by Jim Marrs
—ATTRIBUTED TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
ECONOMIC DECLINE
TIMES ARE TOUGH FOR AMERICA.
Thanks to what Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called the failure of America’s financial system, by the start of 2010 more than $5 trillion of household wealth had evaporated. About one in every eight mortgages was in default or foreclosure. It is predicted that there will be ten million foreclosures on homes through 2012. One in every eight adults and one in four children now subsist on government food stamps.
All of these problems were exacerbated by high rates of unemployment. According to an Associated Press report, one in every five Americans is unemployed or underemployed, with the number expected to rise in 2010, causing the second-highest unemployment figure since World War II.
Dissension and dissatisfaction are widespread, and they’re linked to the poor economy. If the economy were the hands of a zombie, those hands would be bound by debt.
Charles K. Rowley is a professor of economics at George Mason University and general director of the Locke Institute in Fairfax, Virginia. He is widely considered to be a major voice in political and economic thought. In an article for the United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph, Rowley wrote: “The US economy suffers from a growing culture of indebtedness that has increasingly contaminated the federal government since 2001 and has spilled over dramatically into private household behavior.” He also raised a popular question, asking, “If excessive government indebtedness is a major source of the problem, why increase the government debt? Why encourage households to go yet further into debt?” Ominously, Rowley predicted “it is not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first- to third-world status experienced by Argentina under the national socialist governance of Juan Peron.” In other words, if the U.S. government cannot find ways of living within its means, as most families are forced to do, the nation may fall into third-world status, complete with scarcities of food and water, consumer goods, and socialized government control.
One of the barely noticed aspects of the financial crisis is the substantial drop in tax revenues, even as the Obama administration and Congress spend more to stimulate the economy. According to CNN, through the end of August 2009, the federal government collected 25 percent less tax revenue than for the same eight-month period in 2008. The Congressional Budget Office predicted tax receipts would fall to 14 percent of the gross domestic product, a sharp decline from the historical average of 18.3 percent. Additionally, individual income tax revenues fell 20 percent while corporate income taxes dropped a whopping 56 percent. Predictions for 2010 were not much better.
And the loss of governmental revenue has filtered down to local governments. Increasing unemployment has caused thirty-two state unemployment insurance trust funds to fall below the recommended federal level, indicating these states will require massive federal loans to continue assistance for the jobless. Officials in Vigo County, Indiana, announced in mid-2009 that they could no longer afford to bury a dead person if that dead person had no savings, insurance, or family money set aside for a funeral. In Atlanta, citizens’ groups have tried to stop city plans to demolish its remaining public housing units. More than twenty counties in Michigan have reverted paved roads to gravel in an effort to save money, according to the County Road Association of Michigan.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that 90 percent of all U.S. businesses are family owned or controlled. The financial crisis has forced many to close their doors. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated between the fourth quarter of 2007 and the fourth quarter of 2008, some four million firms with nineteen or fewer employees went out of business.
The American public in 2009 managed to actually increase their savings, but runaway deficit spending by the government undermined their efforts. Peter Schiff, the author of Crash Proof, explained, “The simple truth is that government debt is our debt. So if a family manages, at some cost to their lifestyle, to squirrel away an extra $1,000 in saving this year, but the government adds $20,000 in new debt per household (each family’s approximate share of the $1.8 trillion fiscal 2009 deficit), that family ends up owing $19,000 more than they did at the beginning of the year!”
SOCIALISM AND LOSS OF INDIVIDUALITY
SOCIALISM IS A KEY word in understanding what has happened to America. Most dictionaries define “socialism” as the collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods and services. Invariably, a centralized authority is needed to administer these means.
The communist leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin foresaw a worker’s paradise where “Each person will be voluntarily engaged in work according to his capacities, and each will freely take according to his needs.” But, as Lenin noted, before a person could freely take from the State, that person must become subordinate to the State.
“All our lives we fought against exalting the individual,” said Lenin. Espousing the same agenda of the early-day Western globalists who funded the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin proclaimed, “The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.” He also may have foreseen the methods being used to bring down the American Republic when he said, “The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency” and “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
As former assistant secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts stated in a treatise on the first principles of freedom, “A person born before the turn of the [20th] century was born a private individual. He was born into a world in which his existence was attested by his mere physical presence, without documents, forms, permits, licenses, orders, lists of currency carried in and out, identity cards, draft cards, ration cards, exit stamps, customs declarations, questionnaires, tax forms, reports in multuplicate [sic], social security number, or other authentications of his being, birth, nationality, status, beliefs, creed, right to be, enter, leave, move about, work, trade, purchase, dwell…. Many people take private individuals for granted, and they will find what I am saying farfetched. But private individuals do not exist in the Soviet Union or in China where the claims of the state are total and even art and literature must be subservient to the interests of the state….”
Roberts presented an example of how bureaucracy has begun to erode the liberties of American citizens: “[In the 1970s] US District Judge Wilbur Owens instructed the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia to use involuntary transfers of faculty members between system institutions to achieve racial balance among the faculties. As long as the involuntary transfers of teachers was intra-city and confined to elementary and high school teachers, my liberal colleagues saw it as social progress. But once they faced inter-city involuntary transfers, they called it fascism. It is true that until the liberal progress of the 1960s, government direction of labor in this century was unique to the Hitler and Stalin regimes. As is often the case, people realize the consequences of statist ideas only when their own private individualities are touched.”
But the fleecing of America did not merely start in the 1970s. It’s been going on for many more decades. Consider a 1934 editorial cartoon published in the Chicago Tribune, entitled “Planned Economy or Planned Destruction?” In the drawing there are men identified as “Young Pinkies from Columbia and Harvard,” who are shoveling money from a cart. Beneath the cart sits a disheveled Leon Trotsky writing, “Plan of action for U.S.—Spend! Spend! Spend! Under the guise of recovery—Bust the Government—Blame the capitalists for the failure—Junk the Constitution and declare a dictatorship.” This cartoon might well have been drawn by a conservative cartoonist of today.
A few older citizens may recall the words of Norman Mattoon Thomas, a pacifist who ran for president six times between 1928 and 1948 under the Socialist Party of America banner, “The American
people will never knowingly adopt Socialism,” he said. “But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
In a 1948 interview, Thomas said he was retiring from American politics because both the Democratic and Republican parties had adopted every plank of the Socialists’ platform and there was no longer a need for the alternative Socialist Party.
If Thomas was possibly correct in 1948, he is undoubtedly correct now. Many people see what once was termed “creeping socialism” in the United States now full-blown policy in Washington. This perception was reflected on the February 16, 2009, cover of Newsweek that declared, “We Are All Socialists Now.” Many Americans cringed at the nationalization of the banking and auto industries. They feared more would follow.
TEA PARTIES
BEGINNING IN APRIL 2009, protests against “out-of-control” government spending, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the squabble over health care spread nationwide in citizen meetings termed “tea parties.” The name came from the original Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists tossed shipments of tea into Boston Harbor in protest of the British government’s “taxation without representation.” Many modern wits have pointed out, “If the colonists thought taxation without representation was bad, they should see taxation WITH representation.”
In 2009, the spirit of protest spilled over into several town hall meetings, where members of Congress, off for the summer recess, were shouted at and, in some cases, chased from the hall by constituents angered by what they saw as President Obama’s socialist health-care plan and general government malfeasance. This groundswell of public protest continued into 2010, with even more tea parties and demonstrations of anger over perceived socialist giveaway programs, the health-care crisis, corporate bailouts, and the destruction of the U.S. economy, all of which will be discussed later.
NEW WORLD ORDER
MANY CONCERNED CITIZENS TURNED to alternative radio talk shows and Internet blogs to learn more about a plan by globalists to control the world, one that President George H. W. Bush called the “New World Order.” It’s a term that Adolf Hitler once used. Self-styled globalists are those people who believe themselves above petty nationalism. These men and women deal with the planet Earth as their sphere of influence. Many view the United States as a not-so-profitable division of their multinational corporations. Globalists adhere to the old Illuminati philosophy of “The end justifies the means,” although most would disdain any connection to that elder secret society or to the Nazis who carried this philosophy to its political extremes.
In the book Shadow Elite, Janine Wedel described globalists as “flexians,” members of a transnational elite, the “mover and shaker who serves at one and the same time as business consultant, think-tanker, TV pundit, and government adviser [and] glides in and around the organizations that enlist his services. It is not just his time that is divided. His loyalties, too, are often flexible.”
Despite the scoffs of “flexians” within the corporate mass media and bought-off politicians, a New World Order does exist and it often makes far-reaching plans. President T. Woodrow Wilson wrote that the bulk of money sent to Russia from the United States at the time of the Russian Revolution went to the Bolsheviks, the forerunners of the Communists. These funds came from the Rockefellers and other Wall Street capitalists such as Jacob Schiff, Elihu Root, J. P. Morgan, and the Harriman family (W. Averell Harriman became U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II). These men and others also provided initial funding for the Council on Foreign Relations.
When these same globalists became fearful of worldwide communism (they needed separate national or economic blocs to play off against each other for the tensions necessary for maximum profit and control), they supported National Socialism in Germany. German army intelligence agent Adolf Hitler was funded to provide a bulwark against the Communist tide by enlarging his National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis), in turn sowing the seeds of World War II. Three prominent Americans who were instrumental in funding the Nazis were National City Bank (now Citicorp) chairman John J. McCloy; Schroeder Bank attorneys Allen Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles; and Prescott Bush, a director of Union Banking Corporation and the Hamburg America shipping line. It is interesting to note that, following World War II, McCloy became the high commissioner of occupied Germany; John Foster Dulles became President Eisenhower’s secretary of state; Allen Dulles became the longest-serving CIA director; and Bush, as a senator from Connecticut, was instrumental in forming the CIA. It might also be noted that both McCloy and Allen Dulles sat on the largely discredited Warren Commission assigned by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. After World War II, the globalist agenda was advanced by the creation of the United Nations. An earlier attempt to create a transnational organization, the League of Nations, failed because the U.S. Senate thought that ratification would end American sovereignty.
Nick Rockefeller, a participant in the World Economic Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, may have revealed the agenda of the New World Order in a casual comment. According to the late Hollywood producer Aaron Russo, Rockefeller told him, “The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world.”
Catherine Austin Fitts, assistant secretary of housing during the George H. W. Bush presidency, wrote in early 2009: “In the fall of 2001 I attended a private investment conference in London to give a paper, ‘The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works: The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group.’ The presentation documented my experience with a Washington–Wall Street partnership that had engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble; illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the US; used ‘privatization’ as a form of piracy—a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder. Other presenters at the conference included distinguished reporters covering privatization in Eastern Europe and Russia. As the portraits of British ancestors stared down upon us, we listened to story after story of global privatization throughout the 1990s in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.”
Fitts reiterated Rockefeller’s statement about a New World Order ruled by a global elite. She noted, “As the pieces fit together, we shared a horrifying epiphany: the banks, corporations and investors acting in each global region were the exact same players. They were a relatively small group that reappeared again and again in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia accompanied by the same well-known accounting firms and law firms. Clearly, there was a global financial coup d’etat underway.”
Walter Cronkite, the legendary anchor of CBS News, often referred to as “the most trusted man in America,” also stated his belief that the country was ruled by a small elite. Shortly before his death in July 2009, Cronkite was asked if there was a ruling class in America. “I am afraid there is,” he replied. “I don’t think it serves the democracy well, but that is true, I think there is. The ruling class is the rich who really command our industry, our commerce, our finance. And those people are able to so manipulate our democracy that they really control the democracy, I feel.”
With the bulk of the public both manipulated and distracted by political parties and the corporate mass media, no one seems capable of discerning, much less opposing, this New World Order of elitists with corporate, family, and class connections and common interests.
Until the real rulers of America are identified and confronted, no amount of hand-wringing, letter writing, or demonstrating can have any meaningful effect.
DISSENSION IN THE RANKS
THE FINANCIAL CALAMITY OF 2008 exposed the New World Order to be in slight disarray even before it was firmly established. Though the Obama administration is rife with men and women w
ell connected to the centers of wealth and power, as will be seen, control over both the economic and social conditions in the United States appeared to be getting out of their hands. There was even dissension in the ranks at the University of Chicago, which many consider to be the center of globalist thinking. The university’s 1995 Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economic Sciences, Robert E. Lucas, claimed the Obama administration’s stimulus plans are “schlock economics,” while his colleague, Professor of Finance John H. Cochrane, stated they were based on discredited “fairy tales.” Their cry was reminiscent of the term “voodoo economics,” used by George H. W. Bush against Ronald Reagan’s free-enterprise plans during the Republican presidential primaries in 1980.
Paul Krugman, a New York Times op-ed columnist and winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, wrote, “As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations…the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.