I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Butler, Smedley. War is a Racket. 1935

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (aka ‘The Fighting Quaker’ and ‘Old Gimlet Eye’) was, at the time of his death in 1940, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. In 1934, he told the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional Commission that he had been approached by a group of wealthy industrialists to lead a military coup to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was offered $3 million to lead half a million angry World War I veterans to physically remove FDR from the White House to save the American dollar from Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Allegedly, Robert Sterling Singer Clark and J.P. Morgan offered funding, the former providing a $50 million war chest. Remington would supply weapons and DuPont ammunition. Shockingly, many of Butler’s claims were confirmed by the McCormack-Dickstein Committee’s final report:

In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country…There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.

United States Congress, House of Representatives, House Committee on Un-American Activities 1935

This unusual episode is unknown to most Americans making me wonder how many others like this have happened that even fewer know about. Some even persuasively claim that the Fascists have indeed succeeded in their paradigmatic coup. Way back in 1975, Charlotte Twight stated in her book America’s Emerging Fascist Economy:

The fascist state initially assumes increased control over a few industries deemed ‘vital’ to the national interest. The list may vary, but it usually embraces agriculture, armaments (national defense), energy, and finance (as a means of engineering the full spectrum of its economic, social, and political policies). Both Germany and Italy acted early to centralize control over the key areas of agriculture and finance, abrogating capitalism to a degree at that time unusual for the budding fascist economies.

Twight, Charlotte. America’s Emerging Fascist Economy. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975

Democracy is by its very nature collectivist, placing the welfare of the ‘whole’ above that of the individual. Popular opinion holds representative democracy to be government that “tends to provide for the interests of the governed and protect them against the abuse of power,” and one “in which satisfaction is maximized and conflicts reconciled by pressures bringing countervailing pressures into operation” (The Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1967).  Despite its good intentions, representative democracy tends to achieve results antithetical to these intentions. In this chapter, my purpose is to explain how the paradigm of pure democracy tends to actually work against anomalies that may subvert the dominant paradigm and the interests of the individual.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.

Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Vol. IV, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Historical Criticism, edited by Josephine M. Guy. USA: Oxford University Press, 2007 (reprint edition), p. 244

The United States is a federal constitutional republic; however, our representatives are elected democratically, and politicians are known to break their campaign promises to pursue their own agendas. Individual interests are truly protected only by the constitutional law, all people being equal before the law, no matter how anomalous they are or what they have to say may be. Further, forces that lead to the centralization of symbols, manipulate democracies through the manipulation of money and language:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

(Attributed to Sir. Alexander Fraser Tytler)

Constitutional republics usually have mechanisms in place to prevent the majority tyrannizing over dissenting individuals and minority groups. However, the last few elections reveal that, in representative democracies, it is not always the majority that threatens to oppresses the minority (as DeToqueville warned); instead, representative democracy actually allows the tyranny of a minority. In the last presidential election, the majority of Americans did not vote. However, America got its representatives and the President. A narrow and well-organized minority of voters (even discounting the possibility that an influential number of those votes may be fraudulent) determined the outcomes, which the majority that didn’t vote had to accept. Either way, if not extremely alert, representative democracy can end up as either De Toqueville’s tyranny of the majority or as the Political Action Committee and special interests’ tyranny of the minority. Either way, without strong laws protecting the individual, such as the Bill of Rights, you end up with tyranny.

They were not Slaves to Tyranny,
Nor ruled by wild Democracy;
But Kings, that could not wrong, because
Their power were circumscrib’d by Laws.

Mandeville, Bernard. “The Grumbling Hive.” In The Fable of the Bees. London: Penguin Group , 1989, p. 63

These issues still remain unresolved. Condorcet, a brilliant eighteenth century French philosopher and mathematician, explained how the collective decision of a group of rational individuals could produce irrational results. In a small group of individuals where alternative choices are few, the majority rule works well. However, as the number or individuals voting and the number of choices voted upon increase, the performance of ‘majority rule’ as a barometer of what ‘the group’ wants decreases (Condorcet, Marquis de. Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions. 1785). Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow built upon the work of Condorcet to formulate his Impossibility Theorem that states that no voting method is fair and in life there is a choice; one must forego the concentration of political power at the expense of social rationality (Arrow, Kenneth. “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare .” Journal of Political Economy 58, no. 4 (August 1950): 328-346).

Democracy, at present, defeats its objects by the vastness of the constituencies involved. Suppose you are an American, interested in a Presidential election. If you are a Senator or a Congressman, you can have a considerable influence, but the odds are about 100,000 to 1 that you are neither. If you are a ward politician you can do something. But if you are an ordinary citizen you can only vote. And I do not think there has ever been a Presidential election where one man’s abstention would have altered the result. And so you feel as powerless as if you lived under a dictatorship. You are, of course, committing the classical fallacy of the heap, but most people’s minds work that way.

Russell, Bertrand. The Impact of Science on Society. London and New York: Routledge, 1952, p. 72-73

For centuries, until the recent proliferation of the Internet, the economy for media has favored an information distribution system where a few information engineers (academics, writers, journalists, etc.) feed processed information to a larger number of voting, ‘non-information’ laborers in other divisions of the economy (manufacturing, retail, etc.). Through licensing and the threat of censorship, the state has bullied information laborers into servitude. Consequently, information is manipulated and filtered causing the voting decisions of the uncritical electorate (the non-information labor numerator in a division of labor society) to advocate whichever pro-statist policy is the pet of the politicians currently in power. Another word for such doctored information is propaganda. The highly influential syndicated columnist Walter Lippman correctly identified the method by which democratic governments retain power—the manufacture of consent (Lippman, Walter. Public Opinion. University of Virginia American Studies Program, 2003). It requires collusion between the government and the media used to send information to the electorate.

One of the tendencies of democracy, which Plato and other antidemocrats warned against a long time ago, was the danger that rhetoric would displace or at least overshadow epistemology; that is, the temptation to allow the problem of persuasion to overshadow the problem of knowledge. Democratic societies tend to become more concerned with what people believe than with what is true, to become more concerned with credibility than with truth. All these problems become accentuated in a large-scale democracy like ours, which possesses the apparatus of modern industry.

Boorstin, Daniel J. Hidden History. New York: First Vintage Book, 1961, p. 129

Children in public schools are the greatest consumers of this engineered information (see Richman, Sheldon. Separating School and State. Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995, p. 39). Taught by teachers who are extraordinarily reluctant to bite the state hand that feeds them, students are relentlessly indoctrinated with the pro-state ideology. Of all the pro-state propaganda received by these students, the most deceitful is that which tells them that the American economy is a free market one, when in fact it is a fascist one. Fascism, as manifested by Benito Mussolini, was essentially interventionist and advocated policies of a strong nationalistic collectivism.

The Culmination of Fascism’s Economic Policies: Economic and Psychological Dependence… Economic dependence is fostered on many levels. Businessmen are forced to depend on government licenses as a prerequisite of pursuing their trade, making entrepreneurs subject to bureaucratic whim and governmental fiat for their economic livelihood… As a fascist government increasingly usurps the functions of private enterprise in providing the daily necessities of its citizens such as health care, food, housing, energy, and insurance, the individual becomes acutely aware that his survival is dependent upon governmental decisions that he as an individual cannot significantly influence.

Twight, Charlotte. America’s Emerging Fascist Economy. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975

Let me be clear here that I am not using the term fascism loosely but as an analytical term differentiating one form of political economy from the rest. Alfredo Rocco described Mussolini’s stato corporativo aptly when he said, “For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists of using individuals for its social ends” (Rocco, Alfredo. The Political Doctrine of Fascism. Translated by Dino Bigongiari. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Intercourse and Education, 1926). Democratic, majority rule, fosters this sort of mentality that puts group interests ahead of the individual.

Under democratic ideology runs the current of fascism which overflows at the surface.

Pareto, Vifredo. La transformazioni della democrazia. Edited by Mario Missiroli. Capelli Editore, 1964

Common usage (from my Random House College Dictionary) describes fascism as a form of government that:

1. Exerts control through a centralized state (In the US, federalism with centralized control housed in Washington, D.C.)
2. Customarily fosters racism (read slavery and eugenics movement in the US, apart from less extreme forms of racial bias)
3. Stresses aggressive nationalism (demonstrated amply by events in the US after 9/11, or go to a NASCAR rally to witness it yourself)
4. Is led by a dictator. (Do you need to look any further than Franklin Delano Roosevelt?)

America clearly has become a Fascist state. The only point of contention could be the last criterion. (Note that the Weimar Republic’s democratic government was merely a means to Hitler’s Nazi ends).

FDR with dictator Josef Stalin whom ordered the deaths of more innocent individuals than Adolf Hitler.

Despite Roosevelt’s oath under Article II, Section I, subsection 8 of the Constitution, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he deliberately tried to topple the Madisonian balance of powers outlined in the Constitution by using the executive branch to control the judicial branch. Within a week of taking power, he obstructed Americans from gaining access to their own property by closing banks nationwide (during a bank run caused by the immense credit expansion allowed by fractional reserve banking endorsed by the Federal Reserve), and called a special session of congress known as ‘The Hundred Days’ which granted him immense control over the economy through such legislation as the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the Emergency Banking Relief Act of 1933, which completely by itself suspended the right of American citizens to own property, allowing government to seize any gold held privately. According to the rhetoric of the day, you weren’t a good American if you selfishly “hoarded” what rightly belonged to you.

Fascism’s Philosophic Core: Capitalistic Collectivism… Since private property and the profit motive work effectively as incentives for high production, fascism uses these features of capitalism insofar as they do not conflict with the national interest as formulated by fascism’s political authorities.

Twight, Charlotte. America’s Emerging Fascist Economy. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975

When the Supreme Court deemed the National Recovery Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and a host of other of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies blatantly unconstitutional, F.D.R responded by packing the Supreme Court with justices who would not oppose his ascent to dictatorship. By 1944, all but two were justices appointed by Roosevelt himself. The mergers and acquisitions in the media that serve the disinformation campaigns produced by Black Chambers, the dominance of the Executive Branch (or the ‘Cult of the Presidency’ as one author calls it), and the corruption and collusion between corporations and governments, all grant incredible power over our lives to just a handful of people.

This was followed by the Japanese-American evacuation and relocation in World War II, which began as a ‘voluntary program.’ When it became clear that Japanese-American citizens did not really want to relocate to internment camps, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9102 and the War Relocation Authority was created. More than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were made to move from their homes under threat of physical violence from the state and to surrender their property and jobs, and some were imprisoned in the internment camps for up to three years! (Smith, Page. Democracy on Trial. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995)

A further, more specific reason why, in 1933, the New Deal was often compared with Fascism was that with the help of a massive propaganda campaign, Italy had several years earlier begun the transition from a liberal free-market system to a state-run or corporatist one. In the 1930s, corporatism was increasingly regarded internationally as a perfectly comprehensive response to the collapse of the liberal, free market economy—as was the policy of national self-sufficiency practiced by the Stalinist Soviet Union in withdrawing from the world economy. Of course, the Italian corporatist program—which historian Maurizio Vaudagna calls ‘Fascism’s most original innovation up to that point’—seemed infinitely preferable to the Communist ‘great leap forward’ because it didn’t involve the expropriation of private property. There was hardly a commentator who failed to see elements of Italian corporatism in Roosevelt’s managed economy under the National Recovery Administration, the institution formed in 1933 to maintain mandatory production and price ‘codes’ for American industry. The Italian press was quite taken with these similarities, and Mussolini laid the groundwork for such comparisons in a book review he wrote of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. …he identified a spiritual kinship:

The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Three New Deals. New York: Picador, 2006, p. 23

Before Roosevelt, however, Woodrow Wilson paved the way for fascism in America. Wilson brought a lot of the beginnings of a fascist state to America during his administration with:

1. Entangling America in World War I through propaganda, which directly led to the rise of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and the events of World War II.
2. Creating the League of Nations (a first attempt at one-world-government and forerunner of the United Nations)
3. Racism. Here is Woodrow Wilson from the racist film Birth of a Nation:

The concentration of state-power in executive branch and influence (in the form of propaganda) were not the only forms of centralization institutionalized by Woodrow Wilson. He also centralized financial and economic power with the creation of the Internal Revenue Service (a part of his reform package that passed Congress) and the implementation of the quasi-government system of credit Federal Reserve in 1913.

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Jefferson, Letter to Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury 1802

The centralization of credit under the auspices of government has had as much of a stifling effect, if not more, as the centralization of influence under the institutionalization of Wilson and Roosevelt’s propaganda systems here in the United States. Again, the Bismarckian influence of centralization and machpolitik was not just permeating education and medicine, it was infecting finance and economics, as well. As early as 1906, the New York Chamber of Commerce recommended the creation of a centralized banking system patterned after the Reichsbank. Just one year later, the Aldrich Bill was passed which allowed, but did not mandate, central banking activity by the Treasury Department of the United States. In September of 1909, both George Reynolds, president of the American Bankers Association, and William Howard Taft, President of the United States, publically stumped for the establishment of a centralized banking system modeled upon the German Reichsbank.

In 1910, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich (father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and grandfather of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, the Vice President of the United States under Gerald Ford) and the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A. Piatt Andrews invited Frank A. Vanderlip of the National City Bank, Paul Warburg of the wealthy German Warburg banking family, and J.P. Morgan partner Henry Davison to a secret meeting (read conspiracy) on Jekyll Island, Georgia, at a private resort owned by John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan to develop a strategy to implement the centralized banking system. “To guard against revelations of their identity and their purpose, they took elaborate precautions, traveling separately to Hoboken, where they boarded a private railroad car for Savannah, using only their first names in front of the train crew” (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “A Foregone Conclusion, Chapter 2: Banking Reform 1907 – 1913.” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.). In 1913, Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, effectively centralizing the system of banking and credit in the United States. Warburg would eventually run Kuhn, Loeb, and Co., which was the leading investment house for John D. Rockefeller.

We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

Wilson, Woodrow. The New Freedom, A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People. New York and Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913

Just as the Flexner report replicated the German (then Prussian) medical system here with disastrous results, so have the adoption of the Reichsbank centralized bank led us to the current state of our own pervasive financial iatrogenesis. Trope has led to the atrocities of iatrogenesis and the individual rights violations of psychiatry, and now, trope is running roughshod over our system of banking and credit causing the largest economic disaster in modern history. Currency inflation, the debasing of money supply, is trope, plain and simple. As Dr. Thomas Szasz writes:

Orderly human relations depend on the proper functioning of speech, speakers and listeners attaching the same meaning to words. The languages we speak and how well or poorly we speak them define who we are and largely determine who the persons near and dear to us are. Words have standardized meanings… Safeguarding the fixity of the meaning of words (and other symbols) is essential for the integrity and pursuit of the sciences and is indispensable for law, economics, commerce, and honest dealing among upright persons. Conversely, corrupting the meaning of words undermines their integrity, obstructs cultural and scientific progress, and hinders honest discourse among people.

Anchoring money in an objective standard (gold) serves the interests of free trade, the security of property, and personal liberty. Anchoring diagnosis in an objective standard (somatic pathology) serves the interests of medical science, sound medical practice, and personal liberty. Dislodging the meaning of these symbols from their precisely defined positions—legitimizing fiat money and fiat diagnosis as ‘real’ money and real diagnosis—serves the interests of the new political class, the pharmacrats.

As long as the gold standard was the accepted measure of money, no abstract monetary standard, or ‘numeraire’ was needed; similarly, as long as the gold standard of disease was the accepted measure of disease, no abstract disease standard, or ‘diagnostic numeraire,’ was needed.

Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2001, p. 53

To better comprehend the implications, we must understand the relationship between the United States Treasury and the Federal Reserve System. For the United States, the last century has been one of deficits and debt. In simple terms, a deficit occurs whenever you spend more than you have. So every time the federal government spends more than it has, it must issue a debt instrument, or I.O.U., usually a U.S. Treasury bond, to cover the expense. The Federal Reserve banking cartel buys these bonds (with paper currency literally created out of thin-air) on the promise that the government will pay the Federal Reserve back, both the principal and a fixed rate of interest. In exchange for this ongoing cash flow in the form of interest payment, the Federal Reserve literally creates money (mostly electronically and completely out of thin air) through manipulated ledger accounts and gives it to the Treasury. How does the Treasury generate revenue to pay off its debt to the Federal Reserve? The main way is through taxation. Simply put, our income tax goes directly to the central bankers. The 16th Amendment essentially made the American people, via the Internal Revenue Service, surety for the debts of the central bank.

Eventually this fiat money borrowed from the Federal Reserve trickles into the economy as the government spends it and, eventually, finds its way back into the private banks. Once there, the real inflation begins through the magic of fractional reserve banking. In a nutshell, since, by law, the banks must only maintain a fraction of the actual reserves on-hand (while their ledgers falsely say they have the whole amount), the currency is inflated and the risk of bank runs remains perennial. This inflationary process is documented in the Federal Reserves’ own manual Modern Money Mechanics, originally published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago:

The total amount of expansion that can take place is illustrated on page 11. Carried through to theoretical limits, the initial $10,000 of reserves distributed within the banking system gives rise to an expansion of $90,000 in bank credit (loans and investments) and supports a total of $100,000 in new deposits under a 10 percent reserve requirement.

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Deposits, Currency and Bank Reserves. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 1971, p. 8

Even more sobering is the extent of revenue the IRS must collect to pay the Treasury’s bondholders (that is, the Federal Reserve banking cartel and foreign governments). The National Debt towers at nearly $12 trillion (remember a trillion is a thousand billion, and a billion is a thousand million, and million is one-thousand-thousand). At an estimated population of 306,902,359, each US citizen’s share of the outstanding public debt is nearly $40K.[1] This is the money that is owed to the Federal Reserve (which just bought, in early 2009, another $300 billion by creating money out of thin air) and foreign governments (the top five being China, Japan, United Kingdom, Oil Exporters, and Caribbean Banking Centers according to http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt).

For this intellectual shell game, the cartelists needed the support of the nation’s intellectuals, the class of professional opinion-molders in society. The Morgans needed a smokescreen of ideology, setting forth the rationale and the apologetics for the New Order. Again, fortunately for them, the intellectuals were ready and eager for the new alliance. The enormous growth of intellectuals, academics, social scientists, technocrats, engineers, social workers, physicians, and occupational ‘guilds’ of all types in the late nineteenth century led most of these groups to organize for a far greater share of the pie than they could possibly achieve on the free market. These intellectuals needed the State to license, restrict, and cartelize their occupations, so as to raise the incomes for the fortunate people already in these fields. In return for their serving as apologists for the new statism, the State was prepared to offer not only cartelized occupations, but also ever-increasing and cushier jobs in the bureaucracy to plan and propagandize for the newly statized society. And the intellectuals were ready for it, having learned in graduate schools in Germany the glories of statism and organicist socialism, of a harmonious ‘middle way’ between dog-eat-dog laissez-faire on the one hand and proletarian Marxism on the other. Instead, big government, staffed by intellectuals and technocrats, steered by big business and aided by unions organizing a subservient labor force, would impose a cooperative commonwealth for the alleged benefit of all.

Rothbard, Murray N. “The Origins of the Federal Reserve.” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 2, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 3-51

The tricky question is what if the growth of the debt remains constant and greater than the rate of growth of average real income (which is what is taxed)? What then should we expect the government to do when tax revenues are no longer sufficient to pay the interest on the debt? Repudiation is not a viable option given the interest and influence of the politically and financially powerful. Nor could it result in hyperinflation, by the same logic. If you think with your cui bono hat on, the mostly likely scenario is one of massive deflation, as that would benefit the bankers most by increasing the value of their assets (including the loans, with interest due, that they’ve made). While all this is speculation, I’d lay the odds, at this writing, of repudiation at 5%, hyperinflation at 30%, and deflation at 65%.

The cui bono case for a deflationary scenario is compelling. The U.S. government is mostly borrowing its way to solvency (the ridiculousness of such a practice aside), not printing it via the Federal Reserve. The U.S. Treasury Department auctions are setting records for sales of federal bonds and T-bills (Treasury Bond Auctions Show Insatiable Debt Demand 2009). These sales records are being set despite the interest paid on these debt instruments is at record lows. This may sound paradoxical until you realize that the insatiable demand for this U.S. debt is not driven by the interest paid on them.

In a deflationary scenario, all you have to do is hold the debt to make money; interest isn’t needed to make money since as prices fall during a deflation, each dollar buys more than it could earlier. Granted, the Federal Reserve is printing money, but it won’t ‘trickle down’ since the banks are using the stimulus money to shore up their capital reserves due to the trillions of dollars of bad loans they made and the disastrous credit derivatives positions they hold. If the banks were to use mark-to-market accounting and actually show their real market value on balance sheets, they’d be shown to be insolvent.

As shown earlier, when the fiat money created from the Federal Reserve reaches private banks, inflation comes as loans to businesses and individuals through fractional reserve banking. But when these loans go bad and individuals and businesses default on their obligations to pay back the loan, that money is simply destroyed. Loan defaults are not inflationary, they are deflationary and loan default rates are at an all time high.

The only thing that’s near 100% certain is the continued centralization of power, wealth, and influence. Perhaps, this will manifest itself as a single world currency. The United Nations has already suggested this in the controversial report, the UN Conference on Trade and Development. In an echo of the events that culminated at Jekyll Island, there seems to be afoot a push for a new ‘Bretton Woods-style’ system of managed international exchange rates where the central banks would manipulate their systems of credit based upon the behavior of the rest of the world economy. Reuters in September, 2009, reported in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the march towards centralization as “New world economic order takes shape at G20” (Wroughton, Lesley. “SNAP ANALYSIS: New world economic order takes shape at G20.” Reuters. September 25, 2009)

The centralization of wealth has been illustrated recently by physicists James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston in “Backbone of complex networks of corporations: The flow of control” (Glattfelder, James, and Stefano Battiston. “Backbone of complex networks of corporations: The flow of control.” Physical Review E 80, no. 3. 2009). They estimated that world’s stocks are actually controlled by a very select few, the most influential of which is the Capital Group Companies started by Jonathan Bell Lovelace back in 1931 (it was called Capital Research and Management Company back then). It is the single most powerful controlling shareholder on the planet with significant control of the capital in 32 of 48 countries considered. This information is not a secret, though little known, and there is nothing nefarious about the Capital Group Companies. It seems like a great corporation. However, the extent of their control of capital is an illustration of this tendency toward centralization.

Many intellectuals, like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, have promoted the idea that ultimate centralization, in the form of a one-world government, is the only means to peace in the nuclear age and, hence, the only means to human survival. This seems like a false dilemma since federalism is not a guarantee of peace, as the exceptionally bloody American Civil War can attest. Centralizing all the power, wealth, and influence into even fewer individuals seems like a recipe for further disaster, given the awful record of centralization for individual rights.

In fact, the decentralization of wealth, the decentralization of power, and the decentralization of influence seem as important as they are uncommon. Human history is largely the history of small groups of powerful elites tyrannizing and enslaving large portions of the population for selfish benefit of themselves or their race or ‘bloodlines.’ As free beings and to continue as free beings, it is of utmost importance to protect the ultimate law of America from the dangers of trope and, thus, prevent what statisticians call a ‘mean-reversion’ or a trend backwards toward slavery. Transparency, not secrecy, and decentralization, not centralization; of language, power, and resources alone can prevent the history of tyranny from repeating itself.

I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

Butler, Smedley. War is a Racket. 1935

[1] http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/