INSIDE THE EMPIRE OF WEALTH

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 * The following is a transcription of a verbal overview           *
 * purportedly given by a scion of a wealthy family preparatory to *
 * his development as manager of the great wealth he will inherit. *
 * This information was provided him by counsellors to his         *
 * father's financial empire in order to introduce him to the      *
 * secret technologies of power hidden behind outer appearance.    *
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By embracing deception whole-heartedly at every level, finance capitalism, or rule through money, has fashioned the ultimate system yet devised for the secure exercise of power. The hidden masters of finance capitalism control those who head governments and those who head manufacturing. Dominance in all aspects of society is surreptitiously accomplished while the great majority of the ruled, and even most of the visible leaders, believe themselves to be fairly autonomous.

Throughout history, secure ruling elites arise through secret knowledge which they carefully guard and withhold from outsiders. The power of such elites or cults diminishes as their hidden knowledge is undermined by truths gained by independent scientific investigation and vanishes as soon as it becomes common sense. Before analyzing the secrets of the finance capitalist money cult, let's look for historical perspective in occult astronomy, the oldest source of stable rule known to man, of which astrology is the remnant.

As soon as men abandoned the life of wandering hunters to till the soil, they needed to predict the seasons. Such knowledge was required in order to know when to plant, when to expect floods in fertile valleys, when to expect rainy seasons, and so forth. Months of backbreaking plowing and planning could be wasted by farming the land at the wrong times. There were no calendars. The men who first studied and grasped the regularities of sun, moon, and stars that presage the seasons had a valuable commodity to sell, and they milked it to the fullest at the expense of their credulous fellowmen. The occult priesthoods of early astronomers and mathematicians convinced their subjects that they alone had contact with the gods, and thus, they alone could assure the return of planting seasons and weather favorable to bountiful harvest. The predicting of solar and lunar eclipses was particularly effective when staged to awe the community. The general success resulting from following the priesthood's timetables for planting insured the priesthood's power. Today's Christmas holiday season continues the tradition set by ancient priesthoods who conducted rituals on the winter solstice to reverse the retreat of the sun from the sky. Their invariable success was followed by wild celebrations. Popular knowledge of seasonal regularities was discouraged by every manner of mysticism and outlandish ritual imaginable. Failures in prediction were blamed on sins of the people and used to justify intensified oppression. For centuries, people who had literally no idea of the number of days between seasons, and couldn't count anyway, cheerfully gave up a portion of their harvests, as well as their most beautiful daughters, to their "faithful servants" in the priesthoods.

The power of our finance capitalist money system rests on a similar secret knowledge, primarily in the field of economics. Our power is weakened by real advance tn economic science. Fortunately for us, the public at large, government leaders, and most revolutionaries remain totally ignorant of economy. However, we who are the established money lords have been able to prolong our control by systematically corrupting economic science with fallacious and spurious doctrines. Through our power in the universities and over the mass media, we have been able to reward the sincere professorial cranks whose spurious doctrines happen to rationalize, in terms of "common good", the government-supported institutions, laws, and economic measures upon which our money powers depend. Keynesianism is the highest form of phony economics yet developed to our benefit. The highly centralized, mixed economy resulting from the policies advocated by Lord Keynes for promoting "prosperity" has all the characteristics required to make our rule invulnerable to our twin nemeses: real private competition in the economic arena and real democratic process in the political arena. Laissez faire or free- market, classical economics was our original attempt to corrupt economic science. Its beautiful internal consistency blinded economists for many years to the fact that it had virtually nothing to do with current reality. However, we are so powerful today that it is no longer possible to conceal our imposing institutions with the appearances of free competition. Keynesianism rationalizes the omnipotent state, which we require, while retaining the privileges of private property on which our power ultimately rests. Although the interim reforms advocated by Marx in his Communist Manifesto such as central banking, income tax and other centralizing measures can be corrupted to coincide exactly with our requirements, we no longer allow Marxist movements major power in developed countries. Our coercive institutions are already in place. Any real steps toward communism would mean our downfall. Of course, phony Marxism is an excellent ideological veil by which to cloak our puppet dictators in underdeveloped areas of the world.

Secondarily, the power of the money lord rests on secret knowledge in the areas of politics and history. We have quite successfully corrupted these sciences. Although many people are familiar with our secrets through such books as 1984 by the disillusioned George Orwell, few take them seriously and usually dismiss such ideas as paranoia. Since real politics is motivated by individual self-interest, history is viewed most accurately as a struggle for power and wealth. We do our best to obscure this self- evident truth by popularizing the theory that history is made by the impersonal struggles between ideas, political systems, ideologies, races and classes. Through systematic infiltration of all major intellectual, political, and ideological organizations, using the lure of financial support and instant publicity, we have been able to set the limits of public debate within the ideological requirements of our money power.

The so-called Left-Right political spectrum is our creation. In fact, it accurately reflects our careful, artificial polarization of the population on phony issues that prevents the issue of our power from arising in their minds. The Left supports civil liberties and opposes economic or entrepreneurial liberty. The Right supports economic liberty and opposes civil liberty. Of course, neither can exist fully without the other. Our goal is to control the Left-Right conflict such that both forms of liberty are suppressed to the degree that we require. Our own liberty rests not on legal or moral rights, but on our control of the government bureaucracy and courts which apply the complex, subjective regulations we dupe the public into supporting for our own benefit.

Innumerable meaningless conflicts to divert the attention of the public from our operations find fertile ground in the bitter hatreds of the Left-Right imbroglio. Right and Left are irreconcilable on racial policy, treatment of criminals, law enforcement, pornography, foreign policy, women's lib, and censorship, to name just a few issues. We generally do not take sides in these issues. Instead we attempt to prolong the conflicts by supporting both sides as required. War, of course, is the ultimate diversionary conflict and serves to enlarge our power and wealth. War provides the perfect cover of emergency and crisis behind which we consolidate our power. Since nuclear war presents dangers even to us, more and more we have resorted to economic crises, energy shortages, ecological hysteria, and managed political drama to fill the gap. Meaningless brushfire wars, though, remain useful and profitable.

We promote phony free enterprise on the Right and phony democratic socialism on the Left in all the nations we control. Thus, we obtain a "free enterprise" whose "competition" is carefully regulated by the bureaucracy we control and whose nationalized enterprises are controlled through the governments we direct. In this way we maintain a society in which the basis of our power - legal titles to property and money - remain secure while the peril of free, unregulated competition is avoided and popular sovereignty is nullified. The democratic process is a sitting duck for our moneypower. Invariably, we determine the candidates of the major parties and then proceed to pick the winners. Any attempts at campaign reforms simply put the rules of the game more firmly under our governments' control.

Totalitarianism of the fascist or communist varieties is no danger to us as long as bastions of private property remain to serve as our bases of operation. Totalitarian governments of both Right and Left, because of the vulnerability of their highly visible leaders to party rivals, can be manipulated easily from abroad. Primarily, totalitarian dictatorships efficiently prevent new money lords who could challenge our power from arising in whole continents, civilizations, and races.

Since division of labor is the key to all human achievement and satisfaction, a system of exchange is crucial. Barter is hopelessly complicated. A command economy in which each is told what to do and how he will be compensated is also hopelessly cumbersome and fails to take advantage of individual initiative, ability and concrete knowledge. A medium of exchange - money - is the obvious solution.

When left to themselves, people of a given geographical area settled upon a durable luxury commodity, usually gold or silver, to use as money. Because money is a store of value as well as a medium of exchange, people saved part of their gold income rather than spending it all. This gold was often stored in the vaults of a local goldsmith - the precursor of the modern banker - for safe-keeping. The depositor received a receipt that entitled him to an equal quantity and quality of gold on demand from the goldsmith. This receipt could be negotiable by endorsing it over to a seller of goods who in turn could exchange the receipt for gold from the goldsmith. Either the receipt or the gold served as money, and the receipt was easier to carry than transporting the gold it represented. Moreover, the receipt was useless to a thief without the endorsing signature. At some point, a goldsmith realized that there was no reason he couldn't loan out some of the gold for interest as long as he kept gold on hand sufficient to meet the fairly predictable withdrawal rate. After all, he simply promised to pay on demand, not hold the gold as such. Better yet, he could simply issue more receipts for gold than he had gold on hand, and the receipts, renamed notes, could circulate freely among the populace as money.

However, he soon found that there was a definite limit set on this process by reality. Not all the extra notes he issued circulated forever among the public. The rate of note redemption began to increase rapidly as the receipts passed into the hands of people unfamiliar with his reputation and especially when competitive goldsmiths, always eager for more gold reserves, came into possession of his notes. To prevent a disastrous run on his gold reserves, note issuance had to be kept within bounds. But the spending power of overissuance was a grave temptation. Especially relished was the power over government, industry, and merchants that the miraculous loan power of the goldsmith could obtain. Many succumbed to temptation, overextended themselves, and brought ruin to their depositors while others slowly became wealthy bankers by pursuing conservative loan policies.

According to present-day "reasoning", Central Banks are instituted to protect the public from periodic financial catastrophe at the hands of unscrupulous fractional-reserve bankers. The excuse given as "protection" is far from the truth. Central banks are established to remove the limitation on overissuance that reality normally places on a competitive banking system. As early as ancient Babylon and India, central banking, the art of monopolizing the issuance of money had been developed into a perfect method for looting the general public. Even today, many bankers copy the traditions of the earlier exploitive priesthoods and design their banks to resemble temples. Defenses of central banking are simply part of the deception that lies at the heart of all power elites.

Let's look at the way a new central bank is created where none had existed previously. We bankers approach the king or ruling assembly - both of whom always want more money to fight wars or curry favor with the people and, typically, are ignorant of economics - with a compelling proposal: "Grant our bank a national charter to regulate private banking and to issue legal tender notes, that is, force our notes to be accepted as payment for all debts, public and private. In exchange, we will provide the government all the notes it prudently requires at interest rates easily payable out of existing taxes. The increased government purchasing power thus created will simultaneously assure the power and prestige of the currently precarious nation and stimulate the sluggish, credit- starved economy to new heights of prosperity. Most important, the violent banking panics and credit collapses caused by unscrupulous private bankers will be replaced by our even handed, beneficent and scientific management of money and banking. Our public-spirited expertise will be at the disposal of the state, while we retain independent enough of momentary political pressures to assure sound "management".

For a while, this system seems to work remarkably well with full employment for everyone. The government and public does not notice that we issuers of the new notes are using the notes we create out of thin air to surreptitiously build economic empires at the expense of

established interests. Because of the legal tender laws, few of the new notes issued by the Central Bank are returned for redemption in gold. In fact, private banks and even a few foreign banks may begin to use the central bank's notes as reserves for further issuance of credit. Soon though, prices begin to rise as the added notes increase demand relative to the quantity of goods and services available. As the value of their savings decline more and more, foreigners in particular begin to question the value of the central bank's notes and start to demand redemption in gold. We, of course, do not admit responsibility for the rampant inflation when it comes. We blame inflation on evil speculators who drive up prices for personal gain, as well as the greed of organized labor and businesses who are promptly made subject to wage and price controls. Even the consumer can be made to feel guilty for agreeing to pay the high prices. Mistaking symptoms for causes, the government accepts the bankers' analysis of the problem and continues to give the bank free reign in monetary policy.

By slowing the rate of note issuance periodically, the ultimate crisis stage is postponed until many decades after the original Central Bank Charter was granted. Before the rapidly dwindling gold reserves on which faith in our bank depends is exhausted, we abruptly contract our loan volume to private industry and government as well. With the contraction of the money supply, a great deflationary crash begins in earnest with all its attendant unemployment, bankruptcies, and civil strife. We do not admit responsibility for the depression. We blame it on evil hoarders who are refusing to spend their money and on the prophets of doom who are spoiling business confidence. The government accepts this analysis and leaves monetary policy in our hands. If things go well, we bankers channel the fury and unrest into puppet movements and pressure groups that carry our agents into full control of the government. Once in charge, we devalue our outstanding bank notes in terms of gold and make them inconvertible for all but possible foreign central banks and begin plans to restore a "prosperity" that will be totally ours. When lucky, we're able to confiscate the gold of private citizens as punishment for hoarding during the climax of the depression.

Once the old order is subdued during the chaos of the crash and desperation of the depression, the field is open for our full finance capitalist system to be realized, and a new and lasting order can be established. A war timed for this period of consolidation provides the perfect excuse for the regimentation required to crush all opposition.

Our central banks are private monopolies of the host nations' money and credit issuance supported by the coercive power of the state. That the central bank be directly in our hands is vital until our new order is firmly established throughout the governmental, business, intellectual, and political spheres of society. After our order is consolidated, formal nationalization of the central bank with great fanfare is usually advisable in order to dispel any lingering suspicion that it is operated for private gain. Of course, only loyal agents of the dynasty are allowed to obtain high offices in the bank, and our power remains intact. Obvious private monopolies are always the targets of sharp reformist agitators. Only the most paranoid, however, can see through the public facade to the private monopoly of the nationalized or quasi-nationalized central bank.

The central bank is the primary monopoly on which all our monopolistic power depends. The hidden power of the central bank to create money out of nothing is the fountainhead that fuels our far- flung financial and political empire. Basically, the power of our central bank flows from its control over the points of entry into the economy of new, inflationary money which it creates by fiat. Ordinarily, bills of exchange, acceptances, private bonds, government bonds, and other credit instruments are purchased by the central bank through specially privileged dealers tn order to put the new money, often only checking accounting entries, into circulation. Our purchase of government securities pleases the government as our purchase of private debt pleases private debtors. As a quid pro quo to assure "good management", our agents are given directorships, managerial posts, and offices in the corporations and governments so benefitted. As the addiction to the narcotic of inflationary easy credit grows and grows, we demand more and more control of our dependent entourage of governments and corporations. When we finally end the easy credit to "combat inflation, the enterprises and governments either fall directly into our hands, bankrupt, or are rescued at the price of our total control.

We ruling bankers control the flow of money in the economy through the wide authority of the central bank to license, audit, and regulate private banks. Banks that loan to interests outside the loyal entourage are "audited" by the central bank and found to be dangerously overextended. Just a hint of insolvency from the respected central bank is enough to cause a run on the disobedient bank or at least dry up its vital lines of credit. Soon that bank learns to follow automatically the hints and nods of our agents tn the central bank.

Further, the periodic cycles of easy money and tight money that we initiate through our control of the central bank cause corresponding fluctuations in all markets. Our inner circle knows in advance the timing of these cycles, and therefore reaps windfall profits by speculating in commodity, stock, currency, gold and bond markets. Monopolistic stock and commodity exchanges are a vital adjunct to our power, made possible by our central bank powers. We do not allow a fair auction market to exist, but make a great show of "tough" government regulation to create a false sense of confidence among small investors. With the aid of our regulatory charade and financial power, we are able to maintain exchanges tailored to our entourage's need to manipulate stock prices at the expense of independent investors. Our privileged specialists on the floors of our exchanges, aided by the propaganda of our financial press and brokerage houses, continually play on naivete and greed to drain the saving of the unwary into our coffers. The commodities, securities and stocks held in trading accounts by our exchange and brokerage houses provides us with a clout far beyond our own actual holdings with which we can manipulate prices and win proxy fights for corporate takeovers.

There is little danger to our lucrative operations from public- spirited regulation. Our manipulations are so complex that only the most brilliant experts could comprehend them. To most economists, our exchange operations appear to be helpful efforts to "stabilize" the market. We ruling bankers become richer and richer as time passes without the annoyance of exerting productive effort of benefit to others.

The danger to our monopolistic system clearly is not that the people will spontaneously rise up and dispossess us. The "people" never initiate anything. All successful movements are led from the top by men with vast resources and brilliant plans, usually without the knowledge of the people in the movement. The real danger arises in the upper middle class. Occasionally these people make vast fortunes through some brilliant technological innovation in their business or through the favor of local politicians who escaped our influence. Because of their ignorance of the reality of our power, however, the new rich usually fall easily into our hands. For instance, they seldom realize until too late that the dozens of loans they may owe to apparently independent banks can be called simultaneously with a mere nod from our top man. Graver danger is presented by those whose enterprises are so successful as to be self- financing. Since the advent of the corporate income tax, truly self- financing corporations are extremely rare. Most disquieting is when these upstarts acquire the covert or open support and advice from our major international banking antagonists. This is particularly dangerous to us in countries with long democratic traditions where it is difficult to make our arbitrary rulings stick.

The best solution is to enact comprehensive taxes and business regulations in the name of the common good. Such measures reduce the incidence of significant upstart competition to manageable levels. This policy, of course, strangles innovation and productivity. Reduction of the Gross National Product in countries under our control would be acceptable in the interests of secure power under the pretext of conservation, ecology, or no-growth stability except that if carried too far, our clout vis-a-vis our international rivals would be impaired. The most difficult problem for the money lord is determining the level of social and economic freedom he dares allow for the sake of his international power. One method is to maintain a home base of carefully monitored, relative freedom on which to base the economic and military strength required to maintain his empire of totalitarian dictatorships abroad.

The following measures are most effective in maintaining our control of nations:

1. A steeply graduated income tax. This does not affect us because our money was accumulated before the tax was imposed, and most of it is now safely protected in our network of tax-exempt foundations. Foundation income and capital can legally be used to finance the bulk of our social, economic, literary, and even political propaganda. In a pinch it is easily diverted to illegal uses. Expensive "studies" required by our profitable economic operations can be legitimately financed through our foundations.

   For the middle classes, income tax makes life into an endless treadmill. Even the most productive find themselves unable to accumulate significant capital. They are forced into the clutches of our central bank entourage for injections of the inflationary credit which we are privileged to create out of nothing. The self-financing wealth of the legendary 19th century robber barons and early 20th century tycoons is no longer possible since those wide-open conditions no longer exist. We were the advocates of the erection of the tax wall that is now in place. Our eternal vigilance is required in democratic countries to prevent our tax shield from being riddled by conniving legislators, who are usually of tax-oppressed, upper middle class origins themselves.

2. Business Regulation. When upstarts slip through our financial tentacles and tax shields, a second line of defense becomes vital. We control the licensing of radio and television to keep damaging information about our system from getting to the public or upsetting the political and social influence we have been exerting over a nation. This makes serious upstart-led mass political challenge impossible. Harassment by bureaucrats armed with arbitrary and voluminous industrial safety regulations is a new and increasingly effective technique to stifle raw competition against our established corporations. Security registration requirements, "to protect the small investor", can cause fatal delays in an upstart's ability to raise capital on the stock market. Ecological considerations are easily perverted to stymie the plans of those who would upset the stability of our carefully planned system.

   Anti-trust law, however, is our ultimate weapon. The handy doctrine of "pure and perfect competition", which we have fostered in our universities, is ideally suited to convicting any successful competitor at our discretion. Also, product quality, safety, and testing regulations are excellent methods by which we insulate our established industries from potential competition.

3. Subsidies, tariffs, and foreign aid. Although direct subsidies can occasionally be procured for our entourage of corporations by appealing to the desire of the masses to preserve jobs, this exploitive technique is usually too obvious. Tariffs are easily passed, but lead to retaliation against our foreign holdings. Foreign aid and government-guaranteed loans that are sure to be defaulted, fill the bill perfectly under modern conditions. Foreign aid maintains our empire of foreign dictators abroad while providing guaranteed, highly profitable sales to our corporations at home base. Foreign aid should always be contingent on the purchase of goods, usually military hardware, that only our entourage of firms can provide. Few people have the courage to oppose such altruistic aid to the "starving masses" of the third world.

4. Centralization of power. Real division of power between national, state, and local government is dangerous to our system. When local politicians have real autonomy, even in limited spheres, they can do much to enable upstarts to challenge our power. Our program is to bring all levels of government under our sway through such innovations as federal aid, revenue sharing, high federal taxation, and regional government.

5. Alliance with the lower classes. In order to keep our valuable regulatory machinery in place and under our control, we must have the mass support of the numerous lower classes against vigorous, but scarce, middle class upstarts. The best method is to provide the lower classes with subsidies at the expense of the middle class. This creates a mutual hatred that prevents the middle class from appealing effectively to the lower classes for support. Social Security, free health care, unemployment benefits, and direct welfare payments, while doing nothing for us directly, create a dependent class whose support for our critical measures can easily be made part of a package deal. Also, the major labor unions began with our financing and are led to this day by leaders of our choosing. No one can rise to or remain at the top of a rough and tumble union without our financial backing. In spite of their rebellious rhetoric, bought union leaders are the source of our power over the management of firms with widely held stock. Unions are the ultimate weapon we have for destroying otherwise invulnerable, self-financing upstarts.

   "Bread and circuses" are as useful today as in Roman times for mobilizing the mob against our staid adversaries.

In order to maintain our system of power, the institution of universal public education is indispensable. The anarchy of private education in which any manner of dangerous ideas could be spread cannot be tolerated. Thus we make private education financially impossible to all but the few, mostly the elite offspring of our financial entourage, by means of burdensome taxation and regulation. The primary purpose of public education is to inculcate the idea that our crucial institutions of coercion and monopoly were created for the public good by popular national heroes to blunt the past power of the malefactors of great wealth. It is crucial to create the impression that, although the people have been exploited in the past, today the wealthy are at the mercy of an all-powerful government which is finally in the hands of the people or do-gooding liberals.

For those of more sophistication who reject this Pollyanna view of reality, we promote the "liberal reformer mentality", which holds that a new era of reform is on the verge of crushing forever the last vestiges of money lordism. Of course, the reforms, after taking shape as a bewildering myriad of regulatory agencies and taxes, are found to be ineffective in subordinating our power to the popular will, whereupon we stir up another era of progressive reform.