The Federal Reserve
of the USA
(or, “In God We Trust”)
The Nixon Shock, the
Petrol dollar and the revolt by China, India and Russia through increased buying
Big Gold Reserves from 2018 on:
How the extremely rich
own and control the Major Banks, Big Pharma, Energy Markets and Mass Media
by
*Robert Gorter, MD, PhD, et al.
*Robert Gorter, MD, PhD, is emeritus professor University of California San Francisco Medical School (UCSF)
Foundation of the Federal Reserve in 1913
Recent news has asked the question: “Is the Federal Reserve System too big and too secret as a privately owned corporation?”
Despite what the name suggests, the Federal Reserve Bank is not part of the Federal government. It is a privately owned corporation with about 200 stock holders that provides no open access to the names of its stakeholders. But we have trustworthy documentation that among the shareholders is the Bank of America, the Kennedy Clan, the Bush Clan, The Rockefellers, to mention a few.
The Federal Reserve is the central bank of the United States, but privately owned. The Fed manages inflation, regulates the national banking system, stabilizes financial markets, protects consumers, and more. Although the Fed board members are appointed by the president, it is designed to function independently of political influence.
On Dec. 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act. Over the following year, a selection committee made up of Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, Secretary of Agriculture David Houston, and Comptroller of the Currency John Williams decided which U.S. cities would be a place of residence for one of 12 Federal Reserve District Banks.
The Federal Reserve Banks are not a part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress. Their purpose is to serve the public. So is the Fed private or public?
The answer is both; but very much private. While the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations. Member banks hold stock in the Federal Reserve Banks and earn dividends. Holding this stock does not carry with it the control and financial interest given to holders of common stock in for-profit organizations. The stock may not be sold or pledged as collateral for loans. Member banks also appoint six of the nine members of each Bank’s board of directors.
Today, only the private bankers know who exactly owns the Federal Banks. It is a secret kept since the Federal Reserve was established. However, a few of the top shareholders are:
1. Rothschild’s of London and Berlin
2. Lazard Brothers of Paris
3. Israel Moises Seaf of Italy
4. Kuhn, Loeb & Co. of Germany and New York
5. Warburg & Company of Hamburg, Germany
6. Goldman, Sachs of New York
7. Rockefeller Brothers of New York.
8. Bank of America, San Francisco
9. Blackrock
10. Vanguard
To bring up the problems around the Federal Reserve on a grand forum to the general public is a difficult matter as it is shunned by the large media like CNN or ABC while individuals have been portraying concern over how powerful the Federal Reserve is as a bank, system, or banking system. To touch the Federal Reserve seems to be a taboo and not popular to discuss in the open. One can ask: “Why?”
The Federal Reserve is made up of a Board of Governors, 12 member banks, and 25 branches which work together to supply a reserve of funds. Overall, it is designed to promote economic growth and monetary policy as it works with and dictates to a large extent the U.S. Treasury Department. Although the Federal Reserve follows both public and private policies, it serves as an institution to not only insure other banks, but assist the government through the Federal Open Market Committee, the printing of currency as it pleases, and the regulation of other financial institutions.
Steve Forbes of Fox News brings attention to how powerful the Federal Reserve has become as an institution. In a recent opinion report, Forbes compared the Federal Reserve’s monetary power to that of the Second Bank of the United States formed in the 1800s. Forbes stated Andrew Jackson fought hard to destroy the Second Bank so that it was not a threat to democracy. Forbes is arguing the same treatment should be applied to policies of the Federal Reserve.
Federal Reserve started with a “micro-prudential approach” aiming to keep business with other financial institutions small. However, over the course of years and relations with other banks, and investment companies, the Federal Reserve has grown to be a system of seemingly relentless influence and power. Over time, it became notoriously known as the Central Bank of the U.S.
According to former banker and journalist Marilyn MacGruder Barnewall, the Federal Reserve banking system started in Jekyll Island during 1910. In 1913, the institution was adopted into the Federal Reserve Act. Barnewall claims there is a query whether all Congressmen were present to vote on the bill on December 23rd, 1913 as she implies members of Congress were home for the holiday week, so the act might not even have been legally established.
Stringent research of Federal Government archives show that this history-changing piece of legislation was brought to a vote just before Christmas Eve, when 27 senators did not even get a vote because they were already home with their families. It passed 43-25. Because America abandoned the gold-backed standard to fund the Civil War in 1862, a private institution now has the limitless power to create new “Federal Reserve Notes” out of thin air. Barnewall stated in an opinion on the News with Views website there is a difference between the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve System. She noted the Constitution gives powers to Congress to establish a taxing system, regulate monetary policy, and borrow against the National Debt, among other things. After the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law, it gave an entity called the Federal Reserve the duty of not only printing money, but the power to expand credit. And, since it is backed by Congress until this day, it has maintained prestige and power to rule over all U.S. banks, whether directly or indirectly, Barnewall claimed. And, the actions of the Federal Reserve have a ripple effect throughout the world. The Federal Reserve has the power to affect the global economic growth (or decline) of their economies.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), commonly known by his initials FDR, was an American statesman and political leader who served as the 32nd President of the United States from March 4th 1933 till April 12th, 1945
Barnewall stated the Federal Reserve is a “private money monopoly” consisting of member banks, and apparently, the federal government as a client. Although seven governors are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to hold seats as Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, taxes from the government (or, the people) go to interest charged by the Federal Reserve for “the right to borrow money.” Barnewall suggested the establishment of the Federal Reserve can best be described by President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) who was president at the time. He was quoted as saying the power of an industrial nation was given to the hands of a few men in the form of a “system of credit.”
If the Federal Reserve is too big as a private institution, then why are taxpayers supporting it through Congress indirectly, and why is it seemingly in debt? The 2008, bailout of banks may have something to do with it, but for the most part, the Federal Reserve might be issuing more credit than it can print, particularly to assist (their own) private banks.
Ellen Brown of Global Research mentioned in an opinion report that in March of 2008 the New York branch of the Federal Reserve advanced funds to J.P. Morgan Chase Bank so the bank could obtain an investment bank called Bear Stearns. According to Brown, this deal was controversial since Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan is also on the board of the N.Y. Federal Reserve. Among other acquisitions, Brown pointed out that most people thought the $700 billion government bailout meant the federal government was acquiring financial institutions with tax payers’ money to save them from failure after the housing crisis which hit in 2008.
Brown stated ordinarily the Federal Reserve trades “notes” (dollar bills) with the government for “pink pieces of paper” called U.S. Treasury bonds to assist Congress with funds it cannot achieve through taxes. Since 2008, however, the Treasury Department has been issuing bonds not for the government’s use, but for the Federal Reserve. Brown claims “triple-A” securities have been issued by the government in exchange for “toxic derivative debt” acquired by the Federal Reserve as a result of financial institutions burdened by the housing crisis. Like these financial institutions, or private banks, the Federal Reserve is also being saved by the federal government in order to rebuild reserves and make “new loans,” but at the expense of (again) taxpayer money.
Brown suggested that since the Federal Reserve is not a federal agency, taxpayer money is going to a private institution that has been given power by the appropriations of Congress. Although Congress can change the “responsibilities of the statute” of the Federal Reserve, it most likely will not do so unless taxpayers demand a change. Barnewall and Forbes argue the same idea in hopes of making the Federal Reserve more transparent and in finding alternatives to supply money without an interest rate or serve private interests.
Although the Federal Reserve is appropriated by Congress for monetary policies and other responsibilities, it also exchanges credit with the U.S. Treasury Department to either collect interest for services rendered, or to purchase government bonds through “open market operations,” giving private financial institutions more privileges than taxpayers. Though Congress gives power to the Federal Reserve to “handle the Treasury’s payments, sell government securities and assist with the Treasury’s cash management and investment activities,” the Federal Reserve System might just be another financial firm too big to replace.
Inflation: The hidden tax
In its original form, the Federal Reserve had power to do little more than was already done by the free market system of money (let the demand for new dollars be met with a supply by decentralized banks). This is because the original Federal Reserve Act placed strict limits on the amount of United States Treasury bonds it could buy: No more than $25 million per year. In 1994, this limit was declared obsolete and has not been adhered to since. Mind you, the Federal Reserve Act was never officially amended to correct this; the limit is simply ignored, much like the ever-moving “debt ceiling.” Today, (during the year 2020) the Federal Reserve is printing approximately $80 to $89 billion per month and using it to purchase Treasury bonds. This runaway printing of money has had disastrous consequences on the purchasing power of the dollar. For every new dollar that is injected into the economy, the dollars one already has become just a little bit less valuable. The Fed has a target rate of 2% inflation. For some reason, Ben Bernanke deems anything less as bad for the economy.
This inflation effectively steals money from a citizen. In fact, inflation has stolen so much of our money that if one had $100 in 1913, today he would have only $4. Why anybody thinks this is a good thing is beyond our comprehension, especially considering wages rarely rise to compensate for this loss (theft).
The solution to cure this sick money is very simple, yet it will probably not be acted on: we need to return to a gold and silver-backed currency. Until we do, all we hold in our accounts are little pieces of paper that only hold value because someone with power says they do. Of course, one can also always opt out of the fiat money system by bartering with people to get the things one needs. This can be difficult, but not impossible if you know the right people.
The “Nixon Shock”
The “Nixon Shock” was a series of economic measures undertaken by United States President Richard Nixon in 1971, the most significant of which was the unilateral cancellation of the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold.
While Nixon’s actions did not formally abolish the existing Bretton Woods system of international financial exchange, the suspension of one of its key components effectively rendered the Bretton Woods system inoperable. While Nixon publicly stated his intention to resume direct convertibility of the dollar after reforms to the Bretton Woods system had been implemented, all attempts at reform proved unsuccessful. By 1973, the Bretton Woods system was replaced de facto by a regime based on freely floating fiat currencies that remains in place to the present day.
Just over 40 years ago, on 15 August 1971, President Richard Nixon stunned the world by closing the gold window (ending the ability of foreign central banks to convert their dollar holdings into gold) and slapping a 10% surcharge on imported goods. These policies were designed to prevent a run on US gold reserves and reverse the deterioration in the US balance of payments by getting other countries to revalue their currencies, as well as head off protectionist pressures in Congress. Together with domestic wage and price controls to reduce inflation, these surprise actions became known as the ‘Nixon Shock’.
The closing of the gold window ended a defining feature of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates (Bordo and Eichengreen, 1993). However, relatively little attention has been paid to the 10% import surcharge, despite the fact that it was a key element of the package. The purpose of the surcharge was to force other countries to revalue their currencies against the dollar, which was widely thought to have been overvalued against other major currencies. Administration officials believed that simply closing the gold window alone would not have induced other countries to agree to a revaluation. As it turned out, four months after the surcharge was imposed, the Smithsonian Agreement was reached, which revalued major currencies and allowed the import surcharge to be lifted.
While short-lived, the import surcharge constituted a unique, unanticipated policy experiment in which the United States imposed an immediate, across the-board tariff on dutiable imports – the first general tariff increase since the Smoot–Hawley tariff of 1930. This paper reviews the decision-making process behind the surcharge, its impact on US imports, its role in bringing about the revaluation of foreign currencies, and the legal issues raised by its imposition in the hope that it may offer some useful lessons about the interaction between exchange rate adjustments and protectionist pressures
Later ramifications:
The Nixon Shock has been widely considered to be a political success, but an economic mixed bag in bringing on the stagflation of the 1970s and leading to the instability of floating currencies. The dollar plunged by a third during the ’70s, and in 1997 several Asian and Latin countries faced currency crises. According to the World Trade Review’s “The Nixon Shock after forty years: the import surcharge revisited”, Douglas Irwin reports that for several months, U.S officials could not get other countries to agree to a formal revaluation of their currencies. German mark appreciated significantly after it allowed the mark to float in May 1971. Also, the Nixon Shock unleashed enormous speculation against the dollar. It forced Japan’s central bank to intervene massively in the foreign exchange market to prevent the yen from increasing in value. Within two days August 16–17, 1971, Japan’s central bank had to buy $1.3 billion to support the dollar and keep the yen at the old rate of 360 Yen. Japan’s foreign exchange reserves rapidly increased: $2.7 billion (30%) a week later and $4 billion the following week. Still, this large-scale intervention by Japan’s central bank could not prevent the depreciation of US dollar against the yen. France also was willing to allow the dollar to depreciate against the franc, but not allow the franc to appreciate against gold” (Page 14 Douglas). Even to the present, Paul Volcker regrets the abandonment of Bretton Woods. “Nobody’s in charge,” Volcker says. “The Europeans couldn’t live with the uncertainty and made their own currency and now that’s in trouble.”
(Please, visit this web link for further insight into “Background and events” by an excellent overview by Ghizoni et al.)
Ghizoni, S., Lowenstein, R., Lehrman, L & Frum, D. “Nixon Shock.” Retrieved 20 July.2014, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock#Later_ramifications
More Current Situation (2008 till mid 2017):
Countless conferences have been organized on the latest financial crisis. One has been told that the economy is following “natural” cycles of up and downs, like seasons or tides. We are currently in a (cyclic) down wave and we should wait for the (cyclic) recovery and ask governments to do something to speed up that recovery. One can probably hear various reasons to explain the crisis and many experts have already highlighted to you the challenges that we should expect in the coming months and years–to-come. As far as solutions are concerned, some have probably told you that Eurobonds could help, while others consider them as a very bad idea. Some would say that more austerity measures are required while others believe that the economy needs a stimulus package. And of course, some would tell you that Greece should exit the Euro zone while others assert the contrary. And so on. And so on.
Yet most of those traditional experts agree on one point: the severity of the crisis was totally unpredictable.
In February 2008, the US Federal Reserve Chairman at that time, Mr. Ben Bernanke said: “I expect there will be some failures of smaller banks. But among the largest banks, the capital ratios remain good and I don’t anticipate any serious problems of that sort among the large, internationally active banks that make up a very substantial part of our banking system.”
So one should accept that the economy reacts totally unpredictable. But is it really so?
The current crisis is the consequence of a long chain of decisions, taken by elite circles (mainly of those by the Federal Reserve). Anyone who steps back and sums up those decisions would see that they could only lead to a major crisis. As one can realize, there is no need to be an expert to come to that conclusion and therefore one can safely assume that the elites behind those decisions knew very well what they were doing. In a sense, for them the current crisis is necessary to promote major reforms and their specific agenda.
We are not talking about hidden conspiracy theories but about historical facts, for sure not published in main street media but still easy to verify.
It has been demonstrated often in recent history that when a population is put under severe shock, it is not capable to think clearly and it is ready to accept gladly things that they would otherwise refuse. As such, some elite circles believe, that shock (panic) is the best way to implement major reforms.
David Rockefeller speaking at a UN Business Conference on Sept. 14, 1994 said “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.” (David Rockefeller meant to say: “My World Order”).
It takes more than a couple of years to engineer a major crisis, to promote major reforms, on a world level. It requires the implementation of many gradual changes in several fields such as commerce, trade, finance. It implies also societal and cultural changes. At first, all those changes seem independent and unrelated but at one point they all converge to create a major chaos.
To understand the root cause of the crisis one would need to go back in history. Just a few examples which lead to the financial crisis as it is: global.
On August 15, 1971, the US president Nixon agreed to follow his economic advisers and especially Mr. Peter Peterson and appeared on TV. In his famous speech, he announced that he suspended the convertibility of the American dollar with gold in order to stabilize the dollar. Nixon said that in full cooperation with the International Monetary Fund, the US will press for the necessary reforms to set up an urgently needed new international monetary system.
Peter G. Peterson, born June 5, 1926, is a controversial Wall Street billionaire who uses his wealth to underwrite a diversity of organizations and PR campaigns to generate public support for slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, citing concerns over “unsustainable” federal budget deficits. In 2007, he made a fortune from the public offering of the private equity firm he co-founded, Blackstone Group, and pledged to spend $1 billion of this money to “fix America’s key fiscal-sustainability problems.” He endowed this money to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which he launched in 2008. His son, Michael A. Peterson, is the President and Chief Operating Officer of the foundation.
Keep this in mind: the announced purpose was to set up a new (USA-led) monetary system together with the IMF.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international organization that was initiated in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference and formally created in 1945 by 29 member countries. The IMF’s stated goal was to assist in the reconstruction of the world’s international payment system post–World War II. Countries contribute funds to a pool through a quota system from which countries with payment imbalances temporarily can borrow money and other resources. As of the 14th General Review of Quotas in late 2010 the fund stood at SDR476.8bn, or about US$755.7bn at then-current exchange rates. Through this fund, and other activities such as surveillance of its members’ economies and the demand for self-correcting policies, the IMF works to improve the economies of its member countries.
The IMF is a self-described “organization of 188 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.” The organization’s objectives are stated in the Articles of Agreement and can be summarized as: to promote international economic co-operation, international trade, employment, and exchange-rate stability, including by making financial resources available to member countries to meet balance of payments needs. Its headquarters are in Washington, D.C., United States.
Peter George “Pete” Peterson (born June 5, 1926) is an American businessman, investment banker, fiscal conservative, philanthropist, and author, who served under Richard Nixon as United States Secretary of Commerce from February 29, 1972 to February 1, 1973. He is also known as founder and principal funder of The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which he established in 2008 with a $1 billion endowment. The group focuses on raising public awareness about U.S. fiscal-sustainability issues related to federal deficits, entitlement programs, and tax policies. In recognition of his support, the influential Peterson Institute for International Economics was named in his honor in 2006.
Before serving as Secretary of Commerce, Peterson was Chairman and CEO of Bell & Howell, from 1963 to 1971. From 1973 to 1984 he was Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers. In 1985, he co-founded the private equity firm, the Blackstone Group, which went public in 2007. Peterson was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations until retiring in 2007, after being named chairman emeritus. In 2008, Peterson was ranked 149th on the “Forbes 400 Richest Americans” with a net worth of $2.8 billion. Peterson has been named the most influential billionaire in U.S. politics.
On August 4, 2010, it was announced that he had signed “The Giving Pledge.” He was one of 40 billionaires, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who agreed to give at least half their public wealth to charity.
John Davison Rockefeller, Jr. (January 29, 1874 – May 11, 1960) was an American financier and philanthropist who was a prominent member of the Rockefeller family. He was the only son among the five children of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller and the father of the five famous Rockefeller brothers. In biographies, he is commonly referred to as “Junior” to distinguish him from his father, “Senior”
Mr. Peterson, please keep also his name in the back of your mind. In 1969, Mr. Peter Peterson’s career was boosted by John D. Rockefeller so that he not only became the secretary of commerce of Nixon but he was for years Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, an old and very powerful American Think Tank. He is the founder of Blackstone group and is also the founder of the Peterson Foundation which is very influential amongst the financial circles.
For centuries, the money that has been used was either silver or gold coins or paper backed by silver or gold. After the Nixon decision, for the first time ever in the entire history, humanity used someone’s debt as a mean of exchange. I guess that you all know, that the money you are using is created out of thin air and is only backed by debts. In 1971, after removing the remaining remote connection to gold, the brakes were released and from that moment on, money could be created at full speed. This is what the privately owned Federal Reserve does till today: print money in abundance and their stockholders get 6% of what the Federal Reserve prints (in 2013, about 80 billion dollars per month were printed; the so-called “Quantitative Easing”).
This decision, often called the “Nixon Shock,” coincided with the oil crisis. Forty years later we know for sure that this oil crisis was totally engineered. By early 1973, the dollar had lost 40% of its value against the German Deutschmark. The power of Wall Street and of the American Century was threatened as never before in the postwar period.
As had been the case with Britain’s Pound Sterling a century before, controlling the world reserve currency would give Wall Street and the large international banks of New York an incomparable advantage in dominating the world financial markets and economy.
In May 1973, a group of 84 of the world’s top financial and political insiders met at Saltsjöbaden in Sweden at one secret Bilderberg meeting. The Bilderberg group gathers once a year and about 130 world top managers meet for private discussions. In 1973, present were David Rockefeller, various CEO of the major oil companies, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Kissinger and many other top executives. The oil crisis was planned together with what Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petrodollar flows’ into US banks in the City of London. Anyway, the point is that after the oil crisis the dollar was firmly established as the world reserve currency since oil is quoted in dollar. And a world reserve currency managed by a single country (the US) was the best receipt to engineer a world crisis at a later stage.
Mr. John Connally once famously said to European finance ministers: “(the) Dollar is our currency, but your problem”.
One last word about oil, in order to justify the high price, the oil companies promoted the never proven assumption that oil is a fossil fuel and supported the unscientific methodology of Hubbert‘s to claim that oil production will peak. The abiotic origin of oil exposed by the Russian scientists Mr. Krayushkin was mocked. In fact, various foundations and club such as the Club of Rome supported a general Malthusian plan which aimed at promoting the idea that the resources on earth are limited, that humans are producing too much CO2 and polluting and therefore, that the human population should, one way or another, be reduced.
When money is created, it benefits the ones who have a direct access to that new money that is the ones closer to the source of money. And this is to the detriment of the ones that are far from the source namely the average man or woman who will suffer from the general price inflation, which is a consequence of the money creation and the dilution of its exchange value. Commercial banks are the source of money are and thus, the ones who benefit from the new money are commercial banks or Hedge Funds with easy access to commercial bank loans. There are mainly 2 points of entry for newly created money:
the stock exchange and commodity markets
and real- or commercial estate
The holder of the new money can use that money to blow various speculative bubbles on those 2 points of entry or they can attack weaker currencies. And indeed: that’s exactly what happened, after 1971, there have been many crises:
◾In 1973, the oil prices soared, causing the 1973–1974 stock market crash
◾Then in the United Kingdom we had the secondary banking crisis of 73–75
◾Then in 1982, beginning in Mexico with the Mexican Weekend we had the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s
◾In Israel, we had the bank stock crisis of 1983
◾Then in 1987, there was “Black Monday”, the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history
◾Then from 1989 to 1991, the United States experienced the Savings & Loan crisis
◾In 1990 the Japanese asset price bubble collapsed
◾During early 1990s also the Swedish and Finnish had their banking crisis
◾In 1992–1993 we had the so called Black Wednesday period with speculative attacks on currencies in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. A good deal for Mr. Soros.
◾In 1994–1995 we had the economic crisis in Mexico with speculative attacks and default on Mexican debt
◾After that, in 1997–1998 we had the Asian Financial Crisis with devaluations and banking crisis across Asia
◾1998 is the Russian financial crisis
2000–2001, the Turkish Crises
◾2001, also the Argentine Crises
◾And of course, 2001 is the Bursting of dot-com bubble. The same year we had the 9-11 events. You know when Islamic fanatics who loved alcohol and prostitutes, crashed 2 airplanes in the towers and were identified thanks to the miraculous discovery of their passport by the US police in the millions of tons of rubble.
◾And here we are with the major financial crisis starting in 2007 and lasting on and on.
Through fractional reserve system, the banking sector and more generally the financial world can survive only if trust is at the center. The receipt is very easy: whatever destroys that trust will create chaos.
Today’s crisis is a direct consequence of Nixon’s decision (and prepared by the Federal Reserve. Yet, that’s not the only decision that caused the current crisis and that will probably lead to a major chaos in the future.
Let us review some of those financial decisions made by Nixon and guarded by the IFM:
Soon after the Nixon shock, central bankers around the world realized that something had to be done to avoid a huge increase of gold price which would send an immediate red warning signal. So they decided to lease their gold to bullion banks who, in their turn, sold that same gold. Then the gold stored on unallocated accounts was sold again, backed by paper certificates or shares of “Exchange Traded Funds.” At the end much more paper gold was sold than what is physically available to back those papers. Of course, the ones behind that scheme knew that the day of reckoning will come and that it will contribute to create an even greater chaos. And during global chaos there is a global panic and one can manipulate if one has organized it (“fishing in troubled waters”).
Under Alan Greenspan reign’s many laws which forced a clear separation between loan and savings banks on one side and investment banks on the other side were abolished.
Greenspan strongly encouraged the development and usage of complex structured financial instruments which were rated AAA by friendly rating agencies.
After the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Greenspan maintained the rates too low for too long. Together with extensive securitization, this decision inflated a real estate bubble in the US and triggered the subprime crisis.
This allowed a contamination of the entire financial world since it appeared to be very difficult to estimate the quality of the loans that were backing those instruments. As we all know the banking sector was rescued by the States and now there is nobody to rescue the States.
The massive usage of High Frequency Trading Program was authorized almost unregulated: if there are no rules set by the government any area will become the playing grounds of greedy and criminal people and forces.
But critical deregulation occurred also on the commodity market, in two steps; before mid-1970s there was no single “world price” for grain, the benchmark for the price of all foods and food products. The first sets of decisions focused on eliminating grain reserves. This was accomplished in 1996 on a world-wide level (except for China and India). The Trilateral Commission’s publications played a major role in that accomplishment. In case you don’t know, that highly influential Think Tank was established in 1973, by Rockefeller and 2 US central bankers, Volker and Greenspan. Then the second rounds of decisions were aimed at eliminating the agricultural commodity derivatives regulation. In 2000 a law was eventually voted. The two key architects of Clinton’s new law were, Mr Larry Summers, a former Goldman Sachs consultant and Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and his Assistant at Treasury, Mr. Tim Geithner, Close to the banking world and currently Obama’s Treasury Secretary. Mr. Summers also prevented efforts to regulate financial derivatives in commodities and financial products. The historic and unprecedented deregulation facilitated the development of derivatives which played a critical role in the 2007 financial collapse. Bare this in mind when you will see in the coming months that the price of food is rising constantly: food is now a financial instrument. On the future market you have real food and virtual food and no distinction can be made between the two. Investors can sell food that does not exist to other investors who are not interested to take delivery of that virtual food. The great advantage for investors is that there will always remain a guaranteed demand. Can you think of any better financial instrument?
All those decisions created a proper framework and greed and selfishness did the rest. The greed of many traders and senior managers lead to various frauds such as the libor fraud or the Robot signing fraud and so on. Goldman Sachs was accused to sell toxic instruments to its own customers and at the same time buy CDS to gain from their collapse. Many selfishly motivated financial actors put their personal interests above the collective interest and this created what is called the ‘financialization’ of the world economy. Where the focus is on short term views (that is one month) to the detriment of long term views, where management is driven by “stock prize”, by “stock options”, by “bonuses” which leads to a lack of productive investments and competition amongst workers on a worldwide level,…etc
Years after years, the Bilderberg group organized private meetings with the top managers of various corporations to foster globalization. But let’s face it, trade liberalization between countries with hugely different living standards, logically leads to the relocation of manufacturing facilities and generates unemployment. Globalization is only profitable for multinational companies and their senior managers. For most of the participant of those meetings, globalization has only one cult: “money“
In an environment where prizes are going up, where salaries are not progressing at the same pace, where unemployment grows due to relocation in China and India, another logical consequence is that the only possibility left for a family to purchase a car, a house or even a TV in some case, is to borrow. And again we see that debts are everywhere. We pay with debts and many people are over indebted. And be aware that through interests, debts concentrate wealth into the hands of the largest lenders.
All of this has been performed under the umbrella of leading ideologies such as Fabianism or the ones from the Frankfurt School whose purpose is to advance socialism on a worldwide level via gradualist and reformist means, rather than revolution. Their ultimate goal is to establish an one world government. Fabianism is connected to elite groups, to eugenics and to some much darker ideologies. Many of those ideologies are promoted by the Rockefeller foundation and other equivalent foundations with the help of large media groups (CNN, ABC, etc).
Today we are in more advanced stage of the crisis. As we all know, thanks to the Goldman Sachs special transactions debt issued by Greece in dollars and yen was swapped for euros using an historical exchange rate, a mechanism that implied a reduction in debt. The swaps were highly structured and even if initially it appeared as debt reduction it wasn’t at all. Many countries used swaps and officially, only Greece, could not resist to the temptation to hide its debt level. We shall see. It’s not necessary to explain what you all know about Greece and the consequences if it leaves the euro zone. It will probably have a bad impact on the Target 2 accounts at ECB which are at historical level because the banking system is not working well. The European banks prefer to settle their transactions in central bank money instead of scriptural money. All the banks are so connected through their short term funding, through derivatives that any major shock could have unpredictable consequences.
Mario Draghi, the current head of the European Central Bank (ECB) was Goldman Sachs European Vice President while the famous swaps were established with Greece. He is member of the Trilateral Commission and of the Bilderberg group. Loukas Papademos was Governor of the Greek central bank when the famous swaps were signed. In November 2011, he was appointed prime minister instead of Papandreou. He is also member of the Trilateral Commission. In that same year, Mario Monti was chosen as the new prime minister of Italy without election. He is member of the Trilateral Commission and of the Bilderberg group and was an adviser of Goldman Sachs in 2005. Goldman Sachs is the same bank which played a key role in the European crisis… can one detect a possible correlation between the gentlemen and their institutions they served?
If the crisis is not simply accidental what could be the objectives of the real decision makers? A major crisis like the one we will have to endure, as it’s far from being over, will lead to major reforms. For the purpose of this article, I would like to focus just on one reform: the financial one.
How to find out what could be the ultimate financial reform? In fact it’s very easy: one needs simply to read the publications of the real decision makers. Indeed they don’t hide their objectives.
Immediately after the Nixon shock, amongst the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, we find a key document: « Towards a Renovated World Monetary System ». To summarize it very much, the document describes precisely how to establish a one world currency called bancor and based upon the special drawing rights of the International Monetary Funds which will be transformed into a world central bank. At first that new currency would not replace the other currencies but would act as a new “independent” world reserve currency in place of the US dollar. Through substitution accounts, the old currencies could gradually be replaced, one should say recycled, into the new bancor.
The bancor was the supranational currency that John Maynard Keynes and E. F. Schumacher conceptualized in the years 1940-42 and which the United Kingdom proposed to introduce after the Second World War. This newly created supranational currency would then be used in international trade as a unit of account within a multilateral clearing system – the International Clearing Union – which would also have to be founded.
Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 Keynes’s proposal has been revived: In a speech delivered in March 2009 entitled “Reform the International Monetary System”, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank of China called Keynes’s bancor approach “farsighted” and proposed the adoption of International Monetary Fund (IMF) special drawing rights (SDRs) as a global reserve currency as a response to the financial crisis of 2007–2010. He argued that a national currency was unsuitable as a global reserve currency because of the Triffin dilemma (Triffin paradox) – the difficulty faced by reserve currency issuers in trying to simultaneously achieve their domestic monetary policy goals and meet other countries’ demand for reserve currency. A similar analysis can be found in the Report of the United Nation’s “Experts on reforms of the international monetary and financial system” as well as in the IMF’s study published on April 13, 2010.
David Rockefeller (1915) is an American banker and philanthropist who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation. He is the oldest living member of the Rockefeller family and family patriarch since July 2004. Rockefeller is also the only surviving child of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
The Trilateral Commission is a non-governmental, non-partisan discussion group also founded by David Rockefeller in July 1973, to foster closer cooperation among North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE; Peterson Institute) is a private, non-profit, and nonpartisan think tank focused on international economics, based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by C. Fred Bergsten in 1981. According to the 2011 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report (Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania), the Peterson Institute is number 10 in the “Top Thirty Worldwide Think Tanks” and number 9 in the “Top Fifty United States Think Tanks”.
Apart from the Trilateral Commission, there is now more and more support for that plan: especially from the Peterson Institute that I mentioned in the beginning of this contribution.
As Paul Volcker former chairman of the Fed and founder of the Trilateral Commission, said, a global economy requires a global currency. In October last year, even the Vatican (!) with its own bank that is strongly linked to the mafia, called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions. “In fact, one can see an emerging requirement for a body that will carry out the functions of a kind of ‘central world bank’ that regulates the flow and system of monetary exchanges similar to the national central banks,” said the Vatican……
Of course, some readers are thinking this cannot be true, that it’s impossible. You were probably thinking that the Deutsche Mark could never be replaced by a European Currency?
Now how was the euro created? A special fund was established to manage a basket of European currencies called ECU. That special fund was directly managed by the Bank of International Settlement, the central bank in Basel. All the European central banks maintained the exchange rate of their currency against the ECU. That special fund was transformed into the ECB and the ECU was changed into euro on January 1, 1999.
He currently works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006 after the second-longest tenure in the position.
Greenspan came to the Federal Reserve Board from a successful consulting career. Although he was subdued in his public appearances, favorable media coverage raised his profile to a point that several observers likened him to a “rock star”. Democratic leaders of Congress criticized him for politicizing his office because of his support for Social Security privatization and tax cuts that they felt would increase the deficit. The easy-money policies of the Fed during Greenspan’s tenure has been suggested to be a leading cause of the subprime mortgage crisis, which occurred within months of his departure from the Fed, and has, said The Wall Street Journal, “tarnished his reputation”.
Please take your time to read that trilateral document and you will clearly see that the birth of the euro followed the plan described in that document. In a sense, the euro showed how to make one currency from many national currencies. Of course, everybody knows that the euro had a birth defect that a world reserve currency cannot have: European governments are independent from tax and budget point of view but the investors assumed that a weak state would always be automatically supported by the others and therefore investors did not apply a real spread on the sovereign yield of a country based upon its deficit. This assumption cannot exist in the case of a world currency. The events in Greece and other EU countries show this.
The Bilderberg Group, Bilderberg conference, Bilderberg meetings or Bilderberg Club, is an annual private conference of approximately 120–150 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media. About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; one third from politics and government and the rest from other fields.
The original conference was held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands, from 29 to 31 May 1954. It was initiated by several people, including Polish politician-in-exile Józef Retinger, concerned about the growth of anti-Americanism in Western Europe, who proposed an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism – better understanding between the cultures of the United States and Western Europe to foster cooperation on political, economic and defense issues.
Retinger approached Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who agreed to promote the idea, together with former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Van Zeeland, and the head of Unilever at that time, Dutchman Paul Rijkens. Bernhard in turn contacted Walter Bedell Smith, then head of the CIA, who asked Eisenhower adviser Charles Douglas Jackson to deal with the suggestion. The guest list was to be drawn up by inviting two attendees from each nation, one of each to represent conservative and liberal points of view. Fifty delegates from 11 countries in Western Europe attended the first conference, along with 11 Americans.
Prince Bernhard received a $1.1 million bribe from Lockheed to ensure the Lockheed F-104 would win out over the French Mirage 5 for the purchase contract. Bernhard had served on more than 300 corporate boards or committees worldwide and had been praised in the Netherlands for his efforts to promote the economic well-being of the country.
The Dutch Prime Minister Joop den Uyl ordered an inquiry into the affair, while Prince Bernhard refused to answer reporters’ questions, stating: “I am above such things”. The results of the inquiry led to a constitutional crisis in which Queen Juliana threatened to abdicate if Bernhard was prosecuted. Bernhard was spared, but had to step down from several public positions and was forbidden to wear his military uniforms again.
Prince Bernhard always denied the charges, but after his death on December 1, 2004, interviews were published showing that he admitted taking the money. Prince Bernhard said: “I have accepted that the word Lockheed will be carved on my tombstone.”
The success of the Bilderberg meetings led the organizers to arrange annual conferences which were secured in many ways. A permanent steering committee was established with Retinger appointed as permanent secretary. As well as organizing the conference the steering committee also maintained a register of attendee names and contact details with the aim of creating an informal network of individuals who could call upon one another in a private capacity. Conferences were held in France, Germany, and Denmark over the following three years. In 1957 the first U.S. conference was held on St. Simons Island, Georgia, with $30,000 from the Ford Foundation. The foundation supplied further funding for the 1959 and 1963 conferences.
Meetings are organized by a steering committee with two members from each of approximately 18 nations. Official posts, in addition to a chairman, include an Honorary Secretary General. There is no such category in the group’s rules as a “member of the group”. The only category that exists is “member of the Steering Committee”. In addition to the committee, there also exists a separate advisory group, though membership overlaps. Names of individual members that participate in these meetings are usually kept confidential (secret).
Dutch economist Ernst van der Beugel became permanent secretary in 1960, upon Retinger’s death. Prince Bernhard continued to serve as the meeting’s chairman until 1976, the year of his involvement in the Lockheed affair. The position of Honorary American Secretary General has been held successively by Joseph E. Johnson of the Carnegie Endowment, William Bundy of Princeton, Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, and Casimir A. Yost of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.
A 2008 press release from the “American Friends of Bilderberg” stated that “Bilderberg’s only activity is its annual Conference. At the meetings, no resolutions are proposed, no votes taken, and no policy statements issued” and noted that most names of the attendees were available to the press. The Bilderberg group’s unofficial headquarters is in Leiden in the Netherlands.
According to the American Friends of Bilderberg, the 2008 agenda dealt “mainly with a nuclear free world, cyber terrorism, Africa, Russia, finance, protectionism, US-EU relations, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islam and Iran”.
The current chair of the Bilderberg Club is Henri de La Croix de Castries, 5th Comte de Castries (born 15 August 1954) who is also a French businessman and a member of the House of Castries. He has been Chairman and CEO of AXA (one of the largest Insurance companies in the world) since 2000.
AXA is a French, multinational, investment banking firm with its headquarters in the 8th arrondissement of Paris that engages in global investment banking, securities, investment management, insurance, and many other financial services. The AXA group operates primarily in Western Europe, North America, the Asia Pacific region, and the Middle East. AXA is a conglomerate of independently run businesses, operated according to the laws and regulations of many different countries. Axa has:
Revenue €86.107 billion (2011)
Profit €4.324 billion (2011)
AUM €1.103 trillion (2011)
Total assets €731.65 billion (2011)
Total equity €49.70 billion (2011)
Employees 102,960 (2010)
Of course, nothing is written publically in advance.
In 2014, the 62nd Bilderberg Conference was held in the Marriott Hotel in Copenhagen (Denmark) from May 29th through June 1st
The agenda included following items:
Is the economic recovery sustainable?
Who will pay for the demographics (mass migration)?
Does / should privacy exist?
How special is the relationship in intelligence sharing?
Big shifts in technology and jobs
The future of democracy and the middle class trap
China’s political and economic outlook
The new architecture of the Middle East
Ukraine
10) What next for Europe?
11) Current events
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation was founded in 1983 and should be dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, with funding from the US Congress, NED supports more than 1,000 projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.
Although administered as a private organization, its funding mostly comes from a governmental appropriation by Congress but was created by The Democracy Program as a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation. In addition to its grants program, NED also supports and houses the Journal of Democracy, the World Movement for Democracy, the International Forum for Democratic Studies, the Reagan–Fascell Fellowship Program, the Network of Democracy Research Institutes, and the Center for International Media Assistance.
A bill was introduced in April 1967 by Congressman Dante Fascell (D,FL) to create an institute of International Affairs. And although the bill did not pass it led to discussions on Capitol Hill to establish an institution in which democracy efforts abroad would benefit the U.S. as well as countries struggling for freedom and self- government.
In a 1982 speech at the Palace of Westminster, President Ronald Reagan proposed an initiative, before the British Parliament, “to foster the infrastructure of democracy—the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities.” The U.S. government, through USAID (United States Agency for International Development), contracted The American Political Foundation to study democracy promotion, which became known as “The Democracy Program.” The Program recommended the creation of a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation to be known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED, though non-governmental, would be funded primarily through annual appropriations from the U.S. government and subject to congressional oversight.
The State Department and United States Information Agency (USIA) proposed the Endowment to encourage and facilitate exchanges between democratic institutions through private sectors; promote nongovernmental participation in democratic training programs; strengthening democratic electoral processes abroad in cooperation with indigenous democratic forces; fostering cooperation between American private sector groups and those abroad “dedicated to the cultural values, institutions, and organizations of democratic pluralism.”, and encouraging democratic development consistent with the interests of both the U.S and the other groups receiving assistance.
In 1983, the House Foreign Affairs Committee proposed legislation to provide initial funding of $31.3 million for NED as part of the State Department Authorization Act (H.R. 2915), because NED was in its beginning stages of development the appropriation was set at $18 million. Included in the legislation was $13.8 million for the Free Trade Union Institute, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, $2.5 million for an affiliate of the National Chamber Foundation, and $5 million each for two party institutes, which was later eliminated by a vote of 267–136. The conference report on H.R. 2915 was adopted by the House on November 17, 1983 and the Senate the following day. On November 18, 1983, articles of incorporation were filed in the District of Columbia to establish the National Endowment for Democracy as a nonprofit organization.
Under the reauthorization of NED several factors were added to the organizations guidelines: the NED Act had to arrange the Board’s prohibition on the use of funds for partisan political purposes, including funding for national party operations; mandate that NED consult with the State Department on any overseas programs it funds prior to the commencement of their activities; move the required date of reporting to Congress on all grants from December 31 to February 4, and lastly despite its non-governmental status, comply fully with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.
Official Washington honors international law when it’s politically useful, such as in condemning a global adversary, but then dismisses it as useless if it gets in the way of some desired U.S. action. This “international law a la carte” undermines the concept’s fundamental value, says Lawrence Davidson.
International law is vital to the welfare of every man, woman and child on this planet, although the vast majority of them do not know this is so. The vital aspect lies in the fact that the universally applicable nature of human rights – which prohibit such actions as the use of torture, arbitrary arrest and detention while supporting freedom of movement, conscience, cultural rights and the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, among other things – has its primary foundation in international law.
Examples of this can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the various Geneva Conventions.
To understand just how important international law is to the universal application of human rights, one has to consider just how inadequate to this end are national and local laws. This inadequacy should come as no surprise. For hundreds of years now, the dominant form of political organization has been the nation-state. The most common sort of law is that specific to the state, and in the vast majority of cases, protection of rights under such law is reserved for the citizen.
In other words, if you are not a citizen of a particular state, you cannot assume you have any rights or protections within that state’s borders. Worse yet, if you happen to be stateless (and the number of such people is rapidly increasing), you are without local legal rights just about everywhere.
Ideally, this is not how things should go. Indeed, Article 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that “everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” And, if you find yourself in a country that has ratified this Declaration, you should come under its protection.
Unfortunately, this is rarely the case in practice. The mystique of the nation-state and the nativism that goes along with it often leads to the denigration of this vital legal obligation just because it originates from outside of the state. Thomas Woodrow Wilson was a strong supporter of the nation-state and “divide and rule” principle.
Many people in the West assume that the denigration of international law upholding human rights occurs mostly within authoritarian states – states that do not protect such rights for their own citizens, much less recognize them as universally applicable. But that is not the case.
Such flouting of international law is common among democracies as well. It is even noticeable in the behavior of the United States. Take for instance the current treatment of illegal immigrants. Their human rights are certainly not respected in this country which, historically, is a nation of immigrants.
The problem goes beyond the maltreatment of immigrants. In fact, the current dismissive attitude toward human rights and the international laws that uphold them has its roots in the fear of terrorism. Such actions as arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, the use of torture, kidnapping, and so forth are all justified by the so-called “war on terror.”
These actions by the U.S. government are illegal under international law, but because the enforcement of law is almost always the business of the state, and the United States is a “superpower,” which is to call U.S. officials to account for their crimes? No one….. International law has no designated policemen. And the UN is helpless.
Appendices
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) was the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921 and leader of the Progressive Movement. He served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910 and was Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913. He led his Democratic Party to win control of both the White House and Congress in 1912.
Wilson induced a conservative Democratic Congress to pass a progressive legislative agenda, unparalleled until the New Deal in 1933. This included the Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and an income tax. Child labor was temporarily curtailed by the Keating–Owen Act of 1916. Wilson also averted a railroad strike and an ensuing economic crisis through passage of the Adamson Act, imposing an 8-hour workday for railroads. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Wilson maintained a policy of neutrality.
Narrowly re-elected in 1916 around the slogan “He kept us out of war”, Wilson’s second term was dominated by American entry into World War I. That year he proclaimed June 14 as Flag Day in a patriotic speech that bore out the nation’s anti-German sentiment. In April 1917, when Germany persisted with submarine warfare, Wilson asked Congress to declare war in order to make “the world safe for democracy.” The United States conducted military operations with the Allies, without a formal alliance. During the war, Wilson focused on diplomacy and financial considerations, leaving military particulars in the hands of the Army. He loaned billions of dollars to Britain, France and other Allies, allowing them to finance their own war effort. On the home front in 1917, he began the first large-scale draft and borrowed billions of dollars in war funding through the newly established Federal Reserve Bank and Liberty Bonds. He set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union cooperation, supervised agriculture and food production through the Lever Act and assumed control of the railroads.
When talking about the Federal Reserve, Woodrow Wilson was quoted as saying that the power of an industrial nation was now given into the hands of a few men in the form of a “system of credit.”
A summary of Rudolf Steiner’s critique towards Woodrow
Wilson and his ideas:
“The years 1917 to 1919 were a time of the most
profound social change throughout Europe. Impulses unleashed by the catastrophe
of the war seemed about to transform European civilization, and indeed, in some
ways, it was transformed. Certainly, in those three years, the twentieth
century, which, in the socio-political sense, has been marked by a threefold
struggle between the ideologies of liberal democracy, authoritarian nationalism
and soviet communism, can truly said to have begun. Three great empires, two of
which had lasted for centuries, collapsed in those years. One of them, Russia,
was to continue as a monolithic state but under the revolutionary modernist
ideology of Communism, a kind of inversion of Czarism, in which first Lenin
then Stalin sought to become the new ‘little fathers’ of all the Russians.
Austria-Hungary, an empire founded by a single family, the Habsburgs, on the
dynastic and blood-based principle of the inequality of its constituent
peoples, broke up into small republics, which were supposedly founded according
to the new Wilsonian principle of
‘national self-determination’. The third empire, Wilhelminian Germany,
which was founded in 1871 and, according to Nietzsche, signified
the ‘extirpation of the German spirit’, became a truncated and bitterly
alienated republic, divided against itself and
bereft of any spiritual direction until Adolf Hitler emerged in 1920 to
give it one.
The seeds of the Cold War bipolarity between Russia
and America were also sown at this time. As the values of 19th century Europe
were shown in the killing fields of Flanders and in other continental
battlefields to be utterly bankrupt, new ideologies were offered to Europeans
in these three years by the two ‘ideologically-based’ states on Europe’s
periphery – the USA and the USSR. The notion of independence and full self-rule
for every ethnic group came from the USA – this obviously did not make for
harmonious relations between peoples of different ethnicity within multi-ethnic
states. Proposed by President Woodrow Wilson and his alter ego Col. E.M. House
as part of their “Fourteen Points Program” for a peace settlement, and eagerly
embraced by leaders of nationalist causes all over the continent, the
line-drawing principle of self-determination did violence to the complex
patchwork quilt of ethnicity which the destinies of Central and East European
peoples had sown over the centuries For its part, the USSR offered a different
gospel of disharmony – class war and
social revolution, hatred of the middle and upper classes and dictatorship of
the proletariat.
In the chaos that followed the collapse of the Central
Powers in November 1918, and throughout the first half of 1919, revolutionaries
of both right and left flourished. The beginning of the first postwar year of
peace 1919 saw the Peace Conference open at Versailles and a week of murderous
street battles in Berlin between Spartacist communists and Freikorp
rightwingers. Bela Kun established a communist regime in Hungary in February,
and two days later, a short-lived soviet republic of Bavaria was declared after
the murder of the Prime Minister Kurt Eisner. In March Moscow announced the
formation of the Comintern (Communist International) for world revolution. On
23rd March Benito Mussolini founded his Fasci di Combattimento party aimed at
destroying both democrats and communists.. The soviet republic in Bavaria was
overthrown in May by Berlin government troops, but the following month, a
pro-French “Rhenish Republic” was declared in several Rhineland cities. Such
political turmoil continued in Germany until the signing of the Peace Treaty of
Versailles on 28th June. Only then did the situation begin to “stabilize”.
Meanwhile, throughout Central and Eastern Europe, refugees and
newly-disenfranchised and dispossessed citizens were on the move as countries’
borders were reconfigured.”
Rudolf Steiner had soon recognized the dangers to
Europe in the ideologies from East and West. He also saw through what he called
‘the nullity’ of the policies and
materialistic war aims of the Central Powers and for decades had been at one
with Nietzsche in believing that the German Empire had been founded with no
spiritual purpose at its core. In 1917, he was asked by Count Otto Lerchenfeld (1869-1938), a cabinet Minister in the
government of Bavaria for advice amidst the growing desperation felt in government
circles. This opened the way for the next step, in July 1917, of attempting,
through his personal connections, to bring influence to bear on the Austrian
government to prepare for peace negotiations. He submitted a Memorandum, which
contained the key sentence: When human beings become free, so will the nations
become free through them. He thus met the group-based national
self-determination of Wilson with the thought of individual self-determination.
He sought to show how the changed conditions of the times required utterly
radical solutions. The worn out values of the 19th century had produced the
catastrophe of the war. As Thomas Meyer has put it: “ … in the twentieth
century evolution has reached a stage where the centralization of state power
can be replaced by a free system of contracts with mature citizens.” That is
why political structures must be created which correspond to the actual degree
of freedom attained by modern man. Those
in public life needed to recognize what the times were demanding, and in
particular that Central Europe had to be able to offer a spiritual alternative
to the programs of Wilson and Lenin; otherwise it would be destroyed between
them. Although his ideas were listened
to with some interest by high-ranking Austrians and Germans, they were not
acted upon. The result was that at the treaty of Brest Litovsk which ended the war between Germany and Russia
(December 1917-March 1918), the Central Powers had nothing to put to the
Russians other than demands based a grasping and selfish materialism.
Having failed to present any ideas to the East,
Germany had a last chance to respond to the Wilsonian principles of the West in
1918. A further opportunity for Rudolf Steiner came when he had promising
conversations with Prince Max von Baden in January 1918 and later in October
1918 by which time Prince Max had become the last Chancellor of Imperial
Germany. Rudolf Steiner had already fully elaborated the idea of Threefold
Social Order (Commonwealth) based on his thorough understanding of the
threefold nature of the human being (as described in his book “Riddles of the
Soul” in 1917). However, in what was said to be one of Rudolf Steiner’s most
bitter disappointments, Prince Max also failed to put the idea of Threefold
Social Order before the German people in his inaugural address. This was the
last chance for the German Empire to rise to a spiritual ideal and the Empire
duly collapsed in ignominy. Vacuous at
its beginning in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1871, vacuous and
pretentious throughout the 47 years of its existence, it expired in a vacuum
with nothing to say for itself. Its birth and death were bound up with the success
and failure of the military. Material strength and prowess, as Rudolf Steiner
courageously pointed out again and again in these years, had been its only
inspiration.
1919– The Year of The Movement for the Threefold Social Order:
As revolutionaries fought to spread communism throughout Central Europe in late January, three men – Emil Molt, Roman Boos, and Hans Kühn in Stuttgart met with Rudolf Steiner for two days for advice on how to work with the principles of Threefold Social Order in the context of an industrial trust company. He responded in three ways. First, he gave a course a lectures which became the basis of his book “Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendig-keiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft” (originally published in English as “The Threefold Commonwealth” and now as “Towards Social Renewal”) and on 2nd February he produced an appeal ‘To the German People and the Civilized World’ and gave it to the three men from Stuttgart. The second day of the second month of 1919 was the beginning of the “Movement for Threefold Social Order”. In the lectures and the Appeal, Rudolf Steiner sought to show especially how social and economic life in Germany could be revitalized on a basis commensurate with modern spiritual reality and the evolution of modern society. “Die Kernpunkte” first appeared in March 1919 along with the publication in the press of the Appeal, signed by leading personalities from various walks of life in the German-speaking cultural world. Out of this grew “Der Kommende Tag”, the association for commercial organizations working with the threefold idea. On 23rd April came the birth of the Waldorf Education movement when Emil Molt asked Rudolf Steiner to establish and run a school for the workers at his Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette factory. This new form of education would help to build a healthier society; the social divisions of the prewar decades had been based upon the economic exploitation of the working classes and their cultural deprivation. It was vital that such a radical and modern form of education had to correspond to the truth about Man and the world, so finally, came the plan to publish the memoirs and recollections of the General Count Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff in 1914 when war broke out. Here Rudolf Steiner was keen to establish the truth of what happened in late July and August 1914 so that the world would realize that Germany was not solely to blame for the First World War as was being insisted at the Versailles Peace Conference, then nearing a completion. He foresaw that the mendacious accusation of Germany’s sole guilt would have a devastating effect, not only upon the soul life of the German people, but also upon the sense for truth within European culture and thus on international relations. In this way, Rudolf Steiner gave a threefold response to those three men which, broadly speaking, addressed the economic, the cultural, and the political concerns of the times.
With tremendous enthusiasm, workers for anthroposophy
set about publicizing and lecturing on the ideas of Threefold Social Order, and
from April to July Stuttgart became the center of a hive of activity in this
direction. Ultimately however, only the Waldorf education movement would
survive. A combination of untimely impatience on the part of some Anthroposophists
and opposition by the German General Staff prevented the publication of von Moltke’s
memoirs, and by the end of 1919 the momentum of the Threefold Social Order movement
had run out. The fruitful moment of social chaos – what is today called a
window of historical opportunity – had largely passed by July 1919 and the
signing of the Peace Treaty (28th June). The will for meaningful change within
society at large, and, it has to be said, within the Anthroposophical Society
itself, was not great enough; countless people simply fell back into the old
familiar ways. Anthroposophical energies were transferred to supporting the
Waldorf School movement.
The
Relevance of the Appeal Today:
The question can be asked: how relevant is the Appeal
to the German People and the World-at-Large today? The Appeal sought to make
clear to the German people and others how the German Empire had been founded
“without a substantial goal to justify its existence” and therefore the West judged
that it could justifiably be “swept away”. Germany had “become an impossible
social structure due to the confusion of its three systems” (spiritual,
political, economic). The failure of the German people to rise to the spiritual
challenge of the years 1917-1919 led to the victory of the perverted
spirituality of the Nazi movement. After Nazism’s defeat in 1945 the new
Bundesrepublik Deutschland became fully integrated into the political,
cultural, and above all, economic community of the West. The Cold War
bipolarity meant that the concept of “Mittel Europa”, so common in Steiner’s
time, was hardly heard for forty years. Today, a reunited Germany is becoming
integrated into a European Union. Powerful forces in the West regard it as
having the role of ‘economic motor’ of the EU. They are not interested in it
being much else. Almost fifty years after its founding, the German Empire was
destroyed because it was built on no spiritual center – only a drive to power,
expressed in military and industrial terms. Fifty years after its founding, the
heart of the Bundesrepublik is transplanted to the old imperial capital of
Berlin – and what is now at the spiritual core of the new Germany? Is it not
still seen primarily both within Germany and without as a drive towards
material power in financial and industrial terms? Instead of this, Rudolf
Steiner hoped the German people would be able to build upon the stream of
spiritual idealism in their cultural history (which is why in 1917 he named the
great building he had designed in Dornach, Switzerland, the Goetheanum) and would become a mediating center of cultural life between East and West.
In the German Empire, spiritual and economic lives
were subordinated to the State – Kaiser, civil service, the military. Germany
today is a country of “the West”, firmly embedded in the EU, NATO, and “the
Euro-Atlantic structures”. As such, it shares the common western feature of the
domination of the economic realm over the cultural and political realms. Eighty
years ago, Rudolf Steiner’s Appeal stated that “Social communities hitherto
have, for the most part, been formed by human instincts. To penetrate their
forces with full consciousness is a mission of the times.” Have western
countries been at all successful in doing this since 1919? The Appeal pointed
clearly to the consequences of the failure to establish a social order with a
mission that “corresponds to the inner essence of its people.” People were deaf
to it then. Surely, in essence the Appeal and its call for Threefold Social
Order are just as relevant today, if not more so in a world with a single
superpower, in which economics and technology threaten to overwhelm all social
life. Will deafness again prevail?
Rudolf Steiner in one out of three lectures regarding
imperialism and Woodrow Wilson; in Dornach, Switzerland – February 20 1920:
Rudolf Steiner:
“Today’s consideration will be episodic, a kind of
interspersion into our considerations, because I would like our English
friends, who will soon be going home, to be able to take as much as possible
with them. Therefore I will structure this lecture in a way to be as effective
as possible. Today I would like, at first historically, not so much referring
to the present – that can be done tomorrow perhaps – I would like to say
something about imperialism, historically, but in a spiritual-scientific sense.
Imperialism is a much discussed phenomenon recently,
and discussed by those who are more or less conscious of its relationship to
the total phenomena of the present time. But when such things are discussed,
what is not taken into account, or at least not enough, is that we live within
the historical course of events, that we stand in a very definitive historical
evolutionary epoch and that we can only understand this evolutionary epoch if
we know where the phenomena which surround us, in which we live, come from.
Basically, what is most effective today and what will
show itself to be an even more effective imperialism in the future will be its
bearer – the Anglo-American people. As far as its name is concerned, it has
shown itself to be something new: economic imperialism. But most important is
the fact that everything said about this economic imperialism is untrue,
everything, I would say, seems to be hanging in the air, which more or less
consciously leads to untruthfulness. So in order to recognize how in these times
realities are completely different from what is said about them, a more
profound observation of the historical course of events is necessary.
I only need to mention one item of present-day
phenomena in order to characterize the public’s ability to judge. We have
experienced how at first in various parts of Europe and finally even in
Germany, The USA President Woodrow
Wilson has been glorified. Our Swiss friends know very well that while
Woodrow Wilson was being glorified I always spoke out against him in the
sharpest terms here in Switzerland, for what Woodrow Wilson is today, he was of
course also then when he was being glorified by the whole word. The public’s
capacity for judgment, as it zips around the world today, is sufficiently
characterized by such things.
And one must keep in mind a second thing. During the
last four of five years, an enormous amount of pretty things have been discussed:
the self-determination of peoples (nations) and so forth. Behind this talk was
a very different truth: a shifting of power. And in order to understand what
it’s about, what is said, thought and judged, it is necessary to return to the
realities. And when things such as imperialism are considered – “Imperial
Federation League” is the official designation in England since the beginning
of the twentieth century – we must realize that they are the recent products of
an evolution and they go back to a remote past, and can only be explained by a
true consideration of history.
We do not want to delve so deeply into the past as we
could when studying the spiritual evolution of humanity, but we do want to go
at least as far back as several centuries before the Christian era. We find
imperialistic empires in Asia, and a subspecies of such empires in Egypt. Most
characteristic of the Asiatic impulse are, for example, the historically known
Persian Empire and, especially, the Assyrian Empire. But it is not sufficient
to study this first phase of imperialism only in the last, historically known
stage of the Assyrian Empire, simply because the motivators dominating the
Assyrian Empire cannot be understood without reaching back to even earlier
oriental conditions. Even in China, which whole organization reaches so far
back, the organization of recent times has changed so much that the true
character of an oriental imperialism as it once existed is not recognized.
However, the conditions which are known historically make it possible to see
what the fundamentals are.
We cannot understand the older oriental imperialism
without knowing the conscious relationship between people of a region (or
empire), and what we today would call the ruler or the rulers of that empire. Our
words for ruler or king and so forth no longer express the feelings about the
ruler or the rulers. It is very difficult to understand the feelings of people
in general of the third to fourth century before the Christian era because it
is difficult nowadays to take account of how people felt in those ancient times
about the relation of the physical world to the spiritual world. Today most
people think, if they even think about a spiritual world, that it is somewhere
in the distant beyond. And when the spiritual world is spoken about – and in
the future it will again have to be spoken about as being present among us just
as the sense world is – then what results is what has led for example to the
Protestant mentality. But the essential nature of ancient times is that no
distinction was made between the physical and spiritual worlds.
This is so much the case that when ancient times are
referred to by people of today they can hardly imagine much consistency, for
the way of thinking was so different then from what it is today. Rulers, a ruling
caste, slaves, ruled people that were reality – not something called a physical
reality, but it was the reality, simultaneously the physical and the spiritual
reality. And the ruler of an oriental empire – what was he? The ruler of the
oriental empire was God. And for the people of those times there was no God
beyond the clouds, no choir of spirits who surrounded the highest God – that
view came later – but rather what we today call ministers or court jesters,
somewhat disrespectfully, were beings of a divine nature. For it was obvious
that because of the mystery schooling they had gone through, they had become
something greater than ordinary people. They were looked up to, just as the
Protestant mentality looks up to its God or certain more liberal circles look
up to their invisible angels and such. Extra invisible angels or an extra
super-sensible invisible God did not exist for the people of the ancient
orient. Everything spiritual lived in man. In the common man lived a human
soul. In those whom we would today call rulers, lived a divine soul, a God.
The concept of a really existing godly empire, which
at the same time was a physical empire, is no longer taken into consideration.
That a king has real divine power and dignity is considered absurd today, but
was a reality in oriental imperialism.
As I (Rudolf Steiner) mentioned, a subspecies was
found in Egypt, for there we find a true transition to a later form. If we go
back to the oldest form of imperialism, we find it based on the king being God
who really physically appeared on earth, the son of heaven who physically
appeared on earth, who was even the father of heaven. This is so paradoxical
for the contemporary mind that it seems unbelievable, but it is true. We can
learn from Assyrian documents how conquests were justified. They were simply carried
out. The justification was that they had to expand more and more the God’s
empire. When a territory was conquered and the inhabitants became subjects,
then they had to worship the conqueror as their god. During those times, no one
thought of spreading a certain worldview. Why would it have been necessary?
When the conquered people openly recognized the conqueror, followed him, then
all was in order, they could believe whatever they wanted. Belief – personal
opinion – wasn’t touched in ancient times, nobody cared about it.
That was the first form in which imperialism appeared.
The second form was when the ruler, the one who was to play a leading role,
wasn’t the god himself, but the god’s envoy, or inspired by the god,
interpenetrated with divinity, an initiate.
The first imperialism is characterized by realities.
When an oriental ruler of ancient times appeared before his people, it was in
full splendor, because as a god he was entitled to wear such clothes. It was
the clothing of a god. That’s what a god looked like. It meant nothing more
than what the ruler wore was the fashion of the gods. And his paladins were not
mere bureaucrats, but higher beings who accompanied him and did what they did
with the power of higher beings.
Then the time came when the ruler and his paladins
appeared as God’s envoys, as interpenetrated with divinity, as representatives.
That is very clear in Dionysus the
Areopagite. Read his writings, where he describes the complete hierarchy,
from the deacons, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, up to the church’s whole
hierarchy. How does he do this? Dionysus the Areopagite presents it as though
in this earthly churchly hierarchy is mirrored what God is with his archangels
and angles, super-sensibly of course. So above we have the heavenly hierarchy
and below its mirror image, the worldly hierarchy. The people of the worldly
hierarchy, the deacons, archdeacons, wear certain clothes, and they perform
their rituals; they are symbols. The first phase was characterized by realities;
the second phase was characterized by signs, by symbols. But this has been more
or less forgotten. Even Catholics understand little of the fact that the
deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops are the representatives of the heavenly
hierarchies. This has been mostly forgotten.
With the advancement of imperialism a division
occurred, a real division. On one hand there were the leaders tending more
towards being divine representatives, priestly, where the priests were also kings;
on the other hand the tendency towards the secular, although still by the grace
of God. Basically these were the two forms: the churches and the empires.
During the first imperialism, when all was physical
reality, something like this would have been unthinkable. But in the second
phase of imperialism the division occurred. On one side more secular, but
nevertheless representative of God, on the other side more church oriented,
also representative of God. That system held until the middle ages and, I would
even say, until the year 1806, but more as a shadow, retained in kings and
paladins as God’s representatives. The Roman Catholic Church’s propagation tended
more towards the priestly. But where this phenomenon of God’s representative or
envoy, which held through the entire Middle-Ages, was most strongly maintained
was in the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which finally
disappeared in 1806. In “Holy” you have a whiff of what was divine during the
ancient times on earth; “Roman” indicates the provenance, where it came from;
“German Nation” was what it covered, the more secular element.
Therefore in the second phase of imperialism we no
longer merely have the Church’s anointed imperialism, but we have the tangled
web of the divine and the secular anointed in the empires. That already began
in the old Roman Empire during pre-Christian times and extended into the late
Middle-Ages. But this imperial Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation always
had a double character. Remember that it goes back to Karl the Great
(Charlemagne). But Karl the Great was crowned by the Pope in Rome. Therewith
royal dignity became a symbol, so that what existed here on the physical earth
was no longer reality. The people of the Middle-Ages did not worship Karl the
Great and Otto I as Gods, which was the case in more ancient times, but they
saw in them Godly representatives, ruling by God’s Grace. And that had to be
continually confirmed, for of course it became ever weaker in consciousness.
But it still retained a symbolic reality, a reality of signs. These emperors of
the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation went to Rome in order for the Pope
to crown them. Istwan I was also crowned king of Hungary by the Pope in the
year 1000. The anointment, and therefore the power, was bestowed on the world’s
rulers by the clergy.
It was also thought that there was justification for
other peoples being incorporated into the empire. Even Dante thought that the
emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was justified in ruling the whole world. So
the formula for imperialism is even to be found in Dante.
In fables and other lore where the events of history
are crystallized in human consciousness, things are expressed from various
viewpoints, not just one. We could say that in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries in Europe the consciousness existed – not a clear one, more like a
feeling – that once in ancient times in the Orient men lived on the physical
earth who were themselves gods. They didn’t think it was a superstition, oh no,
rather they thought that such gods could no longer live on the earth because the
earth had become so bad. That’s been lost, what made men gods, the “Holy Grail”
has been lost and now, in Central Europe, it can only be found in the way
Percival found it: one seeks the way to find god within, whereas earlier god
was a reality in the empire. Now the empire is merely a sum of symbols, of
signs, and one must find the spirit in the symbols.
Of all the things which once existed, only remnants
remain. Reality is deadened. Remnants of the most diverse kind still remain.
Generally, as long as things are real, definite, they later become ambiguous.
And thus in Europe diversity grew from clear reality. As long as the Holy Roman
Empire had meaning in human consciousness, the representative of the empire was
powerful and competent enough to subdue the individual angel-symbols, the local
princes, for that consciousness included the emperor’s right to do so. But his
right rested more or less on something ideal, which more and more lost its
meaning, and the local princes remained. So we have in the Holy Roman Empire
something which gradually had its inner substance squeezed out until only the
exterior remained. The consciousness that earthly men were representatives of
God was lost. And the expression for the fact that people no longer believed
that certain individuals were representatives of God is Protestantism – protest
against the idea of men as representatives of God.
If the principle of Protestantism had rigorously
penetrated, no prince could have been crowned “by the Grace of God” again. But
such things remained as remnants. In Germany and several other countries, these
remnants remained until 1918, then they disappeared. These remnants, which had
already lost all inner meaning, remained as outer appearances until then. The
local German princes were the outer appearances; they only had meaning in those
ancient times when they were symbols for an inspirational kingdom of heaven.
(In the parliamentary monarchies of Northern Europe,
the King still reigns by the “Grace of God” but it is a mere phrase rooted in
tradition.)
In the early 1920’s a Central European Roman Catholic
Archbishop claimed that the catholic priest is more powerful than Jesus Christ
for the simple reason that when the Catholic priest performs the trans-substantiation
at the altar, Jesus Christ must be present in the Sanctissimum, in the Host. The trans-substantiation can only take
place through the priest’s power. It means that the action performed by the
priest forces the Christ Jesus to be present on the altar. Therefore, the more
powerful is not the Christ Jesus, but he who performs the trans-substantiation
at the altar!
If we wish to understand such a thing which, as I
said, appeared in a pastoral letter a few years ago, we must go back, not to
the times of the second imperialism, but to the times of the first imperialism,
many elements of which are retained in the Catholic Church and its
institutions. Therein lies the remnant of the consciousness that those who rule
on the earth are the gods, whereas the Christ Jesus is only the son of God.
What was written in that pastoral letter is of course impossible for the
Protestant mentality, just as for today it is almost impossible to believe that
thousands of years ago people actually saw the ruler as God. But these are all
real historical factors, real facts which played a role historically and are
still present today.
This earlier realities play strongly into later
events. Just look at how Mohammedanism (Islam) has spread. Certainly, Mohammed
never said: Mohammed is your God – as it would have been said thousands of years
earlier by an oriental ruler. He limited himself to what corresponded more to
the times: There is a God, and Mohammed is his prophet. In people’s
consciousness he was God’s representative – the second phase of imperialism.
The manner in which Islam spread, however, corresponded to the first phase. For
Muslims have never been intolerant towards other beliefs the way some others
were. The Muslims were content to defeat the others and make them their
subjects, just as it was in older times when a profession of faith was not
required, for it was a matter of indifference what they believed if they just
recognized God.
And something also remained of the first phase of
imperialism – strongly influenced by the second – in Russian despotism, in
tsarism. The way in which he was recognized by his subjects goes back, at least
partially, to the first phase of imperialism. It was not so much a question of
what was in the consciousness of the Russian people, for the ruler ship of the tsars
rested on the Germanic and the Mongolian elements rather than that of the
Russian peasantry itself.
Now, we come to the third phase of imperialism. It has
been formulated since the beginning of the twentieth century, since Chamberlain
and his people coined the expression “Imperial Federation League”, but the
causes go back to the second half of the seventeenth century, when that great
upheaval occurred in England as a result of which everywhere in the west that
the Anglo-American people lived, the king, who earlier had been God, then an
anointed one, became a kind of mere shadow – one cannot say a decoration exactly,
but rather something more tolerated than taken seriously.
The English speaking peoples bring other preconditions
to what we may call the people’s will, the voting system, than, say, the French
– the Latin peoples in general. The Latin peoples, especially the French,
certainly carried out the revolution of the eighteenth century, but the French
people today are more royal than any other. To be royal doesn’t only mean to
have a king at the top. Naturally, a person whose head has been cut off cannot
run around; but the French as a people are royal, imperialistic, without having
a king. It has to do with the mood of soul. This “all are one” feeling, the
national consciousness, is a real remnant of the Louis IV mentality.
But the English-speaking peoples brought other
preconditions to what we may call the people’s will. And little by little this
became what the elected parliaments decided, and thus the third form of
imperialism developed, which was formulated by Chamberlain and others. For our
purpose here, we want to consider this third imperialism psychologically.
The first imperialism had realities: One person was
the God for the mentality of the other people. His paladins were the gods who
surrounded him, sub-gods. The second form of imperialism: What was on the earth
was the sign, the symbol. God acted within men. Third form of imperialism: Just
as the previous evolution was from realities to signs and symbols, now the
development is from symbols to platitudes.
This is an objective description of the facts, without
being emotionally tinged. Since the seventeenth century, what has been called
the will of the people in the public life of the Anglo-American peoples in the
law books – of course categorized according to classes – is no more than
platitudes. Between what is said and reality there is not even the relation
which existed between the symbol and reality. So the psychological path is
this: from reality to symbol and then to platitudes – to words which have been
squeezed out, dried out, empty words. This is the reality of the third
imperialism: squeezed out, empty words. And nobody imagines that they are
divine, at least not where they originated.
Just think about the basis of that imperialism, the
ruling elements of which are platitudes: during the first imperialism the
kings, in the second imperialism the anointed, now the platitudes. From
majority decisions of course nothing real results, only a dominant platitude.
The reality remains hidden. And now we come to an important factor upon which
reality is based: the colonization system. Colonization played an important
role in the development of this third imperialism. The “Imperial Federation League”
summarizes the means of spreading imperialism to the colonies. But how do the
colonies become part of the empire? Think back on real cases. Adventurers who
no longer rightly fit into the empire, who are a somewhat down at heel, go to
the colonies, become rich, then spend their riches at home, but that doesn’t
make them respectable, they are still adventurers, bohemians. That’s how the
colonial empire is created. That is the reality behind the platitudes. But
remnants remain. Just as symbols and platitudes remain as remnants of the
original realities, or symbolic crowns on princes and tsars, also from the
enterprises of the somewhat foul smelling colonists, realities remain. The
adventurer’s son is not so foul smelling, right? He already smells better. The
grandson smells even better and a time comes when everything smells very good.
The platitudes are now possessed by what smells good. The platitudes are now
identified with the true reality. Now the state can spread its wings, it
becomes the protector and everything has been made honest.
It is necessary to call things by their real names –
although the names seldom describe the reality. It’s necessary because only
thus can we understand what tasks and what responsibilities confront humanity
in these times. Only in this way is it possible to realize what a fable convene
so called history really is, meaning that history which is taught in the
schools and universities. That history does not call things by their real
names. On the contrary, its effect is that the names describe what is false.
What I have just described is something terrible,
isn’t it. But you see, it’s a question of guiding the feelings towards
responsibilities. Let’s now consider the other side. Let’s consider such an
ancient empire. In people’s minds it was an earthly reality; the priest-king
came from the mysteries. The second was no longer earthly reality, it was
symbolic. It is a long way from the godly jewelry the rulers and their paladins
in the ancient oriental empires wore and the “Roter Adler” [Red Eagle] medals
hung around people’s necks long afterward. But that’s how things evolved. It
went from reality to nothing, not even a sign or symbol, but basically the
expression of the platitude. Finally this platitude system, which has spread
from the west to the rest of the world, has penetrated public affairs. I have
even met court councilors – who anyway have little counseling to do – but what
about the titular court councilors? Just a platitude hung on certain people and
everything remains as before.
Whereas in the first phase the physical reality was
thought to be spiritual, in the future this physical reality may no longer be
thought of as spiritual. Nevertheless, the spiritual must be present here in
the physical world. That means that spiritual reality must exist alongside
physical reality. The human being must move around here within the physical
reality, and recognize a spiritual reality, must speak of it as something real,
super-sensible, invisible, but which exists, which must be established among
us.
I have spoken about something quite terrible: about
the platitude. But if the world had not become so platitude oriented, there
would be no room for the introduction of a spiritual empire. Precisely because
everything old has now become empty platitudes, a new space has come into being
in which the spiritual empire can enter. Especially in the west, in the
Anglo-American world people will continue to speak in the usual terminology,
things that come from the past. It will continue to roll on like a bowling ball.
It will roll on in the words. You can find innumerable expressions especially
in the west which have lost all meaning, but are still used. But not only in
these expressions, but in everything described by the old words the platitude
lives, in which there is no reality, for it has been squeezed out. That is
where the spiritual, which has nothing of the old in it, can find room. The old
must first become platitude, everything that continues to roll on in speech
thrown overboard, and something completely new must enter, which can only
propagate as a world of the spirit.
Only then can there be a kingdom of Christ on earth.
For in that empire a reality must exist: “My kingdom is not of this world.” In
the kingdom of this world, in which the kingdom of Christ will propagate, there
will exist much that had not became platitude. But in the western world,
everything originating in ancient times is destined to become platitude. Yes,
in the west, in the Anglo-American world, all human tradition will become
platitude. Therefore, the responsibility exists to fill the empty vessel with
spirit, about which can be said: “This kingdom is not of this world!” That is
the great responsibility. It’s not important how something came about, but what
we do with what has come about. That is the current situation.
Tomorrow we will speak about what can be done, for
under the surface, especially in the western countries, the secret societies
are most active, trying to insert the second phase of imperialism into the
third. For in the Anglo-American people you have two imperialisms pushed
together, the economic one of a Chamberlain and the symbolic imperialism of the
secret societies, which play a very effective role, but which are kept secret
from the people.” End of quote by Rudolf
Steiner.
The Petrol Dollar in the 21st century
(an essay)
by
*Robert Gorter, MD, PhD.
*Robert Gorter, MD, PhD, is emeritus professor of the University of California San Francisco Medical School (UCSF)
The slippery slope to the Petro Yuan began in 2018: The US petrodollar is backed by Treasuries, so it can help fuel U.S. deficit spending by printing banknotes seemingly endlessly. Take that away, and the U.S. is in trouble.
In September 2018, Russia and India joined China in accepting each other currencies and the Euro for paying each other.
When you see the mouthpieces of the ruling class begin to demonize a foreign country, the first question in your mind should always be “what is actually at stake here?” For some time now Russia, China, Iran, and Syria have been in the cross hairs. Once you understand why, the events unfolding in the world right now will make much more sense.”
9/11 and the seeds of WWIII cannot be fully understood without understanding the yoke of the Petrodollar, which has been placed around the neck of any country that wanted to buy oil, since the 1970s…as SCG says here, with the establishment of the Petrodollar, the dollar went from being a gold-backed currency to an oil-backed currency. It also became America’s primary export.”
“This petrodollar system stood unchallenged until September of 2000 when Saddam Hussein announced his decision to switch Iraq’s oil sales off of the dollar to Euros. This was a direct attack on the dollar, and easily the most important geopolitical event of the year, but only one article in the western media even mentioned it.
In the same month that Saddam announced he was moving away from the dollar, an organization called the ‘The Project for a New American Century’, of which Dick Cheney just happened to be a member, released a document entitled ‘REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century’. This document called for massive increases in US military spending and a much more aggressive foreign policy in order to expand US dominance worldwide. However the document lamented that achieving these goals would take many years absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’. One year later they got it.
Riding the emotional reaction to 9/11, the George Bush administration was able to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and pass the Patriot Act, all without any significant resistance.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and this wasn’t a question of ‘bad intelligence’. This was a cold calculated lie, and the decision to invade was made in full knowledge of the disaster which would follow. They knew exactly what was going to happen but in 2003, they did it anyway. Once Iraqi oil fields were under US control, oil sales were immediately switched back to the dollar. Mission accomplished.
Soon after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration attempted to extend these wars to Iran. Supposedly the Iranian government was working to build a nuclear weapon but after the Iraq fiasco, Washington’s credibility was severely damaged. As a result, they were unable to muster international or domestic support for an intervention…However, the demonization campaign against Iran continued even into the Obama administration.
One can ask: Why? Well, might it have something to do
with the fact that since 2004 Iran has been in the process of organizing an
independent oil bourse? They were building their own oil market, and it wasn’t
going to be tied to the dollar. The first shipments of oil were sold through
this market in July of 2011.
Unable to get the war that they wanted, the US used
the UN to impose sanctions against Iran. The goal of the sanctions was to topple
the Iranian regime. While this did inflict damage on the Iranian economy, the
measures failed to destabilize the country. This was due in large part to
Russia’s assistance in bypassing US banking restrictions.
In February of 2009, Muammar Gaddafi was named chairman
of the African Union. He immediately proposed the formation of a unified state with
a single currency. It is very likely that it was the nature of that proposed
currency that got him killed.
In March of 2009, the African Union released a document
entitled ‘Towards a Single African Currency’. Pages 106 and 107 of that
document specifically discuss the benefits and technicalities of running the
African Central bank under a gold standard. On page 94, it explicitly states
that the key to the success of the African Monetary Union would be the ‘eventual
linking of a single African currency to the most monetary of all commodities: gold.
In 2011, the CIA moved into Libya and began backing
militant groups in their campaign to topple Gaddafi and the US and NATO pushed through
and stretched a UN no-fly-zone resolution to tip the balance with airstrikes.
The presence of Al-Qaeda extremists among these rebel fighters was swept under
the rug.
Libya, like Iran and Iraq had committed the unforgivable
crime of challenging the US dollar.
The NATO intervention in Libya segued into a covert
war on Syria. The armories of the Libyan government were looted and the weapons
were shipped via Turkey to Syrian rebel groups working to topple Assad.
It was already clear, at this point that many of these
fighters had ties to terrorist organizations. However, the US national security
apparatus viewed this as a necessary evil. In fact the Council on Foreign
relations published an article in 2012 stating that the influx of jihadis
brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from
Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results. In short,
the FSA needs al-Qaeda now: the US put ISIS in power.
In 2013, these same Al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels launched
two sarin gas attacks. This was an
attempt to frame Assad and muster international support for military
intervention. Fortunately, they were exposed by UN and Russian investigators
and the push for airstrikes completely fell apart when Russia stepped in to
broker a diplomatic solution.
(Sarin is
an organic phosphorous compound; it is a colorless, odorless liquid, used as a
chemical weapon owing to its extreme potency as a nerve agent. It has been
classified as a weapon of mass destruction in UN Resolution 687. Production and
stockpiling of sarin was outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993,
and it is classified as a Schedule 1 substance).
Sarin can be lethal even at very low concentrations,
with death following within 1 to 10 minutes after direct inhalation due to
suffocation from lung muscle paralysis, unless some antidotes, typically
atropine or bipheriden and pralidoxime, are quickly administered to a person.
People who absorb a non-lethal dose, but do not receive immediate medical
treatment, may suffer permanent neurological damage.
The campaign for regime change in Syria, as in Libya
has been presented in terms of human rights. Obviously, this isn’t the real
motive…..
In 2009, Qatar put forth a proposal to run a natural gas
pipeline through Syria and Turkey to Europe. Assad however rejected this, and
in 2011 he forged a pact with Iraq and Iran to run a pipeline eastward cutting
Qatar and Saudi Arabia out of the loop completely.
Not surprisingly Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have
been the most aggressive regional players in the push to topple the Syrian
government. But why would this pipeline dispute put Syria in Washington’s cross
hairs?
There are probably three reasons:
1. This pipeline arrangement would significantly strengthen
Iran’s position, allowing them to export to European markets without having to
pass through any of Washington’s allies. This obviously reduces the US
government’s leverage.
2. Syria is Iran’s closest ally. Its collapse would
inherently weaken Iran.
3. Syria and Iran have a mutual defense agreement, and
a US intervention in Syria could open the door to open conflict with Iran.
In February of 2014 this global chess game heated up
in a new venue: Ukraine. The real target however was Russia.
You see, Russia just happens to be the world’s second
largest oil exporter, and not only have they been a thorn in Washington’s side
diplomatically, but they also opened an energy bourse in 2008, with sales denominated
in Rubles and gold. This project had been in the works since 2006. They have
also been working with China to pull off of the dollar in all of their
bilateral trade.
Russia has also been in the process of organizing a
Eurasian Economic Union which includes plans to adopt common currency unit, and
which is slated to have its own independent energy market.
Leading up to the crisis in Ukraine had been presented
with a choice: either join the EU under an association agreement or join the
Eurasian Union. The EU insisted that this was an either-or-proposition. Ukraine
couldn’t join both. Russia on the other hand, asserted that joining both posed
no issue. President Viktor Yanukovych decided to go with Russia.
In response, the US national security apparatus did what it does best: they toppled Yanukovych and installed a puppet government…
Though this all seemed to be going well at first, the US quickly lost control of the situation. The Crimea is important geostrategically because of its position in the Black Sea which allows for the projection of naval power into the Mediterranean. It has also been Russian territory for most of recent history.
The US has been pushing for Ukraine’s inclusion into NATO for years now. Such a move would place US forces right on Russia’s border and could have potentially resulted in Russia losing their naval base in Crimea. This is why Russia immediately orchestrated and accepted the results of the Crimean referendum and quickly consolidated the territory.
Meanwhile, in Eastern Ukraine, two regions declared independence from Kiev and held referendums of their own. Also here, rigging and intimidation took place but the final results favored self-rule.
Kiev responded to this with what they referred to as anti-terrorist operations. In practice this was a massive and indiscriminate shelling campaign which killed thousands of civilians. Apparently, killing civilians didn’t qualify as aggression to the West. In fact, the IMF explicitly warned the provisional government that their 17 billion dollar loan package could be in danger if they were not able to put down the uprising in eastern Ukraine.
While the war against eastern Ukraine was raging, elections were held and Petro Poroshenko was elected president. It turns out that Poroshenko was exposed by a leaked diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks in 2008, as having worked as a mole for the US State Department since 2006. They referred to him as ‘Our Ukraine insider’ and much of the cable referred to information that he was providing. (A separate cable showed that the US knew Poroshenko was corrupt, even at that point.)
Having a puppet in place however hasn’t turned out to be enough to give Washington the upper hand in this crisis. What does Washington do when they have no other leverage? They impose sanctions, they demonize and they saber rattle (or pull a false flag).
This isn’t a very good strategy when dealing with Russia.
In fact, it has already backfired. The sanctions have merely pushed Russia and
China into closer co-operation and accelerated Russia’s de-dollarization agenda.
And in spite of the rhetoric, this has not led to Russia being isolated. The US
and NATO have put a wedge between themselves and Russia, but not between Russia
and the rest of the world (look up BRICS if you are unclear about this).
This new anti-dollar axis goes deeper than economics. These
countries understand what’s at stake here. This is why in the wake of the
Ukrainian crisis China has proposed a new Eurasian security pact which would include
Russia and Iran.
Consider the implications, here as the Obama Administration
begins bombing in Syria, which also has a mutual defense agreement with Iran.
This is not the cold war 2.0. This is World War 3.0.
The masses may not have figured it out yet, but history will remember it that
way.
Alliances are already solidifying and a hot war is
underway on multiple fronts. If the provocations and proxy wars continue, it’s
only a matter of time before the big players confront each other directly, and
that is a recipe for disaster.
Does all of this sound insane to you? Well, you’re right.
The people running the world right now are insane, and the public is
sleep-walking into a tragedy.
If one wants to alter the course that we are on, there’s
only one way to do it. One has to wake up that public. Even the most powerful
weapons of war are neutralized if you reach the mind of the man behind the
trigger.
How does one then wake the masses one must ask oneself?
Don’t wait for someone else to answer that for you. Get creative. Act like you children’s
and grandchildren’s future depends on it, because they do.
Other Media Tycoons who are influential political
leaders because they owned the mass media:
Silvio Berlusconi is an Italian media mogul and former Prime Minister of Italy who owns the largest broadcasting company and Mass Media in that country: Mediaset. His promises to buy off his personal assets to avoid conflicts of interest were never fulfilled (and the Italian people accepted that), which sparked controversy throughout his terms in office. Berlusconi is a controversial figure in modern Italian politics: his tenure as Prime Minister was racked with scandalous sex affairs and poor judgment and decision-making. These events were widely covered by the media, drawing outcry from many of his Italian contemporaries and worldwide counterparts.
Links to the Mafia
Mafia boss Giuseppe Guttadauro in a wiretapped conversation:
“Berlusconi, in order to solve his problems, he has to solve ours.”
Silvio Berlusconi has never been tried on charges relating to Cosa Nostra, although several Mafia turncoats have stated that Berlusconi had connections with the Sicilian criminal association. The claims arise mostly from the hiring of Vittorio Mangano, charged for Mafia association, as a gardener and stable-man at Berlusconi’s Villa San Martino in Arcore, a small town near Milan. It was Berlusconi’s friend Marcello Dell’Utri who introduced Mangano to Berlusconi in 1973. Berlusconi denied any ties to the Mafia. Marcello Dell’Utri even stated that the Mafia did not exist at all.
In 2004 Dell’Utri, co-founder of Forza Italia, was sentenced to nine years by a Palermo court on charge of “external association to the Mafia”,[39][40] a sentence describing Dell’Utri as a mediator between the economic interests of Berlusconi and members of the criminal organization. Berlusconi refused to comment on the sentence. In 2010, Palermo’s appeals court cut the sentence to seven years but fully confirmed Dell’Utri’s role as a link between Berlusconi and the mafia until 1992.
In 1996, a Mafia informer, Salvatore Cancemi, declared that Berlusconi and Dell’Utri were in direct contact with Salvatore Riina, head of the Sicilian Mafia in the 1980s and 90s. Cancemi disclosed that Fininvest, through Marcello Dell’Utri and mafioso Vittorio Mangano, had paid Cosa Nostra 200 million lire (between 100 000 and 200 000 of today’s euro) annually. The alleged contacts, according to Cancemi, were to lead to legislation favorable to Cosa Nostra, in particular the harsh 41-bis prison regime. The underlying premise was that Cosa Nostra would support Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in return for political favors. After a two-year investigation, magistrates closed the inquiry without charges. They did not find evidence to corroborate Cancemi’s allegations. Similarly, a two-year investigation, also launched on evidence from Cancemi, into Berlusconi’s alleged association with the Mafia was closed in 1996.
According to yet another Mafia turncoat, Antonino Giuffrè – arrested on 16 April 2002 – the Mafia turned to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party to look after the Mafia’s interests, after the decline in the early 1990s of the ruling Christian Democrat party, whose leaders in Sicily looked after the Mafia’s interests in Rome. The Mafia’s fall out with the Christian Democrats became clear when Salvo Lima was killed in March 1992. “The Lima murder marked the end of an era,” Giuffrè told the court. “A new era opened with a new political force on the horizon which provided the guarantees that the Christian Democrats were no longer able to deliver. To be clear, that party was Forza Italia.” Dell’Utri was the go-between on a range of legislative efforts to ease pressure on mafiosi in exchange for electoral support, according to Giuffrè. “Dell’Utri was very close to Cosa Nostra and a very good contact point for Berlusconi,” he said. Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano told Giuffrè that they “were in good hands” with Dell’Utri, who was a “serious and trustworthy person”. Provenzano stated that the Mafia’s judicial problems would be resolved within 10 years after 1992, thanks to the undertakings given by Forza Italia.
Giuffrè also said that Berlusconi himself used to be in touch with Stefano Bontade, a top Mafia boss, in the mid-1970s. At the time Berlusconi still was just a wealthy real estate developer and started his private television empire. Bontade visited Berlusconi’s villa in Arcore through his contact Vittorio Mangano. Berlusconi’s lawyer dismissed Giuffrè’s testimony as “false” and an attempt to discredit the Prime Minister and his party. Giuffrè said that other Mafia representatives who were in contact with Berlusconi included the Palermo Mafia bosses Filippo Graviano and Giuseppe Graviano. The Graviano brothers allegedly treated directly with Berlusconi through the business-man Gianni Letta, somewhere between September/October 1993. The alleged pact with the Mafia fell apart in 2002. Cosa Nostra had achieved nothing.
Dell’Utri’s lawyer, Enrico Trantino, dismissed Giuffrè’s allegations as an “anthology of hearsay”. He said Giuffrè had perpetuated the trend that every new turncoat would attack Dell’Utri and the former Christian Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in order to earn money and judicial privileges.
In October 2009, Gaspare Spatuzza, a Mafioso turned pentito in 2008, has confirmed Giuffrè statements. Spatuzza testified that his boss Giuseppe Graviano had told him in 1994 that Berlusconi was bargaining with the Mafia, concerning a political-electoral agreement between Cosa Nostra and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Spatuzza said Graviano disclosed the information to him during a conversation in a bar Graviano owned in the upscale Via Veneto district of the Italian capital Rome. Dell’Utri was the intermediary, according to Spatuzza.
http://www.ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.com/page/26708.html
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