by Jim Knapton Ph.D.

“US National Debt: $13,362,864,779,167 or $43,010 per person, $120,340 per tax payer”
                                    

 – World Clock, Poodwaddle.com, August 28th 2010, 7.00am. PST

Ben Bernanke is worried. Two years ago under his watch we saw the near total collapse of the US economy. The result: the greatest slump in economic activity since the 1930s brought on by the bursting of the American sub-prime housing bubble, caused by bankers lending far too much credit for “dodgy” property development and real estate investment via what many saw at best unscrupulous, at worst fraudulent techniques in mortgage-lending. Yet the Federal Reserve Chairman told us yesterday not to worry. “The issue at this stage is not whether we have the tools to help support economic activity and guard against disinflation. We do.” So why not use them Ben? After all it was middle-class Americans, the nation’s primary tax payers, who suffered the worst since many of them were holders of defaulting mortgages. Too many lost what to them had appeared to be guaranteed homes and salaries. It was a very fast downhill slide (still is at the 9.8% official unemployment rate, 18% in reality!) akin for many to falling into a financial black hole!

Ben, scientists tell us escape from a black hole is impossible whatever your “tools”!

As we all know to stem the downturn our leaders, Ben at the forefront, deemed it prudent to bail out top bankers, the very same moguls that had been the cause of the crisis in the first place. The government stepped in quickly, almost as if they were ready for the rescue—which, in hindsight, they probably were—spending billions we didn’t have, and still don’t as we can all see,  propping up their chosen few. But it stopped the rot whether we, the taxpayers, agreed with it or not.

(We didn’t at first if you remember? The House voted against the bankers’ bailout. But that was the last time a democratic vote was taken. The Oligarchy put the wind up House Members so badly a forced re-vote a few days later comprehensively overturned their earlier stance. Best of three was never even contemplated!)

Banking “survival of the fittest” then became killing off some, presumably the weakest, and handing over billions to a select leftover few, the strong, the Oligarchy-judged correct. Hardly Darwinian evolution in action, but it had to do. Nevertheless, the Dow Jones stopped falling after a 60% drop. It has since gradually begun its ascent, signaling things are looking up? The world saved? Yet millions of families have lost their homes, millions more have no jobs. But bankers have their bonuses back and we have to be happy for them. Yet the US is mired deeper than ever in both national debt and Middle East wars. So what? The Dow is on the rise again. That’s the good news. All’s well that ends well, right?

A second round of mortgage shock is waiting for us. We are not halfway through yet!

It has been estimated that the sub-prime mortgage crisis—the low end of the property market, the one we have just got through by the skin of our teeth and, up to now, has been the cause of the turmoil—cost the US taxpayers around $2 trillion? But the higher quality asset bubble, the next ready to rumble, is fuelled by the more exotic “Alt A’s” (classified as a mortgage riskier than prime but less so than sub-prime) and “Option Arms” (periodically adjustable mortgages) bigger, better and brighter. It has yet to burst.

And it’s on its way just as night follows day.

Many of these more expensive properties were being sold at the same time as the sub-prime mortgages by banks and other investment institutions using—how can we put it kindly—just as sleazy methods, but to wealthier yet equally gullible clients, often at “teaser rates,” some as low as 1%. Designed to reset monthly after two, three, or four years, it is not unlikely, for example, a monthly $1,500 mortgage will max out at $2,700+. And the resetting years are now kicking in such that the unsuspecting are beginning to find it impossible to pay their inflating monthly mortgage payments. So naturally they seek to sell their property(s) only to find that is impossible because prices are falling; few buyers have cash in hand, fewer still are looking for uncertainties. Finding themselves unable to get out of the sweet deal they thought they had, many have, and more will be having, no choice but to walk away. Foreclosures and bankruptcies are on the rise in this newly developing defaulting wave, estimated to be just as big, if not bigger, than the sub-prime fiasco, and projected to last even longer! A predictable time bomb and the banks know it.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” (Aldous Huxley.)  

Just as before, bankers and brokers set their terms to get their fees upfront. The more they wrote, the more they made. Consequently they were willing to lend money to virtually anyone, irrespective of the purchaser’s future prospects. All this debt was going to get bundled up into securities and sold off anyway, just like the sub-primes. “I‘ve got my profits. So what!”

The Dow is above the 10,000 level again, just, so at least it is halfway back. But over the next four years it has been estimated another 8 million families are expected to lose their homes. Someone will have to pay that piper: another $2 trillion added to the national debt, an additional bailout for the taxpayer? Then there is the commercial property market, also in jeopardy. Just around the corner: credit cards, auto loans, piling up everywhere. We are but halfway through the Mortgage Bubble, a third of the way through the Asset Bubble, and at the latest count, 1 out of 10 of all mortgage-holders today is behind on their payments. So are we skating on very thin ice?

As different from priests, business men are practical and never hedge their bets with god-theories. But their hope was that this recession would soon cool and, with fingers crossed, a depression would be avoided. True, many would suffer, particularly the less well off, but those left would be able to pick up the pieces and get back to normal again, hopefully pretty soon. But it may not be happening that way.

What was left of our national wealth has literally been given away to those top bankers and their too-big-to-fail institutions. Or at least what we perceived as the impression of wealth, since as a bankrupt nation we were at that time the best part of only $10 trillion in debt. But here were the financial cowboys, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, issuing cash to massive clients as if run-amuck madmen. And while some thought this will cause an even greater mess in the future, the “flavor-of-the-month economic theory” at the time proclaimed it to be the answer to our prayers. And the nutcase who came up with it was a foreigner, an Englishman by the name of John Maynard Keynes, conveniently long since dead.

The Chosen Pathway Back

Economists are a bunch of priests/rabbis beholden to various competing economic-god theories they have come to believe in and preach through scholarly texts. These have become their true gospels and “lights of the way.” Knowing, for them, is not necessary because it is faith they believe in. This view is well documented by Hunter Lewis in his 2009 book Where Keynes Went Wrong.1 Page 11: “Prior to Keynes, economists played a role in public life, but at a remove from the action. They were like biblical prophets of old who would appear from time to time to speak truth to the political leaders, but unlike the old prophets spoke quietly through their articles and books. The economists’ job was to focus on what was best overall, not just for special interests, but for the whole nation, even for humanity as a whole; and not just for the short term, but for as far as they could see ahead, even into future generations. These economists were, above all, custodians of the future.”

The trouble was, and very much still is, these so-called wise men held, and still hold, differing opinions on “the one true way,” not unlike the various warring factions of yesterday’s and today’s Christian, Muslim, and Jewish denominations, sects, and movements. But while their true bible was Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations,2 published in 1776 and written by a supreme intellectual with a passion for liberty, reason, and free speech, their opinions differed as to how to apply Smith’s natural economic law to today’s Flat Earth reality. Karl Marx had gone one way. Milton Freedman, with a follow-up from Alan Greenspan, and now Bernanke later rowing the same boat, had gone another. Soviet Marxism, not that Karl himself would have sponsored such a moribund oddity, eventually failed, as is China’s experiment with communism, even while it morphs interestingly into something quite different. And, of course, so did the Friedman/Greenspan/Bernanke monetary fantasies, falling over the edge in 2008.

All were expected, since each missed the point.

Smith’s key argument was that since self-interest is the essence of business, it is the key to establishing fair prices, which provide fair returns. So why on the one hand exclude free enterprise entirely (communism), and on the other exclude all else (capitalism)? For we forget what Adam Smith also made very clear: It is labor, rather than the nation's quantity of gold or silver, that is the free-market driver of national wealth. Once you ignore a nation’s labor force in the equations of a nation’s economic health, as all these capitalist “priests” have done—notwithstanding John Kenneth Galbraith who told us in 1958 how stupid that would be in The Affluent Society3—it is no surprise that our free-enterprise economic wonder is a congenital failure, going to hell in a hand-basket at the beginning of this decade.

We have locked out the biggest asset our nation has by birthright: the American worker!
 
Keynes was an intellectual, an economist with a realism that any economic model must work for the full benefit of the society, not just the masses or, alternatively, the ultra-wealthy speculator class. What differentiated him from the herd was his penchant for liberal causes and the recognition of the value of the enterprise of the common man, as opposed to the mid-20th century conservative tendencies of exploitation of labor by both communist and capitalist elites. In the context of mid-wartime 1940s Keynes, seeing the benefits and the contradictions of conflicting economic systems, sought the “middle way.” At Bretton Woods, where the first monetary management rules for commercial and financial relations were being developed in order to, hopefully, serve the world’s free nation-states, he had to persuade American economists that Roosevelt’s judgments of economic planning, mixing government assistance programs with the continuation of capitalism—very new and very disturbing to the powerful but very scared US capitalist establishment at the time—was not only the fairest method of dealing with post-war development, but the only way.

His arguments were particularly difficult to take for businessmen because the rise of communism scared the pants off American industrialists, itching to get back into the saddle after the debacle of the big bust of 1929. They feared any potential left-wing threat might work far better than it eventually did in Russia, China, and everywhere else it was tried. Remember too no one had attempted this middle way. Ramsey MacDonald’s government push towards a British socialist economic agenda in the early 1930s had ended in failure. So the fact that Keynes not only pulled it off but was lauded by everyone as an economic genius was an astonishing endorsement of his ideas. Importantly, it laid the groundwork for a prosperous post-war American economy, the formulation of the Marshall Plan for re-developing the destroyed economies of Europe, including much later the development of the European Union, the re-establishment of capitalism as the backbone of the American economy, yet staying with Social Security and later leading to Medicare, and at the same time giving the go-ahead in Britain, immediately after the war in 1945, to Atlee’s Labor government’s attempts at socialism. In other words his contribution to the politics and economic development of the capitalist world over the next sixty years was immense.

Consequently it is not surprising when the worldwide takeover recreating the capitalist house of cards of the 1920s, manipulated into being by the laissez faire economic policies of the Papa Bush/Clinton/Baby Bush troika, began to collapse in 2008 that a superstar was called upon to save us. Keynesian theories were in the wings, brushed off quickly, just as they had been sixty years previously, that too being a similar knife-edge time. But his views were interpreted with a unique twist. His thesis was promulgated this time to save the rich first! And why was that? Because Keynes’s argument had always been, as Hunter Lewis presents it, all about using government intervention to kick-start an ailing economy. “If spending stops, the economy does not just collapse. It keeps on collapsing, because a market-economy is not self-correcting. Everything gets worse until the Government steps in and starts spending on our behalf. Once this happens, the free fall stops, we all shake off our panic and start borrowing and spending again.” And since the only “economy” we have left is banking—the rest, other than manufacturing munitions, we have given up to others—we had no choice but to directly bail out the rich. The only trouble was this time even the government had no money.

All it owned was debt.

So big banks were bailed out—note the emphasis on the rich-first concept—using the people’s tax dollars or, at least, what can better be described as our future tax dollars. Free market forces were abandoned, infuriating Libertarians (Ron Paul) but welcomed by Socialists (Dennis Kucinich). Keynes was perceived to have the answers once again. But with the debt burden the nation was carrying this time, would Keynes himself have gone for it as eagerly, or as desperately, as Bernanke and Paulson did this time?

At first glance it appears putting all our eggs in the rich man’s basket is having a positive effect. Certainly the stock market—his game—is stimulated. So hope springs eternal among the ‘fortunates’. Business is getting back on its feet. Americans are spending once again. Whether they have money doesn’t matter. There is credit and that is all that counts. Unemployment has leveled out at around 10%, at least as government calculates it; to the rest of us the real figure is closer to18-20%. Sub-prime foreclosures are less frequent, house prices are stabilizing, and homes are being built once again. If nothing else, a semblance of order is back in financial markets. Nevertheless, anywhere between $2-4 trillion has been added to the national debt, moving every American’s outstanding debt from $35,000 to over $40,000. And we are still at war. Not entirely unlike the last time (1945) we have two ongoing wars, Iraq and Afghanistan—the first winding down, the second winding up. A third is rumbling in Pakistan. Who’s to know how many we will take on with this third Bush administration—Obama’s first—in power? For a fourth with Iran could break out any time; Cheney’s still pushing from the wings? (Perhaps that potential we can palm off conveniently on Israel to run as a proxy war!) So whether the economy is on the rebound due to Keynesian economic manipulation or the continuation of war for the sake of war is still anyone’s guess. 

What we are certainly not doing is saving for a rainy day.

Strangely, however, even in tough times Keynes recommended we don’t save to any great extent. Why? Because as a nation it is not in our best interest. Less value comes from hoarding cash, even if others are using it, since markets tend to establish interest on cash-in-the-bank rarely higher than cash-in-the-pocket. And since economic activity depends on spending, how else can businesses profit? Hoarding our well-earned wealth does no one any good, least of all ourselves. This in a nutshell is what Keynes argued as the “Paradox of Thrift.”

So the question becomes, now that our super-rich have been assuaged, can we the people spend enough to keep the economy chugging along and work our way out of the debt-crisis at the same time?

That in a nutshell is my “Paradox of Underpaid Toil.”

Carrying this massive national debt-anchor and assuming we can sail on calmly expecting change “we can believe in” as we do now, is not only wishful thinking, it is asinine. Like the Emperor with no clothes in the Hans Christian Andersen story, America appears to be hoping it can ignore its obligations to those carrying our debt, largely the Chinese. Not unlike the definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” as Ben Franklin warned us, is this our ending? It appears it could be. For up there on the Hill, who is calling for the sanity of a debt-free future? Well, both Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are for sure. Representing opposing realities, they are bellowing for realism in the nation’s business. They offer solutions, like them or not, to the obvious potential collapse of all we hold dear. Few up there, or elsewhere, are taking heed because it involves the pain of forfeiting comforts. Americans are not used to that and don’t like the idea. But isn’t Uncle Sam Lear’s sad and ironic Fool?

If we are not careful, doesn’t his present inability to grasp reality toll the death of reason?

So let us not forget what our democracy has taught us. Only together can we the people forge a better way that will guarantee continuance of tomorrow’s show. And only then if together we put all our heart and soul into it. Remember, the dollar may be the world’s currency now, but it will remain so only if it deserves to be.

Challenging ourselves then, let’s ask a few questions: “Isn’t the profitable utilization of a nation’s labor force the crux of a nation’s health and wealth?” Adam Smith thought it was and he was an intelligent fellow. “Isn’t this the ingredient so often excluded when a nation concentrates only on profits?” Like throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Or again, “Isn’t the position of labor in America today one of heartless abandonment?” It seems to be for the 25 million or so Americans who cannot find any job in the best-run democracy on earth, or for at least another 25 million or so overqualified but underpaid workers just hanging in there, all of whom, incidentally, have few healthcare benefits at the best of times yet are unlikely to benefit much from pending government change-we-can-believe-in healthcare overhauls. “Are we not, America, being self-destructive in our greed?” Quoting Tom Paine once again “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

No kidding!

The Beginning of the End Game

Take, for example, a comment thrown out on the PBS News Hour (12/10/09): “In 1980 54% of the working population of Philadelphia was employed in manufacturing or the navy shipyards. Today, 30 years on, that number is 4%.” Or the changes witnessed in our Southern states where virtually all garment and textile manufacturing jobs, chiefly female, over the last twenty years have been humiliatingly exchanged for cheaper labor south of the border or across the Pacific. How has our consumer economy absorbed all that female talent? Or where today are our household commodities made? Refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers, tables, chairs, beds, linens, carpets, gardening tools, you name it; we made everything for ourselves not too long ago. Virtually none of these products are made in America today. Instead we build aircraft carriers, bombs, rockets, machine guns, tanks, stealth bombers, fighter jets, and killer drones. But Home Depot and Wal-Mart do not sell munitions. Because of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), plus heaven knows how many other world, national, and local trade agreements, big business ships it all in from which ever marketplace, country, factory, is the cheapest at the moment of purchase. With internet access for immediate ordering, billing, follow-up, oversight, quality control, checking of shipping dates and delivery times, etc., why not? The world is unquestionably as flat as Thomas Friedman in his The World is Flat4 said it was.

Here’s an idea: Assume then that the nation comes back to remembering its greatest asset is labor. Coupling it with the ingenuity bred by our freedom of entrepreneurship, there is nothing we cannot accomplish if these natural endowments are given the opportunities to thrive, assuming, of course, our society possesses the political will to do so. But when tariffs on imported goods are but a past remembrance because government caved in to business pressure long ago, and when banks and media advertising make easy credit the public excuse to spend irrespective of the potential national economic disaster it encourages, who cares for America’s out-of-work labor force and the society’s mounting national debt? Labor remains out there, forgotten, twiddling its thumbs—the sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters of all those who built modern America in the first place—ignored, desolate, demoralized, and destroyed, while debt grows like a time bomb. For the sake of a few additional cents profit on our purchasing dollar that finds itself comfortably in the pockets of the richest 10% of our population, we have become an impoverished nation denying a decent daily wage to millions, while racking up at the very same time an insupportable national debt that is likely to destroy us.

Why does this not seem totally absurd? Because until recently Murdoch’s minions have been telling us we had never had it so good. And we bought into it! Just as we bought into accepting massive inner-city poverty, out-of-control crime rates, illegal drugs, shocking numbers of unemployable young men and women, huge prison populations, miserable under-funded school systems, truancy, illiteracy, prostitution, gangs, rape—even of children!—the homeless, dysfunctional people in every inner city and large and small town in America.

We ignore this national disgrace brought on, not by the people themselves that are stuck in poverty, but through the inability of business leaders to think of anything other than the bottom line. They argue that’s their job. But when big-money cartels run the show they do not care, and with federal, state, city, town governments in cahoots—Schwarzenegger,  for example, refuses under any conditions to increase any taxes any time—will things ever change? We argue that this is unfortunate, natural, the way things have evolved. The way things are. But this cannot go on forever. There has to be another way—but not if we don’t pay our debts!

Remember that $43,010 each of us owe our creditors, all of us Emperors with no clothes? 

Or the Start of a Future

We have the answer staring us in the face. Forget being nice to the world. To hell with being run by an Oligarchy interested in riches for its own sick entertainment. Here’s an idea: why don’t we get America fully employed again? The key is to bring manufacturing back home.

There is this one sure way out of this crisis. Let the world know what we are doing this for and why. It may not like it. But others will have to understand that in a peculiar way it will be to their advantage in the long run. They too will have to stand on their own two feet. They will not have us to guarantee we will be shoveling our needs and wants their way.

Begin by abrogating slowly, carefully but with absolute determination, all world trading agreements we are presently signed up to. With equal slowness, care, and deliberation, add tariffs on all incoming manufactured goods. This will pressure American business to find a reliance on quality manufacturing here at home. For that to be realized, local manufacturing must be given full rein to rebuild. And the key to encouraging change is cooperation among all parties, government, business, and unions. In addition, organize a massive internal reconstruction of our national infrastructure: transit systems, bridges, dams, solid waste disposal systems, roads, drinking water, wastewater, hazardous waste, navigable waterways, all graded D by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2007. Crowded schools, traffic-choked roads are our way of life. It’s time to take care of ourselves instead of meddling in the affairs of the Middle East. Besides, the skills lost by American workers will now be regained, basically paying for this national reconstruction, as Franklin Roosevelt proved in the 1930s.

All must recognize, going in, this is likely to be unnecessary ever again if done right the first time. Every one of us must be the beneficiary. No one must be left out. Moving from reliance on others, whose only value was cheap prices and the creation of profits for the fortunate few, will not be easy. But the long-term gains will be immense. We will begin again to take pride in a guaranteed national economic well-being that remedies many of our current national maladies, at the same time as slowly absolving ourselves of a debt well beyond our present means ever to pay off.

To make sure we get it right this time, immediately stop all wars. Channel the resultant savings from “defense” spending into the recovery of the domestic economy by the financial encouragement of the infrastructure of “peaceful” America’s space, energy, aeronautics, metals, transportation, housing, textiles, electronic industries, etc. By giving free rein, within strong regulatory rulings, to home-production incentives, we could soon again become proud of the “Made in the USA” label. Promote domestic research and development programs, particularly in clean energy projects, that are funded now at disastrously low levels. Exempt defense industries from this money flow. The logic will follow: if you know how to stimulate one section of the private sector, you can equally well stimulate another. Better still, we will stop shipping whatever wealth we thought we had to others everywhere else.

The buck stops here, at America’s shoreline.

What this induces is the reindustrialization of America. It means more than the equitable distribution of profits. It means recreating national wealth. It is preposterous to continue our present absurd policy of industrializing Asian countries at the expense of our own. When transnational industrialists hold no allegiance to any nation—why should they?—naturally they seek the cheapest source. When those are offered by countries whose political policies are geared exclusively to industrial encouragement, our competitiveness is diminished since our national policies have been exactly the opposite—munitions manufacturing, our only specialty. And when the quality of their goods is exceptional, and unbeatable from the standpoint of cost, we can do one of two things: give up and rely on their resourcefulness—hardly the American way—or turn around and recapture the industrial edge. Only we can recapture our legacy.

The Way Things Are

This is not going to be easy. The entrenchment of Big Money over our democratic institutions runs deep. Whether it is at a local, state, or federal level, the structure of government in the Land of the Free is hardly democratic. The worst example is the US Congress itself. Run by Big Money it has become, what Robert G. Kaiser in So Damn Much Money5 calls, the “Corroded Culture.” Money flows through the halls of power in the world’s capital like the River Nile, a continuous flow from the gods. Power begats power, corruption begats corruption.

One party rule, the rule of money, becomes the pretense of democracy.

When John Kenneth Galbraith worried about the national consequences of the creation—by the power of persuasion—of an affluent America 50 years ago,3 he never imagined this force would morph into the manipulation of a national addiction for consumption fueled by credit (debt) manipulated by the New Olympian money-lenders of Corporatism. Nor could he have foreseen this consumption frenzy—now rated at 70% of GNP—would metastasize into world domination by an Oligarchy with tentacles that control the will of the people. All it takes is the realization that “in electoral politics the most persuasive incentive is fear—the fear of defeat,” quoting Kaiser6. Since the technologies necessary to stay elected exist but are expensive, control is easy. Big Money wins every time with the result that not only does the quality of statesmanship decline but the people’s business doesn’t get done. “The country” over the first years of this new century has “faced staggering challenges: how to pay for the retirement of the baby boom generation, how to provide healthcare to American citizens,” how to build a safe home environment and surrounding infrastructure, “how to cope with the largest influx of immigrants in American history, how to protect America from terrorists, how to preserve American prosperity in a complex global economy, how to save the earth. For years these challenges all shared one peculiarity: the politicians in Washington avoided or ignored every one of them.”6 (Italics added.) 

Even now when an initially popular President has come to power, how much oversight do we the people have over his decision to use 1) more of the national debt—potentially doubling it—to shore up banking institutions “too big to fail,” 2) have a say in the debate over healthcare reform—a Full Medicare (single payer) option having been excluded at the very beginning, while the once promised “open reconciling Senate/House debate” was held behind locked doors, and 3) continue the war in Afghanistan, already eight years old and long since lost? Hardly any! But then when we think we have a voice speaking for us, Congress inevitably listens not to us, ignoring any public outcry for restraint. It does as it is told and votes for Big Money. Then it curls up in a corner while the Federal Reserve Bank (a private bank owned by guess who?) and the Treasury (a public institute in the hands of unelected officials) plow the dollars we don’t own—China does—towards the mouths of the “haves” while we, the “have-nots,” suffer the consequences of a depression about to rival the immensity of the 1930s.

Once again solutions to this national disgrace are obvious. How about term limits—two six-year terms maximum for Senators, six two-year terms for Congressmen? Campaign finance reform that includes strictly held but equitable rules on financing all elections for all contestants, eradicating the business of lobbying activities, the abolition of earmarking and, wonder of wonders, fair democratic rules holding all Senators and Congressmen accountable to the public good, not private interest. The key: breaking elected officials of their addiction to money so election to office is less of a road to riches and more of an avenue to respect and moral rectitude. The consequence: honest democratic national governance, as our forefathers thought they were fighting for 235 years ago, instead of this pretense that is becoming the laughing stock of the world.

It could be done. But it is probably too late. World control is just around the corner.

The New World Order

This is not a new idea. Two thousand years ago one city alone, Rome, conquered most of the then “known” world, Europe, including Britain, North Africa, Egypt and the Levant. Roman control held sway for the best part of a thousand years. And while it may seem in many ways to have been barbaric times to us, the city of Eboracum for example, now the modern city of York in northern England and founded by the Romans in AD 71, boasted for at least four hundred years afterwards structured governance, substantial stone buildings, broad streets, running water, bath houses, an underground sewerage system, and, as far as we know, peace and prosperity for the majority. An example, perhaps, of an Old World Order with promise! But once the Romans left in AD 404, “civilization” changed markedly for the worse. York, like so many other cities and communities of the Roman Empire, suffered for the next thousand years or so from invasion by far rougher elements: local Europeans ranging from Scots, Danes, Saxons, Normans, even Germans were bombing the city only 70 years ago! All of whom then were after domination, pillage, and rape. Subjection was on the minds of their World Order. Order as such was less important, civility largely unnatural. That is until things “settled down.” And then when they did, a New World Order arose: a dominant social structure where, of course, power always remained with the few, subjugation always the lives of the many.

The Holy Roman Catholic Church took over, side by side with monarchy. Together this dominating duo built Beauty: cathedrals and churches, Power: castles and mansions, and Control: the feudal system. But duos don’t last long. Henry V wanted the Vatican out of the picture, threw off its bondage, and through his remarkable daughter, Elizabeth I, began the conquest of the seas. Under later reigns this grew into a gigantic undertaking, the first truly world power, the British Empire. Flung across all continents, the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australasia, the Middle East, mostly everywhere except Central Europe and Russia, Britain ruled the waves, the first experiment with world domination, the second World Order with promise, particularly when exchanging monarchy with democracy in America did not seem like too bad an idea. But like all man’s promises, it didn’t last. Yet it remained the dominant world feature of the 19th century, a form of “order” we now find abhorrent—built on slavery, land expropriation, class warfare, exploitation of natural resources, poverty at home, wealth creation for the few—but a World Order nevertheless, the dream of all conquerors since Alexander the Great in the third century B.C. And now once again, World Order is back, this time as the dream of the world’s very, very rich. Wars may be less important this time—that’s nice—but subjugation of the masses is still necessary. And the one thing an Oligarchy cannot tolerate is the masses having a say. Never has it room for the “common good.” Democracy, in their frame of reference, stands no chance unless controlled. And since the root of all evil is the love of money, as Timothy told us in the King James Version of the Bible, those that have the cash own the cow.

Modern World Order possibilities appeared first in 1919, after the destruction of the European monarchies (the exception being the British monarchy, the only one to gain from the experience) with the establishment of The League of Nations, an outcome of the Treaty of Versailles. Designed as a world power, the League had none in that although it was designed to uphold the Rights of Man, such as the rights of non-whites, women, soldiers, disarmament, and the prevention of war, it had no teeth. Hitler and Mussolini saw to that

New World Order concepts were contemplated once again after the Second World War ended. These were centered this time on world domination via economic control, most notably after the Bretton Woods Convention (1944) that organized economic methods of World Order centered on the creation of, for example, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. What followed shortly afterwards was the formation of the United Nations, for the explicit purpose of maintaining world peace and security, developing friendly relationships and international cooperation—wishful thinking once again?

Housed in New York, this time with “teeth,” the United Nations was obviously under the influence of the new atomic superpower, the United States of America. Then the only stumbling block was the Soviet Union, for it had differing plans for world domination. Fortunately for the takeover of this united World Order into the hands of private power, the USSR collapsed in the late 1980s, giving full rein for George H. W. Bush and his cronies to begin their private power consolidation through the developing possibilities of globalization.

All the tools were now in place for the experiment of world domination by the hidden few to begin in earnest. Except three growing crises—global warming, global financial failure, and global terrorism—began to upset the applecart. However, since it was perceived that these crises required global solutions, what could be better for the Power Cabal but to clothe these issues with deeds from their drummer boys: the new Nobel Peace Prize recipient and dedicated warmonger, President Obama; 2009 Time Man of the Year, Ben Bernanke, whose wizardry helped cause the 2008 financial crisis and whose magic is working us out of it; and Forbes’ Company of the Year, Monsanto, a free-wheeling monster carrying a manmade genetic time-bomb capable of doing more to potentially destroy Planet Earth than any other business monopoly in the world.

Some see this privatization of the New World Order in the light of “conspiracy theory.” Quoting from David Martin’s poem Idling Intellect:

Whenever “conspiracy theory” I hear
I know that a brain has gone out of gear.
The common phenomenon again I behold
Of a person determined to believe what he’s told
By the press and political powers-that-be
Who have long had no credibility.
It’s a sad thing to witness the widespread condition
Of critical faculties out of commission.

Our nature is to want to believe in hope for a decent future. But “how easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again,” as Mark Twain pointed out not that long ago.

This lie that we the people are in control of our destiny is obvious to all of us if we get around to thinking about it. We the people don’t own the airwaves, the media, think tanks, NGOs, lobbies, and certainly not those we vote into power, with the exception of a very small minority. Political power today is centered in the corporate world. Just as well-known members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group, are the key decision makers influencing that world. It is these privileged few who control the financial, industrial, banking, and other financial interests, such as the IMF and the World Bank. They rule the world through ownership of Capitol Hill, the British Parliament, the EU in Brussels, democratic sideshows that gives these interests the leverage to appear to be acting as bystanders whereas, in reality, they are the puppet masters. And we, the people, are their puppets.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers, British parliamentarians, European politicians, government bureaucrats, corporate officials, Ivy League deans, and military generals are all well known to us. There is no conspiracy here. They are out in the open, speaking their minds, yet saying virtually nothing. Nevertheless, they share a common purpose. Through their obsession with buying influence, they have come to control the destiny of all of us around them. And while there is no obvious collective push and shove, they are themselves influenced by a common interest: the power of the purse. What money says to do, they will be guaranteed to follow. If they are told to bail out big banks, continue war in the Middle East, do nothing to stop Israel destroying the Palestinian people, ruin our rainforests, allow illegal immigration, maintain a drug culture (legal or illegal), it really doesn’t matter to them. That’s business. They are but spokes in the wheel of fortune that grinds liberty of person and freedom of thought into a nothingness of continuous TV claptrap. In that sense, they think they own us. Not all, of course, but enough of us.

Boy, did George Orwell get that right!

The Quality of Renewal is Not Strained

It is hard to visualize a turning point, a way out of this global decline. But we don’t have a choice. We need to come up with a radical new view quickly. Now that we see our very existence growing more tentative every day, it’s time to make the paradigm shift to a far healthier future. The question is: how?

Let me be presumptuous and offer a compelling possibility. This is made easier since it is likely to be backed by the mandate of the majority willing to present, given the option, alternative behaviors, and flex its moral strength to make it obviously the way to go. I’m thinking now of a worldwide revolution engendered by the moral majority of the world’s people—women!

Think of what might happen if instead of the discussion being dominated by the male view from the bridge, as it always has, we listen to the unbridled views that could be offered given the chance to flow freely, of smart women from all over the world’s leading bureaucracies, institutions, universities, businesses, and families, whose voices have rarely been heard and never in concert, and whose views have never been acknowledged let alone solicited.

Just think, over half the world’s population has not yet had the chance to even be recognized as intelligent “others” much less listened to. And when male domination is our history, and it is in every sense his story, there is no way in our state of nuclear thunder and mind-boggling stupidity that we can survive the onslaught of continuing male hypocrisy when it surrounds the three universal conundrums: nuclear war, economic soundness, and environmental health. To be as obviously out of kilter as we are, nationally and internationally, is absurd particularly when the alternative voice—intuitively compassionate, less belligerent, naturally more consensual, tuned into the rhythm of human creativity, and free to formulate a future not driven by male passion—is out there ready to roll. Wow, wouldn’t that be interesting?

“Man, know thyself” was the foundation of Greek thought 2,500 years ago. Since then we men have been found wanting. The making of the modern world is less about building bombs and destroying the life forms on which we all depend, and far more about men and women living together for as long as it takes, in harmony with all forms of life on this beautiful planet, together using the brilliant resources of both halves of both of our brains.

Whether or not we have the political will, we now have an intelligent way to free ourselves from the yoke of Dominant Man and the threat of blowing it all big-time.

References

1.    Hunter Lewis, Where Keynes Went Wrong 2009 (ISBN 9781604190175)
2.    Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations 1776.
3.    John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society 1958 (ISBN 9780395925003)
4.    Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat 2005-7(ISBN 9780374292881)
5.    Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money 2008 (ISBN 9780307266545)

Note: This article is taken from Changing Our World: Solution for a Future, by Jim Knapton, to be published by Ottoline Publishing in December 2010.

 

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