Brave New Economy

Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World depicts a scientifically structured class-tier society, where people are bred and reared in ways conducive to the role they are determined to fulfill. This ensures not only that they are capable of doing their job, but also that they are happy doing it. People are given material comforts, particularly drugs and the opportunity for promiscuous sex and despite the lack of religion or war the system of social control works very well. Like many other dystopian narratives, not to mention most film trailers, 'one man' stands up against this system, and essentially fails to accomplish anything. This is because the system itself is too well designed, it accommodates such small rebellions quite comfortably. The same basic narrative and conclusion appears in Orwell's 1984, but in the story of Rollerball the protagonist Jonathan is somewhat successful, so it should be said that not all dystopian narratives are pessimistic.

The present financial dystopia is a topic of great concern for some. Just this week the two biggest oil companies in the world, Exxon-Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell announced a dramatic fall in quarterly profits. The Bilderberg member owners of these companies are staring down the barrel of only making $3.95 billion and $2.3 billion in the last few months. Still, compared to the potential for looting $23.7 trillion via the Federal Reserve this is small fry. Nonetheless, senior BBC journalist Robert Peston is still doing his best to misconstrue what has happened and who was responsible. Peston recently published a blog article titled 'why men are to blame for the credit crunch', which concludes that because he knows far more men than women driven entirely by their salary and bank balance that a few more women in the City might help avoid this sort of collapse in the future.

This explanation and suggestion is faulty for two main reasons. Firstly, while it may be true that men and women have certain characteristic differences this may in part be because of the very 'sexism in the City' (and elsewhere) that Peston mentions. If you treat people differently for a long time chances are they'll end up behaving differently. Secondly, this places the blame for the collapse on the greed of bankers and traders, and some on the incompetence of the government who sat back and watched the dramatic rise in the hundreds of trillions in collateral staked via the derivatives market. Left out of the equation is the role of the economic system of creating money as debt.

A government or corporation creates new money to spend by selling debt with the promise of a low but guaranteed interest rate and the payment of the debt at a given point. This year the UK government is intending to borrow £175 billion, to cover investments in banks and financial assets, and lower tax revenues due to the recession. This means someone, typically a country like Japan or China who has a huge trade surplus, or a country like Saudi Arabia with massive oil revenues, will have to buy that debt. The aim for the government is that by growing the economy they (a) have money to service and pay back the debt, (b) inflate the economy, reducing the real value of the debt, and (c) maintain the ability to issue/sell new debt in the future. This is all predicated on the ability of the country to maintain its tax revenues, i.e. on the ability and willingness of its citizens to pay its taxes, and hence is a form of mortgage using the future labour of citizens as collateral.

As such, it is in the government's interests to support any profitable activity in their country which leads to increased profits and revenues. One such activity is derivatives trading. Derivatives are essentially contracts sold by one person to another. In exchange for money, the seller agrees to buy or sell something at a specified future date, whether it's an amount of oil or sugar, or shares in a company, or a particular type of mortgage-backed security. If the price fluctuates significantly in the intervening period the seller may end up buying or selling something worth a vastly different amount to when the contract was made, thus enabling large profits and losses to be made from relatively smaller amounts of money.

This is how the derivatives market and the sub-prime mortgage market in the US caused the crash. As increasing numbers of people were given mortgages when they were unlikely to be able to pay them back, the derivatives speculation on the value of mortgage-backed securities was increasing. That speculation drove up the value of those securities which in effect were debt issued by banks and mortgage companies on the basis of expected future income from the interest and repayment of those mortgages. As the true value of those mortgages, and hence securities backed by those mortgages, and hence investment funds who had money in those securities, and hence the derivatives contracts betting on the value of those investment funds, was going down, the traded value was going up. It is this way that the Royal Bank of Scotland built up a balance sheet including £1900 billion of liabilities, or 140% of British GDP. The taxpayer is theoretically now the largest stockholder in RBS and therefore could be asked to underwrite nearly £2 trillion if there's another crash.

When BNP Paribas announced in August 2007 that they were freezing withdrawals from three investment funds largely composed of mortgage-backed securities, it was the first admission that the problems in the US mortgage market had global financial implications. As all these derivatives trading firms, debt-issuing mortgage companies, national governments/central banks, investment funds and so on had invested in one another, mutually inflating the worth of each others financial assets, relatively small problems with people defaulting on their mortgages in the US ultimately took hundreds of trillions off the balance sheets of various institutions. The Ponzi Scheme started to collapse. A Ponzi Scheme is a type of pyramid selling where investments are taken for a company that doesn't exist, and initial profits are paid out of this investment to make it appear legitimate and encourage further investment. It is named after Charles Ponzi, who was taking investment for an apparent plan to make money from currency fluctuations, and this was back in the 1920s.

However, the plan here wasn't to cut and run, because that would make the money looted through the derivatives-debt bubble worth nothing as the entire global financial system fell apart. So the governments of various countries, and the Eurozone, all of which are beholden to this system of creating money as debt and committing to growth and inflation by any means available, stepped in and announced that it wasn't a Ponzi scheme after all, and they would prove this by investing trillions of our money in the scheme to prop it up for a bit longer. Even Robert Peston, at best a confused and ignorant commentator, noticed an aspect of this contradiction:

Right now we appear to be as far from ever from reconciling the conflict between the short-term imperative that banks lend more, in order that the recession isn't too prolonged, with the equally important long-term imperative that they lend considerably less. - Peston, BBC blog

As such, it makes little difference who is in charge of these major financial institutions because they're all held to ransom by a system of mortgaging the future and then betting on the value of that process of mortgaging. However, this doesn't mean we should blame 'the system', we should all blame the people who knew what they were doing when they implemented this bubble and this crash. But at the same time we must recognise how this happened if we are to build an economy that is not subject to such manipulative domination by a financial elite. At this point it is worth asking who works in Wall Street for the Securities Services of BNP Paribas, and the answer is Marcia Rothschild.

However, it has not been plain sailing for this network of banksters. Barclays, a Rothschild interest through Lazard, has recently announced quite solid half-year profits of just under £3 billion. Much of this is from their investment banking arm, Barclays Capital, which has almost doubled its profits compared to last year, largely due to confidence in Barclays generated by their choice not to take public money but instead to get bailed out by the same rich Arab who bought Man City. Mansour made nearly £1.5 billion on a £2 billion investment in a matter of months, suggesting he's in the know about which banks are protected assets of the cartel and which are not. He wouldn't be the only one.

There’s been a clear concentration of market share amongst the winners, like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and Barclays. That looks set to continue. - Bloomberg

However embarassing it must have been to go cap in hand to the Arabs, people still identify most positively with a bank that is privately owned than one that borrows money from a government. Likewise, Goldman Sachs in September 2008 turned itself from a conglomerate of trading companies into a bank holding company so it could gain access to public funds, which they rapidly turned into the best quarterly profits in their history.

Despite even the biggest and brightest banks having to adopt some risky strategies to maintain their position, the news in the last few weeks has been largely positive. Obama, Geithner and Bernanke are all predicting a recovery in 2010, and according to Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman Britain is also in good shape. There are two quite different ways of looking at this, with regard to what came out of the 2009 Bilderberg club meeting in Greece. The pre-meeting booklet, leaked to Daniel Estulin, says that the main item on the agenda was how to manage the recession, considering:

Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty ... or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency. - globalresearch

However, Estulin reported that his sources inside the group feared the hardline, Kissinger model of a rapid shift to a new economic order. Their concerns were largely that such a policy might make things spiral out of control, leading to a collapse of the influence of the Bilderberg group and associates. So the recent positivity may be, as Esulin says, hype designed to set people up for another crash and massive losses, or may be a sign that some of those who crashed the market in 2007 feel that things have gone too far.

The first of these interpretations is supported by several recent stories. As previously described here the Rockefeller/Rothschild interests have been moving into global warming lobbying and buying up Carbon Credits/Trading companies. Goldman Sachs are similarly well positioned, as they own at least 10% of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the main US centre for the sale of carbon credits. The recently passed US Clean Energy and Security Act has made cap and trade an official national security policy, and those with a stake in the trading system of this new currency are set to make a fortune.

Goldman Sachs admitted recently that the software they use for automated trading could be used to manipulate the markets, due to its ability to execute complex trading strategies at high speed. Amusingly, a man called Sergey Alenykov was recently arrested by federal agents and accused of stealing the software to sell overseas. The idea that Goldman could be among those banks profiting not only from the bubbles but also the crashes was explored at some length in an article by one of Rolling Stone's editor, Matt Taibbi. Uncompromisingly titled 'The Great American Bubble Machine, From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again' this is one of very few in depth pieces published by the major media explaining just how such private financial institutions really operate.

Taibbi outlines five prior bubbles Goldman helped created, and profited from even when they burst: The boom before the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the Tech-Stock bubble of the 1970s and 80s, the housing bubble of the the 1990s, the oil price bubble of 2008 and the new bubble emerging from the bailout. He also predicts a new bubble for the 'more efficient' economic order desired by the hardliners in the Bilderberg group, the global warming bubble.

Predictably, Goldman have labeled Taibbi's article as a conspiracy theory, but along with the evidence of other banks adopting near identical strategies this is a desperate protest. Not only have these banks bought carbon trading firms, they've bought shares in the very exchanges where the trading will take place. The new market is essentially unregulated, and Taibbi is not the only one suggesting that it will bubble. Louis Redshaw, head of environmental markets at the highly profitable Barclays Capital predicted back in July 2007 that carbon trading would become the world's biggest commodity market, and possibly the world's biggest overall market, a claim echoed by others.

Cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected. - Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Why is carbon trading going to become so profitable? As governments pass legislation that require firms, and ultimately ordinary people too, to work within quotas for reducing greenhouse emissions the value of permits allowing you to go beyond the quota will skyrocket. Already the term 'carbon debt' is being used to describe the 'overuse' by an individual or state of the world's capacity to absorb carbon. Governments are being encouraged to impose a carbon tax, to help pay this carbon debt, making any activity which uses energy (i.e. almost anything) potentially taxable, and subject to the speculations and manipulations of the bankster elite.

The model of creating money as debt, and thus requiring taxation to service that debt, so our source of money beholds us to a system of perpetual owing, is being applied not just to all activities which require money, but all activities which require energy too. This is a measure by which the wealth elite will protect themselves, and further increase the poverty of the majority of the world's occupants. They will be able to borrow from future emissions allowances or buy other people's allowances because they can afford to do so. A recent episode illustrates the likely future for much of the developing world if the activity as debt system is allowed to take hold.

In Gujarat, India, there is a Fluorochemical plant which produces refrigerant gases for air conditioning and other cooling systems. A few years ago they installed new technology at the plant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and were lauded and financially rewarded by the UN, as were a British company who'd invested in the new scheme. However, as part of the deal the auditors whose job it is to verify the reduction in emissions, the 'carbon saving', were paid for by the company who runs the plant, and they are only interested in greenhouse gases. They also used some of the UN money to build a plant making Teflon and caustic soda. The result of this is that the land around the plant has become heavily polluted, poisoning the water supplies and starving the local agricultural population. The British company involved can claim it has off-set or reduced its emissions by participating in the Gujarat deal.

Why can they get away with this? Because the pollution doesn't come under the sexy, neanderthal flag of global warming. Because the pollution isn't classified by scientists as 'carbon emissions'. That phrase is as bizarre a synecdoche as you'll find. In order to prevent climate change we must reduce carbon emissions, the scientists and their client governments repeat, over and over, but they really mean carbon dioxide emissions. And even that isn't quite right, because there are many greenhouse gases beyond just carbon dioxide. And even that involves a deception because we should be concerned about pollution in general, about all forms of environmental destruction, not just those which might if our abstract computer models are correct lead to some sort of change in the climate.

Instead we continue to screw over some of the world's poorest people and brand ourselves the morally righteous. The really sick element, picked up by Taibbi's article, is that Goldman, JP Morgan and so on won't even have to manipulate the carbon market to create a bubble. As reductions targets become more aggressive over time the value of carbon credits, in effect the right to ignore those targets, will become higher and higher. Even without the mass speculation that will almost definitely come alongside the Brave New Carbon Economy the price will rise aggressively. However, the ability to crash the market, possibly by flooding it with cheap carbon credits, will remain.

The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) - Taibbi, Rolling Stone

If there is a quick fire, Kissinger inspired depression then the Carbon Debt economy is most likely what the Bilderberg report means by a system 'with more efficiency but less sovereignty'. Perhaps significantly, it was Goldman Sachs who first put up the money for Kissinger to open his private consultancy back in the 80s, and the likely outcome of an activity as debt economy is Kissinger's long desired reduction in the global population. However, there is a more optimistic view, where the elite are worried that trying to execute an even tighter economic grip will see them lose their status.

One man's story supports this more optimistic view. Benjamin Fulford is the son of a Canadian diplomat, from a major ruling class Canadian family. Having left home at 17 with a feeling that something was deeply wrong with the West, he lived in the Amazon for some years before studying at length at a Japanese university. He then lived and worked in Japan for years, for Forbes' Asian bureau among others. Over time he came to realise that the democratic, civilised veneer of Japanese society was a front for a collaboration between the state, huge corporate interests and organised crime. He wrote about these topics and met with some opposition from different parties, leading to various threats by trained assassins hired by the very powers he was seeking to explain and document.

One such threat came from a ninja sent by former Japanese finance minister Heizo Takenaka, a protege of Henry Kissinger, who told him that if he wanted to be a muckraking journalist he could, but he'd die at the age of 46. The ninja then told him that his other option was to become part of the process and offered him the job of finance minister of Japan, an idea that had occurred to Fulford before because he sees the $5 trillion in foreign reserves Japan has as a means of, in his words, 'ending poverty and environmental destruction'. Fulford countered this by asking the ninja if the mass depopulation plan was true, was actually in the works. The ninja confirmed that it was. Fulford has also interview Takenaka on the same subject, who told him that the Japanese were going along with it because the Americans had threatened them with HAARP-induced earthquakes. Fulford claims, as do others, that SARS is a racially targeted bioweapon, designed specifically to facilitate the genocide of all but around 500 million people in the 'yellow countries'.

Shortly after the visit by Takenaka's ninja Fulford was approached by representatives of the Asian secret societies, which he says have 6 million members and over 100,000 trained assassins. They too were concerned about the depopulation plans, and the general warlike dominance of the West in global affairs. They asked Fulford for suggestions and strategies of what to do. Fulford thought about it and decided to start writing more aggressively about the Takenaka-Rockefeller connections. Further death threats were made by the ninja, to which Fulford responded saying that if they killed him, David Rockefeller and his cronies would all die, as the Asian secret societies vastly outnumbered them if it came to a covert war of assassination.

Fulford expanded this to the effective issuing an 'ultimatum to the Illuminati', via two widely received sources in the realm of secret societies and conspiracies, Jeff Rense's website and radio show, and Henry Makow's website. Essentially he said that they had two options - stand aside and let the world flourish, or they can die at the hands of the Asian secret societies. He has since done further interviews telling the same story.

However true or false you might find Fulford's story, there are indications of a serious dissatisfaction in Asia with US-led dominance. The US is currently running up extraordinary deficits, and therefore borrowing money through the Federal Reserve, i.e. selling debt, in large quantities. This is a rapid inflation, and therefore devaluing, of the dollar as a currency. The Chinese have responded by dumping their dollar currency reserves, and spending them on more tangible, valuable assets. The Japanese have held back, though have suggested plans to do the same. It's also been reported that India, Russia, Brazil and others are preparing to do the same. China is calling for a new world currency, one of Fulford's suggestions, furthering damaging the dollar's value. China was conspicuously absent from recent US bond auctions, indicating they are unwilling to take on more than their present $800 billion or so of US debt. So who is buying the bonds? The US itself, who have for some time been the largest holders of their own debt. The Ponzi scheme is going into overdrive because the Asians have stopped playing ball.

They have no excuses, as the Bank for International Settlements, the central banker's bank, warned of a financial meltdown due to ludicrous credit and derivatives policies back in June 2007, and a year later issued further warnings, anticipating the Lehman collapse. It is possible that by backing them into a corner the elites might be put off their depopulation, carbon as debt economic plans and reconsider what it is they truly want. Ultimately, unlike most stories told by conspiracy whistleblowers (including Matt Taibbi), if Fulford is right then there are reasons to be optimistic about what's coming next. Whatever else you might say about him and his story, he does offer a possibility and a vision that truly tests the limits of the system of control. The most extensive of his interviews, in which he outlines his personal background and how he came to the position of issuing such an ultimatum, was with Project Camelot, which you can see in three parts below.