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How America Became An Oligarchy
Submitted by Ellen Brown via The Web of Debt blog,
"The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners."
- George Carlin, The American Dream
According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.
“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?
The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails.
In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age.
In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money.
When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece, where the populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by the moneylenders who have the government in a chokehold.
How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?
Democracy’s Rise and Fall
The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments:
The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of private banking. The banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. This control of money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs. In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington.
Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England’s money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender.
In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled.
They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold.
This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks’ privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who created the notes with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them.
President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists’ paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued.
In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.
The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers’ monopoly over the right to create the nation’s money. According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard, politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players.
In All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks.
Democracy Succumbs to Globalization
In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting government participation to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections by other means:
First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden. Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote or of the issues to be dealt with. Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media. These media, in turn, are controlled by moneyed interests.
Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.
The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was “globalization” – an expanding global market that overrides national interests:
[T]oday’s global economy is fully transnational. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.
The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections.
Looking at Alternatives
Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most effective way of governing on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist Eric Li makes a compelling case for the system of “meritocracy” that has been quite successful in China.
In America Beyond Capitalism, Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia, which have large empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls “The Pluralist Commonwealth”: a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of regional and national coordination when necessary. He is co-chair along with James Gustav Speth of an initiative called The Next System Project, which seeks to help open a far-ranging discussion of how to move beyond the failing traditional political-economic systems of both left and Right..
Dr. Alperovitz quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002:
What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal tradition to justify states’ and local communities’ recalling, out of their own sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp.
Taking Back Our Power
If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests while the people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged.
The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.
The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom – the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care and a decent retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not beholden to the moneylenders, they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the money to fund it.
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Any solution does not involve the current government or any associates thereof......
"Oh, we must delegate the power of currency production to a third party, to prevent its politicization"... Little did we realize that the power of currency production would drive political decisions instead.
Nomi Prins for President!
Dammit! And here I thought my votes really counted! :(
Oh, and don't tell Barry he can start printing his own coins.
when I saw "how", i thought, well, murder and lies of course !
I'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... www.globe-report.com
wow
The 800 pound gorilla in the room is the fact that since 1991, Wall Street computer boiler rooms have generated nearly 2 quadrillion dollars in derivatives. Most of the derivatives were created after the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. The global GNP is about 60 trillion dollars. Can the Western national economies declare a joint bankruptcy when the interest payments and costs associated with these derivatives gets too high? This looks like a job for Jewish lightning!
The definition of insanity: repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
The notion that "consenting harder" will eventually lead to the land of milk and honey is specious.
If you continually lose the game, make sure you understand WHAT game it is. No matter how skillfully you play checkers, if the game is actually Monopoly, you will lose every time.
We are where we are (collectively, stripping away the notion that "Politics" or "Constitutional Theory" is of any use) because we have continued to do the same things. Run the same mazes that were given to us, with same illusion of "choice." The same illusion that "we" were "in charge."
"We" (The Public) have never been in charge.
The last 3000 years have been a vast experiment to build a better mouse trap. Feudalism, servitude, human chattel...these concepts never disappeared, simply morphed due to constant refinement and ever-more sophisticated marketing.
If you repeat a lie often enough, that lie becomes truth. Then dogma. Until the descendants of those to whom the lie was told willingly kill and die for the sake of preserving that lie.
Slavery works ever so much better when the slaves ASK to be enslaved. Because they are told that they are the best loved children of their Masters. Their Lords.
Words provide disclosure. And disclosure abounds. There is no dark, hidden conspiracy. The truth brazenly parades in front of all of us, every day. The Owners trip over themselves trying to make it ever more obvious what they think of us, how things work. Turns of phrase, and words that fly right under our collective radar:
"Human Resources"
"Children are OUR greatest RESOURCE"
"Citizens"
Because "everybody knows" what these words mean. Yes, but how did "everybody" come to know? Through introspection, critical thought, and reflection? Or because they heard them repeated by their "teachers" and "Parents."
Democracy is a horrid word. It means "To control the commoners with force."
But "everybody knows" that it means "People Power!" Right? Greek and Latin are no longer taught in schools for a reason.
We are here collectively because we are content to float on the surface meanings of words, sipping our umbrella drinks and assuaging our civic dopamine receptors by "voting" like "good citizens." And each year wonder how things continue to get worse.
The corollary to the first quotation is thus: It is insanity not to try something different when confronted by repeated failures.
Remove your energy from the current system. Un-Vote. Repudiate. Try something different.
Or, be content in your insanity as the ship slips beneath the waves. At least the mai tais are good.
Corruption in a democracy system is a feature, not a bug.
Utter, complete bullshit
Corruption can exist and thrive in any system, including what Russia had under the Tsars, or France under an Absolute Monarch
in fact, democracy is that system that allows some pushback against corruption... if applied. but that is a question of political will
The biggest takeaway from this article is that the US has a "the winner takes all" electoral system. Another word for it is "To the Victor, the Spoils". See: Spoils_system
now, why is this important and very relevant? because if you back both runner ups, this system guarantees that you get what you spend money for...
... particularly if the system allows unlimited, secret and deniable backing of political candidates and full-blast unbridled lobbyism as a side-dish
watch the British May Elections, and note how Britons will vote several parties despite their use of the First Past The Post System, btw
The key words are transparancy & accountability. As corruption thrives, they decline.
Ghordius, you do not understand the 2 party system is in the Constitution at the founding of our country.ah well wait -never mind.
overmed, I'm in good company. George Washington, the very first president, did not "understand" it
tell me, where are the parties that were in power then? where are the Whigs, for example?
If a car had one control interface- an on/off button, do you imagine you could safely drive it? Or, better yet, do you think that inflatable, squeaky "steering wheel" the Owners place in front of you actually steers the car?
Voting is binary. It is yes, or no. You, as a "voter" do not CHOOSE anyone.
You are able to consent, or decline to consent when you "register your vote."
That's it.
Voters "vote." Electors "elect."
Words mean things.
Your prejudices and assumptions, despite the yearnings of your deepest heart of hearts, do not cause the world to conform to them.
"Voting" serves two primary purposes, and a slough of others. It provides a "dummy load" to keep the mice engaged. Their energy spent thinking those button-presses release food pellets.
The second, it serves to indicate consent, and willingness, to be ruled. This latter is very important, because the Owners can say with Clean Hands that "they" (The Public) are "asking" to be ruled over.
Again. You are playing Checkers. The game is Monopoly.
Corruption can exist and thrive in any system
Now please tell us why in your posts you never demand more competition and accountability,
but instead mostly whitewash acts of non-accountability or pushs to further reduce open, fair competition.
"Remove your energy from the current system. Un-Vote. Repudiate. Try something different."
how is not voting "trying to do something different"? As far as I know, half of the American Electorate never voted, and will never do so
btw, "Democracy is a horrid word. It means "To control the commoners with force."" ?? Are you serious ???
from Greek demokratia "popular government," from demos "common people," originally "district" (see demotic), + kratos "rule, strength" (see -cracy).
whatever you think about democracy, it means "The People Rule". the term was coined to contrast Oligarchy, i.e. "The Few Rule"
Let me simplify things even further.
You vote once. When you submit your voter registration. That's it. Whether you "go to the polls" or not from that point on, you are on record as voting YES.
Which means thus: if you were registered in 2000 and 2004, you voted for Bush.
If you were registered in 2008 and 2012, you voted for Obama.
It does not matter if you indicated a preference for anyone else at the polls. Your "vote" ("wish," "pledge," or swearing of fealty") was FOR THE SYSTEM, and you consented to accept and abide by whomever the Electors chose.
The fact that "greater than 50% of the voters didn't vote" is irrelevant, since I guarantee you that those that "didn't vote" are STILL REGISTERED. Until LESS THAN 50% of the Public are REGISTERED CONSENTORS, the OWNERS WILL HAVE A MANDATE TO DO AS THEY WISH.
No man can serve two masters. If you are a registered voter, you have NO right to complain, since you are quite literally ON RECORD as voting YES.
And yes. I am "serious." And I abide by my previous statement that Greek and Latin are not taught for a reason. Obviously you are one of those that believes rather than digs.
And you are illustrating my argument perfectly: a lie, once engrained, is defended with every resource.
"Kratia" means "rule by force."
I cannot help it if your only source is Wikipedia.
Can you read ancient Greek? I can.
Congressional apportionment was limited in the 1890's to its current 485 members of the House. It took a little under 100 years for those 485 positions to become sufficiently bought.
Original apportionment was 1:30000-making several thousand congressmen in todays world-a number and diffusion of power that would be impossible to control-especially if they remained geographically in their own districts and met openly on line where their constituents could easily witness their conduct on their behalf.
Having NSA dossiers on each and every congressman-as well as potential candidate for that seat doesn't hurt the oligarchs chances one bit
Doctor10 - I believe this is the most important brake that can be applied, make it so extraordinarily expense to buy representatives it takes a VERY long time for power to concentrate. In the end, all systems will be corrupted so better brakes seems like the best man can do.
Since Carlin was quoted and he also said "its a big club and you ain't in it." It reminds me of contacting Jeb Bush. How I got his ear is a longer story but I'll shorten it. I suggested building a communication system so the people could reconnect with politicians in our new digital world. He liked the idea ans referred me to the Rockerfellers for funding.
They said almost verbatim "You aren't in the club so we won't meet you." This verifies what the article is talking about with money centered interests and politicians being below them now in the food chain. The Bush family is the most powerful political family in this country. Good on Jeb for having and open mind but it didn't matter.
As this system breaks down we certainly need to return to what works like Glass-Steagal. There should always be a wall in finance between high-risk investors ans low risk savers. I think we'll see banking as a public utility but not before a lot more bad shit happens that will probably take down 1/3 of us along the way. Se la vie and why I hedge.
"Give me control of a nations money supply & I care not who makes its laws"
~The Pope of Cheese
What does fulfills realize is that we are a democracy of A fascist sort. We are no longer a republic as our funding fathers originally intended.
"funding fathers"
LOL ~ I see what you did there. Or, that was the best Freudian slip ever.
Fucking SIRI. I tried to fix it but no luck.
I thought it was GREAT! That's why I jumped in there & locked you in for posterity.
Let's also remember that the term "Democracy" gets thrown around a lot in places it doesn't belong, like America. Democracy is direct voting and the tyranny of the 51%. Republic is representative democracy, and it has purposeful insulation from the easily enflamed passions of the mob and it's baby-with-the-bathwater tendencies. Republics tend to have much better political stability than the rioting and 'new constitution every 25-50 years' you get with the glorious democracy.
Little-known secret: Freud was a cross-dresser. He would wear a Slip.
Fulfills = fool fails to and funding = founding.
Who gives a flying crap about a republic.
It is just make believe for the dupes to believe in.
Anusocracy - I care about a Republic. The concept is justice first and no man above the law. Then the concept of equality which the first concept protects. Princeton is correct, we are not a Republic but an oligarchy. I think they were afraid to call it Fascism.
Fascism and democracy are mutually exclusive. If fascism is the private ownership of the state (or the merging of private and public power) it follows, that there’s no ‘people-power/-influence’ left.
Oh, horseshit. Fractional reserve banking works (in the long term) ONLY when banks are allowed to fail, Take that away and it becomes institutional tyranny. Which is what happened in 2008. Banks were not allowed to fail so tyranny was allowed to run rampant.
Even a hard gold standard will not stop these motherfuckers now. NO rules-based change in the system will. How could it, when corruption trumps everything?
Call it what it is... A MONEY COUNTERFEITTING OPERATION...
... and backed by the US Army.
W/o them, they would've been taken down a long time ago.
Our original Bill of Rights has been made null and void so why would we believe that TPDB would be inclined to honor any future contracts?? The Founding Fathers did not attempt to fix a system they deemed beyond hope.....
They were never OUR "Bill of Rights." They applied to the signatories of the CONstitution, and their heirs and assigns. Us "little people" (no capitalization) were given privileges.
Let me expound further:
If you are en-titled as "Citizen," please do a search in the CONstitution for every mention of the word. The point at which you find this word is the point at which that document begins to apply to you.
Where did it show up? And what were the words following it? Did they include the word "privilege?"
Hey, the Hedge has provided. [my comment from GW thread:]
==============
That is an interesting article. The first part is very good.
The second part should be controversial. She holds up China as an example of a 'meritocracy', which I would dispute. China has a national bank, which Brown argues - correctly, I think - is closer to a democratic ideal than a privately-owned bank, which obviously has nothing to do with democracy. She correctly identifies the US as an oligarchy, although I would add "fascist oligarchy". China's problems are well known and globalisation gives them the same economic pitfalls as the US except for (Brown's key point) in its banking system.
I have read Brown frequently and I find her committed to democratic ideals. I am not at all a believer in democracy, as I believe it to be among the worst of political systems, both for tyranny (of a 'majority of voters') and for prioritising short-term and even destuctive goals over long-term planning. However, if one believes in democratic ideals, then one should probably also believe as Brown does, that a national bank (its scrip issued exclusively by an elected government) is the best economic model.
Personally, I do not believe that ANYONE, neither private bankster nor government, should have the exclusive ability to issue scrip. I think everyone should have the legal right to issue their own scrip, insofar as it is backed with real assets and/or represents real transactions. (Money as store of value and/or facilitator of trade.) "Counterfeiting" should not apply to scrip unapproved by government, but rather to unbacked (fraudulent) scrip. I bet we'd have fewer cases of fraud to prosecute, even in this case, since citizens would have to perform due diligence and be much more knowledgeable, and careful, about money.
An interesting article, anyway. I would be interested to see some lively discussion in the comments.
========
Many thanks, Tyler.
Can you clarify, how your ideal system worked, when people are no counts in general. Is it Father God or a royal family, that comes from the Heavens and is able to solve our self induced problems.
What renfield is refering to, imo, is that each individual would be responsible for creating their own currency. This is a great IDEA in that one would HAVE to pull their own weight from the beginning. Instead of the state or bank guaranteeing your labour, and therefor obtaining a stake, everyone would essentially be forced to establish themselves within their local economy first. If they were successful at this level they would then have the personal currency to expand outwards.
In this ideal world the only person we would have to solve our own problems ourselves. If unable to do that we would be required to barter the assistance of someone who could.
Again a great idea, but applying it to modern social interaction as it is now would be disaterous. Especially considering we are heading the exact opposite direction with large all-encompassing single currency regimes that are controlled and distributed by a small group of people. As discribed here:
[T]oday’s global economy is fully transnational. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.
As seen in the employment of the Euro and it's local and nation implications. NAFTA and the Amero will have the same effect.
"I think everyone should have the legal right to issue their own scrip . . ."
There is a chapter of Nikolai Starikov's book Rouble Nationalization that discusses a period in US history when multiiple scrips were tried. It was a disaster.
Is this really news to anyone?
As Ms. Brown's earlier Book, The Web of Debt explained, the Bankers' Control of the Debt-Based Money Supply and Political Process pretty much finished off this Nation-State. Add in Immigration Amnesty Advocates (My Mother's Naturalized. I'm all for fast-tracking Green Cards for Business, Import/Export, Jobs, School, Internships; but) show me a case where the number of "above average wage" Blue/White Collar jobs have increased due to Illegal Human Trafficking (sorry smartarses - we're excluding prostitution, drug/gun running, money laundering)), H-1B Peddlers, FreeTrade Job Exporters (including Outsourcers), MIC, and Citizens' United for the "Frosting on the Cake".
It's baked and done. The real purchasing power/wage freeze and the hollowing out of the Workforce have been going on for years now; and Society and Banker-Rigged-System are beginning to collapse upon itself.
Congress, Supremes, and the Oval Office are bought out. It'll take a Reformation Movement Nationwide to get Private/Corp/Foreign Money out of the Election Process. The General Populace are not up to the task; and Demagogues and Profiteering Parasites abound.
Guess that's the way the Bankers, Oligarchs, and the Bi-Partisan Politicos wanted it to be. They have it their way; and we're seeing how FUBAR'd that Plan was...
To all the 'Merica First Type: I myself am on the "Tarmac", ready to leave and work abroad - because that's were the action is.
I too am looking for some action from a broad.......
Princeton is late, slow, retarded and part of the problem. Harvard, Yale and Princeton should be shut down. Arrest Lloyd Blankfein.
"Harvard, Princeton, Yale - Bullets, bombs and banks" (Gerald Celente)
Here is the cure!
"Stop whoring for Wall Street"
http://www.showrealhist.com/yTRIAL.html
http://patrick.net/?p=1223928
Burn it down, Bitches!
WTF tyler. what do you give this stupid womyn air time? its not right, there are young people here.
http://www.garynorth.com/public/7070.cfm
"..
In 2006, Brown's 500-page book appeared. By 2008, it was in its 4th printing. It is an attack on fractional reserve banking and the Federal Reserve System. It began getting a hearing on the World Wide Web.
The book does not initially appear what it really is: a call to set up a government-funded welfare state. But there are brief statements to this effect in the early pages. Only on page 234, halfway through the book, does she get to the point: the Nazi economy.
At this point, anyone with an IQ above 90 should begin to smell a rat.
The Greenbackers are big advocates of Abraham Lincoln. Why? Because he allowed the banks to suspend payments in gold in 1861. Then in 1862 and 1863, he signed into law a system of unbacked fiat money called Greenbacks. They see him as the creator -- a would-be national savior who was thwarted by the bankers, who had him assassinated.
They never discuss the fact that Lincoln was an advocate of fractional reserve banking. They never mention that in January of 1863, he signed the bill authorizing a second issue of Greenbacks, but sent Congress a letter deploring the law. He called for a national bank act. Congress gave it to him a month later.
With this as background, I return to Brown's discussion of National Socialism.
The German economic system was run by the central government. It preserved the illusion of private property, but it was a socialist system. The government controlled the means of production. The government issued fiat money, and it established price and wage controls. It set up a system of 1,600 cartels in 1933-36. Beginning in 1934, government officials set the prices of commodities, and this resulted in shortages of most domestic commodities. The government also expanded the power of the government over the affairs of everybody in the society.
.."
Gary North has been so completely destroyed you should not cite him as a reference. There is a website callled something like 'Gary North is a big fat idiot' that details how wrong he is.
The 1% mean to have it all soon, and kill anyone who gets in the way.
Sure, I know, that sound too harsh. Really? Is it? Look around you! Do you think this is gonna get better, or continue on until the elites have us back in our serf cottages, and tipping our caps to the elites.
What are the lessons from the French Revolution , would you say ?
:-)
The English philosopher Bertrand Russell nailed it nearly a century ago. "Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton."
This is what's behind mass immigration from the Third World, endlessly portraying blacks and other vibrants as cool, clever, good-looking and law-abiding (hence good mating material) forcing race-mixing in every public - and increasingly private - space, debasing schooling and traditional art, increasing welfare dependence, bread and circuses. This is producing an easily-controlled dumbed-down deracinated helotry, the kind Russell had in mind.
"How America Became An Oligarchy"
Acquiescence, submission, and obedience.
The banksters need to repay us.
Ha! The author may want to read up about the Dutch Act of Abjuration which predates the Declaration of Independence by a century. See http://www.news.wisc.edu/3049 and http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/before-1600/plakkaat-van-verlatinghe...
Good info and comment. I did not know about the Dutch branch of Liberty's history, but only the English and French branches. I guess that I will be doing some more research. You should put a line before the quote so as to enable people to up-vote it.
Additionally, the Dutch version does not include this:
"...it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security..."
That is the essence of America right there. Individual Liberty and responsibility--their, my, right, their, my duty.
Also proves that ideas are powerful and live much longer, and have many more lives than the people they inspire.
The banksters need to repay us.
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
(Thanks for the hint about putting a line before a quote)
You may be interested in reading this article about Joan of Arc (in particular, the part about Nicholas De Cusa) and how her cause was an important spark for the Renaissance and for the concepts of natural law, equality and individual liberty:
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2015/4214joan_arc.html
It's true: if you start your post in Italic letters, we cannot vote.
It's an IT glitch that ZH has.
The average single family home in Toronto now costs over $1 Million. This means that only those with a down payment, six figure job, life insurance/mortgage insurance, and a high credit score, can afford to own a home. Democracy is
based on home ownership for a wealthy middle class that cannot afford home ownership anymore due to mass restructuring of government, and the corporate sector, downsizing of workforces/sectors, and a disappearing disposable income. Add increased part time work and a decrease in full time jobs with pensions, and we have a corresponding decrease in the homeownership Ponzi that a so-called 'democracy' provides to 'the people'. ERGO, fuck
'democracy' and the shills that shill for it. Our system is one characterized in terms of an 'oligopoly' so we can dispense with this faux 'democracy' bullshit right now.
The moneychangers have always been the problem...
Bring back Christ of the cat-o-nine-tails driving the money changers out of the temple!
T.S. Elliots "Christ the tiger" in "Gerontion"
or Mathew 23 - best rant ever against the you know whos!!
Brutus is an honorable man.
Democracy is not the rule of the majority, it is the rule of the elite that control the information - and thus the decision-making - of the majority; thus, democracy is an illusion. It is oligarchy in disguise.
+100
It is an interesting situation:
A. The elitists "branded" THEMSELVES as "elite" for the purpose of making it seem as if somehow they are better than those they purport to own. The ability to create money out of thin air and to give it to oneself, ones cronies, to create "so called" laws and hire armies does not make one elite ... I mean really, think about it. It is a scam.
B. So called laws giving ownership of one set of people by another, written by the first set and not approved by the other are meaningless... EXCEPT in that the first set then feels justified in the use of force to exercise their ownership "so called" right. People can and do use force to make others do what they want ... it causes resentment and division.
C. Force was once applied with a whip. Now it is applied by the withholding of "money" which by their laws is required to fulfill basic needs and the use of force to prevent people from supplying those basic human needs for themselves. All sorts of so called laws exist, written by those who branded themselves as elite, to prevent people from being able to provide for themselves. Those so called laws are then enforced with the threat of kidnapping and forced isolation, violence or death.
This is why those who brand themselves as "elite" don't get it and will never get it as long as they oppress others and live parasitically. It is also why Christianity is perceived as a threat. The self-branded elite would rather be kings of this world than to advance themselves in the quest for knowledge and maturing of the soul. They are petulant children who delude themselves into believing that creating false conflict between the people corrupts the people and depriving the people of knowledge inhibits people's development. But development of the soul comes through stress, suffering and enlightenment which leads to love and sacrifice for others. It removes the governors of ego and fear.
No matter how many idols they build for themselves. No matter how much they laud their own accomplishments in this world, it is just pissing in the wind. The universe does not (actually it does and that is their "chance" for salvation) give a damn about a bunch of deluded psychopaths, who dress themselves in temporal masks that fail in hide their true nature.
A suggestion: give it up, ask forgiveness and join the human race. Improve your substance and dispose of useless illusions. Cast off your ego and fear and you will be accepted.
We are all sheep for the government class (fed/state/local/agencies) that live off of us. They will keep taking more and more, through taxes and increased debt, year by year, until their system collapses. Their fundamental goals are selfishness, power and control. But Dancing with the stars is fun!
Well here is part of the problem. Without reading their piece, I would have thought some folks at Princeton would have known America was never a democracy. I am sure they know this but it is good to discuss anyway...
In a democracy the majority is sovereign. That is why the framers created a federal republic, as an experiment, to protect the minority. But life is what happens while making other plans and along the way we created the "federal" reserve bank (s), incorporation, corporations as people, people as corporations, main stream media of the untruth and of the trivial, separated the senate from their constituents, income taxes, and more. We also have a legal system based on the principals of electricity and water (charges and discharges, courts look like the inside of ships, port passes, berth certificates) and also debt (UCC, accepted worldwide).
We could pick a time from the past and restore America, on paper, to what it looked like then. Probably easiest to do this in another country.
Solution: Show our 'elected representatives' the door (with no retirement pension) and select, via lottery, new representatives from existing voting lists.
You claim, "[Colonists] lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange.
Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold."
What you fail to mention is that prices adjust fine to a limited gold supply in circulation and therefore any money system doesn't have to keep expanding. That is a myth.
If we had stayed on a physical gold and silver system as the constitution specifies, we would have prevented banker counterfeiting of paper currencies through a fraudulent fractional reserve banking system.
We again lost control of our money to England after the revolutionary war by allowing the private Rothschild-owned First Bank of the US to switch back to paper currencies and therefore counterfeit our money and also extract their interest charge on money out of nothing - exactly as the Bank of England had done before the war.
Few people understand how the English banker parasite re-attached after the war. Alexander Hamilton was an English Rothschild agent promoting this parasitic re-attachment and Aaron Burr teased him about his misplaced loyalty and that's what led to the famous duel and Hamilton's death.
The Rothschild parasite still attached to our easily corrupted paper money system after the war as historian Eustace Mullins pointed out. The same goes for the 2nd Bank of the US in 1816-1838 and the Fed since 1913.
There's no substitute for physical gold and silver and represents kryptonite to parasitic central bankers and corrupt politicians and that's why the constitution specifies that it's the only money allowed to be used.
The supreme courts have conveniently ignored this money clause in our constitution since it's inception in the 1791 Coinage Act.
A static, constant money supply is the basis for a stable economy that prevents parasites from attaching to the publics purse and sucking the life blood from the people. If the population increases, then prices easily adjust and the money supply shouldn't have to.
This is the basis of the Austrian School of Economics and why economist Mike Maloney's Seven Stages of Empire keep returning back to physical gold and silver in stage one throughout history as each paper currency regime inevitably gets counterfeited into oblivion.
This is one of the major repeats of history that strangely keeps getting left out of our controlled education.
Agreed, but, then we must get comfortable with deflation, which is why we have been told by the banksters deflation is the most evil threat to any economy on earth. In fact, deflation is a return on investment in real money, even when interest rates are zero, and they certainly aren’t going to allow us that kind of freedom and reward now, are they.
Awesome to see this article on ZH with that nice little plug for the Next System (New Left)!
Ted Cruz will fix this. Oh what's that, his wife is an executive and Goldman Sachs? Never mind.
dumb fuck.
Ellen Brown does NOT check her facts!
I have studied colonial economics for 50 years, having started with collecting the coppers some of the states issued during the Confederation period.
I refer to Eric P Newman's reference book on early American paper money.
The first paper money in the Western world were Massachusetts' issues of 1690. Massachusetts continued to increase the supply of printing press money, backed by mortgages on <sarcasm> then-scarce real estate in places like Worcester County. </sarcasm> Newman presents a table showing the inflation in his book and that was, IIRC, 2-3% yearly.
Massachusetts issued notes in three tenor periods, which was like the modern-day dropping of insignificant zeroes in the price. This 'money' was primarily used for such public works as invading French Canada, especially when the mother regimes went to war, and disturbing the natives. In other words, extending the Puritan Empire.
Massachusetts so ruined itself financially that King George II's government in 1750 shipped nearly the Royal Mint's entire copper mintage of 1749 and 1750 to Boston as a bailout, forbidding that province from ever emitting paper notes again. I am sure that one of the motives for Massachusetts independence was to resume the paper money scam, which it did after Lexington and Concord.
Other provinces issued paper money in the 18th century and continued to do so through and after independence.
Enabling the US Treasury to emit fantasy money makes no difference from the current system. We need to grow up and lose the fairy tales already!
Ellen Brown does NOT check her facts!
I have studied colonial economics for 50 years, having started with collecting the coppers some of the states issued during the Confederation period.
I refer to Eric P Newman's reference book on early American paper money.
The first paper money in the Western world were Massachusetts' issues of 1690. Massachusetts continued to increase the supply of printing press money, backed by mortgages on <sarcasm> then-scarce real estate in places like Worcester County. </sarcasm> Newman presents a table showing the inflation in his book and that was, IIRC, 2-3% yearly.
Massachusetts issued notes in three tenor periods, which was like the modern-day dropping of insignificant zeroes in the price. This 'money' was primarily used for such public works as invading French Canada, especially when the mother regimes went to war, and disturbing the natives. In other words, extending the Puritan Empire.
Massachusetts so ruined itself financially that King George II's government in 1750 shipped nearly the Royal Mint's entire copper mintage of 1749 and 1750 to Boston as a bailout, forbidding that province from ever emitting paper notes again. I am sure that one of the motives for Massachusetts independence was to resume the paper money scam, which it did after Lexington and Concord.
Other provinces issued paper money in the 18th century and continued to do so through and after independence.
Enabling the US Treasury to emit fantasy money makes no difference from the current system. We need to grow up and lose the fairy tales already!
Send her an email. I'm sure she'll appreciate the Correction.
I had to stop at, "vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges." Some of the article was "interesting", but when the author lists liberal hysteria talking points as media manipulation, credibility flies out the window.
By obsessing over just one aspect of "American System" economic policy - as promoted by lying Abe Lincoln and implemented by military force between 1861 and 1871 - this article completely misses the real nature of the oligarchy we have been ruled by since around 1868.
(Central) Banking and debt-based fiat currency were only two aspects among an array of mercantilistic machinations employed by the wannabe ruling elite when they nationalized the plantations and conscripted the Citizens of every (formerly) sovereign State into a "national" citizenry of tax slaves, subjected to the whims of a relative few in D.C. who granted themselves that authority based on the fiction contained in the 14th Amendment.
But sure, let's focus on a single one of Lincoln's actions - one which was taken for the sole purpose of benefiting his political base - and ignore the array of crimes he and his minions committed after he unilaterally granted himself the authority to wage war on U.S. Citizens, thereby effecting the fundamental transformation of the Republic into an empire.
Looks like the oligarchy Lincoln established has finally sucked sufficient real wealth out of society that a substantive (if not yet critical) mass are waking up to the true nature of the federal government, as it has existed since Lincoln destroyed State sovereignty.
but at least we have a say in the matter through voting! ........
"They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold."
These statements are the core of this idiot's scheme. And they are incorrect.
When a fractional reserve bank loans out its supply of gold multiple times as Brown posited, it does not control the gold supply. Rather it goes bankrupt, and you get a bank run. Banks cannot by themselves control an element on the periodic table. They need governments to establish legal-tender laws, and to set up central banks in order to make that possible.
If they didn't do EITHER of those two things, overextended bankers would simply go bankrupt. Without Legal Tender laws, no one would have to use their banknotes at all. Without a central bank that has a relationship with the treasury, banks would go bankrupt as soon as they get caught without enough money to redeem their loans.
The key thing to understand is this: Neither you nor your bank knows whether your deposit is treasury-created money or whether it is a loan from some other bank. The only way to discover it is through the clearing process, when you try to draw on those funds.
The only reason we are not seeing the whole financial sector go bankrupt today is that we have a Central Bank that provides unlimited 'liquidity' to the banks to prevent their bankrupcy, and a government foolish enough to demand we use those banks fraudulent paper. All of this is intended to do one thing: Prevent actual clearance of debt.
And guess what? In that task of preventing clearance of debt...it works fabulously. In every other way it is a disaster.
That is what the financial crisis of 2008 (and maybe of 2015?) is all about.
This article is bullshit. Take a couple of populist points and throw some vague historical events around them... then keep rep;aeting banking families... and voila... an article bereft of a real message and point.
The author must have been just dumped by er boyfriend. Bitch, bitch, bitch.
How America became an Oligarchy: by hook and by crook the British & French wrested the northern territories from the oligarchs conducting the Spanish genocide conquest. Then just like the Spanish, they established plantations of caucasian slaves... and they're still here.