From my brother in Northern Cal, came this cute video by Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff. In it she describes our consumer society, replete with: Corporate/Government collusion, resource depletion, population growth, third world exploitation, pollution, etc. What I found enlightening, tucked away in her video, was the truth that our consumer society was planned post-WWII. Retailing analyst Victor Lebow laid out the basic plan for a consumer society and Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors adopted it.
What has this cute little video have to do with our current financial/banking/monetary crisis in the U.S. and the miserable state of our Government and civil liberties? At the end of Lindsay’s video, she said, “See the connections, the big picture. Look around, get involved.” Well, I’ve had more time to look around and read since leaving engineering and entering public school teaching in 1999.
After losing 60% of my retirement savings in the NASDAQ crash of 2001, I studied our monetary and banking system for seven years. In the last year, I’ve begun studying the connections between the monetary system, banking, Government, the super-rich and big corporations. With conviction, I can assert that a large part, a very large part of what passes as random events in politics and economics, is not random, is not reaction to unforeseen circumstances, but is planned.
Divining these plans would seem to require the skills of an oracle or prophet. What seems clear at present is that Bush II’s presidency and his rubberstamp Republican and Democratic Congress have brought us to the point of military and financial crisis. Many foresaw the current crises, screamed loudly, and were ignored, like trees falling in a forest with no one there to hear them. And, those who knew were not talking. Bush I and Bush II certainly knew, Clinton knew, and Alan Greenspan knew what was going on and why. A long line of others knew before them as well.
But, if the NY Times is just getting around to hinting at the magnitude of the current financial crisis No Quick Fix to Downturn, that F. William Engdahl also wrote about in November The Financial Tsunami, Part I: Sub-Prime Mortgage Debt is but the Tip of the Iceberg, and many others before him have been writing about for years, you can be sure that the problem is so obviously true and apparent that what used to be considered “fringe” is now mainstream. Therefore, expect the Establishment to: 1) stop ignoring and dissembling about it, and 2) start psychologically preparing people to deal with it. That is, it is time to ramp up the propaganda machine to: get people to accept as fact that there is no way to avoid it, nothing could have been done to prevent it, no one saw it coming, and no one in particular is to blame. Certainly, there was no foresight or plan behind it. For those who do not accept the official story meekly, the “Patriot Act”, is ready and waiting to crash down like Maxwell’s silver hammer.
So, what the heck is really going on in the world??? What is the grand plan? Consider what many conspiracy theorists say. The League of Nations was founded after WWI to prevent future wars. After it failed to prevent WWII, the United Nations was founded, ostensibly also to prevent future wars. However, it was clear from the beginning and from U.S. laws enacted not long after the founding of the U.N. that one of its explicit purposes was over time to establish a world government. The two main barriers to world government were: funding and law enforcement. Later, it was proposed that the best way to fund the U.N. would be via a tax on world oil production, and at some point it would be necessary for it to be given control of a military of sufficient force to police the world. U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the world revolves around oil. Our biggest ally and essentially our largest advanced base in the Middle East by proxy is Israel.
Here is where many conspiracy theories tend to differ in the details, and some would say differ from reality, but the gist of it is that shadowy groups such as: big transnational corporations, the Rockefellers, the Fords, the Rothschilds, etc, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, the Trilateral Commission, the Royal Institute for International Affairs, are in cahoots with the Federal Reserve, Central Banks in Europe, the World Bank, the IMF, and the United Nations to establish One-World-Government.” When martial law is declared, the “black helicopters” are overhead, and U.N. troops are in the street, we will all know the day has arrived and who is in the driver’s seat.
Do the conspiracy theorists have it right? Is the world is falling under the sway of a power-mad clique of shadowy groups, trying to take over the world, like Pinky and the Brain, and that is all there is to it? Most people can read that last paragraph right down to the “Middle East” part. Then their eyes roll back in their heads. That was me too for most of my life. Now, I’m much more of the opinion there’s a lot of truth in those conspiracy fears, but the details are infinitely more fascinating than fevered imagination can produce. The truth is always more interesting than fiction.
Most Americans think that Government leads the country. But, if the conspiracy theorists are right, even if they tend to get a little paranoid, excitable, and see shadows where there are none, I tend to think they are right about the basics. Super-rich families, large corporations, central banks, top political leaders, and even wealthy and influential European royalty do lead and manipulate our political system, and the little people are kept in the dark most of the time, with little say or control in Government or where our country is headed.
There certainly were people in the early days of the U.N. who agreed with its lofty purpose and goals. However, it is obvious that the purpose and goals of a political organization can deviate from the intent of its founders over time. An organization can be co-opted, twisted, and put work for purposes far different than those originally stated. In my opinion, the families, large corporations, banks, political leaders, and royalty involved with groups named above are still in business to create a “world government”, however, not for the stated purpose behind the original U.N. charter. I’m not saying they are as sinister and as all-controlling as the “black helicopter” conspiracy theorists would have us believe, at best they are in pursuit of mundane goals such as political power, wealth acquisition, and self-preservation, while we the people are unfortunate serfs to be used, stepped on, or stepped over. At worst, yes their motives could be darker.
I’m convinced the Establishment wants world government or at least de facto world government in the sense of sufficient influence over all governments to control world natural resources and economies. They see themselves as superior to common folk and are for the most part, unconcerned about “the general welfare.” To achieve their goals, they plan and participate in financial manipulation on a global scale. As just one example, the World Bank and IMF engage in predatory third world lending that lead to concessions such as international trade agreements, the elimination of protective tariffs, abdication of authority by national courts, and collusion in crafting favorable government regulation, such as ownership and public benefit requirements. By globalizing economics this way, they take world wealth out of the control of governments of sovereign nations, and bring national politics and economics under their control.
What makes the Establishment so powerful, and how does the Establishment get what it wants? Well, one aspect is financial such as just described above. Another aspect is force as exemplified by military power and intervention. Obviously, the U.S. does not need to spend more on military spending than the rest of the world combined or have 147 some such permanent advanced bases in foreign countries around the world for “national defense.” The only military sufficient for the goal of the U.N. to police the world and protect the interests of the elites is the U.S. military, augmented as necessary by the forces of the EU. Together, the U.S. and European forces under NATO can easily police the world, provided that all the other major nuclear powers can be convinced, coerced, or bribed into going along. It is a given that all small rogue nuclear states must be economically suppressed, bought, militarily contained, or overthrown by covert or overt means.
A third aspect of Establishment power is the media and education. By exerting great influence on what stories are promoted in the “mainstream” media, and perhaps more importantly what stories are not promoted, by selectively funding research at the most prestigious universities and think tanks, the public is manipulated in thinking and believing, for the most part, what the Establishment wants them to believe and think. Corporate and private ownership of the major media outlets is a well-known subject, not in need of rehashing. Less understood by many is the exceptional influence of the Establishment on the selection of both Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates at the highest levels of both parties, the influence of the mainstream media on elections, the participation of perennial insiders in the crafting of all the leading candidate’s statements on foreign policy, and how such factors guaranty exceptional Establishment control over the U.S. executive branch of Government, foreign policy, and the military.
So, where is the evidence for this vast conspiracy, and what is the plan? Much information can be found piecemeal just by poking around, there are hundreds of sources, including some making a good case that the CIA is in large part a private club, a private army, and a government within a government serving the Establishment, but the best single recent article I’ve found outlining the tracks left by the Establishment in our financial system is The Financial Tsunami, Part II: The Financial Foundations of the American Century, by F. William Engdahl. A surprising and quite interesting second source is The Energy Non-Crisis. The latter link is a video, but the Energy Non-Crisis is a book by Lindsay Williams. It is a long video (90 minutes), but I strongly suggest that you watch it from beginning to end. Lindsay Williams is a Baptist preacher who went to Alaska to minister to the men working on the Alaska Pipeline and later became a confident of many oil men in high places. He says many surprising things, but everything he says is consistent with what Engdahl and others have said.
According to Lindsay Williams, there is an agreement between the West, lead by the U.S. and large oil interests, and major oil producing nations of the Middle East, brokered by Henry Kissinger, to the effect that the U.S. will help them develop their oil fields, support and defend their regimes, buy their oil, and not compete with them by developing domestic energy supplies. Two conditions were imposed on the oil producing nations. One is that they agree to always denominate their oil sales in dollars, and that they agree to always buy the U.S. national debt. These two conditions ensure that all other nations in the world must keep large foreign reserves in dollars, thus establishing the U.S. dollar as the world currency. After this agreement was made, the U.S. went off the gold standard, and the dollar was allowed to literally float on oil.
In order to maintain the agreement with the oil producing nations of the Middle East, to insure that Petrodollars would continue to be repatriated to the U.S. to finance the national debt, and to make it possible for U.S. banks to recycle the funds as predatory loans to third world countries, it was also necessary to: co-opt the environmental movement in the U.S. A powerful environmental lobby is necessary to prevent the U.S. from extensively developing its own energy resources and competing with the Middle East (ref. Lindsay Williams, Gull Island, Alaska oil and natural gas reserves).
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