36 min readAug 12, 2022

Mega thanks again to Katherine Bosiacki for editing. Roots photo by cottonbro on Pexels

“If you control oil, you control entire nations; if you control food, you control the people; if you control money, you control the entire world.” Henry Kissinger

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of …It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” Edward Bernays

“Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rule of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare — which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.” B.H. Liddell Hart

The First Truly GLOBAL Experiment? Part I

“Those who rule have always had an interest in shaping the perceptions of those they wish to rule. But never in the history of humanity has their toolbox been so full. Advances in technology and psychology have enabled the messages of the rulers to permeate our consciousness to a degree no prior society could have imagined.” James Rozoff

“The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.” Nikola Tesla

The Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary defines “paradigm” as, “a very clear or typical example used as a model.” In other words, it is about the way most of us perceive, interpret and live our lives.

Is that because a centuries-old experiment has been self-organizing each of us to live an unnatural way of life — honing us on gaining knowledge that directs the outward-looking system onto ourselves so that

“Everything we think we know about the world is a model … Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.” Donella Meadows

“The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system.” Jay Wright Forrester, creator of the System Dynamics National Model

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work — that is correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria — that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple.” John von Neumann

Since we perceive a model to be the system we are co-dependent on, what does it do?

“An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.” Donella Meadows

Is this Business-as-usual (BAU) experiment we have collectively been building to live the 21st century’s East India Company (EIC) — the model/prototype for today’s multinationals? EIC aka “the original evil corporation”/”the original corporate raiders.”

Its cornerstones?

Anchored on Henry Ford’s opaque factory assembly line model, hidden people behind legal fictions (e.g. central banks and the Bretton Woods trio) set targets and incentives, top-down, and use mathematics and fiat currencies to reward model building to reinforce how “the system must be first” as that augments their control and power:

“Social sciences rely increasingly on modeling as a result of their mathematization, the overall computerization of science, and the increase of available data. Once dubbed the ‘hermeneutic sciences,’ the social sciences now resemble more than before the natural sciences, in which model building, testing, and comparison occupy a central role. In this development, economists have undoubtedly been pioneers among the social scientists: Since World War II, model building has become the main practice of economists. What is more, the various modeling methods adopted and developed by economists have disseminated to other social sciences. Especially, political scientists have been inspired by the rational-choice style of modeling and the associated mathematical techniques used by economists (see Morton 1999).” encyclopedia.com on Models and Modelling

Once the Bretton Woods agreement enabled this rent-seeking experiment to go global, didn’t that officially birth a global central banking system where central banks and other legal fictions with no greater god than greed become incredibly powerful?

Because when Richard Nixon unpegged the US dollar from gold, the anchor of trust in gold was transferred to the central banks that issue the fiat currencies — their value set by law and/or other governmental interventions:

“The measure of success of the central bank is whether we have boom bust cycles and ultimately, that can be much more painful and costly if you have big boom bust cycles. Big unemployment. Big dislocation. Great depression.” Richard Werner

Through “legal tender” currencies, doesn’t this model have us pour our everything into chasing after money? Isn’t that how “legal fictions” like banks and too big to fail cartels have come to monopolize the world’s resources (including humans) as they self-organize folding us into building their corporate fiefdoms, trading our real value for fiat?

“through two pillars and one commodity — unchallengeable military power and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency combined with the quest to control global oil and other energy resources …the greatest confidence game the world had ever seen” — a ‘special hegemony’ to:

— print limitless dollar paper certificates to buy every imaginable product;

— accumulate endless trade deficits;

— ‘inflate (the) currency beyond imagination;’

— have the government pay interest on its own money; and

— create an unprecedented public and private debt to enrich an elite few at the expense of the greater good.” F. William Engdahl

The Bretton Woods system was only fully operational in 1958, but about eight years later (1966), non-US central banks held $14 billion in gold reserve while the United States had only $13.2 billion. Of that, only $3.2 billion covered foreign holdings as the rest was covering domestic holdings. (Source: Wikipedia/Nixon Shock)

(The London gold pool was established in 1961 but it failed to keep up with the outflows.)

Then as the world’s greatest fiat currency experiment unleashed the world’s dumbest idea — i.e. shareholder value — haven’t you been fixated on price, if not madly competing to put a price tag on everything — including yourself, nature and whatever you need to survive?

There is no transparency, accountability or context for what’s happening in plain sight, so over time, as everyone does his/her job — some faking it till they make it — won’t whatever you do become a habit, an addiction … an algorithm?

“It is actually not in the least surprising that nations are chronically in debt, governments have inadequate public resources, public services are underfunded and people are beset by mortgages and overdrafts. The reason for all this monetary scarcity and insolvency is that the financial system used by all national economies worldwide is actually founded on debt. To be direct and precise, modern money is created in parallel with debt.” Michael Rowbotham, The Grip of Death

So, if every country in the world is in debt, who are all of us in debt to?

Was this how the debt foundation was systemically laid? A Second Look At the United Nations [1964]

As the international institutions behind the failed Bretton Woods agreement fold us into being co-dependent on a simple umbrella BAU model of control designed with mathematical constructs to fold us into debt with fiat, are we like frogs in pots of slowly boiling water? Let’s explore the context …

The Unnatural “System Must Be First” Model

“We have been trained for a world of scarcity and we have developed an image of man under the psychology of scarcity.” David Riesman

“It’s not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” Henry Kissinger

As I explore root causes for the mess our world is in, the dominant pattern that’s emerged is that scarcity and fear keep perpetuating predictable “I win, you lose” behavior so

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin

Can this be the systemic root?

Since the turn of the last century, the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations have set out to influence and manipulate the education and morals of not only the USA but countries globally.

The most prominent bankers in the US had informed Norman Dodd — chief investigator in 1953 for the U.S. Congress Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations — that since the end of World War I, they had been responsible for “the institutionalizing of conflicting interests.”

Dobb was given access to records at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP). What he discovered was very different from commonly held public perception. His testimony to the Reece Committee stated:

“The trustees of the Foundation [CEIP] brought up a single question. If it is desirable to alter the life of an entire people, is there any means more efficient than war…. They discussed this question… for a year and came up with an answer: There are no known means more efficient than war, assuming the objective is altering the life of an entire people. That leads them to a question: How do we involve the United States in a war.”

Their top-down modus operandi:

“Well, primarily they did it by securing control of what is known as the money supply of the people of this country … By working out a system of banking (Federal Reserve) which was foreign in concept but which enabled debt to be monetized; transforming of the bank deposits … By having at their disposal unlimited quantities of this newly created money and being able to reward the personnel who were active in the world of education and administratively as well as academically. They were able to see that textbooks were almost produced on order. And assuring the publishers of textbooks of the funds necessary to make publication of those books profitable.” Norman Dodd

Possible examples:

In 1966, Konrad Lorenz published On Aggression in English, arguing that human beings are innately aggressive, competitive, possessive and violent. That became a bestseller. A decade later, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, another bestseller on the human instinct for self-preservation.

As these leading scientists popularized how success depends on you being selfishly preoccupied with yourself, Hollywood and the US mass media flogged that simple theory. To make us co-dependent on the umbrella BAU model, economists and government officials then created policies that favored the largest, most “efficient” companies built atop Ford’s still opaque but now global factory assembly line model.

Inspired by the conveyor belt system he observed in slaughterhouses in the Midwest, Ford consulted with Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of Scientific Management. On December 1, 1913, he piloted how “the system must be first” based on Taylor’s four principles to monitor and control a worker’s every movement:

· Replace simple habits and common sense with the scientific method to determine the most efficient way to perform specific work tasks. This “one best way” consists of examining what is required to carry out the task, measuring the daily maximum a “first-class” worker could do and then benchmarking other workers against that.

· To maximize efficiency, management scientifically matches workers to the work most suited for them and train until the workers become first-class at their jobs.

· Monitor worker performance by providing instructions and supervision to ensure they scientifically use the most efficient ways of working.

· Allocate the work so managers spend their time planning and supervising the work that the workers carry out.

Increasing work rate and, eventually, reducing wages has always been at the core of management science — the fundamentals of Business-as-Usual.

Through the world’s greatest fiat currency experiment, haven’t selfishness, greed and winning at all costs behaviors been rewarded? This conditions you to be a stand-alone individual, where to win, others have to lose.

Spurred to fight each other to get ahead, won’t you miss how the umbrella BAU model of control has made us co-dependent on corporate middlemen aka legal fictions with no greater god than greed? As you interpret how to orient yourself to this model — won’t you willfully turn human value into exchange value and feed yourself and all and sundry to it with fiat?

“Everything is turning into a transaction: our relationships, emotions and expressions; our ways of producing, acquiring and transferring knowledge; communication; everything. As soon as each of these things become the subject of a service, they become transactions: they become an atomic part of a procedure.

Because this is what a transaction is: an atom in a procedure, in an algorithm. This includes the fact that transactions are designed, according to a certain business, operational, strategic, marketing model.

This means that when our relationships, emotions, expressions, knowledge, communication and everything become transactions, they also become atoms of those business models whose forms, allowances, degrees of freedoms and liberty are established by those models.” Salvatore Iaconesi, The Financialization of Life

In Models Will Run the World, Steven A. Cohen and Matthew W. Granade opined models are the source of the real power behind Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data:

“A model is a decision framework in which the logic is derived by algorithm from data, rather than explicitly programmed by a developer or implicitly conveyed via a person’s intuition. The output is a prediction on which a decision can be made. Once created, a model can learn from its successes and failures with speed and sophistication that humans usually cannot match … In a data-driven business, the data helps the business; in a model-driven business, the models are the business.”

Treaties we have no way of verifying (e.g. between the United States and Great Britain in 1871 where Article XXXV stated that the Emperor of Germany was its absolute, final arbitrator); the 18th-century industrialized Prussian education model conditioning us on having achievements; decisions for our lives made behind closed doors or at secret meetings by those with vested interests addicted to growing their power; life siloed on Ford’s factory assembly line model, measured by metrics that dehumanize us; and the social constructs we live all make it really difficult for you to see this forest for the trees (tools, people, norms, etc.).

Is that how a few people well hidden behind multilayers of extractive models of “legal fictions” have been able to use “legal tender currencies” to covertly shape public policy, perception and to govern us, particularly post the Nixon shock?

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” W. Edwards Deming

So, what’s a system? “… a set of things — people, cells, molecules, or whatever — interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”

As World War II ended, the US dollar was made the world reserve currency at the Bretton Woods Conference (officially known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference). As America became the model that the world emulated, work also evolved from a job into a calling defined by one’s identity that included race, nationality, gender, habits, family/loved ones, status, etc.

“Instead of being taught independence, energy, and enterprise, our youth today is taught to look for security.” B. Carroll Reece, chairman of the Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations

By directing the outward-looking system onto yourself, narcissistic behavior becomes an outward manifestation of inner need and weakness:

“people today hunger not for personal salvation, … but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”

“People with narcissistic personalities … play a conspicuous part in contemporary life… these celebrities set the tone for public life and of private life as well … The beautiful people… live out the fantasy of narcissistic success.” Christopher Lasch, cultural historian

By preoccupying you with becoming an island unto yourself, won’t you be inclined to take everything personally? To defend yourself? Since living this gigantic global experiment now requires that we need fiat to survive or to prove your worth, won’t you then justify your survival as a cog in a rent-seeking war machine?

“These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be.” Joel Bakan

Ford well understood how human energy is the operating currency of his factory assembly line model.

In 1921, he urged countries to 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”… where “the standard would be a certain amount of energy exerted for one hour that would be equal to one dollar.” New-York Tribune, 1921

Alas, as our lives are now transactionalized top-down to grow business empires — hasn’t the world’s dumbest idea rendered whatever we do (e.g. our energy, hard work, ideas, time, labor) invisible?

As data becomes the future of (no)/programmable money, isn’t the world’s most dangerous idea sending a siren call to feed ourselves and each other into the “Mega-Machine”?

According to Lewis Mumford, the driving force for the rise of machines and the Machine Age is military where the “Mega-Machine” is a social structure for science and technology to create a “universal, but inadequate society” based on the principle of reward. Organized around the “needs” of the machines that have come to characterize and control our lives, this “varsity rich” but “totalitarian system” will increasingly replace the compulsion to work with the compulsion to consume.

1913: A Pivotal Year for this Experiment

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frederic Bastiat

On May 1, the Rockefeller Foundation was established as an American private foundation by Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller (“Senior”), his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. (“Junior”), and Senior’s principal business and philanthropic advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates.

The same month and year that Ford launched his factory assembly line model, the US Federal Reserve System — the most powerful single actor in the American economy — was established:

“This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress … The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government.” Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. (1859–1924) Congressman (R-MN)

“… JP Morgan and the bankers … pressed for a privatized central bank run out of Wall Street, Boston and Philadelphia, not Washington. They excluded Washington from the Fed’s board so as not to let the Treasury have a voice on it.

Their logic was that banking should only be regulated by the private sector, because only in that way could they turn the government from a democracy into an oligarchy … they created a central bank that acted on behalf of bankers, not the economy as a Treasury is supposed to do.” Michael Hudson

In 1913, a $20 bill was equal to one ounce of gold and had been for many years. Twenty years later (1933), the government demanded that people turned in their gold for the sum of $20.67 by executive order. The Bretton Woods agreement subsequently pegged US dollar to gold at $35 per ounce, a whopping rent-seeking profit of $14.33 per ounce.

Back in 1913, the US Bureau of Internal Revenue was established to impose a tax on income. It was renamed the Internal Revenue Service in 1953.

However, the Revenue Act of 1917 subsequently made foundations “tax exempt” in the US as “charitable” organizations to enable the wealthiest people to fund their various social engineering projects without having to pay income tax.

The Run-up to the Nixon Shock and After?

“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, Postmodern Imperialism

“The IMF and the World Bank have integrated a large number of countries into the world economy by requiring governments to open up to global trade, investment, and capital. They have not done this out of pure economic zeal. Politics and their own rules and habits explain much of why they have presented globalization as a solution to challenges they have faced in the world economy.” Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers

Based on how “the (BAU) system must be first,” can these milestones from 1968 to 1977 have impacted your life and those around you? (Please note the list is not exhaustive.)

1968

· Three years before US President Richard Nixon decoupled the US dollar from gold, the “internationalization of business” was discussed at the 1968 Bilderberg conference in Canada. George Ball, investment banker and undersecretary for State and subsequently, Trilateral Commissioner, announced what he called the “World Company” project.

· The Club of Rome was founded at David Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy as a think tank with an elite membership to address the problems of mankind. The Limits to Growth and The First Global Revolution publications originated from there.

(But the latter shockingly stated: “The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”)

· To commemorate its 300th anniversary, Sweden’s Sveriges Riksbank — the world’s first central bank — made a donation to the Nobel Foundation to establish the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

· Morgan Guaranty launched Euro-Clear, a Brussels-based bank clearing system for Eurodollar securities. The first such automated endeavor, Brussels serves as headquarters for the new European Central Bank and for NATO.

1969

· Two years before the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) created the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) aka “paper/liquid gold.”

John Maynard Keynes had originated its basic concept for the Bretton Woods agreement. He envisaged “Bancor” as a new reserve currency that would be used only for settling international accounts through an overarching “International Clearing Union.”

“The SDR has become a widely used unit-of-account in international treaties and law. Government-owned corporations, international agencies, and other intergovernmental organizations have also adopted the SDR for accounting purposes.

The SDR is also used as an accounting unit for the financial statements of several international organizations. This includes the IMF itself, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the African Development Bank (ADB), and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The World Bank’s International Development Agency also reports its financials in SDR terms, as well as denominating many of its loans in SDRs.” John Paul Koning

Now that the entire world is in so much debt, is Keynes’ Bancor-SDR-in-waiting about to bestow even greater power to international institutions controlled by the hidden few?

· In October, the first ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) host-to-host (independent network-to-independent network) connection was established between the University of California in Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute. Subsequently underpinned by mathematical work in the early 1970s by Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA, this became the cornerstone for the Internet, a network of computer networks. For years, it percolated as complex, near-impenetrable masses of data stored in computers around the world.

“… with funding from the DoD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, few are aware of just how much modern technology was originally funded by or created for government, military and intelligence agency customers.” James Corbett, How Big Brother Seeded the Tech Revolution

1970

· Jay Wright Forrester, founder of system dynamics, published Urban Dynamics to centrally model the complex interactions of the world’s economy, population and ecology. His work caught the attention of Aurelio Peccei, the Club of Rome’s key founder.

· June: At the Club of Rome meeting in Berne, Switzerland, discussions of world problems formed the basis for the model that appeared in World Dynamics. The following month, it was used in meetings with its executive committee at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

To support research, Eduard Pestel arranged for the Volkswagen Foundation to support work that resulted in The Limits to Growth book in 1972. That summer, MIT researchers began studying the implications of continued worldwide growth based on these five basic facts they pre-determined: Population increase, agricultural production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation.

Such data fed into a global computer model showed population tended to grow faster than the means of supply.

· September: Milton Friedman’s article titled The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits appeared in the New York Times. He clumsily advocated that business could not have responsibilities as only people could have responsibilities. The legitimacy of corporate activity needed no justification beyond a general assertion of the legitimacy of private property: shareholders “owned” the corporate vehicle and its executives were simply the agents of the owners. As US businesses were then grappling with the initial impact of globalization, Forbes’ Steve Denning commented that “People just wanted to believe.”

1971

· January 24: Klaus Schwab, a protégé of Henry Kissinger and a professor of business policy at the University of Geneva, founded the European Management Forum as an international non-profit foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland.

(The European Management Forum became the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 1987, the year Edmund de Rothschild unveiled the Global Environment Facility at the 4th World Wilderness Congress as the International Conservation Bank. Early in its inception, the WEF had aligned itself with the Club of Rome.)

· February 8: The Nasdaq stock market began operations as the world’s first electronic stock market in New York City. Initially, the world’s second-largest stock exchange was merely a “quotation system” that did not perform electronic trades.

· March 15: On ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, “chat rooms” made their first debut.

· March 21: At the ceremony of the ringing of the Japanese Peace Bell on Earth Day, UN Nations Secretary-General U Thant spoke of Spaceship Earth.

Spaceship Earth is a 1966 book by internationally influential economist Barbara Ward. It laid the foundation for the Circular Economy as Ward viewed the Earth as a closed system, as on a spaceship, with finite resources that needs to be used and reused.

“Spaceship Earth — The Life Support System” also titled a chapter in the Rockefeller Brother Foundation’s 1977 book The Unfinished Agenda, a book the Club of Rome has promoted.

· April 1: All restrictions on gold ownership were lifted in the UK.

· July 9: US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger secretly traveled to China to meet with the Chinese leader Chou Enlai for approval of an official state visit by the American president.

· Following Forrester’s talk at a joint NATO/US conference on cities in Indianapolis, Indiana, William Dietel, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, kickstarted funding how system dynamics was to be applied to the model of debt, top-down:

“The National Model identified for the first time the feedback loops causing the economic long wave (or Kondratieff cycle) with peaks followed by major depressions some 45 to 65 years apart. The short-term business cycle (three to ten years between peaks) involves an overbuilding and underbuilding of consumer durables. In a similar way, the economic long wave arises mostly from the overbuilding of capital plant and the excessive debts associated with it, followed by the collapse of production of physical capital and the repayment of debt.” Jay W. Forrester

· Eight days after the Nixon shock, the future US Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. drafted a confidential memorandum for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society.

(What “The rise of the money power” paved:

“Nowadays it’s every man for himself. How did this happen? The rise of the money power in our time goes back forty years. We can pinpoint the date. On August 23, 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell — a board member of the death-dealing tobacco giant Philip Morris and a future justice of the Supreme Court — released a confidential memorandum for his friends at the US Chamber of Commerce. We look back on it now as a call to arms for class war waged from the top down.”

When the public became aware of that in September 1972, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson devoted two pieces to describing “a blueprint for an assault by big business on its critics” as the memo reflected a “militant political action program.”)

· October 25: The UN General Assembly expelled Taiwan and admitted China to the United Nations.

· Simon Kuznets won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He had presented the modern concept of gross domestic product (GDP) to the US Congress in 1934, but it was only after the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that GDP gradually became the main tool for measuring a country’s economy.

· The Inter-Alpha Group of Banks, a financial syndicate controlled by British baron and financier Lord Jacob Rothschild, was set up by six major European Community banks to represent the family funds (or fondi) of some of the most powerful families in Europe. These old families wield enormous power but do so discreetly to keep their power and influence hidden from the general public. By providing a covert mechanism for their funds to be deployed, this group also originated hedge funds, private equity funds and other domineering financial tools.

“The founding banks themselves were hardly household names, even in 1971: Williams & Glyn’s Bank of England; BHF-Bank of Germany; Banco Ambrosiano of Italy; Crédit Commercial de France of France; Kredietbank of Luxembourg; and Nederlandsche Middenstands Bank of the Netherlands. Williams & Glyn’s was a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland, bankers to the opium-running British East India Company, the Venetian-controlled company which became the British Empire (as did Rothschild). These banks all serve as ‘private bankers,’ specializing in managing the fondi of the imperial elite.

The Inter-Alpha Group is a conduit for these oligarchic families, and their wealth and power. It represents a predatory system which exists by keeping mankind as peasants, to be looted as required, and cast aside when they are no longer useful.” Sam Parker and Joe Mhlanga

1972

· February 21: Nixon’s visit to China.

· April 4: The opening of the mammoth World Trade Center complex in New York, conceived by David Rockefeller.

· June 5–16: Led by Maurice Strong as Secretary-General, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm, Sweden.

A declaration containing 26 principles concerning the environment and development, an Action Plan with 109 recommendations, and a Resolution were made. This led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

· November 14: The Dow‐Jones industrial stock average achieved one of Wall Street’s long‐sought goals by finishing above 1,000 for the first time. The venerable Dow broke through the barrier with a flourish, climbing 6.09 points to 1,003.16.

1973

· April 26: First day of trading by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) — the first marketplace for trading listed options. Edmund “Eddie” O’Connor, the man who gave us derivatives:

“ … created [them] to give Board of Trade men something to do when the grain markets were slow. He … didn’t pull this off himself, but it was his idea and it wouldn’t have happened without him. When the traders he knew were reluctant to trade this complicated new product, he and Billy formed another clearing firm and provided backing and support. ‘It was a little scary,’ he said.

‘We didn’t know if the concept would fly, and we didn’t have much money.’ But it worked so well that they had more business than they could handle. They sold their firm in 1979, and it’s now part of Goldman Sachs.” Emily Lambert

(In 1991, Goldman Sachs came up with its own commodity index:

“The Goldman Sachs Commodity Index reduced food to a mathematical formula. Barclays, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, speculators, high-risk offshore hedge funds bet on the future grain price with no need to take delivery of actual wheat or corn at the end of the contract. Food was no longer a physical “good” to feed the world, but rather a virtual and unlimited trading instrument. The corporate empires expanded as never before, making them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Grain was now entirely decoupled from everyday supply and demand — sending shock waves throughout the world.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN estimates that since 2004, world food prices on average have soared by an unprecedented 240%, sending price-shock waves throughout the global food production and delivery system. The market was no longer run by people involved in the food business, but by the new casino masters of grain supplies — from Wall Street to London and beyond.

The dotcom bubble followed the real estate bubble and we may see a food bubble.” Daniel Estulin, TransEvolution: The Coming Age of Human Deconstruction

S&P acquired the index on February 2, 2007 and renamed it the S&P GSCI.)

· July: International financier, David Rockefeller, longtime chairman of the Rockefeller family-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank, founded the Trilateral Commission after reading Between Two Ages by Zbigniew Brzezinski, upcoming President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor.

As its first Executive Director, Brzezinski was charged with selecting three hundred powerful international members to bring the major areas of the industrial world under the control of a Rockefeller agenda.

“Trilateralists laid the foundation for today’s globalization. They also followed Samuel Huntington’s advice that democracy’s unreliability had to be checked by some measure of (public) apathy and non-involvement (combined with) secrecy and deception. The Commission further advocated privatizing public enterprises along with deregulating industry.” F. William Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction

“Trilateralism is the creed of an international ruling class whose locus of power is the global corporation. The owners and managers of global corporations view the entire world as their factory, farm, supermarket, and playground.

The Trilateral Commission is seeking to strengthen and rationalize the world economy in their interest. Trilateral Commissioner George Ball (investment banker and former undersecretary of state) applauds the growing number of ‘cosmocorps’ which are engaged in taking the raw materials produced in one group of countries, transforming these into manufacturing goods with the labor and plant facilities of another group, and selling the products in still a third group…[all] with the benefit of instant communications, quick transport, computers, and modern management techniques…

These corporations control vast amounts of natural resources; monopolize the production of commodities vital to our daily lives, such as food and energy;* and dominate the research and development of new technology …” Holly Sklar, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management

· The term, “Internet” was born.

· From October: A major victory was engineering the 1973 oil price shock to prop up the dollar and make Wall Street rich.” Daniel Estulin, The True Story of the Bilderberg Group :

“Bilderberg is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy reality … a vehicle through which private financier oligarchical interests were able to impose their policies on nominally sovereign governments. The idea is the creation of a global network of cartels, more powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the rest of humanity.”

“The orchestrated oil hoax of 1973–74, with its introduction of financial speculation in the oil market via the spot market, created a huge pool of petrodollars, with which the City of London could wage war against nations. These petrodollars, combined with the proceeds of the British Empire’s “Dope, Inc.” drug trade, were instrumental in restructuring Wall Street in the 1970s, paving the way for the junk bonds of the 1980s and the derivatives of the 1990s.” Daniel Estulin, TransEvolution: The Coming Age of Human Deconstruction

· The Club of Rome’s “Regionalized and Adaptive Model of the Global World System” report divided our world into ten kingdoms. (The 1973 report is missing from the original website.)

1974

· “The Kissinger Report” was released but not declassified until 1989: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests. It was instrumental in transforming US foreign policy from pro-development/pro-industry to the promotion of under-development through totalitarian methods in support of population control.

Kissinger stated: “… if future numbers are to be kept within reasonable bounds, it is urgent that measures to reduce fertility be started and made effective in the 1970s and 1980s …[Financial] assistance will be given to other countries, considering such factors as population growth … Food and agricultural assistance is vital for any population sensitive development strategy … Allocation of scarce resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control … There is an alternative view that mandatory programs may be needed ..” [emphasis added]

For Kissinger, the US foreign policy orientation was mistaken on its emphasis of ending hunger by providing the means of industrial and scientific development to poor nations. He believed such an initiative would only lead to further global disequilibrium as the new middle classes would consume more, and waste strategic resources.

· The Petro dollar system was created:

“In this new environment of decreased power, the U.S. came up with a new plan to get some of this hegemony back. Nixon and Kissinger sent their Treasury Secretary to Saudi Arabia in 1974 to establish the Petrodollar system. The framework was simple, the U.S. would “buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.” (Source: renaissancemen.org)

· In 1974, two ARPA researchers named Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, working on a government grant, published an early blueprint for the TCP/IP protocol, “the Internet’s backbone.”

1975

· The average cost of a new house was just under US$40,000 and for the first time, the price of oil went over US$13 per barrel.

· February 11: Margaret Thatcher became the leader of the opposition for the UK Conservative party.

· April 3: Motorola publicly demonstrated the world’s first portable cellular telephone and system in New York City: The first public calls using Motorola DynaTAC (DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) technology.

· April 4: Bill Gates and Paul Allen created the soon-to-be mega company Microsoft by developing and selling BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.

(In the mid-1980s, it rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS, followed by Windows.)

· October 17: New York City avoided bankruptcy when President Gerald R. Ford signed a $2.3 billion loan. (In Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis And The Rise Of Austerity Politics, Phillips-Fein argued how New York’s investment bankers and political opportunists used the crisis to shape the city in their own image, gutting necessary social services along the way, and permanently shrinking the fortunes of the working class.)

1976

· According to Don Nielson who led the Internet experiment on behalf of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a major ARPA contractor: “The most important thing to understand about the origins of the internet is that it came out of the military. While Arpa had wide latitude, it still had to choose its projects with an eye toward developing technologies that might someday be useful for winning wars. The engineers who built the internet understood that, and tailored it accordingly.

That’s why they designed the internet to run anywhere: because the US military is everywhere. It maintains nearly 800 bases in more than 70 countries around the world. It has hundreds of ships, thousands of warplanes, and tens of thousands of armored vehicles. The reason the internet can work across any device, network, and medium — the reason a smartphone in Sao Paulo can stream a song from a server in Singapore — is because it needed to be as ubiquitous as the American security apparatus that financed its construction.” Ben Tarnoff

· April 1: The Apple Computer Company was established by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne to develop and sell Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer. It was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. in 1977. They developed small, easy to use personal computers that could be used at home or in the office.

· May 31–June 11: Habitat I aka the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements was convened in Vancouver, Canada where privately owned land was raised as a threat to the social equity of people:

“Land, because of its unique nature and the crucial role it plays in human settlements, cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. Social justice, urban renewal and development, the provision of decent dwellings-and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole.”

Margaret Mead, a key participant in the Macy conferences on cybernetics and an editor of their proceedings, was a key participant. Her address to the inaugural conference of the American Society for Cybernetics was instrumental in the development of second-order cybernetics.

· November 2: Jimmy Carter won the US Presidential election.

1977

· February 2: The Environmental Agenda Task Force, an organization sponsored by the Rockefeller Brother Fund, held a little publicized, day-long symposium on Washington’s Capitol Hill to publicize its just released report, The Unfinished Agenda.

Written by the 12-member Task Force in collaboration with 63 other leading environmentalists, the report was a blueprint for the total destruction of United States industry through a combination of energy cutbacks coupled with at least five-fold increases in energy prices.

· November 17: Implementation of how “you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet … This included a radio network and a satellite network connected as well as the ARPANET. The most important thing in this three-network test was to show the TCP/IP protocol would link all three together.” Vint Cerf

As the Nixon shock began to get traction for legal fictions to manufacture consent around living “the system must be first” model that mechanically self-organizes us to unnaturally fight each other to grow their power, could that have accounted for the rise of the winner-take-all economy?

In Winner-Take-All Politics, political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson shared how by the late 1970’s, a political system that traditionally has been responsive to the interests of the middle class has been hijacked by the super-rich. They revealed an unpleasant but catalyzing truth: winner-take-all politics is still very much with us.

Observing the bureaucratization of business, life and the surrender of parental authority to “professionals,” Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations in 1979 to share how post-war America essentially produced “pathological narcissists”:

“Corporate bureaucracies put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”

“But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch.

The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called “symbolic analysts” — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities.

Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities.” Scott London

Did the Nixon shock enable the emergence of this tiny “paranoid” minority that wants to rule by controlling everyone and everything at all costs?

In his 1911 book “Political Parties,” Robert Michels explained a political theory called the Iron Law of Oligarchy — how rule by an elite or oligarchy is inevitable as an integral part of the “tactical and technical necessities” of organization.

Bureaucracy works when the jobs are highly specialized so the work can be highly standardized.

Working on Ford’s factory assembly line, the Iron Law measures and benchmarks everyone against numeric KPIs. With bureaucratization and specialization as the driving processes, won’t the rise of professional administrators lead to the rationalization and routinization of authority and decision-making?

As centralization occurs, power then ends up in very few hands:

“Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts.” Darcy K. Leach, The Iron Law of What Again? Conceptualizing Oligarchy across Organizational Forms

These few — the oligarchy — will use all means necessary to preserve and further increase their power. “Oligarchy” comes from the Greek word oligarchia, and it means “few governing”:

“The ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’ states that any organization or society will eventually become an oligarchy. That’s because the people who learn how to succeed in the organization gain a competitive advantage. The larger and more complicated the organization becomes, the more advantages the elite gain. Oligarchs only associate with others who share those same traits. They become an organized minority, while average citizens remain an unorganized majority. The oligarchs groom protégés who share their values and goals. It becomes more difficult for the average person to break into the group of elites.” Kimberly Amadeo

For leaders in organizations, Michels argued: “The desire to dominate . . . is universal. These are elementary psychological facts.” Scarcity ensures seeking power and dominance becomes addictive.

Creating One “World Company” For Rent-Seekers?

“Since the 1980s, it is mainly the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF that act as the enforcers of neoliberalism. These programs are levied against the countries of the South which can be extorted due to their debts. Meanwhile, numerous military interventions and wars help to take possession of the assets that still remain, secure resources, install neoliberalism as the global economic politics, crush resistance movements (which are cynically labeled as ‘IMF uprisings’), and facilitate the lucrative business of reconstruction.” Claudia von Werlhof

In The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Katharina Pistor explored different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders and how

“the logic of capital coded in law … does not follow the rules of competition; instead, it operates according to the logic of power and privilege.”

With “legal fictions” as gatekeepers to what we need to survive, do a few people, well hidden behind these corporate raiders with no greater god than greed, control our means of survival and determine who should live or die and dictate that our way of life revolves around “the system must be first”?

According to Eric Holt-Gimenez, Executive Director of Food First:

“For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day — most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating inviably small plots of land — can’t afford to buy this food.”

As for the world being overpopulated, a NYC-based entrepreneur had used population data from NASA/SEDAC based on 2000 populations and world borders GIS data from Thematic Mapping. Max Galka found half the world’s population lived in just 1% of the land.

However, the umbrella BAU model we are co-dependent on pre-determines outcomes for us based on mathematics to benefit institutional rent-seekers.

In Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?, Brett Christophers described “rentier capitalism” as a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals who own key types of scarce assets (e.g. land, intellectual property, natural resources, digital platforms) while everybody else foots the bill.

Was that what Ida Auken, former Minister for the Environment of Denmark and Davos elite, was pitching in a November 2016, Forbes article? How by 2030, we will own nothing:

“I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes … One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.”

If we own nothing, does that mean the few people hidden behind the “legal fictions” will own everything?

In February 2016, Klaus Schwab sold government officials at the World Government Summit in Dubai on how they were to shape the world:

“The future is already here. The future has begun. Let me tell you why this Fourth Industrial Revolution is so crucial … It’s not just one breakthrough it’s a combination of many breakthroughs at the same time. In the book which is available to you, on a Fourth Industrial Revolution I mentioned 23 different pixels like the Internet of Things, like brain research and I could go on and on. Of course, drones, robots, artificial intelligence, and so on. And all those different technological advancements reinforce each other … it changes not only what we are doing, it changes us. Because it’s a fusion of our physical, digital and biological spheres. It’s the integration of those spheres. Just think of sensors planted into our brains. The opportunities are immense …”

But are the opportunities immense only for rent-seekers? For that matter, why were governments told what to do?

Did the Bretton Woods treaty give carte blanche to the Bretton Woods trio (the UN, the IMF and the World Bank) and now the WEF to have power over nation-states — signaling how to govern us with fiat currencies to fuel the growth of favored corporate fiefdoms and ultimately, to create the 21st century EIC (the World Company)?

By centrally regulating our world’s first rules-based international monetary system, have they covertly put the system first in the guise of caring for our wellbeing? Is that why we are now living the first truly GLOBAL experiment where our world model is more legally tailored for corporate persons than real people?

In Part I of this two-part article, I have compiled a few milestones from the last century that could have contributed to this. In Part II, I will attempt to cover snapshots of experiments over the last 600–700 or so years — if you have such input, please gmail me at cobundance but try to keep it succinct.

Exploring root causes for the mess our world is in based on how the BAU model molds behaviors, I’m too aware no one person knows everything. So, please let me know if I have made any boo-boos.

This was supposed to be the last article for the “Hacking mindsets” series I’ve been writing but mulling over my research, I started observing a pattern. That got me wondering if we are indeed living a top-down experiment that’s centuries in the making.

Together, let’s try to determine if deliberate and planned efforts, orchestrated top-down, were made to have us live one model of a global experiment to massively benefit a few (hidden) people at our expense.

Can that be the underlying root cause for the mess our world is in?