Source: Global Research.ca
Richard K Moore
When
the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, in the late 1700s, there
was lots of money to be made by investing in factories and mills, by
opening up new markets, and by gaining control of sources of raw
materials. The folks who had the most money to invest, however, were not
so much in Britain but more in Holland. Holland had been the leading
Western power in the 1600s, and its bankers were the leading
capitalists. In pursuit of profit, Dutch capital flowed to the British
stock market, and thus the Dutch funded the rise of Britain, who
subsequently eclipsed Holland both economically and geopolitically.
In
this way British industrialism came to be dominated by wealthy
investors, and capitalism became the dominant economic system. This led
to a major social transformation. Britain had been essentially an
aristocratic society, dominated by landholding families. As capitalism
became dominant economically, capitalists became dominant politically.
Tax structures and import-export policies were gradually changed to
favour investors over landowners.
It
was no longer economically viable to simply maintain an estate in the
countryside: one needed to develop it, turn it to more productive use.
Victorian dramas are filled with stories of aristocratic families who
fall on hard times, and are forced to sell off their properties. For
dramatic purposes, this decline is typically attributed to a failure in
some character, a weak eldest son perhaps. But in fact the decline of
aristocracy was part of a larger social transformation brought on by the
rise of capitalism.
The
business of the capitalist is the management of capital, and this
management is generally handled through the mediation of banks and
brokerage houses. It should not be surprising that investment bankers
came to occupy the top of the hierarchy of capitalist wealth and power.
And in fact, there are a handful of banking families, including the
Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, who have come to dominate economic and
political affairs in the Western world.
Unlike
aristocrats, capitalists are not tied to a place, or to the maintenance
of a place. Capital is disloyal and mobile – it flows to where the most
growth can be found, as it flowed from Holland to Britain, then from
Britain to the USA, and most recently from everywhere to China. Just as a
copper mine might be exploited and then abandoned, so under capitalism a
whole nation can be exploited and then abandoned, as we see in the
rusting industrial areas of America and Britain.
This
detachment from place leads to a different kind of geopolitics under
capitalism, as compared to aristocracy. A king goes to war when he sees
an advantage to his nation in doing so. Historians can ‘explain’ the
wars of pre-capitalist days, in terms of the aggrandisement of monarchs
and nations.
A
capitalist stirs up a war in order to make profits, and in fact our
elite banking families have financed both sides of most military
conflicts since at least World War 1. Hence historians have a hard time
‘explaining’ World War 1 in terms of national motivations and
objectives.
In
pre-capitalist days warfare was like chess, each side trying to win.
Under capitalism warfare is more like a casino, where the players battle
it out as long as they can get credit for more chips, and the real
winner always turns out to be the house – the bankers who finance the
war and decide who will be the last man standing. Not only are wars the
most profitable of all capitalist ventures, but by choosing the winners,
and managing the reconstruction, the elite banking families are able,
over time, to tune the geopolitical configuration to suit their own
interests.
Nations
and populations are but pawns in their games. Millions die in wars,
infrastructures are destroyed, and while the world mourns, the bankers
are counting their winnings and making plans for their postwar
reconstruction investments.
From
their position of power, as the financiers of governments, the banking
elite have over time perfected their methods of control. Staying always
behind the scenes, they pull the strings controlling the media, the
political parties, the intelligence agencies, the stock markets, and the
offices of government. And perhaps their greatest lever of power is
their control over currencies. By means of their central-bank scam, they
engineer boom and bust cycles, and they print money from nothing and
then loan it at interest to governments. The power of the elite banking
gang (the ‘banksters’) is both absolute and subtle...
Some
of the biggest men in the United States are afraid of something. They
know there is a power somewhere, so organised, so subtle, so watchful,
so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak
above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. – President Woodrow Wilson
The End of Growth – Banksters vs. Capitalism
It
was always inevitable, on a finite planet, that there would be a limit
to economic growth. Industrialisation has enabled us to rush headlong
toward that limit over the past two centuries. Production has become
ever more efficient, markets have become ever more global, and finally
the paradigm of perpetual growth has reached the point of diminishing
returns.
Indeed,
that point was actually reached by about 1970. Since then capital has
not so much sought growth through increased production, but rather by
extracting greater returns from relatively flat production levels. Hence
globalisation, which moved production to low-waged areas, providing
greater profit margins. Hence privatisation, which transfers revenue
streams to investors that formerly went to national treasuries. Hence
derivative and currency markets, which create the electronic illusion of
economic growth, without actually producing anything in the real world.
For
almost forty years, the capitalist system was kept going by these
various mechanisms, none of which were productive in any real sense. And
then in September 2008 this house of cards collapsed, all of a sudden,
bringing the global financial system to its knees.
If
one studies the collapse of civilisations, one learns that
failure-to-adapt is fatal. Is our civilisation falling into that trap?
We had two centuries of real growth, where the growth-dynamic of
capitalism was in harmony with the reality of industrial growth. Then we
had four decades of artificial growth – capitalism being sustained by a
house of cards. And now, after the house of cards has collapsed, every
effort is apparently being made to bring about ‘a recovery’ – of growth!
It is very easy to get the impression that our civilisation is in the
process of collapse, based on the failure-to-adapt principle.
Such
an impression would be partly right and partly wrong. In order to
understand the real situation we need to make a clear distinction
between the capitalist elite and capitalism itself. Capitalism is an
economic system driven by growth; the capitalist elite are the folks who
have managed to gain control of the Western world while capitalism has
operated over the past two centuries. The capitalist system is past its
sell-by date, the bankster elite are well aware of that fact – and they
are adapting.
Capitalism
is a vehicle that helped bring the banksters to absolute power, but
they have no more loyalty to that system than they have to place, or to
anything or anyone. As mentioned earlier, they think on a global scale,
with nations and populations as pawns. They define what money is and
they issue it, just like the banker in a game of Monopoly. They can also
make up a new game with a new kind of money. They have long outgrown
any need to rely on any particular economic system in order to maintain
their power. Capitalism was handy in an era of rapid growth. For an era
of non-growth, a different game is being prepared.
Thus,
capitalism was not allowed to die a natural death. Instead it was
brought down by a controlled demolition. First it was put on a
life-support system, as mentioned above, with globalisation,
privatisation, currency markets, etc. Then it was injected with a
euthanasia death-drug, in the form of real-estate bubbles and toxic
derivatives. Finally, the Bank of International Settlements in Basel –
the central bank of central banks – pulled the plug on the life-support
system: they declared the ‘mark-to-market rule’, which made all the
risk-holding banks instantly insolvent, although it took a while for
this to become apparent. Every step in this process was carefully
planned and managed by the central-banking clique.
The End of Sovereignty – Restoring the Ancien Régime
Just
as the financial collapse was carefully managed, so was the
post-collapse scenario, with its suicidal bailout programs. National
budgets were already stretched; they certainly did not have reserves
available to salvage the insolvent banks. Thus the bailout commitments
amounted to nothing more than the taking on of astronomical new debts by
governments. In order to service the bailout commitments, the money
would need to be borrowed from the same financial system that was being
bailed out!
It’s
not that the banks were too big to fail, rather the banksters were too
powerful to fail: they made politicians an offer they couldn’t refuse.
In the USA, Congress was told that without bailouts there would be
martial law the next morning. In Ireland, the Ministers were told there
would be financial chaos and rioting in the streets. In fact, as Iceland
demonstrated, the sensible way to deal with the insolvent banks was
with an orderly process of receivership.
The
effect of the coerced bailouts was to transfer insolvency from the
banks to the national treasuries. Banking debts were transformed into
sovereign debts and budget deficits. Now, quite predictably, it is the
nations that are seeking bailouts, and those bailouts come with
conditions attached. Instead of the banks going into receivership, the
nations are going into receivership.
In his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,
John Perkins explains how the third world has been coerced over the
past several decades – through pressure and trickery of various kinds –
into perpetual debt bondage. By design, the debts can never be repaid.
Instead, the debts must be periodically refinanced, and each round of
refinancing buries the nation deeper in debt – and compels the nation to
submit to even more drastic IMF diktats. With the orchestrated
financial collapse, and the ‘too big to fail’ scam, the banksters have
now crossed the Rubicon: the hit-man agenda is now operating here in the
first world.
In the EU, the first round of nations to go down will be the so-called PIGS
– Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain. The fiction, that the PIGS can
deal with the bailouts, is based on the assumption that the era of
limitless growth will resume. As the banksters themselves know full
well, that just isn’t going to happen. Eventually the PIGS will be
forced to default, and then the rest of the EU will go down as well, all
part of a controlled-demolition project.
When
a nation succumbs to debt bondage, it ceases to be a sovereign nation,
governed by some kind of internal political process. Instead it comes
under the control of IMF diktats. As we have seen in the third world,
and is happening now in Europe, these diktats are all about austerity
and privatisation. Government functions are eliminated or privatised,
and national assets are sold off. Little by little – again a controlled
demolition – the nation state is dismantled. In the end, the primary
functions left to government are police suppression of its own
population, and the collection of taxes to be handed over to the
banksters.
In
fact, the dismantling of the nation state began long before the
financial collapse of 2008. In the USA and Britain, it began in 1980,
with Reagan and Thatcher. In Europe, it began in 1988, with the
Maastricht Treaty. Globalisation accelerated the dismantling process,
with the exporting of jobs and industry, privatisation programs, ‘free
trade’ agreements, and the establishment of the regulation-busting World
Trade Organisation (WTO). Events since 2008 have enabled the rapid
acceleration of a process that was already well underway.
With
the collapse, the bailouts, and the total failure to pursue any kind of
effective recovery program, the signals are very clear: the system will
be allowed to collapse totally, thus clearing the ground for a
pre-architected ‘solution’. As the nation state is being dismantled, a
new regime of global governance is being established to replace it. As
we can see with the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and the other pieces of the
embryonic world government, the new global system will make no
pretensions about popular representation or democratic process. Rule
will be by means of autocratic global bureaucracies, which will take
their orders, directly or indirectly, from the bankster clique.
In his book, The Globalization of Poverty,
Michel Chossudovsky explains how globalisation, and the actions of the
IMF, created massive poverty throughout the third world over the past
several decades. As we can see, with the dramatic emphasis on austerity
following the collapse and bailouts, this poverty-creation project has
now crossed the Rubicon. In this new world system there will be no
prosperous middle class. Indeed, the new regime will very much resemble
the old days of royalty and serfdom (the ancien régime).
The banksters are the new royal family, with the whole world as their
dominion. The technocrats who run the global bureaucracies, and the
mandarins who pose as politicians in the residual nations, are the
privileged upper class. The rest of us, the overwhelming majority, will
find ourselves in the role of impoverished serfs – if we are lucky
enough to be one of the survivors of the collapse process.
Today
Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore
order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they
were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or
promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all
peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from
this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented
with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for
the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world
government. – Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderbergers meeting
The End of Liberty – The Global Police State
For
the past four decades, since about 1970, we’ve been experiencing a
regime-change process, from an old global system to a new global system.
In the old system, first world nations were relatively democratic and
prosperous, while the third world suffered under police state tyranny,
mass poverty, and imperialism (exploitation by external powers). As
discussed above, the transition process has been characterised by
‘crossing the Rubicon’ – the introduction of policies and practices into
the first world, that were formerly limited, for the most part, to the
third world.
Thus
debt bondage to the IMF crossed the Rubicon, enabled by the
collapse-bailout scam. In turn, mass poverty is crossing that same
Rubicon, due to austerity measures imposed by the IMF, with its new
bond-holding powers. Imperialism is also crossing the Rubicon, as the
first world comes under the exploitative control of banksters and their
bureaucracies, a power nexus that is external to all national
identities. Unsurprisingly, police state tyranny is also crossing the
Rubicon: the imposition of third world poverty levels requires third
world methods of repression.
The
anti-globalisation movement can be taken as the beginning of popular
resistance to the process of regime change. Similarly, the police
response to the Seattle anti-globalisation demonstrations, in November
1999, can be taken as the ‘crossing of the Rubicon’ for police state
tyranny. The excessive and arbitrary violence of that response –
including such things as holding people’s eyes open and spraying pepper
into them – was unprecedented against non-violent demonstrators in a
first world nation.
Ironically,
that police response, particularly as it was so widely publicised,
actually strengthened the anti-globalisation movement. As demonstrations
grew in size and strength, the police response grew still more violent.
A climax of sorts was reached in Genoa, in July 2001, when the levels
of violence on both sides began to resemble almost a guerilla war.
In
those days the anti-globalisation movement was dominating the
international news pages, and opposition to globalisation was reaching
massive proportions. The visible movement was only the tip of an
anti-systemic iceberg. In a very real sense, general popular sentiment
in the first world was beginning to take a radical turn. Movement
leaders were now thinking in terms of an anti-capitalist movement. There was a political volatility in the air, a sense that, just maybe possibly, enlightened popular sentiment might succeed in shifting the course of events.
All
of that changed on September 11, 2001, the day the towers came down.
The anti-globalisation movement, along with globalisation itself,
disappeared almost totally from public consciousness on that fateful
day. Suddenly it was a whole new global scenario, a whole new media
circus – with a new enemy, and a new kind of war, a war without end, a
war against phantoms, a war against ‘terrorism’.
Earlier
we saw how the orchestrated financial collapse of September 2008
enabled certain ongoing projects to be rapidly accelerated, such as the
dismantlement of sovereignty, and the imposition of austerity.
Similarly, the events of September 2001 enabled certain ongoing projects
to be greatly accelerated, such as the abandonment of civil liberties
and international law.
Before
the towers had even come down, the ‘Patriot Act’ had already been
drafted, proclaiming in no uncertain terms that the police state was
here (in the USA) in force and here to stay – the Bill of Rights was
null and void. Before long, similar ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation had
been adopted throughout the first world. If any anti-systemic movement
were to again raise its head in the first world (as it did, for example,
recently in Greece), arbitrary police powers could be brought to bear –
as much as might be necessary – to put the resistance down. No popular
movement would be allowed to derail the banksters’ regime-change
designs. The anti-globalisation movement had been shouting, ‘This is
what real democracy looks like’. With 9/11, the banksters replied: ‘This
is what real oppression looks like’.
The
events of 9/11 led directly to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan,
and in general helped create a climate where invasions of sovereign
nations could be readily justified, with one excuse or another.
International law was to be as thoroughly abandoned as was civil
liberties. Just as all restraint was removed from domestic police
interventions, so was all restraint being removed from geopolitical
military interventions. Nothing was to stand in the way of the
banksters’ regime-change agenda.
Some
of the biggest men in the United States are afraid of something. They
know there is a power somewhere, so organised, so subtle, so watchful,
so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak
above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. – President Woodrow Wilson
Today
Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore
order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they
were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or
promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all
peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from
this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented
with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for
the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world
government. – Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderbergers meeting
The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society… dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values… this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behaviour… Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the stepping-stones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society… In addition, it may be possible – and tempting – to exploit for strategic political purposes the fruits of research on the brain and on human behaviour. – Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, 1970