mergers and acquisitions, equity and hedge fund speculation, and purchase of securities on margin has been explosively enabled through bankers’ ability to move massive amounts of funds electronically. These leveraging practices should be outlawed, as they are abuses of the public interest. (According to the London Times, one John Paulson made $3.7 billion in hedge fund trading last year. “Mr. Paulson’s firm, Paulson & Co, made a fortune from shorting America ’s sub-prime mortgage markets.”��) A national fuel conservation program with real teeth should also be instituted. And at least half of the U.S. military budget should be eliminated, with half of the remainder devoted to energy R&D and domestic public works. Employees of the military-industrial complex will find many new career opportunities as the domestic economy revives.
As these measures are taken, the United States will no longer be dancing to the financiers’ tune. We would be helping prepare a future where man’s inhumanity to man as expressed through war and financial exploitation is no longer glorified. Such a future would be a milestone in the eventual enlightenment of the human race. But these are measures that must be implemented now, before it is too late.
While we await these epochal changes, more modest steps may be in order. The author is often asked for personal financial advice. His advice is to invest in yourself and in other people. Plant a robust home garden. Learn new skills. Start community food co-ops that buy local products. Establish local currencies and barter networks. Join or form a union. Raise bees. Put kids through school. Get out of debt. Pray and meditate. Become politically active. Demand change.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=8854