“The financial system … has been turned over to … the Federal Reserve Board. The board administers the finance system by authority of … a purely profiteering group. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people’s money.” Rep Charles A. Lindberg (R-MN) in 1913
“The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks, which were themselves private corporations.” Carroll Quigley
“Money is a tool. It’s a financial system. Think of it as a toolkit and it’s part of the governance system and the power is in the governance system but there’s no doubt that the financial system is used for a variety of purposes including incentivizing and controlling people. It’s a management tool and you use it to optimize resources and manage resources and you use it to incentivize.” Catherine Austin Fitts
“Wars are fought to control strategic routes, to open markets, and to gain access to natural resources.” George Draffan
Cogs Trapped in the BAU System?
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” W. Edwards Deming
“What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine.” Norbert Wiener
You need money to survive and typically, money is scarce — created and controlled by hidden people behind legal fictions — artificial corporate entities with no greater god than growth/impact.
Born into this global Business-as-usual (BAU) paradigm of control after World War II, hasn’t the system made chasing after money your default ‘cog’ setting to survive?
Because to produce something, most will need funding — an employer, a bank or other funding bodies (increasingly, platforms) — all legal fictions.
Don’t these corporate entities then play a huge role in key aspects of our lives?
In a way, doesn’t money scarcity blind you to how the BAU machine turns us into interchangeable or replaceable cogs and sadly, against one another? Are you and I not parts on a factory assembly line so businesses can be done better, faster and cheaper because our world is legally more pro them than us?
Then as fear governs your behavior, don’t you self-organize to keep feeding yourself and each other to an insatiable debt-based system that is not West, not East or even country-centric — a global system designed to increasingly centralize power and control into fewer and fewer hands?
“States, most especially the large hegemonic ones, such as the United States and Great Britain, are controlled by the international central banking system, working through secret agreements at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and operating through national central banks (such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve) … The same international banking cartel that controls the United States today previously controlled Great Britain and held it up as the international hegemon. When the British order faded, and was replaced by the United States, the US ran the global economy. However, the same interests are served. States will be used and discarded at will by the international banking cartel; they are simply tools.” Andrew Gavin Marshall
Let’s explore how through a network of legal but artificial cogs modeled on the original corporate raider, our energy is harnessed so we live a cradle to grave business plan. Divided by wanting to survive/win, don’t we then unwittingly grow an insatiable global rent-seeking system that concentrates power and molds such behavioral patterns:
“Today’s economy is built on one layer doing actual work and three layers of abstraction on top.” Rick Falkvinge
“When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood.” Norbert Wiener
“Lust of absolute power is more burning than all the passions.” Gaius Cornelius Tacitus
“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The world wars never really ended. Today, that’s just Business-as-usual
“It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms.” John Stockwell, former CIA official
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” Thomas L. Friedman
In Mafia of the Powerful, Catherine Austin Fitts shared that for 500 years, a central banking warfare model has organized us around a governance structure where the First World is strategically subsidized by the Third World.
Until globalized in the mid 90s, it was also relatively simple for the G7 central banks — they could print money which the military would then force the people to take.
She believes a mistake Eisenhower made with Truman was to create the 49 Act as that turned the CIA into the world’s most powerful banker — the iron bank with the ability to keep everything secret, to kill with impunity and to live outside the law:
“The national security state was created by the 1947 act … and the CIA act was passed two years later … the 1949 act was the beginning of building the really significant secret infrastructure of the national security state.
The CIA are bankers because they control the largest pools of secret money in the world working with the central bankers. If I have a hundred percent intelligence of what’s going to happen and why and when and I have access to money that I can print out of thin air and I can kill with impunity, then I don’t need money to make money. I can make all the money I want … it’s the ultimate insider trading machine.”
In the spring of 1997, Fitts shared she was doing a presentation to the largest pension fund leaders in the United States and the president of the largest pension fund then had told her:
“You don’t understand, it’s too late … they’ve given up on the country. They’re moving all the money out starting in the fall.”
Wasn’t the 1990’s when Al Gore led the Clinton administration to reinvent the US government for Public Private Partnerships and to increasingly flip taxpayers from being customers into cogs?
In the 1999 fiscal year, Fitts’ attorney noticed US$59 billions were missing from the US Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD). They subsequently discovered huge amounts of money had disappeared from the HUD and the US Department of Defense. At the same time, private equity firms in Washington with little track record and experience were suddenly blessed with billions of dollars flowing in to invest in China and Asia.
(Until they got huge cloud contracts from the CIA and the U.S. intelligence agencies, Amazon never made a profit.)
In 2018, the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board Statement 56 (fasb56) was quietly adopted so a clandestine group of people could secretly keep as much as they wanted of all the agencies, related agencies and companies’ secrets (including publicly traded corporations and banks):
“Standard 56 creates a set of situations where government entities may move numbers around to conceal where money is actually spent or even not report spending outright.”
A growing global population has made Mr. Global’s job of control very difficult. As economies globally grow much faster and become much more important and more powerful than the G7 nations, the model to keep extracting natural resources cheaply from the Third World is unravelling.
Mr. Global has kept the reserve currency going by weaponizing the dollar with financial sanctions but you cannot use a currency that’s a weapon to trade.
As the dynamics between an industrial economy and a network economy play out, Mr. Global is most of all worried about risk management:
“I have a euro and you have an oil well. I want your oil well and you want my money so I give you my money and I take your oil well. Now, how can you be better off in this transaction? If you kill me and steal my oil well, now you got the money and the oil. You’re better off.
You have a database and I have a euro and I want your database technology so I give you a euro and take a copy of your database technology. How can you be better off? If you kill me and steal this back, are you better off?
If we collaborate, I have the database, you have the data. We can create a new thing. In an information economy, we can make a lot more money collaborating than fighting.
This is a fundamental change.
Now here’s the problem — this can only work if there’s transparency … because I’m incentivized to cooperate and collaborate, I want to know what’s going on there because I want to figure out how we can create something new.
… if you’re Mr. Global, you want to get the open collaboration down to a group of players who can be trusted to handle the secrecy. This creates real challenges between the giving access to this technology to the general population because then their learning speed can end up being higher than yours. This is a very fundamental change in how the economics work and what it does to politics.
New technology can create so much wealth and productivity … but if you’re Mr. Global, you’re a lot less worried about productivity because the potential is so great. The thing you’re most worried about is risk management because if various groups get a hold of it and can weaponize it, then you’ve got a real mess … central control and tyranny is incredibly wasteful. Phenomenally wasteful but if you’re Mr. Global, … you’re willing to take that waste because frankly with robotics and software and AI, you don’t need these many people.
The game is who controls the data, who has access to the intelligence, who can engineer that intelligence into action fastest and this is why you’ll see the expression that data is the new oil …in a digital economy, data about money is worth more than money.” Catherine Austin Fitts
In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explained:
“Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money … It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.”
With these enormous (competing) tensions, won’t there be a pressing need to reconfigure the reserve currency as a way to retain the status quo of control?
Over the last 20 years, the central bankers have legally taken control of the whole system, doing it in a way where they can de-link the US dollar reserve currency and globalize it. Now you change the reserve currency but also de-link it from the US political infrastructure, globalize it (which is what fasb56 and these other things are) and then just reconfigure the governance:
“You’re globalizing the Treasury; you’re globalizing the military and you’re globalizing the aspects that the civil service run that you want.
What the turning point is — if you steal everybody’s retirement savings when they start to retire then you have to do something because the money’s not there. It’s not there for health care. It’s not there for pensions. It’s not there for the infrastructure of a society.
It’s a financial coup d’état … The G7 nations have run a financial system which is a balance of power between the elected representatives who basically allocate the tax money (fiscal policy) and the private bankers who run the central bank and monetary policy and it’s a balance of power between them.
This was the process by which they bankrupted the government, shifted the assets into their control and basically, put the electorate system in a position where the central banks could control all of fiscal policy because you were dependent on the central banks to finance your debt and the electorate or the elected representatives were in a financial trap with the debt entrapment.” Catherine Austin Fitts
“Without exaggeration, the US federal debt market is the most manipulated market of importance in the world at this writing. The US banking system is a captive auxiliary of the central bank. The Fed has flooded the banks with reserves and pays them 0.05% (5 basis points) to hold these reserves at the Federal Reserve’s repurchase facility. At the end of 2021’s second quarter, banks had parked a trillion dollars at the Fed. The object is to drive the banks into the Treasury market, and it is succeeding.” David P. Goldman
Because once you have levered up the sovereign governments and they and their people have lost their sovereignty, won’t Mr. Global do whatever he wants to maintain the status quo, namely re-engineer a change in control from fiat to data where Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has proclaimed:
“You will own nothing and be happy.”
Because as mere cogs in the BAU war machine, don’t we already own our national debt through our retirement money even as the interest compounds and accrues at an exponential rate?
World Debt Clock and Interest Accrued
(Click to open above link)
For instance:
“The national debt level has been a significant subject of controversy for U.S. domestic policy … Unfortunately, the manner in which the debt level is conveyed to the general public is usually very obscure. Couple this problem with the fact many people do not understand how the national debt level affects their daily lives.” Investopedia
Can the real agenda behind the failed Bretton Woods agreement be to progressively make each of us deeply dependent on the global debt system as a way to bankrupt nations? You know, as cogs.
If so, isn’t the paranoid need for top-down central control via BAU legal fictions at the root of all our (biggest) challenges?
The Mafia Business Model
According to Woody Zimmerman, soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, US President Herbert Hoover had originated ‘The Mafia Business Model,’ albeit “elevated to new respectability.”
To show no amount of deficit-spending can produce prosperity, Zimmerman highlights the problems with government spending:
- It accomplishes nothing except pile up more debt; and
- The poor economic results always produce calls for more spending. At best, the “stimulus” has no effect; at worst, it actually does damage.
Either way, more spending is needed to “get the economy moving.” But each new dose produces the same non-result … The cycle can continue indefinitely — no improvement of the economy, but more and more government spending demanded, with lots of new regulations thrown in.
During the next three years of his term, Hoover had doubled government spending and raised taxes significantly to jump-start the shocked economy … by 1932, unemployment was 25% and a quarter of the nation’s banks had failed, taking depositors’ money with them into oblivion.
Was that an early experiment to pave the way for:
“… people with tons of capital benefit from running the economy into a huge recession every decade or two so they can buy up assets on the cheap and consolidate even more wealth into a small number of hands.” Ed Burmila
Isn’t using Other People’s Money how our economy works?
“Banks are thought of as deposit-taking institutions that lend money. The legal reality is banks don’t take deposits and banks don’t lend money … At law, the word ‘deposit’ is meaningless. The law courts and various judgements have made it very clear if you give your money to a bank, even though it’s called a deposit, this money is simply a loan to the bank.
The money that you lend to the bank, which they call erroneously deposits, is actually their money. They own it. It’s just a loan … They’re in the business of purchasing securities …” Richard Werner
“Let’s set up a game of Monopoly and you want to buy Park Place. What I can continually do is just print money, give myself more money, lower the value of your money by printing more. No matter how hard-working you are or how successful you are, I can always end up buying you for free.” Catherine Austin Fitts
“Our global banking system is a global cartel, a ‘super-entity’ in which the world’s major banks all own each other and own the controlling shares in the world’s largest multinational corporations … This is the real ‘free market,’ a highly profitable global banking cartel, functioning as a worldwide financial Mafia.” Andrew Gavin Marshall
In the BAU paradigm of control through scarcity and fear, the more the humans, the lesser the value but the greater the competition. As the population grew exponentially after World War II and corporations competed to increasingly take over our means of survival, the top-down system our predecessors depended on also began to morph into a massive global rent-seeking machine based on extracting our energy/value.
Particularly since the Nixon shock, hasn’t this Mafia-like war model legally made BAU our way of life where increasingly, you have to give me your money, do as I say or you’re going to get hurt?
Since BAU normalizes making money with money, are corporate legal cogs and legal tender fiat currencies not the key tools used to centrally self-organize us around accumulating debt? By allocating work, risks and rewards, won’t we systemically and willfully fold ourselves and all and sundry into institutionalizing rent-seeking?
Any wonder our world today is legally more pro-business than real people?
How BAU hypernormalizes value extraction
“The real estate, financial system, monopolies, and other rent-extracting ‘tollbooth’ privileges are not valued in terms of their contribution to production or living standards, but by how much they can extract from the economy. By classical definition, these rentier payments are not technologically necessary for production, distribution, and consumption. They are not investments in the economy’s productive capacity, but extraction from the surplus it produces.
“Milton Friedman has said … “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” But the economy today is all about how to get a free lunch. That is what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were all about, and what government bailouts of the financial sector tend to be about.” Michael Hudson
“The upper spheres of Wall Street overshadow the real economy. The accumulation of large amounts of money wealth by a handful of Wall Street conglomerates and their associated hedge funds is reinvested in the acquisition of real assets. Paper wealth is transformed into the ownership and control of real productive assets, including industry, services, natural resources and infrastructure.” Andrew Gavin Marshall
At the turn of the last century:
In 1906, Yale economist Irving Fisher published The Nature of Capital and Income. Since hailed as “the first economic theory of accounting,” that was likely the first move toward the colonization of accounting by economics.
A 1910 New York Times article titled “What the baby is worth as a national asset: Last year’s crop reached a value estimated at $6,960,000,000” declared:
“An eight-pound baby is worth, at birth, $362 a pound. That is a child’s value as a potential wealth-producer. If he lives out the normal term of years, he can produce $2,900 more wealth than it costs to rear him and maintain him as an adult.”
In How Money Became the Measure of Everything, Eli Cook observed that Fisher, who “rarely met a social problem he did not put a price on,” was “arguing for why people needed to be treated as “money-making machines.”
“Treating society as an income-generating investment and workers as human capital, Fisher and other Progressive Era efficiency experts used such price points in the first two decades of the twentieth century in order to calculate the annual cost or benefit of such varying things as tuberculosis ($1.1 billion), government health insurance ($3 billion), prohibition ($2 billion) skunks ($3 million) or Niagara Falls ($122.5 million).” Eli Cook
In 1911, Robert Michels published Political Parties in which he defined “the iron law of oligarchy” as “A tendency for large organizations to be run by a small number of people committed to maintaining their leadership.”
That year, Frederick Winslow Taylor also bluntly summarized his efficiency techniques in The Principles of Scientific Management:
”In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”
Manufacturing Cogs for the Control Grid?
“We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.” Norbert Wiener
Author of The Pricing of Progress, Eli Cook shared that when millionaire capitalists such as John Rockefeller Jr. and J.P. Morgan came to recognize the power of financial metrics in their era, they began to plan for a private research bureau that would focus on the pricing of everyday life.
Founded in 1920, the corporate-funded National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) went on to play a major role in inventing official measurements of the gross national product (GNP) and other related indices of economic activity.
Isn’t that largely how our behaviors come to be like mechanistic cogs — systemically governed by numbers, key performance indices (KPIs) and the like — institutionalized to benefit the few?
With proof of Taylor’s concept ten years later, Henry Ford even pitched that countries build “the world’s greatest power plant” backed by their “imperishable natural wealth” of energy resources to create a new “energy currency” system based on “units of power”:
“The essential evil of gold in its relation to war is the fact that it can be controlled. Break the control and you stop war.”
“Under the energy currency system, the standard would be a certain amount of energy exerted for one hour that would be equal to one dollar. It’s simply a case of thinking and calculating in terms different from those laid down to us by the international banking group to which we have grown so accustomed that we think there is no other desirable standard.” New-York Tribune, 1921
Was Ford’s real agenda to try to legally garner greater power for himself via his company? An early sleight of hand for real people to give away our energy to money so you will lose sight of your true value?
“Through the imputation of energy, nature was recast in the image of the newly constituted human as worker.” Ivan Illich
Whatever you give your time, energy, and attention to every day defines your existence. Such learned behavior becomes your life. When you realize this, you may understand why you get upset when people, activities, and situations don’t resonate with what you give most of yourself to.
Since you are likely to spend the most time working to pay your bills:
“Never expect someone to understand change when their livelihood depends on not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
In The Social Construction of Energy, Illich explored how scarcity is inherently economistic and capitalistically constructed. Was he explaining how our energy has been hijacked so we unwittingly work for capitalists as “money-making machines?”
Today, if something is free, are you not the product — a cog in the BAU war machine?
“You might think that giving away money is free, but it is not. Even if you hold a random lottery, potential winners still need to take the time to enter. At my $5 hourly wage, my entry cost me $15. I learned later they received 450 entries. If my experience was typical, the rent-seeking cost of all the applicants was $6,750 just to win a $1,000 scholarship. If you add the time to judge the competition and send return letters, the waste gets even greater.
During a strong economy there are fewer incentives for rent-seeking because production is highly rewarded. But when economic times make it more difficult to produce, it becomes more attractive to rent-seek someone else’s surplus.” David John Marotta
Embedding our individual survival into growing the BAU rent-seeking system?
“Through the centuries, the problem has been how to produce enough of the things men wanted; the problem now is how to make men want and use more than enough things, the ‘science of plenty,’ it has been called. Formerly the task was to supply the things men wanted; the new necessity is to make men want the things which machinery must turn out if this civilization is not to perish.
The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers. Consumptionism is the science of compelling men to use more and more things.
Consumptionism is bringing it about that the … citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.” Samuel Strauss in 1924
“Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.” Rutger Bregman
Did Ford get traction for corporate raiders with no greater god than growth to become the all-powerful-middlemen on his Taylor-inspired factory assembly line model? Based on psychological control, didn’t he pioneer the BAU cycle of rent-seeking so real people become cogs to live — working for money and buying from his company?
Excerpt from Social Movements Powering the Future of Money:
“In America, the financial panic of 1907 saw John Pierpont Morgan, then the country’s leading banker, spearheading the 1913 creation of America’s central bank. Although World War I broke out less than a year later, the Federal Reserve system has been the most powerful single actor in the US economy.
In 1910, Henry Ford created the factory-scale assembly line model, building on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s simplistic ‘scientific management theory’ to try to increase the work rate and eventually, to reduce wages. That has always been at the core of management science.
By breaking the assembly of the Model T Ford into the simplest repeatable activities any unskilled immigrant could do, Ford removed the need to think and turned work into a rote task. The less human the workers and the more they resembled machines, the better Ford’s system worked. (Today, you are a cyborg if you become an extension of machines, but I digress).
According to Bob Kreipke, corporate historian for the Ford Motor Co., Ford was a hard-nosed businessman. Standardizing the production was easy but the workers had thoroughly disliked the pressure and monotony of his assembly lines. By late 1913, the company had to hire 953 just to expand the workforce by 100 men.
So, to get workers to do the same repetitive, specialized tasks hour after hour, day after day, Ford introduced the $5 workday. In 1914, that was over twice the average wage for automakers and he also reduced their workday by an hour.
1914 was also the year World War I started.
To show he was the Boss, Ford’s workers first had to be ‘qualified’ for the new wage. Their personal lives were investigated, with advisers conducting home visits, checking bank deposits and even monitoring the workers’ children’s school attendance.
By instilling psychological control and then using money to entice, the Ford Motor Co. went on to double its profits in less than two years. Ford called that the best cost-cutting moves he had ever made.
He could even have helped the Fed get traction to institutionalize modern-day capitalism into our lives.
Once his workers outsourced their value and means of survival to his company for money, all Ford did was scale up his operations. The initial building block was as simple as paying them sufficiently large sums, so a middle class could emerge to buy the products they were making.
Then as money-addicted humans joined the chase for recognition, convenience, speed and bargains, we surrendered our ability to care for ourselves and each other to business entities best at extracting our value:
Didn’t the Nixon shock subsequently enable our value to be exponentially and legally extracted via fiat currencies?
After America entered World War I, an innovative government propaganda service hired Edward Bernays to mold public opinion in support of American intervention in Europe as key to bringing democracy there.
Considered the father of public relations and propaganda, Sigmund Freud’s nephew realized his work for the Committee on Public Information was applicable to peacetime:
“When I got back from the war, I realized that ideas could be as important weapons as anything.”
In 1923, H.V. and H.W. Poor Co., a company founded by money man Henry Barnum Poor, created an early version of the S&P 500. It began by tracking 90 stocks in 1926. As speculators made leveraged bets on the stock market in the decade-long “Roaring 20s” — inflating prices — the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929.
Today, we know H.V. and H.W. Poor Co as Standard & Poor’s, the bond-rating agency.
With Bernays’ help, US President Calvin Coolidge even won the 1924 election:
“The chief business of the American people is business and the religion of business permeated and dominated the society. The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.”
In Volume I of The Crisis of the Old Order, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. portrayed the US from the end of the Great War to the beginning of the Great Depression and opined:
“for Coolidge, business was more than business; it was a religion; and to it he committed all the passion of his arid nature … He felt these things with a fierce intensity. William Allen White, who knew him well, called him a mystic, a whirling dervish of business, as persuaded of the divine character of wealth as Lincoln had been of the divine character of man, “crazy about it, sincerely, genuinely, terribly crazy.”
“Business leaders were revered as prophets of the new dispensation. Even Jesus Christ was drafted; Bruce Barton, the advertising man, praised the Son of God because He had “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business, and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”
“… by the turn of the 20th century, several large corporations began to grow and offer pensions. These included Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, AT&T, Eastman Kodak, Goodyear, and General Electric. All of these companies had adopted pension plans before 1930.” Melissa Phipps
Following the Bretton Woods Conference (formally known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference) in New Hampshire in 1944, a new rules-based international monetary system was agreed upon by delegates from seventy-seven nations, including the USSR and China. This laid the cornerstone for globalization through the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) aka the World Bank.
In April 1946, the UN took over the mandate, properties and assets of the failed League of Nation (LoN) to strengthen the power of international organizations.
After World War II, the UN charter formed the basis for reconstructing Europe and developing the Third World. It was the first fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states based on a gold-dollar exchange standard:
“The Bretton Woods system was only fully operational in 1958. But by 1966, non-US central banks held $14 billion while the United States had only $13.2 billion in gold reserve. Of that, only $3.2 billion covered foreign holdings as the rest was covering domestic holdings.
Participating countries also realized they were supporting American living standards and subsidizing American multinationals. In February 1965 President Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to exchange its US dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. After West Germany left the Bretton Woods system in May 1971, other nations began to demand redemption of their dollars for gold.” (Source: Wikipedia/Nixon Shock)
Sovereign money went from being backed by gold to being made legal tender (a fiat system — “currency that is not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver, but rather by the government that issued it.” James Chen, Fiat Money, 2020)
According to Michael Hudson who published Super Imperialism exactly a year after Nixon took America off gold in August of 1971:
“The reason he took America off gold was that the entire balance-of-payments deficit from the Korean War to the Vietnam War was military in character.
Especially in the ’60s, the money that America was spending in Vietnam and Southeast Asia had to be spent locally. And the banks were French banks, because it was French Indochina. So all the money would be sent to Paris, to the banks’ head offices, turned over from dollars into francs, and General de Gaulle would end up with these dollars. Then every month he would send the dollars and want payment in gold. And Germany would do the same thing.
So the more America fought militarily, it depleted its gold stock, until finally, in August 1971, it said, “We’ve been using gold as the key to our world power ever since World War I, when we put Europe on rations. So we’re going to stop paying gold.”
They closed the gold window. And most of the economists were all saying, “Oh my heavens, now it’s going to be a depression.” But I said, “Wait a minute, now that other countries can no longer get gold from all this military spending” — and when you talk about the balance-of-payments deficit, it’s not the trade deficit, it’s not foreign investment; it’s almost entirely military in character.
So all this money that was spent abroad, how are we ever going to get it back? Well, these dollars we spend around the world, mainly for the 800 military bases and the other activities we have, these dollars end up in foreign central banks.
The question is, what are these foreign central banks going to do with these dollar inflows? Well we wouldn’t let foreign central banks buy American industries. We would let them buy stocks, but not become a majority owner.
A former mentor, the man who taught me all about the oil industry at Standard Oil, became undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs. When Herman Kahn and I went to the White House, he said, “We’ve told the Saudi Arabians that they can charge whatever they want for their oil, but all the money they get, they have to recycle to the United States. Mostly they can buy Treasury bonds, so that we’ll have the money to keep on spending.” They could also buy stocks, or they can do what the Japanese did and buy junk real estate and lose their shirts.
So basically, when America spends money abroad, central banks really don’t speculate. They don’t buy companies. They buy Treasury bonds.
So we run a monetary deficit; the dollars are spent abroad; the central banks lend them back to the Treasury; and that finances the budget deficit, but it also finances the balance-of-payments deficit. So we just keep giving paper IOUs, not gold.”
By decoupling the US dollar from gold, wasn’t Richard Nixon able to shove the greatest fiat currency experiment ever on humanity so through the financialization of our lives, real people globally and progressively accumulate debt to become cogs in the BAU war machine?
“Since 1971, floating exchange rates for most of the world’s currencies had created an ongoing atmosphere of speculation, which dramatically increased with computer technology, allowing instantaneous multiple transactions around the world. … The speculative role of banks and financial intermediaries has increased dramatically. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 was precipitated by western banks with the intent of crippling these high growth economies, which were using traditional government-supported national economic development plans to encourage stable, balanced growth, uncontrolled by international capital.
The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.” Eric Walberg
In Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley outlined how international bankers control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government as real people transitioned from European domination in the nineteenth century to three blocs in the twentieth century.
“Central banking functions in a very similar, although much more dubious manner, in which it needs to expand its control over industry, nations and people through the expansion of debt, continually needing to bring more individuals, nations and industries under debt bondage.
Debt is the source of all power and wealth for the central banking system — as they do not actually produce any tradable good, such as industry; nor do they provide any necessary service, such as government. Interest on debt is the source of income and authority for the central banking system, and thus, it needs to continually advance credit and expand debt.” Andrew Gavin Marshall
“ … a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It’s not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it’s going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.
The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximising the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means of earning rent.” Rutger Bregman
“The military/industrial/governmental complex is perfectly positioned to profit handsomely from both the endless war on terror and the privatization of public resources, with nary a complaint from government officials and next to no meaningful media coverage of the long term ramifications of such ‘profit centers.’” Geraldine Perry
“Have you ever noticed that the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving problems is to declare war on it? We have the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on drugs. But did you ever notice that we have no war on homelessness? Why? Because there’s no money in that problem. No money to be made off of the homeless. If you can find a solution to homelessness where the corporations and politicians can make a few million dollars each, you will see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty damn quick!“ George Carlin
(Note: BlackStone and BlackRock are two key institutional investors buying up homes)
“… why is the Fed lending money to Blackrock at 0.05% to go out and buy houses (i.e., compete against poor people), vs. poor/middle-class Americans who are forced to take home loans out at 4–5%? Is this not the definition of inequality?” Gordon Johnson
According to Catherine Austin Fitts, the Going Direct Reset was initiated by a group of retired central bankers working through the Blackrock Investment Institute in August 2019 to radically reengineer the global financial system: “put together a plan … whereby the central banks take control of the Treasury functions.” (More in Part II or click to read Fitts’ summary.)
In 2015, legendary Wall Street investor Carl Icahn had called BlackRock an “extremely dangerous company” because it packages junk bonds into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and calls them “High Yield” which people chasing after yield buy without understanding what they are buying is extremely risky:
“Wall Street does what Wall Street does best — it sells securities. I used to laugh with some of these guys that sell these bonds. I used to say, “You know the Mafia has a better code of ethics than you guys. You know you’re selling this crap and you keep selling it and in fact you’re shorting some of this and that is really what’s going on and it’s just déjà vu.”
With US$9 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has been called the “fourth branch of government” and is increasingly known as the company that owns our world.
Larry Fink, its CEO, has famously stated: ”we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance” as they look to redistribute US$120 trillion dollars — the entire wealth of the world’s middle class and poor combined several times over.
“The equivalent of an emperor, what I call the corporatocracy, is this group of individuals who run our biggest corporations and they really act as the Emperor of this empire. They control our media either through direct ownership or advertising. They control most of our politicians because they finance their campaigns either through their corporations or through personal contributions that come out of corporations. They’re not elected and they don’t serve a limited term. They don’t report to anybody and at the very top of the corporatocracy, you really can’t tell whether the person’s working for a private corporation or the government because they are always moving back and forth.” John Perkins
In 2017, Financial Post informed that according to Bloomberg News calculations: “With $20 trillion between them, Blackrock and Vanguard could own almost everything by 2028.”
As the direction remains for us to grow this insatiable system with our energy/value and the Great Reset self-organizes shoving us from the world’s dumbest idea (with fiat currencies) into the world’s most dangerous (with our data), don’t we unwittingly co-create our BAU prison?
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff has warned:
“You are not the product, you are the abandoned carcass.”
As early as in 1983, Nobel Prize winning economist Wassily Leontief had observed:
“The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished and then eliminated.”
To continue exploring how we became cogs in the BAU rent-seeking war machine we depend on, read Part II and look out for Part III.
References
How Wetware turns Humans into Technology
Piezoelectricity: The Future of Energy
Can electricity from the human body replace batteries?
Upload: living forever, digital personhood, and hacking your own reality
DARPA’s New Project Is Investing Millions in Brain-Machine Interface Tech
Modern Times 1936 (Charlie Chaplin)
The Twin Towers of Financialization: Entanglements of Political and Cultural Economies
Who Runs the World? Blackrock and Vanguard
How Corporate Moderates Created the Social Security Act
The Corporation Nation & The Great Pension Fund Hoax
Corporation Nation: How Corporations are Taking Over Our Lives — and What We Can Do About It
The Great Federal-Debt Ponzi Scheme
Theft of the Nation: The Structure and Operations of Organized Crime in America
Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding
