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| Many of the so-called "classical" economic and political writings, such as Hobbes' Leviathan or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, are so full of outmoded concepts and convoluted arguments that the modern-day student finds them almost unintelligible.Politics and economics are only dismal when presented in a way meant to obfuscate ideas and confuse readers. |  |
At times, these tactics of bewilderment become apparent to the perceptive student of world events. In August of 2007, the cabal's head economic confabulator, Robert Samuelson, 
made it clear that the world financial structure was not meant to be understood. In an article entitled "Is the Global Economic Boom in Peril?" Samuelson made this interesting statement:
"Anyone claiming to understand today's world financial system is either delusional or dishonest."
This is an interesting statement to make in the context of an article pretending to explain at least certain aspects of the world financial system. What he intended to convey was a warning that the common person could not hope to understand the non-Federal Reserve System, the Wall Street crap shoot, or their accompanying scams. It's not intended that the investor understand what he's doing, he's just supposed to put his money into the maw of the Big Money swindle and keep his mouth shut.
In this series, we'll examine the essence of political and economic ideas and practices, simplifying them so they become understandable.
| We usually think of economics in relation to a large culture such as the United States. But to simplify, we'll refer to a fictional economy, that of the ship-wrecked Robinson Crusoe and his friends, Friday and Sunday, who live on a desert island. Crusoe has skill in building boats, but he's not adept at fishing from the ocean shore.
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| Friday is an expert spear fisherman, but lacks the skill to build large boats. Sunday, a female native, is skilled in cooking, which includes fire-starting. The three find that they can exchange goods and services to their mutual benefit, thus creating their own desert island economy.
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| Person
Has these goods and services | |||||||||||||
Crusoe
Building large boatsFish and meals cooked | Friday
FishingLarge boats and meals cookedSunday
Cooking (including fire-starting) skillLarge boats and fish | |||||||||||||
Crusoe and his two friends are now exchanging goods (boats, fish, cooked meals) and services (boat building, fishing, cooking), so the services becomes a means of barter and the goods become a means of exchange--money.
Money is simply any object used in the exchange of goods and services. Over the centuries, many objects have been used as money: cattle, beads, gold, silver, paper currency, entries in financial records. A medium of exchange must be seen by all members of an economy as possessing value. For example, Crusoe finds some old currency on the wrecked ship, but it has no value to him or the other two.
Sunday has become a storekeeper and performs one of the services of a banker: keeping custody of the means of exchange (money).
They decide that they need a written statement of the policies which the government and the citizens will follow: a constitution and a body of laws. The islanders then elect representatives to create new laws and regulations as they are needed, setting up a legislature, and they elect individuals to administer the laws, establishing a judiciary.
In 604 B.C.E, the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar decreed that gold would be the medium of exchange in his empire. The Babylonian temples contained strong rooms where people brought their gold and other precious items for safekeeping by the temple priests. The customers were given small clay tablets as receipts for their valuables.
The priest-bankers demanded that the people pay twenty percent interest for guarding their valuables--not a bad racket. Some Swiss banks today charge interest for securing deposits. But most modern banks pay depositors interest on the money they keep in their accounts.
The Babylonian priests, never letting the grass grow under their feet, discovered that most of the people depositing valuables for safekeeping seldom came to reclaim their gold and other precious items. Instead, the people began using the clay receipt tablets as a means of exchange--money.
Now, thought the priests, the people believe that the clay tablets are backed by gold and other valuables, yet the deposits are seldom if ever claimed. We can issue ten times as many clay tablets as are backed by gold and grow rich. The priest-bankers issued clay tablets unredeemable by gold, loaned out the clay tablets at interest and were soon living the life of luxury.
The crafty Babylonian priests had invented all the features of modern full-service banking:
But let's not forget old Nebuchadnezzar, he invented two important strategems which have lasted through the centuries:
Nebu and his fellow-dictators discovered that war was the best way to gain and maintain control over a nation's people and the most profitable way to make money.
War as a technology is highly efficient, because it totally uses up most of the goods (munitions, armaments) and services (men and women in military forces) it involves. With many technologies, for example, the manufacture of goods, machinery and tools are not completely used up, they merely depreciate over time. War materiel is destroyed, requiring a constant re-supply, necessitating a "military industrial complex" to furnish the objects and personnel involved.
The technology of war became a major part in a ruler's arsenal. So in 1514 when Machiavelli formulated his advice to rulers in his book The Prince, one of his axioms was: "A [ruler] ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline. . ."
Beginning with old Nebu (perhaps even before) the ruler or rulers of a state decreed what the official policy would be as to money and finances. In most centuries and in most countries, this has meant that only the rulers of a state are allowed to issue money and everyone in that state--and economically related states--must use the money created.
The power to issue currency and coins and to set a nation's fiscal policy resides either in a monarch, the elected officials of a state, or a private group of financiers. In 1666, the profligate King Charles II and a corrupt Parliament sold the British fiscal powers to the East India Company ( a group of financiers). The East India Company established the policy that goods could only be purchased by the colonies, including America, by goods of exchange (tobacco, timber, fish, furs, rum) or coins.
As the American colonies moved out of barter into a more complex economy, they had a dire need for currency, "bills of exchange." The colonists had very little in the way of coins, since most of their exports were traded for goods, not coins. So with the encouragement of men such as Benjamin Franklin, the colonies began to issue their own currencies to facilitate domestic and foreign trade.
The importance of American domestic currencies is not often emphasized in American history books and we are not made aware that one of the major reasons for the revolt of the American colonists against the British is that the English Parliament in 1751 and 1763 made it illegal for the American colonies to issue currency. Had Americans accepted this British mandate, domestic trade would have ground to a halt and the colonists reduced to barter, a very inefficient method of exchange.
After the United States was established, a national bank was chartered in 1791: the Bank of the United States. Only about twenty percent of the national bank was actually owned by the government, the rest by foreign investors. It soon became clear that the Bank was being operated for the benefit of foreign investors, so the Bank's 20 year charter was not renewed by Congress in 1811.
A second national bank was given a federal charter in 1816, but like the first one, it too was largely controlled by foreign investors through such front men as John Jacob Astor, Stephen Girard, and David Parish, a New York agent for the Vienna branch of the Rothschild money interest. This second national bank was controlled by Nicholas Biddle who administered it according to the aims of its foreign owners and contrary to the welfare of Americans.
In 1836, President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill which would have renewed the national bank's charter which expired that year. In his veto message, President Jackson said:
"The bold efforts the present bank has made to control the government, the distress it has wantonly caused, are but premonitions of the fate which awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."
Americans were well rid of the foreign-dominated second national bank. But they were left in the vulnerable position of having no national bank to further their interests. The foreign financiers, especially such moneyed groups as the Rothschilds, saw their opportunity and soon sent their agents to America to begin setting up state banks. The Rothschild's primary agent in America was August Belmont, who established a large bank in New York City, but also a large number of state banks in the south. The Rotshchilds and other European financiers loaned money to state banks at high rates of interest and controlled loan decisions.
Many of these state banks, were also supported by state bonds. The state of Mississippi, for example, sold $5 million in bonds with which to subscribe a third of the $15 million capital of the Union Bank. The promoters of the Union Bank made ill-advised loans and within a short time the bank failed. The state officials in Mississippi realized that the foreign financiers had hoped to reap windfall profits and had been largely responsible for the failure of the Union Bank, so these officials refused to repay the money owed the foreign vultures.
The European financiers bought up "repudiated" southern state bonds and then began to use their financial power to have the United States federal government compel the southern states to pay off the disputed claims. The Rothschilds and the other foreign financier groups also thought they might be able to use their money power to force the U.S. federal government to assume the debts of the southern state banks as federal obligations. At its inception, the newly-formed United States had assumed the debts of the colonies; so the foreign vultures thought they might be able to force the federal government to pay off the southern states' debts. The issue of "states' rights" versus a "strong central authority" became a national crisis point and the American civil war was the result.
When reviewing the technology of war above, we saw that this is a very profitable stratagem for rulers. The Rothschilds and other European financiers had exacerbated the discord and hostility between the North and the South. Knowing full well that war was their best means of reaping huge profits, these vultures did everything in their power to instigate an American civil war. They worked both sides of the street, as usual.
The Union commissioned Jay Cooke to act as selling agent for its bond issues and Cooke arranged with August Belmont, the New York agent of the Rothschilds, to sell Union bonds in Europe. In 1861 the Confederacy sent James M. Mason to England and John Slidell to France to borrow money. Slidell was a nephew of Belmont's wife. In Paris, John Slidell entered into negotiations with the Erlanger company, confidential representatives of the Rothschilds. Slidell's daughter married Erlanger's son. Even though most investors in confederate bonds lost their shirt, the Erlangers reaped huge profits.
The American Civil War cost the Union about $3.2 billion and the Confederacy close to $2 billion, all money loaned on interest. August Belmont, the Democratic National Chairman, sabotaged the Democratic presidential candidate, Horatio Seymour, through derogatory statements made in his New York World newspaper, assuring the election of the Republican candidate, General Ulysses S. Grant.
The so-called Credit Strengthening Act of March 18, 1869 was passed immediately upon the assembling of the new Congress elected in the 1868 election. It was the first act passed by that body and signed by the new President Grant. The passage of that Act was equivalent to the payment to the Rothschilds and their banker satellites in America and abroad of at least $275 million over and above the amount they otherwise would have received in the form of interest and principal for the bonds they owned or controlled.
At least ever since the American presidential election of 1868, the financiers who rule this country have made sure that they have hand-picked presidential candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Whichever party wins, they have their puppet in power.
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"The structure of financial controls created by the tycoons of 'Big Banking' and "Big Business' in the period 1880-1993 was of extraordinary complexity, one business fief being built on another, both being allied with semi-independent associates, the whole rearing upward into two pinnacles of economic and financial power, of which one, centered in New York, was headed by J. P. Morgan and Company, and the other in Ohio, was headed by the Rockefeller family. When these two cooperated, as they generally did, they could influence the economic life of the country to a large degree and could almost control its political life, at least on the Federal level."
Carroll Quigley. Tragedy and Hope
As we've seen, the rulers of the United States have found war to be their biggest profit-making scheme. Thus the windfall profits for the Rothschilds and their satellites in the Civil War.
As the Rothschilds were joined by the Morgans and the Rockefellers in exploiting America in the early years of the 20th century, they decided to create a private enterprise which would possess the power to set national fiscal policy and issue money. In 1913, the Federal Reserve System was created. Having set up this private national bank, the American rulers proceeded to start the next profit-making war in 1914: World War I.
After the end of World War I, there was a short period of rebuilding war-torn Europe. Beginning in the 1930s, American and European financiers backed Hitler and World War II was the result. Europe was again devastated and, this time, so was Japan and other parts of Asia. So began the rebuilding of Europe and Asia, with money from the international financiers loaned at interest.
Also, immediately after World War II, the rulers came up with a new invention: a permanent state of war called the Cold War. A steady supply of armaments and personnel was now required as America competed with the Soviet Union in an "arms race."
It was decreed that America's new enemy was the Soviet Union and its satraps: East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria. The U.S. had its NATO allies, but its real client-states were its Asian satellites: Japan, South Korea, Thailand, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Taiwan.
The United States rulers turned the country into an imperialist military state, supporting foreign dictators in national struggles for independence:
supporting insurgency against a
Sandinista government in Nicaragua sympathetic to Castro's Cuba; U.S. supported cocaine trade of
Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, the "Contras"
Now this "permanent state of war" scam has been extended by the Bush I and Bush II administrations in their creation of the Gulf War, the invasion of Panama, the Afghanistan war, and the war against Iraq. Dubya is mandating increased expenditure on the military and has decreed a permanent state of war against terrorism.
Norman D. Livergood
