31 July 2010
Dear Adam,
You will soon be a man and there are things you need to know about this world. You may have sorted many of them out for yourself but it will not hurt to have a lifetime of experience to guide what will probably be a quite difficult future compared to the life I have been fortunate enough to live.
You will probably be aware that your father and I care much for what happens to this world mainly because we recognise the good fortune we have to be born at this time in this country. There are millions of worse places to live, physically, economically, socially and politically. We care because the price of the freedom we enjoy is Eternal Vigilance.
A year ago you told me that the USA as the most hated country on earth and your mother, quite correctly told you to be quiet. I am giving you a book that will explain why what you said is true but also explain why the notion is false. The enemy is not America but something quite different which you will discover if you read the book assiduously.
I commend the book to you and much of its content. Some is quite hard going and some of quite doubtful provenance but the majority is good stuff. Determining which is which is part of your development. Believe nothing and test everything. When your own logic tells you it is true, believe it and stand by your own judgement. If you are wrong you will find out. At this stage in your life you should do nothing. Your immediate task is to learn and form your knowledge base and opinions.
For what it is worth I offer my own potted version of what is civilisation and what you need to do about it. It rambles quite a bit but that is how history is. Things that appear quite unconnected eventually prove to have common roots. This is an attempt to sew these disparate things together.
The common element is The Banksters. That name , not my invention, has been deliberately chosen to rhyme with Gangster.The root of civilisation is the need for security. Men banded together for mutual protection. It quickly became apparent that some were more capable that others at different things and society quickly became stratified in kings, rulers, priests, learned men, professionals, workers, serfs and slaves. The system is not much different today – we just use different descriptions and job titles.
The essence of civilisation is power. Political power describes the relationships between men. The theory of these matters is called philosophy. Philosophers through the ages have bent and distorted reality to fit their own twisted visions or the demands made upon them by their surroundings, patrons, masters and enemies.The fundamental reality of man in a civilisation is that his prime means of survival is his brain. Lions have big claws, eagles have big beaks, men have brains. Well, some of them anyway. The initiation of force in human civilisation is forbidden. The first consequence of this is that man must work to survive. There are a million and one jobs he may do but he must work to survive. The product of work we call wealth. There is only one way on this earth to produce wealth. You take materials, consisting of the fundamental 92 natural elements in nature, out of the ground and turn them into usable products. There are three ways to achieve this. You can hunt and gather the natural products of nature. You can farm and grow crops from the land or you can mine materials and work them into one of a plethora of products.
The second consequence of man’s brain is that he must have the right to work. He cannot exercise his brain, his means of survival, if he cannot work. Then he must have the right to keep the proceeds of his work. There is absolutely no point in working if you cannot keep the proceeds. This leads onto the principles of property. A man must have the right to own his property. This is a clear progression of rights based upon the fundamental uses of his brain. This is also the source of the denial of the initiation of force. A man cannot use his brain if it is opposed by brute force. These are the fundamental human rights that belong equally to every man. They cannot be legitimately denied.
A legitimate government is one that secures them by constitutional guarantee. There has only ever been one government that was constitutionally based on these principles and that was the government of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Their constitution has been subjected to so many amendments and evasions that it is now no better than many others. The Founding Fathers have been well and truly betrayed.It has become fashionable to consider money to be wealth, but money is just a token of wealth. The products that constitute wealth may keep you alive. Money without products will not. But money and products have become freely interchangeable so that money now has great power. The great advantage enjoyed by money is that it occupies very little space and is easily stored. Wheat or potatoes require great silos to store them and suffer various ravages of nature. Vast amounts of money can be stored in nothing but an entry in a ledger occupying no more than a dozen bits of information and remains safe for long periods of time. It is also fairly freely convertible into other currencies, gold or other products at any time.
In medieval times the gold and silver trades developed and men found they needed somewhere to store their precious materials. Some goldsmiths build safe rooms and soon found they could let the storage space out to other men at a charge. The holders of the materials would give the depositor a receipt for the value of the metal or jewels. The receipts soon took on an exchangeable value of their own. The receipt was a promise to redeem which soon became a promise to pay and so was born the promissory note which we now call a bank note.
The holders of these deposits soon found that much of the wealth in their vaults never left it and they could safely issue more promissory notes than they had stored wealth. Around the end of the seventeenth century this system had grown to such an extent that it inevitably became corrupt. Crooks soon learned to scam it. This led to the formation and regulation of banks. At around the same time increasing trade had led to the formation of the Joint Stock Company. This was a means of men joining together in ventures that no one of them could afford or manage. It also allowed them to limit their liability. The success of the JSC is a key part of this story and is, if you think about Limited Liability, quite remarkable.
Most banks were set up with limited liability and the banking industry as we know it was born. One of the key issues regarding the constitution of banks was the Capitalisation Ratio – or how much of their book deposits they could lend. This has typically remained around 10% for the last three hundred years. What this means is that if a bank receives a deposit of £10,000 it must store £1,000 and can lend out £9,000. If someone borrows this £9,000 and deposits in another account the bank can then lend another £8,100. Effectively a bank can lend approximately ten times its deposits.
This is what it does if you request a loan. It can lend up to ten times its assets and can, in fact, hardly find that many borrowers. That is why you are regularly inundated with offers of loans. But now we come to the sting. The bank has actually had to do nothing but print off a form and get your signature. You now owe it all the money together with a promise to repay together with a substantial interest burden. The bank makes five or ten percent on money it does not own.The bank makes money out on nothing and charges you ten percent per year. It has no liabilities in this transaction as your loan is a credit and it can actually use it to create another £90,000 worth of loans. You may think this was written by Lewiss Carrol but it is how the system works. The banks create money out of nothing and charge you for doing It. As a matter of interest (no pun intended), The Wizard of Oz was supposed to be a commentary on this system.
The separation of commercial banks – that is those that deal with the public - and Investment Banks that deal in the stock exchange has been a significant part of much of the banking scene for the last century. The Glass-Steagall Act (now repealed) in the US after the Great Depression specifically separated these functions. Similar Chinese Walls had existed for long in the UK. Deregulation by George Brown within the labour government of Tony Blair specifically removed these safeguards and allowed commercial banks to make risky investments using the funds of depositors. The removal of these safeguards, together with the developments of “sophisticated” monetary devices to do with the separation of mortgage capital and debts led to the present financial meltdown.
In the seventeenth century, Mayer Amstell Rothschild was a well established financier in Germany. In 1798 his son Nathan Mayer Rothschild was sent to London to open the first foreign branch importing textiles. Jakob went to Paris in 1811. Brothers Salomon and Calmann were established in Vienna and Naples. The family is still one of the richest and most influential on earth. They and a few other families like them such as the Rockefellers control everything that happens in the western world and their influence is spreading rapidly.
The ability of banks to create currency out of nothing gives the banking system, and the banksters enormous power. Mayer Amstell Rothschild was alleged to have said “allow me to issue the currency of a nation and I care not one whit for its laws.” The bankers issue our currency and they often give not one whit for our laws.
There have been in the last two hundred years several revolutions aimed at freeing “the people” from various tyrannies. Perhaps the first was the American Revolution of 1775/6 which is commonly attributed to King George oppressing the colonists. The reality was more likely that the Bank of England, aided by the East India Company, was trying to impose its currency upon the colonists. The revolution appeared to have been successful but the American banking system is still dominated by the huge international banking cartels and the issue of its currency is not under the control of Congress.
The French Revolution came soon after and attempted to address the excesses of the French Court. Hundreds were beheaded but the bankers, who were financing the extravagances, escaped scot free.
The American Civil War was almost certainly set up by powerful interests to create work for arms manufacturers. It also contained a sideline in that President Abraham Lincoln issued his own “Greenbacks” to avoid the very high interest being demanded by European banks. There is some evidence that this was the reason for his assassination. There have been three presidents assassinated and all seem to be associated with banking and money creation.The American Revolution also gave birth to the finest constitution the world has ever known. If the clear desires and wishes of the Founding Fathers had been achieved the world would now be a very different place. The story really starts in 1215 when King John signed Magna Carta. This was the first time a King had negotiated with his barons rather than dictating to them. It was a small victory but a chink into which wedges could be forced.
There were various important British constitutional documents thereafter at various points in history. The point is that when the Founding Fathers came to make their plans they had a substantial history to draw upon. They did not invent it from thin air. It is interesting to note that at the beginning of their declaration they declare their wish to remain English - but. The American Constitution was about individuals. All men were equal. All had a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The definition of happiness is probably quite different today from what they had in mind. Wholeness or contentedness is probably a better word to use now.
The first World War was started by hidden powers and there is , again, suspicion that hidden Banksters were at work. There were certainly vast fortunes made by a few financiers.
The Russian Revolution in 1916 destroyed the extravagances of the Tsar but brought to power an even worse tyranny and utterly failed to address the fundamental source of abuse. Russia is once again ruled by western banks.
The Great Depression of 1930 followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that was clearly engineered by banksters to make themselves very rich while “shearing” the punters. The Depression was maintained by The American Federal bank which is a private company.
Despite having the foulest regime in history, Hitler was never short of funds. He did print some of his own money, so bypassing the banks, but he still needed, and received, massive international funding.
Japan was brought into the Second World War by being starved of oil. In 1898 America had gone to war with Spain as a result of false allegations and taken virtually all Spanish overseas possessions including Cuba and the Philippines. Virtually all oil and rubber then available to the eastern World came from the Philippines and America rationed it. But one has to ask by what mechanism this occurred. There is little doubt that there was enormous pressure from the Banksters upon the President and Congress. America took the decisions but who was pulling the strings? There is little doubt that everyone knew that war was coming and the myth that Pearl Harbor was a surprise is unsupportable. If nothing else, why were the Carriers, the important part of the US Navy, off on some exercise without their support ships? There was never an explanation for this.
Things changed for a while after the Second World War. Both Britain and the US had built massive armaments industries but Britain was bankrupt. The people were in no mood to be dictated to and a series of fairly strong presidents set things on a fair course that was maintained for around thirty years. At Breton Woods in 1945 the Dollar was pegged to Gold at $32 an ounce, a price that was maintained until around 1972. This provided a relatively stable environment in which Europe could be rebuilt.It is not clear if the Banksters had a hand in the fall of The Iron Curtain, most likely they just took advantage of it to develop the Military Industial Complex in the US and make profits by the billion.
Then the world changed. Up until then the big money had been in manufacturing. Now it moved to oil. The US had developed its own resources to the point that it was clear they would soon run out. The British had found and developed oilfields in Iran and Iraq and the Americans soon found oil in the virtually unpopulated country of Saudi Arabia. Their oil has literally oiled the world ever since.The Americans had always been jealous of the British Empire and now set about in earnest wresting it from them. They had set up a large number of military bases on British possessions all over the world and they soon eased Britain out of Iran and Iraq. They put their own puppet governments into both countries. The Shah lasted about ten years in Iran and the Iraquis played ball until Saddam Hussein came along. Even he played ball for a long time.
The face appearance is that the US has been an aggressive nation taking over the world. But you should not bother to examine a folly. Just ask what it achieves. The people of the US could have achieved a decent standard of living without having to build an empire based upon oil secured by military force. If you doubt that just draw yourself a map of the known world oil reserves and a map of overseas US bases. The correspondence is virtually complete. The only reason to fight a senseless war in Afghanistan is that it effectively completes the surrounding of Iran and pushes borders with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which area is probably the world’s second largest potential supplier of oil after Saudi Arabia. It also effectively muscles in on Russia’s previous hegemony over that region.
But we need to ask what and who is driving this expansive empire. There is much evidence and little doubt that every major conflict in the western world in the last two centuries has been engineered and financed by wealthy individuals who have manipulated whole countries into untenable positions. The vast majority of conflicts have been fought to secure the sources of wealth of a very few individuals.
The Cold War proved a source of vast fortunes created by building and stockpiling weapons. The space race spun off from that and proved another lucrative venture. The upside was that it provided lots of work and reasonable incomes for a lot of people who might otherwise have been unemployed. The downside was that it involved constant international tension and fear and occasionally required the sending of masses of young men to the battlefields of slaughter.
When the Cold War finished the US had no need of vast arsenals and the lucrative contracts started to dry up. It did not take long to invent a new Casus Belli in the destruction of the Twin Towers. There were many strange things about that day and many unanswered questions. Do not bother to examine a folly: ask only what it achieves. There is little doubt that powerful forces within the US knew a lot more than they are letting on.
The US ostensibly now has a new enemy. The enemy consists of a few barely visible rabble kids playing war games on their own territory. They have about as much chance of seriously attacking the US as an ant has of killing an elephant. The whole thing has been carefully contrived to secure oil supplies, not exactly for the US, but directly for the oil companies. They are the prime beneficiaries and they are backed by big money. Once again the Banksters are one of the main beneficiaries of this utter folly.
The serious downside of this is that the Western World has effectively declared was on the Muslim community. Peter Drucker, one time American management consultant wrote a book many years ago pointing out that over 50 percent of the world’s oil is in an area stretching from Mecca in the south to Archangel in the north and between Bulgaria and Tajikistan west to east. To the west of this area the population is predominantly white Christian, aging, declining and rich and powerful. To the east of the region the population is Muslim , poor, young, expanding and ambitious. In between lies half the world’s easily recovered energy supplies. You could not design a scenario more likely to create tension. But nowhere is it inscribed in stone that this situation must be solved by war. Only the rich and greedy Banksters make it so.
The US is a pawn in this game just as Britain was when it was the greatest World Power. Most of the large western countries have been pawns in this game of wealth grabbing for over three hundred years. It is estimated that four percent of the world’s population own 95% of its wealth. This is clearly wrong. In a fair and just society you can expect wealth differentials to grow naturally by a factor of ten and perhaps even a hundred. Competition, if it exists, should act to reduce such large differentials. But the Banksters are not subject to competition. They dictate the terms under which they operate and we, the people, have allowed them to get way with terms that would make us into criminals were we to try to operate in a similar manner. It is our society, our civilisation, and we have a complete and fundamental right to determine the terms and conditions of our society. We have given it away to the Banksters. It is time to reclaim it.
The problem here is not the US. She is just the biggest patsy in this game. The US is the only country on earth that has a constitution that was firmly and justly based on the fundamental individual rights of man. The Banksters have perverted that constitution to their own ends and they effectively own the Executive, Congress and the Senate and probably the judiciary also. It is time to spread this message and put a stop to the Banksters by returning power to sovereign nation states that can, and do, secure the rights of man.
Colin Walker
31 July 2010