1789 -1989
In 1789, the French Revolution decisively ushered in the Modern Age. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the establishment of the American Republic had signalled the beginning of the end for the era of powerful monarchs, but America was a distant colony of the British Empire and not yet a giant on the world stage. Its liberation did not provide a fundamental psychological rebooting of the human mind. Europe was where the world was controlled and only in Europe could the transformation to modernity begin. The decisive blow was struck in France, which thus takes the honour of being the first modern nation. When one of the most powerful monarchies on earth fell to a people's Revolution, and the King and most of his ruling order were executed, the irreversible signal had been broadcast to the world that it was no longer business as usual for the ruling elite. Now the people would have their say.
The age of monarchs did not however properly end until the bloodbath of the First World War. In 1917, the Russian Revolution toppled the Tsar who was executed by Bolsheviks in the following year. 1918, the year in which the cataclysm ended, also saw the end of the powerful German monarch Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the meantime, the British monarchy, terrified of its people, was compelled to change its name from the Germanic "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha" to the English "Windsor" - a fake name for a disgusting, fake family.
The one hundred and twenty-nine years from 1789 to 1918 is how long it can take for a dialectical age of the World to be fully resolved. The Illuminati-inspired American and French revolutions began the modern world but only a World War completed the job.
The 1917 Russian Revolution was the beginning of the next phase of the dialectic: class war between the rich capitalist elite (who took over from monarchs and the nobility as the power elite) and the ordinary people. A war between capitalism and communism was inevitable, but, before it could break out, a new dialectical force appeared on the scene, a synthesis of capitalism and communism called Fascism (or "national socialism"). Fascism was based on the concept of a capitalist elite being subordinated to a totally dominant national leader (a Duce or Fuehrer). The Leader allowed the capitalists to make healthy profits, but only if they did his bidding. Capitalism, in Fascist countries, was harnessed to state policy rather than to free markets. Fascism and communism were both based on the same economic model of an enormously centralised command and control system under the charge of a totalitarian, paramilitary political party. The central difference was that communism outlawed private ownership of industry whereas Fascism was happy to use the capitalist class as its economic agents. National Socialism in Germany was spectacularly successful, transforming in a few short years a nation in economic ruin and chaos, suffering from disastrous hyperinflation and enormous unemployment. Of course, most of the reason for the success lay in the fact that the whole nation was given over to rebuilding the German military machine to its former glory.
In the modern day, China has much more in common with Hitler's National Socialism than it does with Marxism. Like Hitler, the Chinese totalitarian Communist Party now actively utilise the capitalist model of private ownership under central direction. Technically, China is no longer a communist nation but national socialist i.e. Fascist. National Socialism has proved to be an extremely effective way of running economies - far superior to free market capitalism - because it is capable of avoiding the disastrous, irresponsible, greed-fuelled boom and bust cycles of irrational free markets.
Markets are like tiny, hysterical children, driven by greed and terror. There is no rationale at work, no controlling mind. National Socialism, on the other hand, provides a coherent framework, aligning the interests of the state with the capitalist economy. Contemporary America is not governed by politicians but by banks, corporations and lobbyists. Non-elected entities, unaccountable to the people, direct the destiny of America. Politicians are irrelevant and have no real power at all. Elections are meaningless and are performed merely for show. It doesn't matter who's in charge, Democrats or Republicans. Wall Street, and the Jews and Freemasons of Goldman Sachs in particular, run America. America isn't a nation; it's a corporation run by business and banking interests, and a large army of lawyers.
The Illuminati's economic system - which can be variously called social, public or meritocratic capitalism - has, technically, a certain similarity to centrally controlled National Socialism, with the critical difference that there is no totalitarian party in charge and no Fuehrer. In social capitalism, there are no privileged elites, no dynastic families, no inherited wealth, no free market mayhem, and no boom and bust.
In social capitalism, the most meritocratic individuals set economic policy according to the needs of "positive liberty", the doctrine of actively seeking to improve the quality of humanity. All economic activities that seek to degrade, exploit and sedate "the masses" are outlawed. Free markets are fine, to the extent that they support meritocratic objectives. They are never fine if their purpose is to make disproportionate wealth for greedy capitalists who have no interest in the Commonwealth.
Despite all the obfuscation of economists, economics is a simple subject. It is in fact entirely a function of politics. In the nineteenth century, capitalism was production-oriented. That suited the political need to build an advanced industrial nation with a complex infrastructure. Capitalist goods were sturdy and long lasting. A person might own a single pair of shoes for years. Production capitalism was about functionality and utility: everything had to be useful, practical and enduring. But what happens when the infrastructure is built and everyone has their indestructible shoes?
After WWI, American capitalism had to reinvent itself. It switched from production to consumption and the birth of the consumer who has been the focus of capitalism ever since. People no longer bought things because they needed them but because they wanted them. This was a revolutionary change. Now the purpose of capitalism was no longer to manufacture useful things but to stimulate demand for, essentially, useless things. This suited the political agenda because consumers, with an immense number of choices regarding what goods and services to buy, saw themselves not as cogs in a machine but as free people. Democracy, freedom and capitalism became effectively synonymous, and were always presented as a package. So, if you were hostile to capitalism, for example, you would be branded an enemy of freedom.
The major competitor of capitalism was communism. This was also production-oriented but because it banned private ownership, profit-making and extra reward for harder work, production proved inefficient, cumbersome, non-innovative and the goods produced were slipshod and ugly. In other words, the politics of communism and its hatred of salary differentials, hence of any incentive for anyone to try hard and come up with new ideas, inevitably gave rise to an unmotivated workforce manufacturing low-quality goods. There was no market to test goods, and no competition between rival companies since the State prohibited commercial competition.
The Soviet Union produced endless junk. Capitalist America produced endless exquisitely produced junk. Americans liked their glossy junk that they were free to choose much more than the Soviets liked their shoddy junk that didn't work most of the time and which offered them no choice.
Communist China was once like the Soviet Union, and in fact even more backward, but when it became "national socialist" China, everything changed. The Chinese started manufacturing reasonable-quality consumerist junk that massively undercut American prices. So the whole Western economy started buying enormous amounts of Chinese goods. Credit was handed out like candy to allow people to buy as much as possible. Major Western corporations started transferring their production facilities to China, hence work started to dry up in America. The salaries of the low-paid were driven down. Ordinary American people couldn't afford repayments on their mortgages. Consumption stuttered and went into reverse. The global economy stalled. All the hidden debts in the system were suddenly brutally exposed and enormous numbers of people started defaulting on their loans. Banks, having loaned incredible amounts of money to all and sundry in order to maximise their profits, and retained practically no capital reserves (because the more they loaned, the higher their profits were, so why not loan every last cent, thus massively inflating the profits of the banks and permitting gargantuan bonuses to the senior personnel?) were now all technically insolvent since they didn't have the capital to meet their immediate financial obligations. That had never been a problem in the past because they could borrow what they needed from other banks, but now the other banks were in the same boat - the whole system had imploded. The game of musical chairs had ended and there were no chairs left at all.
According to the laws of free market capitalism, the entire banking system should have gone out of business, but of course that would have meant the death of capitalism itself and total political chaos. So all the rich people were allowed to keep their wealth and the gullible taxpayers had to bail out the bankrupt banks. Now it was the State rather than the private banks that was groaning under an unmanageable debt. Governments all across the West had to slash public spending. Millions of workers were laid off and salaries frozen for everyone else. But the rich bankers kept getting their vast bonuses - now paid for by the taxpayers. The rich had found their holy grail - the privatisation of profits (i.e. they get to keep all of the profits in the good times) and the socialisation of losses (i.e. the taxpayers pick up the pieces when the high-risk games go wrong).
That's the world we live in now. Capitalism is dead, replaced by capitalist socialism - the most monstrous economic miscarriage ever know. The rich, as the controllers of the global economy, simply get governments to transfer the losses of private corporations to the State sector. America could easily have declared itself officially socialist and proclaimed that the State was now running the entire economy, including the banks since the taxpayers had effectively paid for the whole shooting match.
Ask yourself this - why are you paying for something even though you don't get to own it nor to enjoy any of the profits (vast bonuses), which go to the people who screwed the whole thing up in the first place? Is that the act of a rational people? Moreover, how can employees of insolvent banks be getting bonuses at all (these are not of course paid out of genuine profits since there aren't any - instead they're paid directly by the taxpayers)? The reason they are paid bonuses is that that they will all leave if they don't, and the banks will collapse. In other words, they're blackmailing the taxpayers and extorting money from them with menaces. Why don't the people lock them up in jail as if they were Mafia hoodlums (which is effectively what they are)?
Contemporary economics is a madhouse. Politicians aren't in charge of it. The super rich are. They have arranged to keep getting enormous bonuses, paid for by the taxpayers. The whole point of Western economic policy is simply to prevent the rich from ever losing their wealth, and to keep saddling the taxpayers with ever-increasing debt. The official economic objective of the West (though never expressed in those terms) is: KEEP THE RICH RICH.
The West is terrified of what would happen if the wealth of the rich were allowed to be challenged. Banks would collapse, the stock market would endure the biggest fall in history and the entire political and economic system of the West would die. To avoid this, we keep the rich rich. They have a gun pointed to our heads and we are doing nothing to disarm them.
We are now playing out an economic catastrophe. There are hedge funds in America that are betting so heavily against the Euro that they are making its collapse almost inevitable. But if the Euro goes down, so does the global economy. So American capitalists are actually using the levers of capitalism to destroy capitalism in order to make massive profits from the collapse. What these retards have failed to understand is that without capitalism, all of their ill-gotten gains will be useless.
When ultra-capitalists are betting on capitalism to fail, you know that the system has become utterly insane. This is what it means to have "free markets" in charge of the global economy rather than intelligent politicians and economists with a clear agenda.
Neither Communist China nor Nazi Germany would ever have permitted free marketeers to destabilise the economy. Under Hitler, all of the hedge fund managers would have been put in concentration camps. In China, they might well have been executed.
Is it not an astonishing thing that although Western taxpayers have had to effectively buy the Western banking system, not a single politician anywhere suggested that they should henceforth be running the banks for the public and not the private good and that all future profits would be returned to the citizens? Why weren't all the rich bankers, who had spectacularly failed to run their banks responsibly, fired and replaced by publicly accountable officials? Why weren't all of the enormous bonuses stopped? Who arranged the bail out? - expensive gangs of ex Goldman Sachs executives. Well, surprise, surprise. That's like putting vampires in charge of the blood bank.
The American economy has been hijacked by the rich elite and its only purpose is to protect the wealth of the rich come what may. The Soviet Union was bankrupted by the Afghanistan War, but the debts of the communists were as NOTHING compared with the debts of today's capitalist West. If the Soviet Union was a failure, the capitalist West is an enormously bigger one. Why has no one in the media commented on this salient fact?
The degree of anti-socialist indoctrination to which Westerners have been subjected is so extreme that no one even suggested that the banks should be "socialised" from now on and their specific remit should be to grow the economy in a stable way without boom or bust cycles fuelled by insane greed and hysterical fear. What sane person would say that banks shouldn't have that function? As it is, the purpose of banks is to generate enormous bonuses for a select few Jews and Freemasons. That's their raison d'être.
Free markets must, ultimately, be under political control. If they're not then they invariably submit to oligopolies and cartels and become irredeemably corrupt. All information relating to all markets should be freely available to all participants in the market at exactly the same time. There should be no hidden gambles going on such as those of hedge funds. Everything should be transparent, including all of the identities of all participants.
Capitalism, hitherto, has been about materialism, about producing objects, mostly of a junk nature. What's the point? Capitalism doesn't need to be about objects. Imagine a world with only ten percent of the objects that we have right now. Imagine that to fill the gap, ninety percent of the human working population weren't involved in producing and selling objects but in creating and delivering educational services covering all conceivable subjects. Imagine that you could make a living from teaching the subject you love best and that everyone around you was doing exactly the same. We all sell our knowledge to others and they sell their knowledge to us, and we all become smarter. There's barely an object in sight. We go shopping for new knowledge, not for new disposable objects. Imagine an enormous marketplace in knowledge where we pick and choose what to learn - rather than an enormous marketplace in objects where we pick and choose what junk to take home with us and that we use to define who we are ("Hey, look at me, I own this set of objects so I must be cool and desirable.").
All that really matters is that you should have a viable job. It doesn't matter what you're selling as long as there's a marketplace for it. Objects need not be the main point of capitalism at all; it could be anything: art, culture, knowledge, music, spirituality, whatever you like. All that matters is that money should flow round the system, allowing everyone to live comfortably. Imagine that you taught classes several times a week, and you also attended classes of other people. Instead of accumulating objects, you accumulate knowledge. Some subjects might have much higher demand than others and therefore the teacher can ask for more money. Some teachers might offer cheaper classes in order to boost numbers. Some might want a select audience and charge high prices, and thus we see all the normal marketplace mechanisms coming into play, but without an object in sight.
If we lived in a knowledge economy rather than an object economy, wouldn't we become enormously smarter? Wouldn't the quality of the human race rise prodigiously? Wouldn't crime fall, and social deprivation? We would have a much more informed, cultured human race, with far fewer needless objects collecting dust. The planet would be much cleaner if we could avoid all of the pollution associated with industry and replace it with the ultimate "clean", eco-product: ideas.
We live in a staggeringly stupid and unimaginative economic system where we define ourselves by what objects we own. We have thereby turned ourselves into objects. We're barely human at all.
*****
The capitalism versus communism dialectic was taken on a detour by WWII when the capitalists and communists were compelled to unite to defeat the extremely dangerous hybrid form (National Socialism). Then it was business as usual - the "Cold War".
In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolised the end of communism. Yet, amazingly, it also signalled the beginning of the end for capitalism, although no one realised. Borrowing from Hegel and Marx, Francis Fukuyama produced a brilliant but absurd book proclaiming that History had come to an end because "liberal democracy" had now manifestly defeated all challengers. Liberal democracy would be rolled out all across the globe and that it would be for the rest of time.
This demonstrated better than anything else the demented triumphalism of the capitalists. The leading capitalists now thought they were gods and routinely referred to themselves as "masters of the universe". Given that there was no longer any viable alternative to capitalism, the leading capitalists could afford to dispense with all concerns over social fairness and demand ultra capitalism based on zero government interference in the workings of markets. All controls were removed. Regulation practically vanished. Everything the capitalists wanted, they got. All sorts of laws restricting and controlling markets were repealed. Retail banks could start having investment bank functions. The amount of capital reserves they legally needed was shrunk to almost nothing, allowing every dollar invested in the bank to be maximally leveraged (meaning that the risks were magnified to a ridiculous degree). The whole economy of the West began to revolve around a single factor: house prices. While house prices went up, all bets were successful and everything seemed to create healthy profits. People actually convinced themselves that house prices could never fall. Mortgages were given to ninjas - no income, no job or assets. At this point, the system had become insane. The idea was that ninjas could keep borrowing against the rising value of their home to keep paying the mortgage, the ultimate Indian rope trick.
But, of course, if anything went wrong, if house prices failed to go up, the whole system was CERTAIN to collapse. Not just to collapse, but to take the whole global economy with it. Any sane form of government, any economic system based on reason rather than voodoo, would have seen it coming a mile off. After all, isn't one of the primary tests of a rational system the ability to analyse, predict and take evasive manoeuvres? A few experts - very, very few - did give warnings, but were promptly ignored and called doomsayers. No one in casino capitalism likes a party pooper. Voodoo beats reason every time.
And so the financial crisis descended on the world and things aren't getting any better. In fact, the warning signs are all there again that we are on the verge of not just recession but the greatest Depression in human history. If it comes, and the odds are now maybe 50/50 or worse - does any leader on earth have any grasp of what's going on, or any ability to control events? The markets have consistently crushed the politicians.
What is the "market"? It's essentially a small, elite group of cartels intent on making money in whatever circumstances. When they act in any particular direction, the rest of the market - the hangers on, the sheep, the dumb cattle - does the same. Any effect is instantly massively magnified. Most players in the market aren't reacting to any rational analysis of anything at all; they are simply reacting to whether indices are going up or doing. If they're going up, the investors feel great and invest more. If they're going down, they start to panic and sell.
The market is therefore a small group of huge players harnessed to an enormous number of small players who get infected with greed or fear in an instant. The stock market can crash by hundreds of points because someone spread a plausible rumour of impending disaster. Such rumours aren't accidents, they're agreed strategies by big players to "short" the market. The more they can drive down the market the more money they can make. Once they've driven it down, they can then of course buy at the new cheap prices and make a huge profit as the prices surge upwards again. So, they profit whether the market is going down or up and more often than not, they're the ones making it go down or up. Small players can't have any significant effect at all on the market by themselves. Only the big players can set the trends. The whole system is geared up for manipulation and corruption, and none of it is ever meaningfully investigated.
So this "market", outwith the control of any government on earth and susceptible to extreme manipulation by organised cartels of big players, can change the economic climate in a second and induce ferocious greed or equally ferocious fear. Moreover, there are enormous computerised trading systems in operation and these aren't under any human control at all. They are totally reliant on the skill of those who programmed them and anyone who knows anything about programming knows that all programs contain bugs and some of these bugs only appear in unusual situations - exactly the unforeseen and untested situations that occur during rapid boom or bust. And this is supposed to be a sane system! Who's flying this plane?!!!!
We're over the ocean, and we've just realised there's no pilot in the cockpit and there's a catastrophic fuel leak. That's capitalism for you. It's utter insanity to leave anything to any "invisible hand" of any market unless you can rationally define the hand, all of the parameters associated with it and its entire scope of operation. If you can't, you have no choice but to tightly regulate it.
So, the death of communism had the unexpected effect of delivering a fatal blow to capitalism too, though that was the last thing that people grasped in 1989. They thought the opposite had taken place; the absolute vindication and perpetual triumph of capitalism. Yet that's exactly when hubris takes over, and, as the ancient Greeks understood so well, nemesis is sure to follow. Capitalism removed all the factors that had kept it relatively sane. The reason for this was that the rich elite demanded the removal of all obstacles blocking their path to ever-increasing profits. Governments gave them whatever they wanted and there was an enormous boom, with most of the money going to a tiny elite.
Political analyst Drew Westen wrote in the New York Times: "A final explanation is that he [Obama] ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation. But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks."
400 people in the USA have as much money as the bottom half of the American population - 150 million people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150,000,000 versus 400.
150,000,000 versus 400.
150,000,000 versus 400.
150,000,000 versus 400.
150,000,000 versus 400.
Is this sane? Is it rational? Is it comprehensible? Where is the REVOLUTION?!!! What kind of person tolerates this situation? How can anyone think this is the right and proper way for a country to develop? 400 private individuals, unaccountable to the people, have the same power as 150,000,000 Americans. Is that what the Founding Fathers intended? Wasn't the separation of powers supposed to stop any group acquiring too much power? Why wasn't it applied to private individuals? Why were the rich allowed to stand outside the separation of powers? Precisely because of that, they were allowed to use their enormous wealth to buy the political system lock, stock and barrel. They controlled the politicians, but no one controlled them. That's the law of wealth. Wealth makes you a king above the law, a dictator with absolute power.
The rich became mad with vanity, greed and power. And they have brought destruction upon the rest of us, while suffering no consequences at all. The people are so powerfully brainwashed by the elite's media machine that no one has taken any action against the rich.
That same situation of infinite power in the hands of the elite applied in pre-revolutionary France. The monarchy and aristocracy though they were immune. Then came 1789 and the world changed forever.
1789 is coming again. The countdown has begun. The arrogant elite are no longer held in high esteem. They are no longer respected or even deemed competent. They are now seen as crooks, robber barons, carpetbaggers, looters, spivs and conmen in it purely for themselves. The total erosion in the reputation of these people will reap a terrible consequence in due course. They are now living on borrowed time, blissfully unaware of the storm coming, as oblivious as the elite of France at the start of 1789.
If they were at all rational, the rich would surrender ninety percent of their wealth to pay off the huge debts that their criminal irresponsibility and recklessness had on the global economy, and they would still be able to live in luxury. But we know they never will. The dialectic always plays out to the end. These infinitely greedy people are incapable of doing the right, honourable and rational thing. And thus they will reap their inevitable "reward".
1989, exactly two centuries after the French Revolution, saw the birth of another critical dialectical strand that's having an enormous impact on our world. It was the year Englishman Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. The internet has been a revolution in itself but it also has another unprecedented effect: it's a Revolution ACCELERATOR.
In past ages, books, newspapers, radios, music records, film and TV all served as social accelerators, but these were almost always controlled by gatekeepers working for one elite or another. What makes the internet radically different is that the gatekeepers can be bypassed. The "word on the street" can become the word all around the globe, without the elite having the vaguest idea what's going on. The internet allows the elite to be taken out of the loop.
The sociological phenomenon of "other-directedness" goes hand-in-hand with the internet and massively magnifies specific effects. Other-directedness involves such things as peer group pressure, fashion, groupthink and hysterical contagion. Other-directed people are not truly in control of their own behaviour. They are so influenced by others that they quickly adopt whatever posture and opinions are held by the dominant and "coolest" group. Fashions, opinions and memes can spread astoundingly quickly. Viral contagion can infect the internet overnight. A person can go to bed unknown and wake up next morning known all around the globe if something he has done has gone viral.
There has never been a phenomenon like the internet. The world hasn't even begun to wake up to its true power yet and the changes it is bringing to the world. It has brought to life Marshal McLuhan's concept of the Global Village. Everything is now local. All boundaries are breached and annihilated. Everything is converging. The existence of different cultures is coming under threat - the world is heading relentlessly towards a single, global culture. The Muslims of the Arab Spring were heavily influenced by American and European ideas. Eventually, Islam itself may start to collapse as Muslims identify more with the global culture than with daily prayers and reading the Koran.
One thing that now seems sure to happen is the death of "tradition-directedness": life guided by ancient books and ancient bearded leaders. The great weapon used by tradition-oriented societies was separation. Community elders could literally stop the young people from being contaminated by outside influences by using physical barriers. But now anyone with an internet connection has access to the whole world. WALLS DON'T MATTER ANYMORE. It's no use parents denying their children internet access. All it takes is for one person to have access and all the rest will get access via that person. And if parents don't allow access, they cut their children off from the world and make them backward.
What caused the Muslim uprisings? - the internet. Many of the Muslims spoke of "freedom", their idea of freedom clearly being based on Western notions. To that extent, these Muslims are becoming more liberal. But on the other hand, Islamic jihadist extremism has also been massively accentuated by the internet. So we see another effect of the internet - the disappearance of the middle ground. People become more liberal or more extreme. The mid-ground is a position of compromise but on the internet all extremists can find many voices every bit as extreme as theirs, so they no longer feel any need to compromise.
The Tea Party is an internet phenomenon. So is conspiracy theory world. Conspiracy theorists create more and more bizarre theories, being fed all the time by the crazy input from millions of fantasists. The 9/11 conspiracy theory nonsense could never have happened as it did in the absence of the internet. Immense numbers of half-baked opinions, factoids, misquotations, distortions and curious facts and oddities can be spun together to create immense webs of conspiracy. Viral transmission provides a rocket boost and the natural tendency of most people to ignore reason and analysis (Logos) in favour of exciting stories and fantasies (Mythos) means that billions fall under the spell of absolute nonsense. How is it that billions of people believe in the Torture God of Abraham if not by a complete suspension of rationality? Humans are extremely prone to believing what they want to believe and ignoring everything else. A conspiracy theorist is someone who accepts as true everything that supports the conspiracy theory and rejects as false everything that contradicts it. Indeed the contradictions are deemed to be misinformation and disinformation put out by the conspirators to put people off the trail.
A few factoids and anomalies can be combined with fantasy, wishful thinking and a political axe to grind to create something that takes on a life of its own. BULLSHIT can be magnified to a ridiculous degree, and, as Hitler observed, the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed. People believe what they want to believe and if lots of others believe it too then it becomes reinforced, socially acceptable and hence TRUE! The internet can therefore make eccentric but popular ideas mainstream and credible.
The internet is a magnifier, accelerator, exaggerator and reinforcer. It makes the world more extreme. A more extreme world is where unthinkable things become thinkable. All bets are off. Black swan events become commonplace rather than the exception.
We can think of the world being converted not into a single global village but several such villages, each belonging to an extremist tribe, each hating the others. Intolerance will grow in all directions. Even liberals will become more intolerant.
*****
The death of communism had the unintended consequence of delivering a fatal blow to capitalism. Flushed with triumphalism, the leading capitalists bullied and manipulated the governments into removing all brakes from the capitalist greed machine. Capitalism went out of control and in 2008 the Western banking system was technically insolvent i.e. capitalism had died on the operating table, but no one was willing to "call it" and pronounce the time of death. Instead, the capitalists did the most outrageous and hypocritical thing imaginable: they invoked socialism to save them. In effect, private businesses transferred all of their debts to the State, but without transferring any control. It was the WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME for the people. They got all the debts dumped on them, with no formal ownership or control over anything. Why did the people get the debts but not the profits? "No taxation without representation!" the American Revolutionaries declared in the War of Independence. Yet now the American people have been swamped by enormous debt and taxation and they don't have a single representative on the boards of any of the private institutions that needed to be bailed out. Is that not INSANE? The Americans have been betrayed by their leaders. They now have the constitutional right to remove the government from office, just as they had the right to remove the rule of the British Empire. It's time for the American people to act.
The world has allowed the mad ideology of "free markets" to dominate economics. What is the aim of ALL of the participants in these free markets? TO MAKE MONEY! Generating profit is their sole preoccupation. A market does not care about reason, education, knowledge, quality, goodness, morality, virtue, moderation, caution, stability or any of the other qualities that we would expect to be exhibited by a benevolent government. It's asking for disaster to harness government to an inherently unstable and irrational greed machine.
There's a place for free markets but only with a carefully defined framework. The markets have to be subservient to government, not government to markets. We now know for a fact where free market economics leads us - CATASTROPHE. Free market economics is now as dead as communism.
Just as every individual is free to do whatever they like within the LAW in order to ensure social stability, markets should be allowed to operate freely within the legal framework that is imposed on them to ensure economic stability. The stability of the market is the main point, not its freedom, because unfettered freedom will sooner or later generate a catastrophe.
It always comes back to the same issue - who's in charge? Should elected governments run a country, or private, unaccountable individuals in charge of banks and corporations? Should markets devoted solely to profit-making (usually resulting in astonishing and deranged risk-taking and corporate immorality) be the economic engine of a nation rather than rational policies dedicated to stable growth and the improvement of the nation and its people? Isn't it time the people were in charge rather than the rich?
All instabilities will now be massively and instantly magnified by the internet and global computer systems. Stock markets in every part of the world have effectively merged to create a single global stock market. All markets tend to go up or down at the same time because they are all reacting to each other. Any local rumour can become a global rumour in an instant. There are no firewalls separating systems any longer. In ships, to prevent them from sinking, it's essential to have separate compartments in the hull. A breach to one compartment can result in localised flooding, but the ship continues safely on its way because all of the other compartments are unaffected. In the new global paradigm, we've lost all the safety compartments and firewalls. The situation is RADICALLY UNSTABLE. Any event can sink the ship or burn down the whole building. It's absolutely no coincidence that financial turmoil and excessive greed have reached unprecedented levels in the last twenty years. The scale of the gap between rich and poor that has appeared within this timescale is simply breathtaking. The number of major financial crashes that have occurred around the world in the last twenty years is without precedent. Yet no one in power has any idea of what's really going on. They haven't understood that we are perched over financial apocalypse because there are no safety mechanisms built into the global financial system. It's like a nuclear reactor without a single control rod to moderate the chain reaction. And what happens to an uncontrolled nuclear process? - it explodes catastrophically. It's a BOMB.
We are so close to Armageddon that it's simply terrifying. And what's even more terrifying is that the people charged with running the world are patently clueless about what's really going on. They are driven by the markets and the markets are the detonator for the biggest financial explosion of all time. But who will challenge the markets? Who will face down the rich? Who will build firewalls, watertight safety bulkheads and insert sufficient control rods in the financial reactors? Well, NO ONE AT ALL.
We're on a runaway train and we're rapidly running out of track. The buffers are now right ahead of us. Be in no doubt at all, the final dialectical crisis is almost upon us. It cannot be avoided. The current system will definitely fail. It cannot save itself because it doesn't know how to. It doesn't understand itself. It will perish through ignorance. In the end, stupidity is a terminal condition.
The real issue is what is to be done when the shitstorm arrives. Who will pick up the pieces? To whom will the world turn? If the world were sane, it would of course turn to its sanest, most rational, most talented people, but, as we know all too well, the world is neither sane nor rational and anything could happen. We could get Fascist "strong man" dictators, or religious Messiahs. Fundamentalist Islam could sweep the world. All manner of nightmares are possible.
That's why it's critical for all sensible people to be ready to speak with a single voice and promote a single clear agenda. That's why The Movement proved a monumental disappointment. Instead of preparing the agenda for a New Society, the members blabbered on about New Age bullshit, hippie crap and 9/11 garbage. In the end, several members of The Movement thought that their most important task was to investigate other members of The Movement and pronounce McCarthyite denunciations. What the fuck! When a group starts eating itself, you know it deserves to perish.
That's the fast road to nowhere. We hoped people would write constitutions, declarations, that they would set up political groups and stand in elections, that they would seize the chance to prepare to implement a New World Order. Ho, ho, ho. No chance of that. It takes talented and smart people to do such things: a rare commodity within The Movement. Instead, there were legions of self-indulgent fantasists and bullshitters caught up in their own tiny, unimaginative worlds. How on earth could it serve anyone's interests to open yet another thread on 9/11? Droning on about it will change nothing at all. Creating a New World Order will certainly change things...so why don't you devote your time to that rather than to ludicrous, unproductive conspiracy theories?
"You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass."
Nietzsche
The Catholic versus Protestant Dialectic
Catholicism and Protestantism encapsulate two radically different attitudes towards "authority". An ordinary Catholic believes that the Catholic Church stands between God and him and that the Church alone is qualified to hold that role. Its ordained officials are experts in the Catholic religion and have attained all of the appropriate qualifications. A priest is authorised to provide absolution after an authentic act of penance. A priest is qualified to transubstantiate bread and wine into the real body and blood of Christ. The Pope is the divinely appointed Vicar of Christ on earth. An ordinary Catholic knows that even though he himself may have a simple understanding of Catholicism, the experts know everything about the subject.
Protestantism, on the other hand, cuts out the middleman. Each person, regardless of their qualifications and knowledge, gets their own hotline to God. In fact, only one qualification is necessary - faith. One of the reasons why Protestantism flourished was that it pandered to the ordinary person's vanity. The many years that Catholic priests devoted to theological study were regarded as a complete waste of time. All that any Protestant has to do is say, "I believe" and he's the match of any priest. Protestantism, when understood for what it really is, is a protest against expertise and merit. It's a declaration that "intellectuals" have nothing more valid to say about life than someone who's spent his whole life on a production line making baked beans. To a Protestant, books, learning and knowledge are a waste of time, if not actually Satanic. Not for nothing did Martin Luther declare reason the Devil's whore. Luther's message appeals to the legions of ignoramuses who think their ill-educated thoughts are as good as those of professors. The "conspiracy theorist" is almost invariably a Protestant. Not for a moment does he listen to any experts. Who are they to contradict him? He has absolute faith that he is right, and if he is right about God then he must be right about conspiracies. Of course, he's wrong about both, but that thought never enters his head. Many of the greatest intellectuals have declared that the more they know, the more they understand how much they don't know. A Protestant has the opposite view. The less he knows the less he understands how much he doesn't know. How can you know how ignorant you are unless you read lots of books? - but if you read lots of books you won't be ignorant, or at least you'll be a lot less ignorant than when you began.
Catholicism historically fitted in with aristocratic societies i.e. those based on a hierarchy. Modern democracy is essentially a Protestant phenomenon since it reduces everyone to the same rank regardless of their merits. As Dean Inge said, "Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them." In democracies, no weight is attached to the opinions of experts hence expertise becomes devalued and anti-intellectualism rife. In many Western countries, "intellectual" is a term of abuse. Not surprisingly, almost all intellectuals have loathed democracy. Nietzsche despised everything to do with democracy. He regarded it as an insult to life that elevated the mediocre and prevented the great from succeeding.
Protestant anti-intellectualism abounds in the Tea Party. One of their angles of attack on Obama is that he's a sinister intellectual. In fact, they've obviously never met an intellectual if they think Obama is one. When does Obama ever say anything smart? Even so, in comparison with the likes of Sarah Palin he must seem like one of the Seven Sages.
The ordinary Protestant came to believe that if he read the Bible then he was as qualified as the Pope or anyone else to decide the meaning of Scripture. He failed to comprehend that the mere act of reading a book by no means makes you an expert on that book. Anyone picking up a book by Hegel is unlikely to be much the wiser hundreds of pages later. The reason for that is that in order to understand Hegel you need to be a highly intelligent person familiar with the philosophical tradition in which Hegel wrote. In other words, a particular book is just the tip of an iceberg. It is underpinned by an enormous number of unseen books to which the author is responding. You could never hope to grasp Hegel's meaning while being ignorant of philosophy. To understand Hegel you would first have to learn philosophy, which would disqualify about 99% of the population at a stroke. By exactly the same token, to understand the Bible, you need to do much more than read a single book. What was the historical context in which the book was written? What content was omitted and why; what content was changed and why? What did other religions say? Did the Bible borrow anything from other religions? Was it influenced by them? What coded messages were built into the Bible? What was the literary style of the day? What were the expectations of the people of Biblical days? Who were their enemies? What was the philosophy of the age? What did the heretics have to say?
In other words, only a total RETARD would think that reading the Bible makes him an expert in what the Bible says. But that's what Protestants think. They say to themselves, "Fuck the Pope and the Catholic Church and all the so-called 'experts'. I've read the Bible and no one can tell me that I don't understand it. In fact, I understand it much better than any of those dumb asses. God has spoken directly TO ME!"
There are countless Protestant sects and only one Catholic Church. Why? Because Catholics believe that the Pope and the Church constitute the appropriate source of expertise regarding Catholicism. On the other hand, any Protestant can say he's the expert on the Bible, and no other Protestant can contradict him because there is no formal Protestant truth. It's all about faith, not reason and knowledge. If a Catholic rejects the Pope and the Catholic Church, he ceases to be a Catholic. If a Protestant disagrees with the teachings of a particular Protestant sect, he can start up a new Protestant sect promoting his own view. Thus there are no universally acknowledged Protestant experts. Any Protestant can call himself an expert and establish his own Church - the Church of ME!
In the Protestant way of thinking, a person can go into a bookshop, read a book on brain surgery then declare that he's setting up a brain surgery practice because he now "knows" all about brain surgery. Would you be his first patient? Or would you prefer to have your surgery performed by a recognised expert who had studied and practised for many years?
The idea that reading the Bible, or indeed any book at all, makes you an expert on it is infantile and absurd. This attitude undermines the whole basis of education. It exhibits an astonishing degree of arrogance and self-delusion.
The Protestant attitude manifests itself to a ridiculous degree in the arena of conspiracy theories. Suddenly these "know-alls" (ignoramuses in other words) think they can pontificate on structural engineering, the properties of metals, aircraft technology, the modus operandi of the intelligence services and special forces, "secret government", invisible, shape-shifting Reptilians and so on. Conspiracy theories should be renamed Protestant theories and indeed many of them actively accuse the Pope, the Vatican and the Jesuits of being behind almost everything. Strangely, they rarely direct any bile towards evangelical Protestants. They never declare Protestant Fundamentalism to be a conspiracy against the world even though the vast majority of Freemasons are Protestants - WASPs.
We, the Illuminati, are Gnostics so we detest Catholicism and Protestantism, but we can't help but notice how disproportionately Protestant the conspiracy theory world is. Conspiracy theorists are all self-appointed experts and just as Protestants won't listen to anyone who tells them they know nothing about the Bible, neither will conspiracy theorists listen to anyone telling them that their views are ill-informed nonsense.
The Illuminati subscribe to the "Catholic" model i.e. that of a hierarchy. The Grand Master is the equivalent of the Pope, the ruling council are the Cardinals, the lower degrees are archbishops, bishops and priests. The lowest degree is the laity. It would be unthinkable and preposterous for a first degree Illuminatus to say he knew more about the Illuminati than the Grand Master, and he would very quickly cease to be a member of the Illuminati since you can't teach a fool anything.
Meritocracy is also "Catholic". The most meritorious are at the top and the least meritorious at the bottom. No one is allowed to proclaim themselves an expert in the manner of the Protestant way of thinking. You have to demonstrate merit to the satisfaction of your peers. The Pope is elected by his peers, the "princes" of the Catholic Church, these being the best-qualified individuals within the Catholic Church. Within that context, the Pope is the most meritorious individual in Catholicism.
In Protestantism, if you dislike someone's opinion, you declare your own to be superior. Everyone thinks he's more meritorious than everyone else. In Catholicism, you need a priest (a qualified person) to forgive you and to mediate between God and you. In Protestantism, you forgive yourself and you communicate directly with God without any intermediaries.
In Gnosticism, you have to be an extremely special type of person to achieve gnosis. Only the people of the highest possible merit are eligible. In Protestantism, you just need to say, "I believe in my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" and you're SAVED. You're on your way to paradise just because you said, "I believe." How ridiculous can you get? Protestantism is the Ship of Fools.
The Protestant attitude is painfully visible in the moronic Tea Party where a bunch of no-brain Christian Fundamentalists imagine that their embarrassingly stupid analysis of a complex world should be adopted by the whole nation. If it were, America would be destroyed within a single presidential term.
We live a world in which merit is neither respected nor acknowledged. Merit is attacked from two deadly angles. Privilege ("who you know") wipes the floor with merit ("what you know"). And the self-appointed expert ("I know best") - the "Protestant" - ridicules merit. The highly qualified are labelled geeks, nerds and dorks.
Modern-style democracy is a Protestant ideology. People are allowed to vote on things they know nothing about. How many people could write a 10,000-word analysis of the economic system of their country? And if they can't, in what way are they qualified to vote on who should run their nation's economic policy? Is it rational, is it sane, to give a vote to the ignorant? What must be the outcome of allowing the ignorant to vote? Are you likely to get the best government, the most meritorious - or the government best able to pander to and manipulate the delusions of the ignorant? Capitalists are brilliant at manipulating people because their whole purpose in life is to seduce people into parting with their money.
Protestantism and democracy provide an extremely attractive message to stupid people. "You are experts," they are told. "You have a hotline to God," they are told. "You are special people, the saved, the elect."
And all the morons fall for it. Why? Because they're egotists and narcissists. They're vain, arrogant, self-deluded. They think they're clued-up about the world. They think no one can fool them, even though in truth they are fooled all the time. If you don't KNOW, you will always be deceived. Knowledge, not self-delusion, is the antidote to deception.
America is the archetypal "Protestant" nation, both religiously and attitudinally. Every American is an "expert" on everything, or so they like to believe. America is the home of the conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theorist is someone who thinks he's much smarter than the experts. In fact, the experts are invariably in on it, whatever IT is. But the conspiracy theorists can see through it all with their preternatural laser vision. America is the home of rampant ego and narcissism. Like all anti-meritocracies, America imagines itself supremely meritocratic. All the non-experts consider themselves experts.
The world despises education. If it respected it, the best educated and most intelligent would be running the world. But instead the moneymen are in charge, and they're the dumbest fucks on earth, good at only one thing - lining their own pockets. If you allow the equation money = power to form then what do you expect but inept government?
What was the main problem with the Catholic approach? It was the contempt that the Catholic elite had for the ordinary people. The elite kept the knowledge for themselves. They didn't let the ordinary people join in. The monks, priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and popes were all smart people, but the Catholic laity were dumb asses because they received no education.
The founders of Protestantism saw a gap in the market. They gave the people the Bible in their own language rather than incomprehensible, elitist Latin (that no ordinary person understood). But of course, it was then necessary to teach the illiterate masses how to read and write. So that's what they did. And because the ordinary Protestants could now read and write, they became much smarter than the average illiterate Catholics. So although the Catholic elite were enormously smarter religiously and philosophically than the barbarian Protestants who despised philosophy and cared only for Scripture, the average Protestant soon became smarter than the average Catholic.
Meritocracy, unlike Catholicism, wants everyone to be as smart as possible. There can be no such thing as a meritocratic elite ruling over a dumb population. The meritocratic elite must be the crème de la crème, the best of a fully educated population.
What could be more sane and rational than having the smartest, most meritocratic people in charge of the world? So why has it never been tried? Money, faith, superstition, ignorance and violence have ruled our world, never merit.
The Will
America has traditionally been ruled by WASPs - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, originating from England, Scotland, Wales, the North of Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany. Freemasonry - which was originally anti-Abrahamist - gradually became a bastion of elite WASPs and deeply hostile to Catholicism which had banned Catholics from becoming Masons. The Anglo-Saxon WASPs via, first, the British Empire and, secondly, the power of America have in essence ruled the world for some 250 years. Britain, with the world's largest, most powerful and most skilled navy literally ruled the waves, until the end of WWII.
Virtually no country suffered more economically from the two World Wars than Britain, even though it was on the winning side both times. The cost crippled the British Empire and led to its disintegration. Britain could simply no longer afford to run an empire and, with powerful nationalist groups demanding independence in all of its territories, it steadily granted them their wishes. Britain is now a minor nation still haunted by the huge power it once wielded and in denial about its rather pathetic status these days.
America, the rebellious child of the British Empire, has supplanted its frail father but now its glory days are slipping away too and it's disturbingly easy to imagine America slipping much further than Britain. Without its financial and economic clout, it's possible to imagine America as a Third World country, full of poorly paid people suffering worse conditions than the Chinese and Indians.
Globalisation has placed enormous downward pressure on salaries for unskilled labour. An American capitalist can just as easily set up shop in China as in America. He will only establish his business in America if it can generate higher profits than its Chinese equivalent and that means that low-paid Americans are now in competition with some of the cheapest labour in the world, despite living in a much more expensive nation. This is a catastrophic situation. America could easily go down the tubes. Its debts are mind-boggling. America is INSOLVENT. If America were a business and all of its debts were called in tomorrow by its creditors, America would be closed down, all of its workers fired, all of its assets seized and handed over to the creditors. That is the underlying reality of America today. Their capitalist leaders have no national loyalty and only care about maximising return on investment.
You don't get out of this situation by savagely cutting debt, which only serves to cripple economic growth and throw the nation into recession and even Depression. Nor do you get out of it by printing money and generating more debt, combined with deadly inflation. In fact, you're pretty much screwed whatever you do. The real solution is to recognise that the system itself is rotten to the core and has failed. A whole new system is required.
Germany had monstrous and terrifying problems in 1933 when Hitler came to power as the "strong man" to sort things out. Within six years, National Socialism had transformed Germany from a bankrupt nation in ruins to one of the greatest powers on earth. Just SIX years!
Now, of course, no sane person would advocate that any modern nation should embrace Nazism. What we are saying is that a radically new political model with strong leadership can in an extremely short time transform a country's fortunes.
Look at the hopeless muddle and deadlock in contemporary Washington DC. Can any rational person regard that as EFFECTIVE government? It's incapable of sorting out the mess. No one could succeed with that form of government. Its actual structure precludes strong leadership. It was designed that way, and now that feature, once such a virtue, has become a disaster.
Strong, decisive leadership is imperative in these dark days. You can be absolutely sure that Hitlers are waiting in the wings. If the world wishes to avoid a repetition of WWII, it must turn to strong but benevolent leadership dedicated not to war (as in Nazism) but to education (as in meritocracy).
It simply cannot be emphasized enough that there is only one way out of the world's woes - much smarter, higher quality, more creative, more active, more ingenious citizens. There is only one way to create a new humanity - EDUCATION. Education must be the central preoccupation and defining condition of any modern nation. Education is the ultimate production line - for creating SMART HUMANITY.
Adolf Hitler was a man of immense will. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche brought the concept of the will to the heart of German thinking, but whereas those two men were intellectual and cultural giants, Hitler wasn't. Hitler was a soldier, a racist, and an anti-intellectual - almost Protestant in his hatred of the intelligentsia. Any art he didn't like he regarded as "degenerate". He was infected by the Jewish idea of the "Chosen People", which he converted into the "Master Race". Like the Jews, he was obsessed with blood purity. Like the Jews, he was obsessed with the concept of one "God" - himself! - that everyone must worship and obey unswervingly. The greatest irony of history was that in terms of his attitudes, Hitler was the greatest Jew of all time. He subconsciously identified with Judaism so much that he wanted to BECOME Jehovah. You simply have to read the Torah to see that the Nazis were doing all the things advocated by the ancient Jews. Why is it that no one points out that Judaism has always been pure Nazism by another name?
Hitler associated the quality of the will with the quality of the blood. A race with tainted blood was ipso facto weakened and corrupted. It had inferior will and would inevitably be defeated by those of pure will. Much of "Harry Potter" is devoted to the idea that mixed bloods are "good" and can defeat pure bloods who are "bad". Lord Voldemort is simply Hitler and much of the story is about presenting his supporters as menacing Nazi stormtroopers.
In their personal lives, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both extreme individualists. In terms of his philosophy, Nietzsche practically made individualism a religion. He would have loathed the mind-controlled automata of the Nazi movement who had sacrificed all individuality in order to follow the leader. For Nietzsche, will belonged to the individual and expressed the individual's inner nature. It had no racial dimension whatever. Hitler made the will political, racial and militaristic, and Nazism was the expression of national rather than individual will.
The true antidote to Nazism is to have a population of strong-willed individuals i.e. a nation full of strong wills rather than a nation with a collective strong will but individually weak and submissive individuals. All Nazis, by making Hitler their God, were effectively submissives. No dominants would ever have embraced Hitler's "divine" leadership. The Prussian elite class regarded Hitler as the "little Corporal" and mocked him, but unlike Hitler, they had no vision of how to lead Germany out of chaos, so in the end they all bowed to Hitler. The 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler was led by a Prussian and aristocratic elite. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg who planted the bomb that almost killed Hitler was from a Catholic aristocratic family on his father's side, and the Prussian elite on his mother's.
The Same Old Story
"Toughey" sent us the following message:
I am currently reviewing your webpage "Goldman Sucks". You made an issue of the SEC finally "cracking down" on Goldman. To quote Matt Taiibi of Rolling Stone in his article "At least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets." So they made at least $26 billion. The fines they paid the SEC equaled $550 million. That's a pretty good return on your investment showing that white-collar crime pays.
Another interesting fact, the head of the SEC is a former Goldman Sachs employee, as is the head of the Fed, Ben Bernanke as well as the Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner. Goldman also arranged the loans for Greece that they defaulted on. I think being hung, drawn, and quartered would be a "soft sentence" for these pirates.
Our Comment: The SEC turned out to be more interested in posturing than doing anything serious. Same old story. No one ever takes the steps that need to be taken. Goldman Sachs should be closed down or nationalised.
A Bloomberg report stated that the "Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion From the Fed":
Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits. By 2008, the housing market's collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.
"These are all whopping numbers," said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. "You're talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money."
(By Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz)
According to an inspector general overseeing government bailouts, the U.S. so far has committed nearly $2.98 trillion toward stabilizing financial companies and rescuing domestic automakers.
"This is a huge, unprecedented financial commitment…$2.9 trillion is just short of what the entire federal government spent in fiscal year 2008," said Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus. "It's like having a second United States government budget dedicated solely to saving the financial system, and that is truly surreal."
Are you happy that you bailed out the rich? If you didn't, the economy would have collapsed because the economy is actually a plutonomy and is all about the rich.
Ever feel like you've been swindled?
The Bankers
In October 2008, the people of Britain were within TWO HOURS of being unable to withdraw money from British banks. The entire banking system was about to collapse. Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer described the bank chiefs as "so arrogant and stupid that they might bring us all down." Darling said of Sir Fred Goodwin, CEO of the enormous Royal Bank of Scotland, "[he behaved as if he was] off to play a game of golf."
You have to wonder at a system that allows "stupid and arrogant" people, unelected and unaccountable, to be running a nation's economy.
The Tobacco Industry - pure poison
A tobacco industry memo declared: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with 'the body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."
The tobacco industry, as a matter of policy, sows disinformation, encourages misinformation and seeks to personally undermine those who carry out anti-smoking research. They use expensive, high-powered lawyers to bully their enemies. Why are these crooks allowed to get away with it? Are their profits more important than ethics and the world's health?
According to an academic report, smokers are heavily influenced by the glossy, colourful, stylish packaging of cigarettes. If cigarettes were instead presented in plain, brown packets, people would smoke less. Women in particular are influenced by the look and feel of a cigarette pack.
A pack of cigarettes looks "cool" and seems sophisticated and rebellious. If presented in uncool packaging, cigarettes suddenly lose their allure. They become associated with losers, with people with no style, with the desperate, addicted underclass.
Capitalism relies heavily on packaging. Change the packaging and you change the perception of the product. It's essential to make socially harmful activities uncool. Capitalism uses operant conditioning to hook people; reverse conditioning should be deployed by the government to unhook them. The same is true of religion.
This Protestant Party was founded in America in 1845 and flourished for fifteen years. Its modern-day equivalent is the Tea Party. It was ferociously anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, anti-black, pro-temperance and pro-money: the usual sober, materialistic, money-grabbing racist attitude that we all know so well from modern right wing Americans and Christian Fundamentalists.
The Know Nothings' particular hatred was reserved for Catholic immigrants from Ireland. These were fleeing the devastating Famine that killed one million people, despite the fact that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, then the richest and most powerful nation on Earth with a vast Empire. The Protestant British were perfectly happy to watch the Irish Catholics starve to death.
Catholic immigrants from Germany received a barely less hostile reception. Catholics were regarded as an alien army under the direct control of the Pope - yes, you really have heard it all before. Conspiracy theorist Benjamin Fulford is always talking about Satanists in the Vatican. We call Catholics Satanists too, but we also include all Protestants, all Jews and all Muslims amongst the Satan worshippers i.e. every person who believes in the evil God of Abraham who ordered a father to murder his son. If that isn't the essence of evil, what is? If you don't call the story of Abraham evil then it means you have no moral compass whatever. If it doesn't occur to you that it's impossible for the True God to order anyone's death in a human sacrifice then it's no wonder you worship the Devil.
So, 19th century Protestants created conspiracy theories about Catholic immigration. The materialistic Protestant mindset is that of a natural-born conspiracy theorist and the theories are all about "aliens" (whether Catholic, Black, Asian, Hispanic or Extra-terrestrial) coming to take away the material possessions of the Protestants and to stop them practising their "God-fearing" religion.
Ironically, the Know Nothings referred to themselves as "Native Americans", although the actual Native Americans might have had something pointed to say about that.
Only Protestant males over 21 with British ancestry were eligible to join the Know Nothings i.e. they were the archetypal WASP Party. The Know Nothings (what an appropriate name!) demanded immigration curbs and many, but not all, were eager supporters of slavery.
The Party's origins lay in the American Republican Party (not the same as THE Republican Party) established in New York in 1843, which then became known as the Native American Party. In 1845, it went national, and in 1855 it rebranded itself as the American Party. They deployed the usual right-wing tactic of invoking patriotism, nationalism, wrapping oneself in the American flag and saying, "God bless America." Attached to the Party was a Masonic secret society called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner.
"Know Nothing" was the name derisively applied to the American Party because members were encouraged never to discuss the Party with outsiders and the phrase they were instructed to use with any interrogators was, "I know nothing."
The Irish Catholics gravitated towards the Democratic Party, meaning that WASPs then favoured the Republican Party. In many ways, the Democrat versus Republican divide in America is Catholics (Irish, Poles, Italians, Germans, Hispanics) and African Americans versus WASPs (of British, German Lutheran and Dutch ancestry). It's no accident that America's sole Catholic and Black presidents both belonged to the Democratic Party. Jews split both ways, although they have often been more associated with the Democrats, though that is starting to change. In recent years, Christian Fundamentalist right-wingers have eagerly embraced Zionism and mixed it in with theories of Armageddon and the Rapture.
The platform of the American Party comprised:
1) Severe restriction on immigration in general and from Catholic countries in particular.
2) Political office to be restricted to native-born Americans of British lineage and the Protestant persuasion.
3) An immigrant could gain citizenship only after 21 years.
4) Teachers in public schools must be Protestants.
5) The Bible must be read daily in public schools.
6) There must be severe restrictions on the sale of liquor.
7) Only English must be spoken.
Doesn't that platform sound remarkably like that of modern-day American Christian Fundamentalists? America is traditionally associated with virulent racism towards blacks, but it has also been ferociously anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. In fact, America has proved itself one of the most hate-filled, intolerant nations on earth, and all of the hatred has emanated from a single source - WASPs. The WASPs of Britain and America have been one of the most evil forces in human history. Masonic WASPs entered into an unholy alliance with Zionist bankers to create the so-called "Anglo-Saxon" ultra-capitalist economic model, financed by Jewish money. The purpose of this model is to create a global dynastic WASP aristocracy and plutocracy that will always support Zionism and will rule the world in perpetuity. And it has done an astoundingly effective job. Go through a list of all the American billionaires and it's virtually impossible to find anyone who isn't a Jew or WASP Mason. Q.E.D.! This is the economic model and ideology that must be trampled into the ground and destroyed forever. It is anathema.
When are people going to wise up and realise the identity of the REAL enemy? It's not Illuminati "lizards"; it's WASP Masons and Zionist bankers. Tragically, because most conspiracy theorists are Protestants, they refuse to acknowledge Protestantism itself as one of the primary sources of the world's ills. In fact, most Protestant conspiracy theorists are always looking to blame anyone OTHER than Protestants for anything that goes wrong. The "Illuminati" are the perfect fall guys because the version that exists in the minds of most conspiracy theorists doesn't and has never existed - so it's the perfect fantasy on which to project any old nonsense. And, of course, Grand Master Adam Weishaupt was from a Catholic background with a Jesuit education. Could there be a better candidate upon whom to unload endless absurd theories? The fact that he was a law professor committed to the overthrow of monarchy and Christianity somehow permitted him to be described as a Jew, a socialist, a monarchist, an aristocrat, a banker, an international financier, a papal agent, a Jesuit agent yada yada yada. It's complete insanity. To the Protestant mind, an intellectual from a Catholic/Jesuit background is the ultimate monster.
The Ku Klux Klan took much of their agenda from the Know Nothings. A leader of the American Party was depicted in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York in the memorable shape of William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), supposedly based on a Know Nothing called William Poole.
Karl Marx said, "Historical phenomena always happen twice - the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."
In fact, the same historical phenomena happen not just twice but many times and in many guises. The Protestant Know Nothings and Ku Klux Klan have re-emerged as the Tea Party, Christian Fundamentalists, Republicans and conspiracy theorists. Any conspiracy theory that puts Catholics, Jesuits, the Illuminati, socialists, communists or atheists in the frame is unquestionably produced by Protestants. Any conspiracy theory that looks back to a golden age that has been "ruined" by some group or other is the product of the Protestant mind.
The reality is this. Those in power have ALWAYS conspired against those denied power. Power itself is tantamount to conspiracy. Those with power will do anything to keep it and will construct strategies to ensure that outcome i.e. they immediately engage in conduct designed to increase their advantages and decrease threats to them. To put it another way, they automatically conspire.
There is only one type of system where the powerful have no need or scope to conspire: a meritocracy. In a meritocracy, you're at the top because you're the best. But when someone else is best, they take over. In a genuinely constituted meritocracy where merit is objectively obvious, the system cannot be rigged. Anyone who subscribes to meritocracy is essentially signing up to recognising the objective merits of others, and if someone has superior merit then they are thereby entitled to greater power. They have earned it. In non-meritocratic power structures, heredity is the main organizing principle. You get power because your parents had it, not because of any merit inherent in you. The next most common organising principle is cronyism. Power is awarded to you if you are a friend and ally of those in power, or you're one of their sycophants. Unmeritorious cronies will always be favoured over meritorious outsiders. But that very fact sows the seed of destruction of anti-meritocratic systems. Invariably, they let complete idiots get to the top, who then exercise appalling judgment and bring about catastrophe.
Why did the Credit Crunch happen? Ultimately, it was because our society is led by unmeritorious individuals - by the beneficiaries of privilege and cronyism. Stupid leaders create stupid systems. If you want to avoid boom and bust you must turn to meritocrats. The best possible world is the one that gives maximum power to the most talented individuals, to Plato's Guardians and philosopher kings.
If you WANT a disaster, make sure privilege, heredity and cronyism are allowed to go unchecked. Why do successful corporations fail? It's usually because a leader of merit retires who makes the mistake of allowing a son or crony to take over. Look at the Murdoch Empire. It's now collapsing. Why? Because Rupert Murdoch, a ferociously ruthless business mogul, went down the catastrophic road of cronyism and nepotism. He surrounded himself with a gang of immoral individuals who brought his stinking empire into total disrepute. They were the only people an operator like him could trust. He would never have tolerated having someone smarter than him in his organisation.