The Banksters and American Foreign Policy

What's driving the debt ceiling debate

From Antiwar, by Justin Raimondo, July 15, 2011

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Everyone agrees the United States is in a crisis of momentous importance: we’re approaching bankruptcy [.pdf], millions are out of work, and the emotional leitmotif of our culture can be summed up in one word: demoralization.  

Is there a way out? 

Well, yes and no. Yes – if the solution comes from below: no, if we’re depending on our "leaders" to pull us out of the abyss. 

Let me explain. 

The problem is dramatically illustrated by our current debate over the "debt ceiling" crisis. In order to reassure themselves – and, more importantly, the public – that they aren’t just madmen, Congress imposed on itself a "debt ceiling" beyond which they are not supposed to go. In reality, however, they have raised the ceiling whenever they’ve felt like it. Now, however, as the imminence of America’s bankruptcy has impressed itself on increasing numbers of voters, there is some resistance to raising it – and, as a result, there is panic in Washington. Are the peons objecting to Washington’s assumption of absolute power, and actually challenging the elite’s ability to spend without limit? Horrors! 

For months, the pundits and Washington think-tank know-it-alls have been in a tizzy: who do these unwashed peasants think they are? But of course we’ve got to raise the debt ceiling – after all, what about the "full faith and credit" of the United States? Don’t these denizens of flyover country realize they don’t have a choice in the matter? And now, with unmistakable finality, Wall Street has spoken in the form of Moody’s and S&P, the bonds rating agencies, which are threatening to downgrade US bonds if Congress fails to raise the limit. 

This should give the ordinary American a clue as to what is at stake here, and who is on what side: it’s the Washington insiders and Wall Street versus the people of the United States – and the stakes are the fate of the nation. 

Let’s recount a little history here: in the winter of 2008 the house of cards that is the American economy suddenly collapsed, and the Great Bubble of faux "prosperity" burst. A long orgy of malinvestment – spurred by bank credit expansion [.pdf] (i.e. the Federal Reserve printing gobs of "money") – came to an ignominious end. The housing market, already weak, imploded. It was a massive market correction, one that had to be endured before it could be cured – but the big boys weren’t going to take their medicine. 

In a free economy, the banks that invested trillions in risky mortgages and other fool’s gold would have taken the hit. Instead, however, what happened is that the American taxpayers took the hit, paid the bill, and cleaned up their mess – and were condemned to suffer record unemployment, massive foreclosures, and the kind of despair that kills the soul. 

How did this happen? There are two versions of this little immorality tale, one coming from the "left" and the other from the "right" (the scare-quotes are there for a reason, which I’ll get to in a moment or two). 

The "left" version goes something like this: 

The evil capitalists, in league with their bought-and-paid for cronies in government, destroyed and looted the economy until there was nothing left to steal. Then, when their grasping hands had reached the very bottom of the treasure chest, they dialed 911 and the emergency team (otherwise known as the US Congress) came to their rescue, doling out trillions to the looters and leaving the rest of America to pay the bill.  

The "right" version goes something like the following: 

Politically connected Wall Streeters, in league with their bought-and-paid-for cronies in government, destroyed and looted the economy until there was nothing left to steal. Then, when their grasping hands had reached the very bottom of the treasure chest, they dialed BIG-GOV-HELP and the feds showed up with the cash. 

The first thing one notices about these two analyses, taken side by side, is their similarity: yes, the "left" blames the free market, and the "right" blames Big Government, but when you get past the blame game their descriptions of what actually happened look like veritable twins. And as much as I agree with the "right" about their proposed solution – a radical cut in government spending – it is the "left" that has the most accurate analysis of who’s to blame. 

It is, of course, the big banks – the recipients of bailout loot, the ones who profited (and continue to profit) from the economic catastrophe that has befallen us. 

During the 1930s, the so-called Red Decade, no leftist agitprop was complete without a cartoon rendering of the top-hatted capitalist with his foot planted firmly on the throat of the proletariat (usually depicted as a muscular-but-passive male in chains). That imagery, while crude, is largely correct – an astonishing statement, I know, coming from an avowed libertarian and "reactionary," no less. Yet my leftist pals, and others with a superficial knowledge of libertarianism, will be even more surprised that the founder of the modern libertarian movement, also an avowed (and proud) "reactionary," agreed with me (or, rather, I with him): 

"Businessmen or manufacturers can either be genuine free enterprisers or statists; they can either make their way on the free market or seek special government favors and privileges. They choose according to their individual preferences and values. But bankers are inherently inclined toward statism. 

"Commercial bankers, engaged as they are in unsound fractional reserve credit, are, in the free market, always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Hence they are always reaching for government aid and bailout. 

"Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt. Both sets of bankers, then, tend to be tied in with government policy, and try to influence and control government actions in domestic and foreign affairs." 

That’s Murray N. Rothbard, the great libertarian theorist and economist, in his classic monograph Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy. If you want a lesson in the real motivations behind our foreign policy of global intervention, starting at the very dawn of the American empire, you have only to read this fascinating treatise. The essence of it is this: the very rich have stayed very rich in what would otherwise be a dynamic and ever-changing economic free-for-all by securing government favors, enjoying state-granted monopolies, and using the US military as their private security guards. Conservatives who read Rothbard’s short book will never look at the Panama Canal issue in the same light again. Lefties will come away from it marveling at how closely the libertarian Rothbard comes to echoing the old Marxist aphorism that the government is the "executive committee of the capitalist class." 

Rothbard’s account of the course of American foreign policy as the history of contention between the Morgan interests, the Rockefellers, and the various banking "families," who dealt primarily in buying and selling government bonds, is fascinating stuff, and it illuminates a theme common to both left and right commentators: that the elites are manipulating the policy levers to ensure their own economic interests unto eternity. 

In normal times, political movements are centered around elaborate ideologies, complex narratives that purport to explain what is wrong and how to fix it. They have their heroes, and their villains, their creation myths and their dystopian visions of a dark future in store if we don’t heed their call to revolution (or restoration, depending on whether they’re hailing from the "left" or the "right"). 

You may have noticed, however, that these are not normal times: we’re in a crisis of epic proportions, not only an economic crisis but also a cultural meltdown in which our social institutions are collapsing, and with them longstanding social norms. In such times, ideological categories tend to break down, and we’ve seen this especially in the foreign policy realm, where both the "extreme" right and the "extreme" left are calling for what the elites deride as "isolationism." On the domestic front, too, the "right" and "left" views of what’s wrong with the country are remarkably alike, as demonstrated above. Conservatives and lefties may have different solutions, but they have, I would argue, a common enemy: the banksters. 

This characterization of the banking industry as the moral equivalent of gangsters has its proponents on both sides of the political spectrum, and today that ideological convergence is all but complete, with only "centrists" and self-described pragmatists dissenting. What rightists and leftists have in common, in short, is a very powerful enemy – and that’s all a mass political movement needs to get going. 

In normal times, this wouldn’t be enough: but, as I said above, these most assuredly aren’t normal times. The crisis lends urgency to a process that has been developing – unfolding, if you will – for quite some time, and that is the evolution of a political movement that openly disdains the "left" and "right" labels, and homes in on the main danger to liberty and peace on earth: the state-privileged banking system that is now foreclosing on America. 

This issue is not an abstraction: we see it being played out on the battlefield of the debt ceiling debate. Because, after all, who will lose and who will win if the debt ceiling isn’t raised? The losers will be the bankers who buy and sell government bonds, i.e. those who finance the War Machine that is today devastating much of the world. My leftie friends might protest that these bonds also finance Social Security payments, and I would answer that they need to grow a spine: President Obama’s threat that Social Security checks may not go out after the August deadline is, like everything out that comes out of his mouth, a lie. The government has the money to pay on those checks: this is just his way of playing havoc with the lives of American citizens, a less violent but nonetheless just as evil version of the havoc he plays with the lives of Afghans,Pakistanis, and Libyans every day.  

This isn’t about Social Security checks: it’s about an attempt to reinflate the bubble of American empire, which has been sagging of late, and keep the government printing presses rolling. For the US government, unlike a private entity, can print its way out of debt – or, these days, by simply adding a few zeroes to the figures on a computer screen. A central bank, owned by "private" individuals, controls this process: it is called the Federal Reserve. And the Fed has been the instrument of the banksters from its very inception [.pdf], at the turn of the 19th century – not coincidentally, roughly the time America embarked on its course of overseas empire. 

There is a price to be paid, however, for this orgy of money-printing: the degradation, or cheapening, of the dollar. Most of us suffer on account of this policy: the only beneficiaries are those who receive those dollars first, before it trickles down to the rest of us. The very first to receive them are, of course, the bankers, but there’s another class of business types who benefit, and those are the exporters, whose products are suddenly competitive with cheaper foreign goods. This has been a major driving force behind US foreign policy, as Rothbard points out: 

"The great turning point of American foreign policy came in the early 1890s, during the second Cleveland Administration. It was then that the U.S. turned sharply and permanently from a foreign policy of peace and non-intervention to an aggressive program of economic and political expansion abroad. At the heart of the new policy were America’s leading bankers, eager to use the country’s growing economic strength to subsidize and force-feed export markets and investment outlets that they would finance, as well as to guarantee Third World government bonds. The major focus of aggressive expansion in the 1890s was Latin America, and the principal Enemy to be dislodged was Great Britain, which had dominated foreign investments in that vast region. 

"In a notable series of articles in 1894, Bankers’ Magazine set the agenda for the remainder of the decade. Its conclusion: if ‘we could wrest the South American markets from Germany and England and permanently hold them, this would be indeed a conquest worth perhaps a heavy sacrifice.’ 

"Long-time Morgan associate Richard Olney heeded the call, as Secretary of State from 1895 to 1897, setting the U.S. on the road to Empire. After leaving the State Department, he publicly summarized the policy he had pursued. The old isolationism heralded by George Washington’s Farewell Address is over, he thundered. The time has now arrived, Olney declared, when ‘it behooves us to accept the commanding position… among the Power of the earth.’ And, ‘the present crying need of our commercial interests,’ he added, ‘is more markets and larger markets’ for American products, especially in Latin America.’" 

The face of the Enemy has long since changed, and Britain is our partner in a vast mercantilist enterprise, but the mechanics and motivation behind US foreign policy remain very much the same. You’ll note that the Libyan "rebels," for example, set up a Central Bank right off the bat, even before ensuring their military victory over Gadhafi – and who do you think is going to be selling (and buying) those Libyan "government" bonds? It sure as heck won’t be Joe Sixpack: it’s the same Wall Streeters who issued an ultimatum to the Tea Party, via Moody’s, that they’ll either vote to raise the debt ceiling or face the consequences. 

But what are those consequences – and who will feel their impact the most? 

It’s the bankers who will take the biggest hit if US bonds are downgraded: the investment bankers, who invested in such a dodgy enterprise as the US government, whose "full faith and credit" isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. In a free market, these losers would pay the full price of their bad business decisions – in our crony-capitalist system, however, they win. 

They win because they have the US government behind them — and because their strategy of degrading the dollar will reap mega-profits from American exporters, whose overseas operations they are funding. The "China market," and the rest of the vast undeveloped stretches of the earth that have yet to develop a taste for iPads and Lady Gaga, all this and more will be open to them as long as the dollar continues to fall.  

That this will cripple the buying power of the average American, and raise the specter of hyper-inflation, matters not one whit of difference to the corporate and political elites that control our destiny: for with the realization of their vision of a World Central Bank, in which a new global currency controlled by them can be printed to suit their needs, they will be set free from all earthly constraints, or so they believe.  

With America as the world policeman and the world banker – in alliance with our European satellites – the Washington elite can extend their rule over the entire earth. It’s true we won’t have much to show for it, here in America: with the dollar destroyed, we’ll lose our economic primacy, and be subsumed into what George Herbert Walker Bush called the "New World Order." Burdened with defending the corporate profits of the big banks and exporters abroad, and also with bailing them out on the home front when their self-created bubbles burst, the American people will see a dramatic drop in their standard of living – our sacrifice to the gods of "internationalism." That’s what they mean when they praise the new "globalized" economy. 

Yet the American people don’t want to be sacrificed, either to corporate gods or some desiccated idol of internationalism, and they are getting increasingly angry – and increasing savvy when it comes to identifying the source of their troubles.  

This brings us to the prospects for a left-right alliance, both short term and in the long run. In the immediate future, the US budget crisis could be considerably alleviated if we would simply end the wars started by George W. Bush and vigorously pursued by his successor. Aside from that, how many troops do we still have in Europe – more than half a century after World War II? How many in Korea – long after the Korean war? Getting rid of all this would no doubt provide enough savings to ensure that those Social Security checks go out – but that’s a bargain Obama will never make. 

All those dollars, shipped overseas, enrich the military-industrial complex and their friends, the exporters – and drain the very life blood out of the rest of us. Opposition to this policy ought to be the basis of a left-right alliance, a movement to bring America home and put America first.  

In the long term, there is the basis for a more comprehensive alliance: the de-privileging of the banking sector, which cemented its rule with the establishment of the Federal Reserve. That, however, is a topic too complex to be adequately covered in a single column, and so I’ll just leave open the intriguing possibility.  

"Left" and "right" mean nothing in the current context: the real division is between government-privileged plutocrats and the rest of us. What you have to ask yourself is this: which side are you on?  

Read more by Justin Raimondo

• The Debt Ceiling and the Warfare State – July 12th, 2011
• Next Up: Pakistan – July 10th, 2011
• America, Won’t You Please Come Home? – July 7th, 2011
• Against ‘Nation-Building’ – July 5th, 2011
• The Phony Argument Against ‘Isolationism’ – July 3rd, 2011

The Collapse of Paper Money and the Vertical Move of Gold

From 24hgold, July 14th, 2011

by Darryl Robert Schoon - Survive the Crisis

Money in capitalist economies is an IOU, an IOU that can’t be repaid

Paper money, invented by the Chinese, first appeared in the West in the 13^thcentury. Brought back from China by Marco Polo and his uncles, author Ralph Foster describes the West’s reaction to the hitherto unseen phenomena of money as a piece of paper.

Upon returning to Italy, Polo showed off some Chinese currency notes and explained how they were used…An article by Will Willbond in the November 1995 issue of ‘The Bank Note Reporter’ describes the Venetian reaction:

The Emperor of China (who we call Kubalai Khan) gave the Polos a camel loaded with 1,000 cash paper notes as a gift from their sovereign. The doge (chief magistrate of Venice) and the cardinal (the Pope’s cousin) looked at these…notes in awe and dismay.

The hen-scratched writing was not in Latin or Greek but in a secret language, most likely the language of the Devil. They proceeded to burn these notes and accused Polo of heresy.

pg 38, Ralph Foster, Fiat Paper Money: the History and Evolution of our Currency, 2^nd ed. 

In retrospect, the disturbed reaction of the Venetians was not without cause. For when paper money was later issued in the West, it was to assume a far more sinister guise—no longer was money a savings-based instrument of exchange as it had been throughout human history. In the West, paper money was to become an integral part of a scheme to profit by the spread of debt, i.e. usury.

DEBT-BASED CAPITALISM AND THE RISE OF MODERN BANKING

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.

Charles Lab, Essays of Elia, 1833

The above quote is from Will Slatyer’s The Debt Delusion, Evolution and Management of Financial Risk (2008). In his remarkable book, Slatyer traces the origins of debt to before the coinage of gold and silver.

Slatyer notes: In ancient times, interest was rarely charged on advances of precious metals … However, if one did not pay the loan back as agreed, interest was charged at very high rates …The word ‘interest’ refers to the compensation under Roman law which was due to the debtor who had defaulted, i.e. compensation. (pg 12)

Debt distinguished the West’s paper banknotes—issued from central banks in the form of loans—from China’s paper money issued by the state. In the West, however, debt was to replace savings as the basis of commerce.

Although it was two Scots, William Patterson and John Law, who introduced paper money to the West, paper money as debt, i.e. capitalism, can be traced to the Jews who had observed the earlier use of paper money and paper financial instruments in the East

Ralph Foster notes: Jews doing business in China observed and studied the use of promissory notes, vouchers, draft notes, and negotiable certificates of deposit. They saw how this paper circulated freely among the general population rather than only among merchants. Eventually, they adapted these financial instruments to their own use—long before the first Christian travelers had even heard of them.

Europe was thus an indirect beneficiary of eastern financial knowledge. Max Weber, the famous sociologist, recognized the importance of Jewish contributions to the development of capitalism and lectured on their common oriental origin.

pg. 34, Ralph Foster, Fiat Paper Money: the History and Evolution of our Currency, 2^nd ed.

HOW CHINA’S FIAT MONEY BECOME DEBT-BASED PAPER BANKNOTES IN THE WEST

Ralph Fosters’ Fiat Paper Money: the History and Evolution of our Currency explains how China’s paper money came to the West: Those who benefit from fiat money’s devious gifts would rather its origins remain forgotten. Thanks to Ralph Foster’s scholarship, however, the history of fiat money is now known.

Note: To order Fiat Paper Money send check or money order for $29.95 to Foster Publishing, 2189 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94704, free shipping in USA, Global Priority mail outside USA $18.00, email: tfdf@pacbell.net

When the Scot, William Patterson, proposed his idea of a central bank to King William III of England, banks and paper money were unknown, at least in the West. In the East, paper money had for 600 years led to reoccurring episodes of runaway inflation and the collapse of dynasties. Finally in 1661, China outlawed paper money; and thirty-three years later, in 1694, paper banknotes became accepted as money in England.

Patterson’s central bank combined paper money with usury, i.e. money-lending. In Patterson’s scheme, money would henceforth be issued as loans from banks, i.e. if all loans were repaid, all money would disappear. Earlier, the Venetians had feared China’s paper money was the work of the devil. They were wrong. Patterson’s money was.

The underlying purpose of Patterson’s central bank was not to replace gold and silver with paper money (although it eventually did) but to instead profit by the charging of interest on the loaning of paper banknotes as if they were gold or silver.

Debt-based money issued from central banks on which interest accrues is the basis of capitalist economies. In capitalist economies, central banks are engines of credit which emit debt just as internal combustion engines emit carbon dioxide. 

Debt accruing from money issued by central banks constantly compounds and unless capitalist economies also constantly expand, constantly compounding debt eventually overwhelms all economic activity, resulting in ’parcus nex’, i.e. economic death. 

It is the charging of interest on money issued as loans from a central bank that is the foundation of capitalism. It should be noted that prior to capitalism, charging interest on money lending was considered immoral by Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.

Outlawed by Islam, considered by the Catholic Church to be a sin and contrary to the Law of Moses, because of William Patterson’s combination of money and debt, money lending is now the basis of all modern economies.

BE CAREFUL WHO YOU SHUN

Jews, barred from all trade guilds in Medieval Europe, were allowed only two avocations in the Middle Ages, that of money lending and the selling of used clothing. It is not without irony that the once shunned practice of money lending has now catapulted Jewish bankers to their pre-eminent position of power and wealth in the world today.

The Catholic Church’s ban on usury, i.e. money lending, came originally from Talmudic law which banned Jews from lending money at interest to other Jews. Jews, however, interpreted this ban as still allowing them to lend money to non-Jews.

In Hebrew law, an indulgent perception of usury meant that one could loan at usury to a racial alien or one not of the Jewish faith…In early Palestine, loans with interest had been allowed to gentiles and Samaritans, and the practice had spread to Europe.

pg 17, Slatyer, The Debt Delusion, Evolution and Management of Financial Risk (2008).

Today, some three hundred years after William Patterson introduced central banking’s debt-based paper money in the West, the centuries-long prohibition against money lending is as long-forgotten as China’s 600 year history with paper money, hyperinflation and dynastic collapse.

Oh laddie of the highlands

What changes you have wrought

With your bubkes paper banknotes

Governments you have bought

You fueled a Tower of Babel

Where banks and bankers rule

With nations now the victims

Of your monetary tools

When capitalism—institutionalized money lending in debt-based economies—became the world’s predominant economy, bankers found themselves temporarily on top. The operant word is temporarily because where credit and debt is concerned, that which goes up always comes down.

In 1971, capitalism began to unravel when the US was forced to suspend the convertibility of the US dollar to gold. Without gold’s constraint on the money supply, governments—especially the US—began printing and borrowing money virtually without limit. Today, that limit has been reached.

William Patterson’s 300 year-old house of cards and credit is now collapsing as defaulting debt consumes what’s left of savings. Despite the efforts of governments to save the system that allows them to spend money they don’t have, the end of the banker’s reign is near.

Since the advent of paper money, bankers have tended to form an unholy alliance with elected governments to expand debt. Both prosper until the time when debt cannot be repaid.

pp. 32-33, Slatyer, The Debt Delusion, Evolution and Management of Financial Risk, 2008

WAR AND THE RISE AND FALL OF CAPITALISM

The chartering of the Bank of England changed the course of history. Central banking allowed governments to go to war on credit, an advantage England parlayed into world dominion over the next 150 years. 

In Dollars & Sense show 8, I describe what happened when central banking transformed both England and the US. But the ability to arm the military on credit would ultimately indebt nations beyond their ability to repay and, in the end, would contribute to the end of capitalism itself, see http://www.youtube.com/user/SchoonWorks#p/u/3/deRQOa2EIxM 

Since WWII, the US has maintained a costly war footing in peacetime and in so doing dissipated the greatest hoard of monetary gold in history. John Exter, a central banker, tells what happened when the US removed the gold-backing of the US dollar in 1971:

The final link between the dollar and gold was broken. The dollar became nothing more than a fiat currency and the Fed [and especially the banks] were then free to continue monetary expansion at will. The result..was a massive explosion of debt

p. 77, Ferdinand Lips, Gold Wars, 2001

Gold was the cotter pin that held capitalism’s scheme of debt and usury together for almost 300 years. In 1971, the removal of gold from paper money caused the rapid expansion of the money supply and debt, and ultimately, the end of capitalism itself.

GOVERNMENTS WILL FALL AND GOLD WILL RISE

The collapse of Chinese dynasties caused by the excessive issuance of fiat money is about to be repeated, albeit in a modern iteration and on a much wider scale. The recent and unprecedented increase of credit in China and the negative interest rates in much of the world are no less consequential than the excessive printing of fiat money that caused the serial collapse of five Chinese dynasties. 

The slowing of the global economy in 2008 was met with an immediate flood of fiat money from China hoping to reverse the severe economic contraction. It worked, albeit temporarily and at a perhaps fatal cost. 

The flood of fiat money in 2008/2009 set in motion inflationary forces that will dwarf the inflation of the late 1970s that in the US sent gold surging almost 2300 % between 1971 and 1980 (9 years); shaming the Dow’s historic rally between 1982 and 2000, an increase of 1500 % over 18 years.

The rise in gold and silver prices has been underway since 2001. The process itself has been underway since 1971. There is further to go and the price rise will be steeper. In an interview with Ralph Foster, I discuss this process with the noted author and gold and silver dealer, see http://www.youtube.com/user/SchoonWorks#p/u/0/pFx9EfM_Ugs.

China may well play the unfortunate role for the world economy that it did for its own for five successive dynasties. China is once again issuing excessive amounts of fiat money. Then, governments fell. Today, they will fall again; and when they fall, the price of gold will rise vertically.

YOU CAN’T EAT GOLD

The study of capitalism is like the study of religion in a time of idolatry

“You can’t eat gold” is a sophomoric assertion intended to dismiss the value of gold in times of severe economic crisis. Professor Antal Fekete who lived through such times, i.e. the post-WWII Hungarian inflation, simply dismisses this absurd statement by answering, “You can always eat what gold will buy”.

I was fortunate to learn much about the Austrian school of economics from Professor Fekete. The Austrian school holds that human choices and interaction play causal roles in economies, i.e. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises.

I recommend that for those interested in matters of economics, there is no better venue for discussion than with Professor Fekete, a man of towering intellect, humor, compassion and a concomitant love for discourse and argument.

From August 20-29 in Munich, Germany, Professor Fekete will lecture on The Austrian Theory of Interest and Discount. He will be joined by Sandeep Jaitly whose study of the gold and silver basis, an area first explored by Professor Fekete, has led to the basis as a strategy for profitably trading gold and silver.

Note: For inquiries about Professor Fekete’s seminar, email nasoe@kt-solutions.de 

The Austrian school of economics emerged at a time when communism and socialism were offered as alternatives to the capitalist model. Because of the central role of government inherent in communist and socialist models, the potential for tyranny was obvious.

That capitalism, however, offered the same potential is less obvious. The threat of capitalism to human freedom is even more insidious because of its covert agenda and global presence, an agenda described by Carroll Quigley in his seminal work, Tragedy and Hope (1975)

Quigley was a professor at Princeton and Harvard Universities, and later at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University where he was a mentor of Bill Clinton. Quigley’s observations are to be valued as they are an insider’s look at the activities of powerful elites who use government and commerce to accomplish their aims and disguise their activities.

Because of his position as an academic and scholar, Quigley had access to individuals and elite groups who influence events and activities far outside the purview of others; and, in Tragedy and Hope, he exposes the hidden agenda of these elites:

The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds' central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.

The global economic collapse is perhaps humanity’s greatest hope for escaping the debt slavery the world’s financiers and bankers have planned for the world. However, to escape slavery one must first know he is a slave.

Debt is the slavery of the free

Publius Syrus, Sententiae, c 50 BC

Man’s wisdom is most conspicuous where he is able to distinguish among dangers and make choice of the least.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

The above quotes are from Will Slatyer’s The Debt Delusion, Evolution and Management of Financial Risk (2008)

Buy gold, buy silver, have faith.

Darryl Robert Schoon

www.survivethecrisis.com

www.drschoon.com

Check his Blog