Can't have a war without money
In Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World, Boris Johnson writes that NM Rothchild's "role in financing governments was so crucial that it was said that a war could not be begun without the consent of the Rothschilds." It is an obvious fact of our time that the world runs on money. No war can be declared, no university inaugurated, no church established, no hospital or bridge or building or monument built without money. Nothing can be imported or exported, bought or sold without money. Charities, volunteer organizations, political parties, families and individuals require money. The health of your offspring and the attractiveness of your spouse will be affected by money. It has never been more true than it is today: if you want to understand the world, "follow the money."
Just because it's a conspiracy theory . . .
The pursuit of this question led me to Henry Makow who, as it happens, was a friend of mine in graduate school. Henry is a very smart guy. In fact, he was a syndicated columnist and best-selling author at the age of eleven. He has become, according to Tabetha Southey in the Globe and Mail, Canada's leading conspiracy theorist. In Illuminati: The Cult that Hijacked the World, Henry claimsThe New World Order is a hydra-headed monster. The bankers work through many fronts such as Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Feminism, Zionism, Neo conservatism and Freemasonry. Unknown to most members, these "progressive" movements are all secretly devoted to "world revolution" which is a euphemism for banker hegemony and Satanism.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
Old acquaintances notwithstanding, Henry's rhetoric is obviously over the top and his claim that unnamed extant bankers are responsible for all the ism's Henry doesn't like is less than convincing. Like all conspiracy theories, Illuminati is an eclectic cache of facts, observations and quotations. The data isn't the question. The question is how it is all woven together. (As the linguist de Saussure observed, meaning [and therefore truth] does not reside in words or letters but in the spaces between words and letters--that is, how we connect one to another to create meaning.)Conspiracy theory versus chaos theory
The world may obviously run on money, but "do money men run the world?" is a separate and different question. We've been here before (see The Chaos Theory of International Trade): the choice is between conspiracy theory and chaos theory. Things happen. Things that happen might even be predictable within a significant range of probabilities. However, that Person X or Mr. Daddy-Big-Bucks banker made everything happen is a leap to another level of cause-and-effect determinism requiring another level of evidence.How banks make money? (disambiguate "make")
However, the unrefuted fact is that the monetary system, which underpins the financial system and the economy, begins and ends with private banks. Private banks (according to the Parliamentary web site I quoted extensively in Central Banks and the Bitcoin Experiment) create 80% of the money in Canada (and I surmise that this percentage is true for all money creation worldwide). Private banks are legally empowered to create money out of nothing with a few clicks of a computer mouse. So what?So what!?
Do you or I have any reason to be concerned or care about how money is created and who is creating it? This DW documentary offers a clear and succinct explanation of How the Rich Get Richer though The Deluge of Money. The general theme of the documentary is that the money-creation system which allows banks to exponentially create money is guaranteed to exacerbate wealth inequality. As the economy is flooded with money, if you have a little bit of money, your money will lose value over time. However, if you already have billions, you will be able to access billions more that the banks are creating at low-interest rates. Risking little of your own billions, you will be able to buy real estate, businesses, factories and even billion-dollar companies. The documentary offers specific examples but the common feature is that the money men aren't producing anything, they are simply making more money with these transactions in borrowed, bank-created money while degrading the condition of workers and the savings of the middle class.To create money the government must sell a bond to a bank
The documentary follows a research project which demonstrates that most people, even some bankers, simply don't know where money comes from and how it is created. Henry Makow quotes the inventor Thomas Edison who said "It is absurd to say our country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the people."The paradox of money: a private bank created the money, so why am I responsible?
Most people (myself included until recently) believe in the illusion that our national currency is created by the government. It is worth stopping to take note that every time a bank creates money, those dollars or euros or pesos create a debt owed by the national government to whomever holds the currency and a promise to pay which is ultimately the responsibility of you and me, the citizens of that country. There is a fledgling group in Switzerland, as revealed in How the Rich Get Richer, campaigning to prevent banks from being able to create money and advocating a system in which only the government can produce a national currency.Who's in charge here?
Back to the question: do the money men run the world? For Henry Makow and advocates of the Zeitgeist movement the answer is beyond obvious that an unnamed they/them fronted by the world's central banks are running the world, and what we typically call "world affairs" (politics, business and religion) are but smoke and mirrors. Boris Johnson notes that successive kings of England had to borrow money from Dick Whittington, and when the British Government wanted to buy the Suez Canal they had to borrow the cash from Lionel Rothschild. However, Johnson writes that "Today a young Rothschild can still make the headlines with a knock-out yacht-based party on the coast of the former Yugoslavia. But no one needs his permission to go to war."Perhaps. But How the Rich Get Richer concludes with the observation that Brexit and the election of Donald Trump promise even less regulation of private banks and an even greater flood of unregulated, low-interest, private-bank-created money.
Afterword
Two thoughts remained in my mind as I was writing this post. I feared they were tangential to the question, but I have decided to include them as an afterword/afterthought.
It seems a predicable human tendency to always imagine that someone is in charge, a powerful someone is pulling the strings to make whatever happens in the world happen--the Wizard of Oz fallacy. As I wrote this post, I kept thinking about a remarkable documentary I saw on CBC television in 1983. Produced and directed by Allen King, it was promoted as an exposé on unemployment. In fact, as an example of his proto-reality-show filming, King invited a number of unemployed participants to sit on a bleacher in front of a bank of television cameras. The participants were given no instructions, and there was no script. What emerged was a series of assumptions from the participants about the objective of the film, and vitriolic outbursts of blame and counter blame for whatever emotions the participants were feeling. The show was entitled "Who's in Charge Here?" Participants launched a court case to block the presentation of the production, but the injunction was not granted.
The second thought that kept coming to me was "Why am I writing about money again!?" I started this blog, some years ago, thinking I know something about something (roughly university education). However, over time it has evolved (or devolved) into a study of all the things I don't know--the things that make me wonder about the depths of my own ignorance, that provoke me to ask "How could I not know this?" I'm not that modest, so I assume there must be a lot of people who don't know what I don't know. Here is a list of my blog posts on money, just in case you want to follow the slow meandering process of my self-education on the subject:
The second thought that kept coming to me was "Why am I writing about money again!?" I started this blog, some years ago, thinking I know something about something (roughly university education). However, over time it has evolved (or devolved) into a study of all the things I don't know--the things that make me wonder about the depths of my own ignorance, that provoke me to ask "How could I not know this?" I'm not that modest, so I assume there must be a lot of people who don't know what I don't know. Here is a list of my blog posts on money, just in case you want to follow the slow meandering process of my self-education on the subject:
