STRAIGHT FROM LUDWIG VON MISES

FOR A WELL-REASONED and well-written treatise on the virtues of property ownership as the salve for what curses us as a people in constitutional crises, check out this essay...

SAME SAD TALE OF GREED AND DOMINATION

THIS IS THE HOUSE that fell on the mouse that Jill and her best friend Jack built. Or something like that.

Well, it's gobble gobble gobble super-corporation time again! Capitalism eats its own young again. Damn! And I'm such a big fan of capitalism, too. Why does it have to be this way? Why does it always move toward brutal corporatism and homogeneity? I've never uncovered the answer to this mystery? Surely the flaw is not in the blueprint, but is a conscious decision made at some point along the growth baseline. In other words, the capital enterprise doesn't have to evolve into high corporatism, if it wasn't that that creature yesterday.

In fact, a few years ago I belonged to some one of the early blogger entities, but after a couple of days of earnest activity I allowed my account to fall dormant. Later, I tried to return to the site, failed at log-in, having not kept a record of my log-in information, instead relying on my memory of the usual suspects. So, I tried to create a new account, and was repeatedly rejected for the next few weeks. The name of that rather fabulous (I still like its original concept and interface) site was TextAmerica. It had the great idea to charge for what had been a "free" service.

Then Textamerica deleted all content related to those old "free" accounts—the ones created by their earliest and arguably most loyal users. My account had been blocked, and during the transition phase, I wasn't even offered a chance for a paying account.

Moral of the story: TextAmerica went belly up in less than a year. Its domain name is now used by some other type of company which seems to be a loser, something from the late 90s or for mid-school children, if the contents of their rather bleak homepage over two years later is any indication.

MARX DEBUNKED BY TIME MAGAZINE

From TIME MAGAZINE article on May 19, 1947, Karl Marx is man is examined under the light of a man named Schwarzchild who had just written a book about the notorious political philosopher. My, how times have changed.

"If a name had to be found for the age in which we live," says the author of this book, "we might safely call it the Marxian era. For, in one way or another, the most important facts of our time lead back to one man—Karl Marx."

Biographer Leopold Schwarzschild is no admirer of Marx or Marxism. He is pointing to the fact that since World War I no other mind has so potently influenced the political and economic thinking and action of our times. There are masses of unconscious Marxists—men & women who have never read Marx's Capital, and who would rather be found dead than reading the Communist Manifesto, but whose thinking about the role of economic forces in history, the responsibility of government for the individual, and the importance of economic security v. political freedom has nevertheless been profoundly influenced by the choleric expatriate from Prussia.

Even the efforts to fight Marxism with its own weapons have inevitably taken a Marxist turn. Both Naziism and Fascism, Biographer Schwarzschild points out, are Marxist mutations whose predestined political form is therefore the police state. In Nazi concentration camps, as in Russian forced-labor camps, Karl Marx was the presiding genius. In the name of human progress, Marx has probably caused more death, misery, degradation and despair than any man who ever lived.

Complacent & Patronizing. For a mind whose consequences have been so monstrous, this biography is singularly debonair. It is certainly the most readable life of Marx available. For those who wish to see so alarming a monster debunked, it is a complacent job of debunking. Nor need readers fear exposure to the rigors of Marxist political theory or economics. Biographer Schwarzschild lightly writes off those arid involutions.

Schwarzschild's indictment is most effective when describing Marx's personal and political life from 1818 to 1883. Here is Marx the boy taken to a church in Trier, in the recently Prussianized Rhineland, and baptized a Lutheran. His father, the first lawyer in an interminable line of distinguished rabbis, admired Prussia and its official religion. Here is Marx the future socialist, unsocially shunning his school fellows while his mental acrobatics charm Ludwig von Westphalen, a much older man of a much higher social position. Marx later repaid Westphalen for this early interest by marrying his daughter, Jenny, against the wishes of her family. And here is Marx the frustrated poet, wasting his time, and his father's (and later his widowed mother's) slim resources as a shiftless college student. Marx finally received a kind of mail-order degree from the University of Jena.

Boring from Within. Marx got his start in life as editor of the Rhenish Gazette. This newspaper had been founded by a group of solid businessmen turned publishers. Like other publishers since, they were presently bewildered to discover that their paper had been infiltrated by socialists and was being used as a mouthpiece for revolutionary ideas. Marx lost his job. Then began his lifelong career as an expatriate and professional revolutionist.

In Paris he hobnobbed with Friedrich Engels, elegant, fox-hunting scion of a prosperous German textile tycoon. With him Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848), with him he shared his ideas, hopes, miseries and triumphs. Engels gave him implicit intellectual and political obedience, supported him most of his life and finally settled an annuity on him. In 1848 both Marx and Engels were neckdeep in the revolutionary wave that swept over Europe.

With the first gunshots, Marx rushed back to the Rhineland to edit the New Rhenish Gazette. The chapter on this episode shows the extent to which Marx's tactics are still standard Communist equipment. The New Rhenish Gazette was a tight little dictatorship of the proletariat run by a back-room clique of case-hardened Communists. But communism or socialism were rarely mentioned in its columns ; the paper posed as a liberal organ. The Communists posed as liberal patriots. In the name of liberalism, Marx shouted for war between Prussia and Denmark. He knew that war is good growing weather for communism. The result, as always, was the gradual discrediting of the liberals.

Character Assassination. Other enlightening chapters describe Marx's tactics of character assassination (still standard Communist practice) against anybody who threatened his exclusive leadership. One of his victims was Wilhelm Weitling, a tailor's apprentice, one of the few proletarians who has ever become an intelligent Communist leader. Marx falsely accused Weitling of being a literary crook and hounded him to the U.S. Another target was Ferdinand Lassalle, brilliant founder of the German Social Democratic Party. Marx somewhat inconsistently referred to Lassalle as "Baron Izzy" and "the little Jew."

Another victim was Michael Bakunin, an ardent Russian anarchist who threatened Marx's, control of the First International (founded in 1864 in London). Marx charged Bakunin with shady financial dealings and with being a Czarist agent. He could not make the charge stick, but Bakunin withdrew to lick his wounds.

After the collapse of the 1848 revolutions, Marx spent the rest of his life fighting off creditors, plotting against the public peace, burying his son,* suffering from attacks of carbuncles that sometimes covered him from head to foot, grinding away at economics so that he could "prove" (in Capital) that capitalism was inevitably doomed and that socialism was its inevitable successor, lashing his enemies with invective sometimes worthy of an Old Testament prophet and sometimes unprintable. When he was buried in a cemetery in Highgate, London, only eight friends were at the grave.

Author Schwarzschild's biographical facts are true, as far as they go. But the Marx he presents is a man with his brain cut out. Hence the facts add up to a caricature. Schwarzschild's thesis is that Karl Marx was 1) a rabbinical thinker whose pyramids of abstract logic were brilliant, but had nothing to do with facts; 2) a vicious egomaniac determined to ruin any man or group that he could not dominate; 3) a political seer whose prognostications were almost always wrong; 4) a self-styled "scientific" socialist whose science was about as scientific as astrology; 5) an economist whose economic knowledge was perfunctory and puerile. Marx's mind was undoubtedly diabolic (history is studded with malignant political geniuses). But it is no help in understanding or combating Marxism to deny its author's perverse brilliance.

Read it all.

THE CHINA SYNDROME

David Ignatius in the Washington Post analyzes the similarities of the Chinese bailout of its own staggering markets in 1998 to the current US government's intervention with our own faltering system. While some experts may see this Federal intervention as a last ditch desperation akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as the stock market continues to swing wildly, the majority of pundits caution us to remain calm.

As I posted a couple of days ago here, I saw this shift in American capitalism coming of necessity as the inevitable pressures of globalism frayed the interlocking financial systems with the parade of trade imbalances, currency wars, resource deficits, and the like now beginning to show their true natures as leaders attempt to deal with the flaws inherent in those particular systems. We are cautioned that we should not sweat this apparent end of orthodoxy, but should embrace this new paradigm of progressive strength, retool our own industrial base decades lost, address the needs of our national security including energy and other economic strategies, and move along. This is good advice. Monetary purists were never all that honest anyway.

Ignatius writes:

WE ARE ALL CHINESE NOW. That is, we have a nominally capitalist economy, but we don't trust the freewheeling private market when it comes to the crunch. So we turn to the government for protection and stability.

The new interventionism isn't so much socialist as it is Confucian—a belief that a public-private partnership of the wise ones will get us out of the mess. And if it's any consolation, the Chinese are becoming more like us, even as we are becoming more like them.

A Chinese preview of this week's government-funded recapitalization of the banks came in the Hong Kong stock market crash of August 1998. To counter a typhoon of speculation that had battered the local market, Chinese authorities intervened to buy up sagging stocks with public money. The government spent $15.1 billion to acquire about 7.3 percent of the companies in the blue-chip Hang Seng Index.

Free-market partisans in the West were shocked by the Chinese intervention and decried it as a dangerous precedent. But it helped stabilize the Hong Kong market. Now, that earlier bailout seems modest indeed—compared with the quasi-nationalization of the world's leading banks we're seeing this week.

Read it all.

RIDING THE BIG WAVES

Capitalism operates in waves. I have held the opinion for a decade or so that the United States would need to eventually ease into a form of national capitalism in order to compete with similar large regimes in China, Russia, Europe, and several oil-rich quasi-socialist entities in the Middle East. Let me be perfectly clear. I am not advocating a misguided heavy-handed socialist agenda for America, or anything remotely close to the pie-eyed Marxist flim flam so popular among Left-wing bookstore café hipsters who are as personally selfish as any pickup truck-driving capitalist I've ever met. Yet so many of these lovely people with the trés chic smiles embrace an ideology which always seems to end in a pernicious totalitarianism and uninvited oppression by an elite class, quite a shell shocker or two in scale from the worse forms of capitalism ever practiced. Forget all that shuck and jive about false consciousness. It exists, but no one has a monopoly on a justifiable antidote. Life is not that damn complex, even for the uneducated. After all, even for the Big Kahuna, negotiating a Big Wave is a good thing. Negotiating a tsunami, not so much.

I predicted this need to ease into a form of national capitalism back in the 1990s to a loosely knit group of internationalists who were known as the Sworgists for no other reason than the fact that we had gathered around the fledgling Scenewash Project to discuss the future of capitalism. Back then, I was a staunch believer in the capitalist system, and at some point in the late 90s I coined the phrase, "Capitalism has proven to be the most effective and purest form of communism ever practiced."

Having founded the listserv I dubbed—THE SWORG SWILL—I was operating among several staunch Marxists, and a couple of progressives who decried all previous failed experiments, of which Situationist Marxism and formal capitalism were the two more prominent. We hailed from Washington, DC, Austin, TX, Nottingham, England, Peoria, IL, and Sidney, Australia. All of us intuited that capitalism was weakening and its constitutional faultlines deepening. Trapped in our own miasma and personal biases however, we often disagreed on how to proceed with our investigations, and the group ended rather abruptly in May, 2000, after several years of communication.

But I had I suggested that we didn't need no stinking revolution because I viscerally agreed with the poet and musician John Lennon, who rejected revolution while advocating peace. No bloody pacifist am I—given the horrid nature of the world—I however still prefer peace to war, a slap in the face or a kick in the collective ass to total war, and a purpose bounced ounce of dignity in life for everyone not waving a death sentence at me or my family. My impression then and my impression now is that capitalism would fall of its own weight and greed, and in that particular historical moment, a massive reorganization towards a kinder gentler socialist model could possibly improve the government, its daily standards, and the uncommon conditions of more common people struggling in this world, where unfortunately the many prop up the few.

I think that time has come. To that end, let's observe the festering approach in today's New York Times:

FINANCE EXPERTS SAY THAT HAVING Washington take stakes in United States banks now—like government interventions in the past—would be a promising move to address an economic emergency. The plan by the Treasury Department, they say, could supply banks with sorely needed capital and help restore confidence in financial markets.

Elsewhere, government bank-investment programs are routinely called nationalization programs. But that is not likely in the United States, where nationalization is a word to avoid, given the aversion to anything that hints of socialism.

In past times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. After the war ended, bondholders and stockholders were compensated and railways were returned to private ownership in 1920.

During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies, including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman seized 88 steel mills across the country, asserting that unyielding owners were determined to provoke an industrywide strike that would cripple the Korean War effort. That nationalization did not last long, though, because the Supreme Court ruled the move an unconstitutional abuse of presidential power.

In banking, the government took an 80 percent stake in the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust in 1984. Continental Illinois failed in part because of bad oil-patch loans in Oklahoma and Texas. As the nation’s seventh-largest bank, Continental Illinois was deemed “too big to fail” by federal regulators, who feared wider turmoil in the financial markets. In the end, the government lost an estimated $1 billion on the bad loans it bought as part of the takeover of Continental, which eventually became part of Bank of America.

Read it all.

STOP NOW YE PLUNDERING CAPITALISTS

AND MAKE US PROUD AGAIN. There is a under-appreciated class of pro-capitalist anti-communist citizens workers who feel great pain at what America and the global economy have become. We want better choices to be made. We do not wish to destroy in order to have magically appear some unlikely new world because we believe we know at what price that new world would begin. We are the radical center. We want change, but we do not prefer left over right, or right over left. Here is an interesting article on how big business steals back our money after exploiting us in the first place which continues to proliferate the algorithm of the rich getting richer and the poor becoming more numerous, if not exactly poorer. Don't yawn quite yet, the article is solid, and worth a glance.

As someone who had suffered the early part of his life under a brutal regime, economic and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek's keen observation that capitalism works better than communism is proved mathematically. A thousand business owners each working in its own interest can react to the shifting aspects of supply and demand quicker and more efficiently than a centralized committee can even begin to recognize a problem. This mathematical insight solved the riddle once and for all for us here at the Two-Fisted Quorum, as to which is the preferred system, despite the problems with any system, by employing a metaphor akin to the historical scenario of the slow, bulky Spanish Armada warships who lost to the smaller, faster English fleet in rough weather.

We must turn the tide in this fight against an oligarchy of the rich. We must fight for freedom and renewed opportunity. This notion that things are not right does not make me a frothing leftist any more than wanting to own a gun to protect my family automatically makes me an avenging angel of the Right. Come now, let us reason together.

TALES OF PURCHASING POWER

From the Washington Times article—The Camel in the Tent—by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen

Objections to Borse Dubai's proposed acquisition of 20 percent of Nasdaq last week prompted Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank to quip, "In the ports deal, the concern was smuggling something or someone dangerous... What are we talking about here—smuggling someone onto a stock exchange?"

It is not "who" Dubai will smuggle into the stock exchange we should worry about. It's the arrival of the world's first Islamic stock exchange exerting unprecedented Islamic influence in the heart of the U.S. and Western economies that should raise our alarm. Dubai's handsomely paid Washington lobbyists see nothing wrong with that. Rather, they claim the deal benefits U.S. financial markets, giving "Nasdaq access to rich Mideast pockets." Unfortunately, the deal also increases the appeal and influence of Islamic financing in the West.

What is "Islamic" finance? Islamic, or Shariah-based finance, is the 1920s invention of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. He ordered the Muslim Brothers to create an independent Islamic financial system to supercede the Western economy, facilitating the spread of Islam worldwide. He set the theories and practices and his contemporaries and successors developed Shariah-based terminology for "Islamic economics," finance and banking. Attempts by Muslim Brotherhood members in the early 1930s to establish Islamic banking in India failed. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser shut down the second attempt in 1964, after only one year, later arresting and expelling the Muslim Brothers for attempts to kill him. Saudi Arabia welcomed them and adopted their ideas.

In 1969, soon after a mentally deranged Australian Christian fundamentalist, Michael Dennis Rohan, tried to set fire to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Saudis convened the Conference for the Islamic Organizations (OIC) to unify the "struggle for Islam," and have been its major sponsor ever since. The 56 OIC members include Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Based in Jeddah, "pending the liberation of Jerusalem," the OIC mandates and coordinates actions to "support the Palestinian people, assist them in recovering their rights and liberating their occupied territories." The OIC's first international undertaking was the 1975 establishment of the Islamic Development Bank "in accordance with the principles of the Shariah," marking the beginning of the fast-growing, petrodollar-based Islamic financing market. From 1975 to 2005, the bank approved more than $46 billion in funding to Muslim countries. Since 2000, it has transferred hundreds of millions of dollars raised especially to support the Palestinian intifada and suicide bombers' families -- and has channeled United Nations funds to Hamas. Yet the bank received U.N. observer status in 2007.

Overseeing Shariah finance are the 1991-Bahrain-registered and -based Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), which laid the groundwork for the global Islamic financial network and the "de facto Islamic Central Bank"—the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), established in 2002 in Kuala Lumpur "to absorb the 11 September shock and reinforce the stability of Islamic finance." Chairing the meeting, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir stated: "A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West]."

According to Saleh Kamel, president of the Saudi Dallah Al-Baraka Group and the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI), more than 400 Islamic financial institutions currently operate in 75 countries. They now hold more than $800 billion in assets—growing at a rate of 15 percent annually. All investments with Islamic financial institutions are subject to the minimum zakat (Islamic charitable wealth tax). On April 30, the OIC, the organization that initiated global Muslim riots after the Danish cartoon publications, established the clerical International Commission for Zakat, replacing more than 20,000 organizations that previously collected the money. Islamic clerics' "expert committee" in Malaysia now supervises and distributes those funds. The new committee will shortly distribute to Muslim charities roughly $2 billion collected during Ramadan.

But not all charities are equal. In 1999, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi decreed: "Declaring holy war [and] fighting for such purposes is the way of Allah for which zakat must be spent." If past zakat distribution is any indication, all Muslim jihadist-terror organizations (including Palestinian Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and the many al Qaeda offspring) will benefit.

Shortly after September 11, Osama bin Laden called upon Muslims "to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all possible means. Look for the key pillars of the U.S. economy. Strike the key pillars of the enemy again and again and they will fall as one."

Most Arab and Muslim states publicly denounced bin Laden. But the impending Nasdaq acquisition, the purchases of over 52 percent of the London Stock Exchange and 47.6 percent of OMX (Nordic exchange) and the vigorous expansion of Shariah financing apparently follow the Muslim Brotherhood-bin Laden script.

President Bush on Sept. 25 at the United Nations called on all nations to open their markets. Surely, he did not mean opening the markets to domination by Shariah.
_______________

Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the American Center of Democracy and a board member at the Committee for the Present Danger. She is also a member of the American Congress for Truth Board of Advisors. Alyssa A. Lappen is a senior fellow at the American Center of Democracy.

LA RECONQUISTA ACROSS THE POND

Infidel Marx hardly empathetic to Muslim totalitarianism, nor it with him

The fascination with Islam among Spanish Communists is nothing new. Just a couple of months ago the former Secretary General of the Communist Party of Spain, Santiago Carrillo, stated on a television program that "Islam is a powerful instrument of revolution against Western values as represented by the United States."

Senior Carrillo and all like-minded Marxists are quisling fools (in relation to Marxism and with Islam). Sure, one can dub Islam as anticapitalist, but so what? Most of that oil money is in the hands of a very few, not the many. How would implementing sharia move society forward from capitalism to socialism? It wouldn't. There is nothing about Islam that does away with private property, wage labor or class exploitation. Islam veils class rule with religious illusions that Marx scorned. Mohammedanism is an effort to turn back the historical clock that Marx would have rejected. Islam's ultimate ideal is perfect and total stasis, not progress.

It sounds like the New Left is becoming the Old, Old Right. Get off your duff. Smell the manure. Read the first few pages of the Communist Manifesto and try to picture Marx saying, "and in capitalism's final crisis, the proletarians will rise up and establish Islam."

You'll see how far these Communists have drifted from their roots.

Imagine the great treasures of Europe, two or three generations hence, under the dull blade of a theocratic regime such as the Taliban who routinely blow up ancient statues of the Buddha, one of history's great teachers of peace.

So long Sistine Chapel. Goodbye to The Last Supper. Stonehenge blown to bits. Acropolis razed. Marauders pillaging the Louvre. Keep these images in mind whenever confronting anyone over the ban of Islam in the West.

Not on our watch, say a few. Most of the remaining crowd remain in their fog only vigilent in that ever illusive pursuit of happiness...

THE MORALITY OF MONEYLENDING

It seems that every generation has its Shylock—a despised financier blamed for the economic problems of his day. A couple of decades ago it was Michael Milken and his “junk” bonds. Today it is the mortgage bankers who, over the past few years, lent billions of dollars to home buyers—hundreds of thousands of whom are now delinquent or in default on their loans. This “sub-prime mortgage crisis” is negatively affecting the broader financial markets and the economy as a whole. The villains, we are told, are not the borrowers—who took out loans they could not afford to pay back—but the moneylenders—who either deceived the borrowers or should have known better than to make the loans in the first place. And, we are told, the way to prevent such problems in the future is to clamp down on moneylenders and their industries; thus, investigations, criminal prosecutions, and heavier regulations on bankers are in order.

Of course, government policy for decades has been to encourage lenders to provide mortgage loans to lower-income families, and when mortgage brokers have refused to make such loans, they have been accused of “discrimination.” But now that many borrowers are in a bind, politicians are seeking to lash and leash the lenders.

This treatment of moneylenders is unjust but not new. For millennia they have been the primary scapegoats for practically every economic problem. They have been derided by philosophers and condemned to hell by religious authorities; their property has been confiscated to compensate their “victims”; they have been humiliated, framed, jailed, and butchered. From Jewish pogroms where the main purpose was to destroy the records of debt, to the vilification of the House of Rothschild, to the jailing of American financiers—moneylenders have been targets of philosophers, theologians, journalists, economists, playwrights, legislators, and the masses.

Major thinkers throughout history—Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes, to name just a few—considered moneylending, at least under certain conditions, to be a major vice. Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and modern and popular novelists depict moneylenders as villains.

Today, anti-globalization demonstrators carry signs that read “abolish usury” or “abolish interest.” Although these protestors are typically leftists—opponents of capitalism and anything associated with it—their contempt for moneylending is shared by others, including radical Christians and Muslims who regard charging interest on loans as a violation of God’s law and thus as immoral.

Moneylending has been and is condemned by practically everyone. But what exactly is being condemned here? What is moneylending or usury? And what are its consequences?

Although the term “usury” is widely taken to mean “excessive interest” (which is never defined) or illegal interest, the actual definition of the term is, as the Oxford English Dictionary specifies: “The fact or practice of lending money at interest.” This is the definition I ascribe to the term throughout this essay.

Usury is a financial transaction in which person A lends person B a sum of money for a fixed period of time with the agreement that it will be returned with interest. The practice enables people without money and people with money to mutually benefit from the wealth of the latter. The borrower is able to use money that he would otherwise not be able to use, in exchange for paying the lender an agreed-upon premium in addition to the principal amount of the loan. Not only do both interested parties benefit from such an exchange; countless people who are not involved in the trade often benefit too—by means of access to the goods and services made possible by the exchange.

Usury enables levels of life-serving commerce and industry that otherwise would be impossible. Consider a few historical examples. Moneylenders funded grain shipments in ancient Athens and the first trade between the Christians in Europe and the Saracens of the East. They backed the new merchants of Italy and, later, of Holland and England. They supported Spain’s exploration of the New World, and funded gold and silver mining operations. They made possible the successful colonization of America. They fueled the Industrial Revolution, supplying the necessary capital to the new entrepreneurs in England, the United States, and Europe. And, in the late 20th century, moneylenders provided billions of dollars to finance the computer, telecommunications, and biotechnology industries.

Read it all in a well-crafted article by Yaron Brook, writing for the Objective Standard.

Now here is another view from a religious blogger:

A long-existing and self-perpetuating tax-immune internationalist-transnationalist group uses fronts with inter-locking corporate and or fraternal group of individuals, whose membership is either secret or semi-secret, with undisclosed ownership shares, has usurped the sovereignty of borrowing national governments (who serve their lenders). It includes largely unrevealed yet reported campaign contributors who also control the media and press, all major political parties, and dictates presidential appointments. It abhors the direct issuance of money by elected officials and through the creation of a system of privately-owned and controlled central banks, holds all of the world's gold and all loan and mortgage paperwork.

Its business is conducted in secret meetings which determine the future of all national economies and the timing of expansion (through loans) or contraction (through no loans). It exercises an exclusive monopoly of the issuance of money created out of thin air and issued solely as debt, does not create money to repay the interest, and lives off perpetual national debts that consume future income and under international law cannot be repudiated even by an internal political revolution. At least for others, it tends to be pro-bureaucracy, pro-abortion/population control, pro-government education, anti-family, anti-nationalist, anti-inheritance, anti-private property and anti-Jesus Christ. This group can demand special privileges and even military force to collect "national" debts.

It plans to soon accomplish global disarmament (of both civilians and nations) and have a monopoly on force (including nuclear weapons). It has the privilege of a guaranteed untaxable income enforced by liens on all public and personal property and collected by the coercive force of the taxing structure of the various governments. The basis for its continued existence is continued usury and unforgiving collection of all debts resulting from committing the highest crime of usury.

Mostly these latter day types blame the Catholic Church or the EU, or some secret Illuminati. And forget about these firebrand mullahs for a moment. What about the Chinese? Aren't they hacking into US government computers, salivating for the time of their own ascendency? Verily, verily, I say to thee, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world we live in these days...