Back in the early '80's, when I helped found Colorado Public Television, one of the hallmarks of our programming was running political programs of all stripes and persuasions. I remember a piece of propaganda that had Ronald Reagan, when he was still a B-actor in Hollywood, raising the specter of the domino theory by which the Russians were going to take over the world and end our "democratic" way of life. The tenor of this political melodrama was much along the lines of the earlier PSYOPS film, Reefer Madness, which raised the threat of darker-pigmented people destroying American morals.
Then, a couple of decades later, Colorado Public Television became the only broadcast television station in the U.S. to air a documentary that countered the official report on 9-11.
So, it’s refreshing to see that the station is still showing the same commitment to free speech and robust debate as its mission statement declared; for example, airing Four Horsemen.
This is a much more sophisticated piece of misdirection than the agit-prop hosted by Reagan, and its target is not the so-called conservatives and the far-right. The target is what used to be called liberals who, as we see, have become the new McCarthyites, red-baiting anyone who questions the narrative regarding Russian hacking, which has never been proven (as various former intelligence agents have shown), or attacking anyone who points out that both Trump and the Clintons have done major business deals with Russia.
So, in the interests of political and economic analysis, let me point out a few things to watch for in this film.
Right at the beginning, the film says it is not about conspiracies. This ought to raise a red flag on everyone’s radar, since the terms “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory” were popularized by the CIA to denigrate anyone not adhering to the official report on JFK’s assassination. The use of these terms is essentially ad hominem; that is, name-calling, one of the most common logical fallacies, for which you would lose you points in a real debate.
So, rather than basing their documentary on a number of peer-reviewed studies (linked on the home page for the film on the CPT12 website, below my bio) that lay bare the planetary power structure, the writer-director and producers of this film “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” as the Wizard of Oz tells Dorothy and her friends in the allegory by L. Frank Baum, a late 19th century monetary reformer.
What we are seeing in this film is what the intelligence agencies call "limited hangout"; that is, they bait the hook with various well-known truths or beliefs, and then use a variety of untruths to mislead us into solutions which are designed to be completely ineffective in changing the power structure and any of the other issues they disingenuously bemoan.
The premise of the film is that control over the cognitive map of human consciousness is how the world is controlled by the powers-that-be. But control over the mass and social media, the educational and publishing systems, and the electronic voting and counting systems did not manifest simply from an illusory cognitive map. Such propaganda is generated from a source, and those who own that source acquired it through their ability to print money from nothing, and then plan and propagate their "doublethink" with very specific ends in mind.
It’s also worth noting that this film was produced before the Internet was fully taken over by the powers-that-be, before Net Neutrality was repealed, before Facebook, Google, and Amazon began in earnest suppressing progressive sites via algorithms in April 2017 (here, here, here, and here) and Internet service providers began manipulating access speeds to marginalize critical voices. All this is done under the guise of quashing fake news, much of which the intelligence agencies themselves create and tag with software that conjures a false trail of URLs branded with whichever country is the enemy du jour.
Notice that the film characterizes the present power structure as an empire, which, as we noted, willfully ignores various peer-reviewed studies that show the present consolidated array of what many still see as sovereign nation-states—that is, so-called governments, including the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Israel and others—are nothing more than public sector subsidiaries of the Anglo-Euro-American banking cartel. This is not a conspiracy theory; the data is in the public domain and has never been seriously contested for its accuracy.
Further, within the film’s misleading characterization of the U.S. as an empire, it offers an historian’s perspective on the lifecycle of such political and economic structures by discussing signs of the empire’s disintegration, including the debasement of currency. But this is not a sign of imperial decline; it’s the opposite: currency manipulation is being done on purpose, as a means by which the banking cartel exerts further control, segmenting the population into haves and have-nots. The present situation is different, because never in the history of the world (prior to the early 1950’s) have the central bankers instituted a truly global world reserve currency, so-called "Federal" Reserve Notes.
Further obfuscating the history of banking, the film says the U.S. began on a gold and silver standard, but this is not true. The original 13 colonies all printed their own money, and the Continental Congress printed its own script. It was the British bankers that, during colonial times, enforced gold and silver on the people, causing a depression that Benjamin Franklin said was the single-greatest cause of the American Revolutionary War. After the colonists were victorious over the mercenaries soldiering for the British banks, Hamilton convinced President Washington, over Jefferson’s objections, to sign a bill creating the First Bank of the United States, which was controlled by the British bankers. This was treason, selling the fledgling nation back to the bankers whose mercenaries the colonists had just defeated on the battlefield.
The film continues to attempt to define the signs of imperial disintegration by documenting what it describes as societal amorality, as if it were a spontaneous historical event. It is not. It is a well-orchestrated result of creating a disempowered population through distraction, violence, various environmental poisons, and Orwellian thought destruction, as well serving as a means (using drugs and sex) for blackmailing political operatives who then serve the cartel's interests.
Continuing with the false metaphor of imperial disintegration, the film, characterizes the population’s disinterest in governance as a moral issue, rather than an economic one, where the masses are scrambling just to survive, because the .000001% is suppressing the money supply and stealing everyone else’s share of our productive capacity, as well as purposefully creating joblessness, bankruptcies, foreclosures, and homelessness.
Next, the film blames the victims instead of the perpetrators, claiming that the baby boomers are responsible for this mess. This claim fully discredits the film and proves all our points. Private control over money creation has been going on for millennia, and the film is trying to cover this up, using the same tricks that the powers-that-be have always have used, in this case leveraging the same technique the film claims to be exposing: rearranging the cognitive map of human consciousness.
The so-called experts in the film—including Noam Chomsky most prominently, but also David Morgan (a silver investor), and various economists all of whom work for agencies of the banking cartel, including the IMF, World Bank, Federal Reserve System, Department of the Treasury, and cartel-funded universities—assiduously avoid discussing the real power structure, making all of them what the intelligence agencies call "useful opposition." In other words, their job is to keep dissenters within the matrix.
All of this is in the film before the 17-minute mark, where the banking section begins. This next sections opens with some truths, that banks create money from nothing and charge interest for it. Then, the film jumps to 1971, when the U.S. supposedly stopped backing the so-called dollar (actually Federal Reserve Notes) with gold (it's unlikely that the totality of U.S. currency was ever fully backed with gold [at $32/ounce]).
After glossing over the entirety of U.S. monetary history, from the end of the 18th century until the Nixon presidency, the film introduces the term "fiat money" instead of what they are actually talking about, which is “PRIVATE fiat money” and then states that the "dollar," the "pound," and the "Euro" "are all government fiat currencies." This is false. They are private bank notes on which the taxpayers pay principal and interest to use as their medium of exchange. In other words, the public only rents the currency from the privately controlled banking cartel, just as the infamous financier Andrew Mellon once so brashly stated: "During depressions, assets return to their rightful owners."
The film then states that only the government has power to issue fiat money. This is false. The U.S. "government" cannot issue its own money (other than coins), contrary to what is set forth in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, which the cartel claims is overridden by a mere law from the U.S. Code, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which was approved when most of Congress was already on Christmas break. Instead of issuing money, the U.S. government must issue Treasury Bonds, which are sold by the private banks that own the Federal Reserve System (JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and other "market makers"). In return, the private central bankers order an equal amount in Federal Reserve Notes and/or credits for the government, and on which the government must pay principal and interest (to satisfy the bondholders), which is raised by taxing the population (the U.S income tax was created on the heels of the Federal Reserve Act, to pay the interest on Federal Reserve Notes borrowed from the private banks and their clientele).
The geometrically growing debt from this scam is what the bankers call our national debt, which roughly represents our money supply and the interest charged for creating it. The problem, of course, is that the interest can never be repaid under such a system, because the money to pay back the interest is never created—in other words, the money supply is all principal, but the debt is principal plus interest. And thus, debt slavery is the chief weapon of the banking cartel. Technically speaking, the U.S. has been bankrupt since the Depression and the New Deal.
The film then quotes Voltaire as saying that all paper money returns to its original value, zero; but, this is incorrect. Voltaire is speaking of private fiat money, not public (or sovereign) fiat money, something with which he was wholly unfamiliar.
Private fiat money is the value created by labor which has been commodified via interest into capital. Thus, capitalism is based on commodities; therefore, everything within the system, including people and the biosphere become commodities. Public fiat money is money based on the value created by labor and backed by "the full faith and credit of the people," who pledge their labor to support the currency. Basing a monetary system on labor is necessary if our objective is to create a system that benefits people, not the accumulation of capital and other commodities.
Next, the film attempts to characterize the Cold War as a battle between capitalism and communism, but the USSR was communist in name only. Lenin was backed by the western bankers because Kerensky, as head of the Russian Provisional Government, created a publicly owned central bank. So, after he was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, the political economy of the USSR was actually "state capitalism." Such a characterization shows that John Perkins either doesn’t understand the system for which he works, or that he is purposefully misleading us.
Debt burden is an intrinsic dynamic of capitalism; it is a mathematical certainty in a system of private control over money creation, with interest as the poison pill. Interest is the monetization of time, not labor, so it represents no value; it is the opposite: the theft of value and the theft of labor. That is why Jesus drove the money changers from the temple in 33 AD, when every member of the Roman Senate was a usurer.1 This is why Jesus was crucified, the Roman punishment for sedition, just a few days after he cleansed the temple.
It is now our turn to cleanse the temple of democracy of the usurers, the money lenders, the central bankers, and their minions.
If Perkins were interested in ending the criminal dysfunction of private fiat money, he would suggest an overhaul; but, instead, he suggests regulation, which means he, like Chomsky, ignores the actual power structure. Regulation ended because the Anglo-Euro-American banking cartel came to own and operate the government and the regulators. Proposing a restoration of regulations is ignoring the political and economic reality.
Next, the film tries to confine the spectrum of contemporary economics into classical and neo-classical schools. This is a logical fallacy known as black and white; that is, there are only two positions to choose from. Both of the systems offered here are inside the capitalist box; that is, they both are based on private control over money creation. Of course, most universities teach the same lies.
We are then told that neo-classical economics is to blame, as the film has already apparently forgotten that it blamed the baby boomers. Reagan and Thatcher are presented as leaders in bringing neo-classical economics to the fore, but they are just teleprompter readers for the cartel. Again, the film ignores the actual power structure and pretends that destructive economic policies are simply a political choice. Prof. Simon Johnson, who works for the IMF, one of the central bankers levers of control, tries to reinforce this economic misnomer.
Continuing with the blame game, the film spotlights the 1932 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking (and was repealed in 1999), as a leading cause in the collapse of the system in 2008. But, Glass-Steagall, when it was the law, had no effect whatsoever on the power structure and, even if reinstated, would not change the overall trend towards total control of the planet by the cartel.
Next, the film trots out Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel Laureate in Economics, as named by the privately controlled Swedish Central Bank), who blames financial sector lobbying (which he says is a symptom of "a flawed democracy") on the unlevel playing field of the people versus the financiers; but, lobbying is nothing more than a cover for the cartel’s control over Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and the electoral process. There is an implied threat that underlies this control, just as President Woodrow Wilson said:
"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." —Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom: A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People, Section I: "The Old Order Changeth," p. 13.
The film then uses Johnson to reiterate the same notion: that the problem is a flawed political system, again ignoring the peer-reviewed studies, which show that the political system is just a public sector subsidiary of the Anglo-Euro-American banking cartel. Even Max Keiser, an irreverent and often insightful analyst blames lobbying. Again, this attacks the political system and ignores private control over the economic and monetary system.
All of the above in the first 41 minutes.
Chomsky then imparts some well-known truths about Goldman Sachs, in terms of what he calls their "legal" manipulation of various markets, including the sale of securities that bundled sub-prime mortgages, which Goldman Sachs sold to their clients, and then bet against, with credit derivative swaps. Chomsky also makes another important point: this type of gambling has no economic value.
Next, we move onto another great myth of capitalism, that of free markets and the innate right of anyone with a product to make as much money as possible from it. So, now the film is arguing against its earlier solution of regulation by arguing for “free markets,” as if the marketplace isn’t manipulated by those who control large amounts of capital, which they can print from nothing. Morgan, the silver dealer, is shameless in his defense of this, ignoring the fact that manipulation of the silver market has been proven. His disingenuous assertion about serving oneself and simultaneously serving humankind is exactly what Orwell described as doublespeak. Both Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century and a study done by Princeton and Northwestern show that the gap between those at the top of the system and the rest of the population is growing.
To its credit, the film then highlights the hypocrisy of such positions by pointing out (via a Christian minister) that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all say that money must be shared. Then, various economists—Johnson from the IMF and Stiglitz the Nobel recipient—chime in as well, with the latter raising the specter of Adam Smith, the "godfather" of classical economics, who is often incorrectly referenced as excusing the free market because it is guided by “an invisible hand.”
As part of this "truth-telling" interval in the film, we are introduced to the well-known Reagan fairy tale called "trickle-down economics," which we are told doesn’t work, and we then witness a montage of protesters against such practices. Then, we switch back to the misdirection side of "limited hangout," with Stiglitz once again insisting that we have to restructure our political processes to correct these injustices, ignoring once again the financial interests who control the political processes.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, when he was a 4-star general, recounts Powell telling him upon his retirement from the military, that he was going to focus on making lots of money, so he could become a cabinet officer. Wilkerson goes on to say that both parties are beholden to corporate interests and that as long as this situation continues, we’ll never have a healthy government. So, again, lobbying is blamed, instead of looking at the power structure that dispenses these funds and leveraging the peer reviewed studies (linked on the program page) to see the hierarchy and chain of command.
At 51 minutes, the film begins a new section on terrorism with a quote from Orwell: "Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
This moves to an examination of U.S. wars and foreign policy. Note again that the U.S. is being charcterized as an independent nation-state, rather than a public sector subsidiary of the Anglo-Euro-American banking cartel and its corporations, once more ignoring the peer-reviewed studies and the fact that the U.S., as noted earlier, does not issue its own currency, and thus cannot be considered sovereign.
Then, the question is asked, how successful is the military in eradicating terrorism, which ignores the fact that the so-called terrorists are mercenaries of the cartel, and used as an excuse for the cartel’s proxies—the U.S., U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc.—to attack any nation that controls its own central bank and currency (Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya) and/or controls its own oil reserves and gold reserves (Venezuela and Ukraine). There are now only five sovereign nations left—Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and Sudan—which top the official enemies list.
The film creates a list of those who benefit from war—including military contractors (armaments) and industrial contractors (rebuilding the infrastructure that the military destroys). Certainly, such war-profiteering is a peripheral part of the cartel’s game, but what is being missed here is the usurpation of control over the target countries’ money creation process, natural resources, and refined precious metals.
Perkins explains how the rebuilding process in the wake of these wars is used to drive these countries into debt, so that the cartel eventually can "legally" seize resources. But again, this ignores the shift in control over the government and its monetary system.
The film then asks the question, "How much of U.S. foreign policy is altruistic and how much is influenced by the banks and corporations that profit so tremendously from it?"
The upshot of this segment of "truth-telling" is to blame terrorism on the ruthless and arrogant policies of the U.S., which certainly contribute to the recruitment of terrorists, but there is no discussion of how the cartel is involved in creating and manipulating terrorists groups, including the new recruits. So, again, the implication is that U.S. is a sovereign nation-state that needs to be reformed, rather than it being a proxy for a criminal corporate syndicate.
In reiterating the point that U.S. policy is responsible for turning indigenous populations into terrorists, Perkins characterizes Osama bin Laden as a sociopath, which bolsters the official report regarding 9-11 and the mythology created around it by the corporate-owned mass and social media. We all know that bin Laden was trained by the CIA, but most folks don’t know that he continued to work for them the whole time (meeting with the CIA at a hospital in Dubai in July 2001, according to Le Figaro), before he died of kidney failure, years before the staged assassination during the Obama presidency, when the U.S. military claimed to have killed bin Laden, but buried his body at sea, followed by a helicopter "accident" that killed many of the soldiers involved in this operation.
Under the guise of questioning the application of the term “terrorism” to those who see themselves as "freedom fighters," Chomsky maintains his brand by saying that the U.S. commits far greater atrocities than what others do to us, while citing 9-11 as a terrorist event, in line with the official report.
Kudos to Chomsky for referencing the CIA coup d'état in Chile as an example of U.S. terrorism, but in prefacing a solution, the film says the problem is economic, along the lines of Perkins’ thesis, that debt is the principal weapon fueling terrorism, via stealing resources from other nations, while leaving the masses unemployed and starving. The solution offered is "structural reform" back home, which apparently means re-instating Glass-Steagall and other similar measures, which as we noted are the equivalent of window dressing.
At 1:02:45, the section on resources begins with a quote from Tyler Durden, the principal at the ZeroHedge.com, a site that specializes in economic analysis mixed with political speculation.
Prof. Herman Daly, from the World Bank, frames the issue as the globe becoming saturated by "man-made capital," which is eclipsing "natural capital." Please take note that he sees the world as a commodity—capital—which includes people. Everything in the world of private control over money creation is defined by the usurers' ideologues according to a monetary value. So, while Daly may see that there is a problem, his mental toolbox does not possess the right tools to solve it.
Professor Richard Wilkinson, whose specialty is social epidemiology (I kid you not!), leads into a discussion of what the film calls the paradox of technological advancement and increased poverty, ignoring the dynamic that is driving both.
Col. Wilkerson returns extolling Royal Dutch Shell’s analytical construct of the two paths available to humanity at this juncture—a corporate blueprint or a scramble, and declares that the blueprint leaves less blood on the floor. Either the colonel is ignorant of the cartel's objectives, which include severely reducing the world population, or he is a slick salesman for "limited hangout," because anyone paying attention today can see that there is a blueprint and it involves slaughtering people for resources, and letting the survivors scramble.
The film then explains that the reason oil companies are drilling under the seas is that easily accessible oil has mostly been tapped. What this tells us about the producers of the film is that they are pushing oil as a necessary and vital energy source; but, the evidence shows that the vast majority of the world’s energy needs could be met with renewables, particularly if the artificial growth that drives capitalism—because it must expand to satisfy inflation caused by interest and earnings per share targets, not to mention greed and other sociopathic compulsions of those at the top of this structure—were curbed.
Other resource problems named are: dwindling precious metals and the degradation of agricultural land. The film speculates that the greatest threat may not be global warming, but the exhaustion of resources. The colonel comes back to reinforce this by talking about a world population of 9 billion, using numbers from the U.N. (which, along with the CIA, we must note, control all census compilations).
Next, the colonel brings up water resources. He says that Royal Dutch Shell has a blueprint for making this work. In other words, corporations which subscribe to the cartel’s objective of "reducing the surplus population" (as Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge, a usurer from the City of London financial district, put it), are going to pretend to solve the issue. At least, the colonel winds up this fantasy by coming clean and telling us that Shell is betting on chaos.
The film then touches on a key issue when it says that our "competitive nature" is outdated, but the terminology is questionable, because the notion of "human nature" as a fixed set of behaviors runs counter to evolution and the nature of the universe (comprised entirely of light), in which change is a constant. The narration then attempts to balance competitiveness with examples of cooperation, but Wilkinson, the social epidemiologist, frames it as an immutable dynamic among all species, rather than seeing the potential of evolutionary change.
So, the issue is framed as an economic one, moving from globalization to localization for the purpose of sustainability. While this is a positive objective, such a change requires an evolutionary change in human behavior.
The film then states, truthfully, that the growth economy makes consumption a way of life.
Perkins correctly notes that the economy has been driven in the past century by military needs and things that we don’t need. A series of additional commentators state various truisms, such as we need to reconnect with our humanness and recognize that the western ideal of individualism has failed. Even the colonel says that our focus must be outside of our selves.
At 1:13:00 the section on Progress begins with the notion that hopelessness is caused by not understanding what the real problem is, and that cleansing the system of a few bad apples will not rectify the situation. Agreed.
The film then returns to the proposition from the beginning that our cognitive map is the problem, and that this is preventing us from seeing the solution. The social epidemiologist says that we can make this work on a large scale by cooperation. To its credit, the film has a series of commentators explain that apathy and dysfunction is being created by the financial powers, reversing their statements at the beginning of the film, which blamed the cognitive map. Even the fellow from the IMF says it's not hard to understand, and that it's about power and democracy.
The narrator tells us that one source of disinformation is the neo-classical school of economics. So, after all that truth-telling, we are back to the black and white logical fallacy, where the problem is either one thing or another, but nothing else. We're told that the educational system is part of the problem and that we need to study classical economics on our own. Remember, when we discussed this issue at the beginning, we stressed that both schools are within the box of private control over money creation.
Next, we are told by the pro silver advocate that the monetary system must be reformed and further, that the world cannot function on fiat money. So, the culminating agenda of the film is laid bare, by once again mischaracterizing the present system as fiat money. The classical definition of fiat money is currency issued by a sovereign authority and serves as legal tender. But again, the U.S. does not issue its own money; it must issue bonds (and pay principal and interest on those bonds) in order to receive Federal Reserve Notes, which are private bank notes. The only reason that FRNs are legal tender is various unconstitutional laws and the criminal usurpation of the U.S. government by the banking cartel.
This is why we must distinguish between private fiat money, created by for-profit banks, whose business model is fraud (as we delineate in our book), and public fiat money, which is issued by a sovereign government and backed by the full faith and credit of the people; that is, the pledge of their labor and the value created from that labor.
The next claim absolutely discredits the film. The narrator says that there is a natural form of money that is not made by man: gold (which contradicts the films solution at the end, because it ignores extraction and ownership). Then James Turk, of the GoldMoney Foundation, is given the floor and tells us that all the gold mined in history fills only about 2½ Olympic-sized swimming pools and grows by 1¾% per annum, which he says is the same as global population growth. He further states that this is why the purchasing power of gold is consistent over time, because the supply and demand equation is very much in balance. Anyone looking at the gold markets over the last few decades can see this is incorrect.
He is comparing the amount of gold with the number of people, which is meaningless in economic terms, unless we’re talking edibles. The gold market has been cornered and manipulated for centuries by private parties. The ruse that currencies have been backed by gold, what the financiers sell as "sound money," has been a sales pitch since goldsmiths counterfeited bills of credit and earned massive profits that enabled them to become licensed bankers, and eventually destroy the sovereign states of Europe via debt slavery.
A stable currency is created by balancing the money supply with the goods and services in circulation, so if one laborer creates a growing amount of value, the amount of gold assigned to this person, based on the absurd claim in this film, would continue to inflate in value, making a mockery of stability by basing the system on population not production. Even in a radically depopulated world, where machines, computers, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) have replaced most labor, assigning everyone a share of the gold supply seems nonsensical, because in such a world, an economic bill of rights that specifies the goods and services to which every human has rights would determine how much social credit was assigned to each person, and in such an equation, gold is irrelevant. Earlier, however, the film argues against such economic equality by saying that people should be rewarded unequally for their labor, based on the value of the products they conceive. Clearly, such a philosophy is not part of the evolutionary next step that humanity must take, of which we speak about in our book.
Essentially, what the film is promoting is a currency based on a commodity—gold; that is, worship of the Golden Calf. Turk claims that gold is outside the control of politicians. Where has this guy been? For centuries, the price of gold was set every day in London by the firm of N.M. Rothschild, which got out of the business in 2004, because they and their fellow central bankers had enough gold to manipulate its value whenever they wanted. And then there was that time in 1933 when Roosevelt issued an executive order for all citizens to turn in their monetized gold, with Congress quickly following up with a law of their own. (I discuss where that gold went in my book.) And, of course, Nixon demonetized Federal Reserve Notes from gold in 1971.
Let us also remember when the British bankers got Parliament to ban the paper money (public fiat currency) used by every one of the 13 American colonies, and forced the colonists to use gold and silver coins, which created a major depression that Ben Franklin said was the principal cause of the American Revolution.
The same thing happened in the late 19th century when the banking cartel "muscled" Congress to demonetize silver, causing a decades-long depression, and riots throughout the land.
Gold is controlled by the same folks that control the Fed. The solution being presented here would have no effect on that power structure. The proposition is being used as a way of drawing in progressives with some well-known truths and misdirecting them. This is, as we have noted, a PSYOPS technique known as "limited hangout."
I urge everyone to try to understand the depth of sophistication in this type of propaganda. Consider that the film says right at its start that today’s troubled world got this way from control over the cognitive map of human consciousness, and then the film uses this same technique to attempt to mislead us. What types of people do such things?
Next, the film correctly identifies debt, specifically what the banks call "the national debt," as slavery. Michael Hudson, who is generally regarded highly by progressive economists (even with his roots in the world of Modern Monetary Theory [MMT], which pretends that the Federal Reserve System is public, despite declarations by the courts, Congress, and the Fed’s senior counsel and its Chairman), calls for debt cancellation, along the lines of what was done in Germany after WWII, including transfer of ownership of all mortgages from the mortgage lenders to the mortgagee.
This would actually be a reasonable action in the U.S., where the "too big to fail" banks securitized massive numbers of mortgages (including sub-prime mortgages) before the crash in 2008, and sold them to public institutions knowing their toxicity. In collateralizing these mortgages, the cartel entered them into an electronic repository (MERS) and, essentially, destroyed the chain of title of all the deeds, so all of these mortgages should have been transferred to the mortgagees at that point.
Then begins a discussion of taxation. The film’s first suggestion is to end the tax on production and only tax what we consume. Let's step back a minute before dealing with this nefarious proposition.
In any economy, taxation is invariably connected to the monetary system. Because most of the world is captive of a privately controlled monetary system that runs on capital (i.e., money, which is the value created by labor, that has been commodified via interest), and which sells “legal tender” to its proxy governments (the U.S., U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc.) at a profit (principal plus interest, the so-called national debt), taxation is required to make up for what a sovereign nation (that controls its own central bank and currency) could spend directly into the economy and not cost itself a dime (as long as the money in circulation stayed in proportion to the goods and services in circulation).
Next, Hudson proposes a land-value tax. Many economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax, but it is most famously associated with Henry George, who argued that because the supply of land is fixed and its location value is created by communities and public works, the economic rent of land is the most logical source of public revenue.
This point is expanded by Daly, from the World Bank, by noting that natural resources are not man-made, only their extraction is manual (see our discussion of gold earlier). So, he reasons that taxing extraction would lead to greater efficiencies, as if we had "free markets" and as if such a penalty on consumption would necessarily lead to a sustainable economy. In fact, extraction taxes have never successfully curbed consumption, because the tax becomes a cost of production, and so continues the cycle of inflation that is already in place, because the currency is privately owned and inflated by the cost of interest, by which we purchase the "privilege" of using the cartel'’s green pieces of paper. Cotton Mather, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson all understood this shell game.
Hudson comes on to agree with the land-value tax, saying that this would eliminate taxes on business income, personal income, and sales taxes. In theory, this sounds like a good idea, but remember, it is all being done with money that has been commodified into capital; that is, such a tax does not change the inflationary nature of the monetary system, nor does it question the power structure.
The film goes so far as to suggest that this tax would give the third-world the financial resources to address poverty, as well as address our own housing crisis. There are a number of assumptions in such statements that belie the actual current power structure, including the cartel's political and economic chokehold on the countries where such resources exist and where the cartel controls the extraction.
Workers co-op are then suggested in the narration. Chomsky makes some excellent points here. Obviously, this seems like a progressive idea, but it does not address who controls the resources, nor does it address the relationship between these co-ops and the government. For example, such an arrangement could be interpreted to fall within Mussolini’s definition of corporatism. So, scrutiny of the larger picture is required.
The discussion then turns to the ratio of executives’ to workers' salaries, and how that gap has increased dramatically, along with global capital’s concomitant gain in control over planetary activities. To his credit, Daly notes that this exacerbates relationships between classes. The film even goes so far as to attack 19th century British polymath Herbert Spencer's notion of "survival of the fittest," which has been used as a justification for what we know as "Social Darwinism," as if human evolution itself cannot evolve in any other way than by folks trampling each other.
The film says that the competition on the playing field must be leveled, because the monopolists have too much power. Yes, the monopoly capital does have too much power, but by leveling the playing field the film only means regulation, not eliminating monopoly capital.
The narrator then says that those at the top of the power pyramid will try to marginal this film by calling it socialist or Marxist. As we’ve shown throughout our critique of the film, nothing proposed in this 98-minute documentary would actually change the power structure. So, as we noted earlier, we are being manipulated into believing that, by standing up for our rights and calling for the solutions proposed in this film, we would be rising up against the powers-that-be. Rather, we would be helping them implement their plan, just as the pink hats were manipulated into supporting the status quo, including voting for the war criminals that read the teleprompters for the cartel.
Max Keiser then comes on and says he is a capitalist who is just against those who have repeatedly committed crimes against the system. Then Perkins declares himself a capitalist who is against a particular type of capitalism. Stiglitz, in turn, explains that capitalism is here to stay, and that it’s only a question of what kind of market economy, etc.
This leads to the film’s solution: a system of capitalism built on independent money, a tax-system based on consumption, not income, and employee-owned businesses which together would begin to build an economy that is not dependent on constant growth to service its debt. The film then attacks "the free market system," which it says is destroying nature on the premise of progress. Wait, didn’t the silver speculator tell us that we should have "free markets"?
Dr. Ha-Joon Chang, an economist at Cambridge University, backs up this notion that what is being sold as the free market system is not, and that there are many Ph.D. economists who are simply paid to promote this lie. He suggests that regulation is the answer. There is, of course, a lot of truth in this; but, lookout, he selling reform without changing the power structure that created the problem.
The narration explains that, historically, when those in power take too much, people rise up violently to end this, and asks, with such sophisticated tools in the hands of the cartel, can it be done again?
Johnson, from the IMF, says that of course it can be done again, and reminds us that Andrew Jackson beat the Second Bank of the U.S., that Teddy Roosevelt beat J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, and that FDR beat everyone on Wall Street.
This is a totally inaccurate reading of history. Jackson’s victory was only temporary. The banking cartel eventually destroyed sovereign money in the U.S. during Lincoln’s term and, after decimating the economy, eventually passed the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act. What Morgan and Rockefeller experienced were only setbacks—trust-busting only drove monopolies behind more complex legal masks. And, contrary to popular opinion, the banks consolidated their control over the U.S. under FDR via debt slavery.
The colonel then extols his students who disdain Wall Street. The drift is that what has been created by humans can be changed by humans, which is certainly a truism.
The film then calls for a non-violent revolution against our barbaric leaders, who have corporatized democracy, and reviews how this happened with (private) central banks creating (private) fiat money, etc. The film reiterates that the bogeyman is "neo-classical economics."
The film waxes on about revolutions that promised great changes and ended up very much like what they overthrew (with visuals of Mao Zedong to play on "the communist menace").
The narrator then says that to really understand something is to be liberated from it.
As we have noted, the film leverages many progressive ideas while ignoring many pertinent facts and distorting history to reach its conclusion, making it a form of propaganda known as "limited hangout." In our opinion, Ross Ashcroft, who wrote and directed the film, either does not really understand key points about money, economics, and political power and what it would take to create a progressive and sustainable world, or is willfully creating misdirection, which leads me back to why I wrote my latest book, in which you will discover what we believe is a more consistent and thorough approach to the changes necessary at this crossroads in human history.
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August 29, 2018
Boulder County, Colorado
Footnote:
1 Observations on: I. The Answer of M L’Abbé de Vertot to the late Earl Stanhope’s Inquiry concerning the Senate of Ancient Rome, dated December 1719; II. A Dissertation upon the Constitution of the Roman Senate, by a Gentleman, published in 1743; III. A Treatise on the Roman Senate, by Dr. Conyers Middleton, published in 1747; IV. An Essay on the Roman Senate, by Dr. Thomas Chapman, published in 1750; by Mr. Hooke, published in 1758, specifically “Observations of Dr. Middleton’s Treatise and Dr. Chapman’s Essay on the Roman Senate,” p. 189.
[We are pleased to announce that our book, 7 Steps to Global Economic and Spiritual Transformation, is now available online at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble.]
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