[C.M. Burns]

Extraordinary Times, Intentional Collapse, and Takedown of the U.S.A.

By Richard C. Cook

Global Research, April 30, 2008

Much has been written about whether a worldwide plan exists to control events and steer them in the direction profitable to an elite of the rich and powerful. Is this a “conspiracy theory”? While it is difficult to be specific about who exactly may be behind such a conspiracy, if it exists, it is at least clear that the privately-managed system of global financial capitalism gives ample opportunity for the world’s richest people to combine for their mutual benefit. Further, global financial capitalism itself is based on the monopolization of money-creation by a world banking system that is largely privately owned, even while working through the central banks of the largest and most prosperous nations. This article postulates the existence of a coordinated and longstanding matrix set up by the controllers of money to dominate the movements of history. The article focuses particularly on what seems to have been an attack that has been going on for over a century against the independence of the nations of Russia and the U.S. The article also suggests a series of monetary reforms whereby the U.S. , or any other nation, can regain its economic identity and preserve its political freedom. The article was written a short distance from the reconstructed colonial capitol building in Williamsburg , VA. On this site on May 15, 1776, the Fifth Virginia Convention voted unanimously to instruct its delegation at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to enter a motion for independence. It may be time to do that again.

Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) wrote, “It is a mistake to think the times we are living in are like any other. These are extraordinary times.”

Ouspensky, with his mentor, G.I. Gurdjieff, escaped from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, during the Russian Civil War. Though academia has failed to acknowledge it, this epochal convulsion was financed in part through the monetary resources of the international financial elite operating out of London, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Hamburg, and Frankfurt.

It was this elite, acting through Western banks, which appears to have surreptitiously provided the wherewithal for Lenin and Trotsky to destroy the Russian nation after the fall of the Tsarist regime at the end of World War I. Support by the Western financiers is discussed by Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson in his revisionist history, The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism & Orthodoxy. (The Foundation for Economic Liberty , Washington , D.C., 2003)

The present analysis postulates that the takeover of Russia, whose backbone was the alliance among the House of Romanoff, the Orthodox Church, the land-owing nobility, and thousands of self-governing peasant communes, was one of two major projects which the financiers set out to accomplish early in the 20th century in a longer-range plan to dominate the globe. The other was the control and eventual destruction of the United States of America. That project may be reaching fruition through the ongoing and seemingly purposeful financial meltdown of 2008.


Why Russia and the U.S. ?

Events affecting nations have their roots in history, and people underestimate how what happens today is conditioned by the past. The respective fates of Russia and the U.S. have been linked for a long time.

The two countries had a close relationship during the American Civil War, when the Russian fleet anchored in New York and San Francisco harbors. In 1867, Russia sold the huge expanse of Alaska to the U.S. Later, the U.S. provided engineering support for Russian industrial development.

The two continental giants were, during the latter part of the 19th century, becoming the greatest land powers in the world. With Germany , Great Britain ’s chief rival for economic might, added to the mix, the hegemony of the financiers’ power base in Britain and northern Europe was threatened in a way not seen since Napoleon.

Both Russia and the U.S. were largely Christian nations, with a sizeable portion of the American population, especially recent immigrants, being members of the Roman Catholic faith. For centuries nothing had been a greater obstacle to the financial control of nations through war and finance than the Christian religion and its teachings against usury.

Plus neither the U.S. nor Russia had a central privately-owned bank. The U.S. had long since gotten rid of its own central banks, the First (1791-1811) and Second (1816-1836) Banks of the United States . The whole concept of commercial banking having control of a nation’s economy was alien to the Russian and U.S. mindset.

Instead, wealth came from work. This was expressed by President Abraham Lincoln in a December 3, 1861, address to Congress when he said, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Lincoln could make such a statement because the U.S. economy, as was the Russian, was deeply rooted in the soil. The backbone of the two cultures was the Russian peasant and the American yeoman farmer, as Thomas Jefferson called him. The merchant and artisan economies of the towns and cities in both nations were founded upon the wealth of the countryside which was derived from human and animal labor and from working the land. Even when industrialization began to flourish in the latter part of the 19th century, it was fueled in both countries largely through savings and retained earnings, not bank credit created “out of thin air” through fractional reserve lending.


Banker Domination

By the early 20th century, the bankers of Europe had a mission before them. If Russia and the U.S. could be controlled, nothing would stand in the way of the rule of humanity by the materialistic pseudo-religion of power and wealth by which the financiers were obsessed. As Max Weber (1864-1920) wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the acquisition of wealth was viewed as a sign that a person was one of the “elect.” The financiers’ sphere of influence was centered in northern Europe , where the anti-usury doctrines both of the Roman Catholic Church and Martin Luther (1483-1546) had been undermined through the teachings of John Calvin (1509-1564).

As is well known, banking in Europe began in the medieval period with store-front gold merchants who invented fractional reserve banking by lending certificates against a gold reserve held for their customers on deposit. By the time of the Renaissance, banking was centered in Italy and Germany , then spread north and west to the Netherlands , France , and England .

By this time the Catholic prohibition against usury was well-developed. Pope Sixtus V (1585-90) said charging of interest was “detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred canons and contrary to Christian charity.” Theological historian John Noonan wrote that “the doctrine [of usury] was enunciated by popes, expressed by three ecumenical councils, proclaimed by bishops, and taught unanimously by theologians.” (“Development of Moral Doctrine,” 54 Theological Studies, 662, 1993)

Lending of money at interest was often left to the European Jews, where statements in various scriptures, such as the Talmud, appeared to allow the practice when dealing with non-Jews. Some argue that the Vatican worked behind the scenes by using Jews as fronts for their own lending operations.

In England , the Tudor and Stuart monarchs made a stand against the rise of bankers as issuers of currency. As Susan Boskey writes in her book The Quality Life Plan: 7 Steps to Uncommon Financial Security, “the Mixt Moneys Case of 1604 in England determined money as a public measure to be regulated by the state.” According to Alexander Del Mar, head of the U.S. Department of Weights and Measures in the late 19th century and author of the book, History of Money in America From the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Constitution, the Mixt Moneys Case determined that “the state alone had the right to issue money.”

Boskey continues: “For over half a century, this ruling alarmed the merchants of London who attempted to defeat the Mixt Moneys decision. The East India Company was the main instigator in the effort, because they were eager to turn a profit by shipping silver to India in exchange for gold. Success was achieved with the British Free Coinage Act of 1666, which, according to Del Mar, ‘altered the monetary systems of the world.’ He wrote: ‘The specific effects of this law were to destroy the royal prerogative of coinage, nullify the decision in the Mixt Moneys case, and inaugurate a future series of commercial panics and disasters which to that time were totally unknown.’ Moneylenders known as ‘strong room keepers’ began the practice of making interest-bearing loans that were not backed one-hundred percent by the gold reserves remaining in their strong room.”

“The British Free Coinage Act of 1666,” continues Boskey, “marked a turning point in the role of currency creation as a public measure to one dominated by moneylenders. No longer was the act of putting money into circulation directly connected to the actual, existing material riches of a nation.”

About this time, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was writing his now-famous Diary. According to Canadian monetary expert Martin Hattersley, Pepys “was describing in surprised delight the new institution of banking, by which the smart investor, instead of paying the goldsmith for warehousing his valuables, opened an account, and was actually paid interest for having his money looked after!”

Pepys was captivated by the familiar but pernicious notion that, instead of working for a living, a person could have his money “work for him.” Aristotle had spoken against this concept 2,000 years earlier: “The most hated sort of wealth getting and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural.” (1258b Politics)

Hattersley continues: “Who paid for Samuel Pepys' remarkable new service? Basically, the public did. Pepys, leaving his gold with the banker, enabled the latter to lend it out to a third party. Pepys had his ‘money in the bank,’ and the borrower took the gold. The borrower naturally paid interest on the loan. Pepys received interest on his deposit. The same money being (notionally) in the possession both of Pepys and of the borrower meant an increase in the monetary mass of the nation. All the holders of money in the nation, therefore, had the value of their holdings very slightly diluted. There was a profit to the banker on the ‘spread’ between borrowing and lending rates. There was a profit to Mr. Pepys, who at one and the same moment had both money in the bank and an interest bearing investment. Yet the borrower also profited. His loan would be at a lower interest rate than that on capital that had had to be saved up. ‘Smart’ bank financing put him ahead of conventionally financed competitors. All three parties gained, at the expense of the general public, the value of whose money was diluted through inflation of the monetary mass.”

Finally, concludes Hattersley, “Skipping forward three centuries (past events such as the South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, the railway boom and the 1929 market crash) we find that the little spot of inflation that Mr. Pepys indulged in has become a universal way of life. The extensive capital development of Canada [and the U.S. ] in the post-World War II boom has been largely financed, not by personal savings and investment, but by the inflation of the money supply. This has left the thrifty who invested their little savings from the hard times of the Great Depression in mortgages, bonds, and life insurance deprived of most of the rewards of their thrift, and has caused the profits of inflation to benefit all who could borrow, build, and then repay their capital in deflated dollars later on.”

Hattersley captures the essence of the modern usury-based economy. No longer is life based on honest human labor and the resources of nature, but on financial manipulation. This is why religious people have always viewed usury as a crime. Aristotle placed the usurer in the same category as others who “ply sordid trades,” such as pimps.

Returning to the march of history, in 1688, James II, who had become a Catholic, fled the British throne. Through the “Glorious Revolution,” he was replaced by the Protestants William and Mary of the Dutch House of Orange. The main instrument of power of the financiers who supported them was the Bank of England, founded in 1694.

The next two centuries saw the financiers’ control of world commerce spread through the instrumentality of the British Empire . The bedrock of British policy was “free trade,” which allowed British manufacturers who paid their workers a pittance to undersell their competitors elsewhere. This was aided by having the British pound become the world’s trading currency.

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© Copyright Richard C. Cook, Global Research, 2008