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Friday, February 10, 2012

WE ARE ALL GREEKS NOW





The Peoples of the United States and the world are faced with a stark choice between liberating ourselves from a future of debt slavery or freeing ourselves at last from the twin scourges of fascism and war. If we choose to do the latter, it will require educating the common class of the need to give up cherished delusions of radical individualism, national exceptionalism, free markets, the sanctity of private property and the inevitability of war.


Rulers once understood that when a small group arises that seeks to make debt slaves of its People, that system of government is doomed to collapse. Hammurabi established the principle that a ruler had the absolute right to renounce debts and the responsibility to do it when the People could not free themselves from debt bondage. This idea did nor represent an enlightened philosophy but arose from the recognition of the simple fact that the fate of a nation and its government depended on the government’s willingness to protect the basic rights of a People it might someday rely on to fight its wars of conquest.


The tradition continued in ancient Israel, where the tradition of Jubilee required the wealthy to forgive unpayable debts every seven years, ensuring that a lender class did not arise to control the People through usury. When Islam arose, faithful Muslim adherents were required to give a certain amount to assure that family, friends and the poor in general were always able to meet their basic needs. Such governments thrived until they clashed with more powerful debtor nations who used the credit of monarchs to build Armies that could conquer more egalitarian societies and force them to pay tribute in the form of taxes.

The problem with these systems from the point of view of the creditors was that nations which lost wars of Empire could not always afford to pay tribute sufficient to make a profit, and conquerors could choose to renege on their debts, which they often did, remembering the lessons of the past. Nations which forgot the past were inevitably felled when the debt slaves rose in open revolt against the oligarchies that naively assumed they could not unite to defeat them and their powerful Armies.

From time to time, tyrants would arise who would assume control of an oligarchy by appealing to the citizenry by forgiving them their debts. This is the principle by which Athens and many other city-states in Greece and later Rome were founded. Greece was laid waste by Rome when the oligarchy there decided that conquest was a way to endless riches that would always be able to meet the needs of both the ruling class and average citizens by taking it by force from the People’s of other nations. It was the rise of a powerful and unchecked creditor class that spelled the end of the Roman Empire when its subjects in other lands, with nothing to lose, arose in open rebellion.

We find ourselves now in the position of the Roman Empire just before the fall of the Republic. A creditor class with no allegiance to the United States, its people or any of the nations or Peoples of the world has arisen and is fighting among itself for control of what they believe will be a permanent fascist New World Order. They forget that in the game of Monopoly, there is only one winner. In their arrogance, each assumes that the alliances they form now will enable them to turn on the weakest nations among them and that in the end, they alone will emerge victorious.

In England before the American Revolution and in the United States after, bankers were forced to accommodate to the prospect of democratic control of the governments of debtor nations. In characteristic fashion they found a way to make a virtue out of what should have spelled their doom. When a people voluntarily incorporated as a democratic nation, they assumed by choice the debts incurred as the result of war and other government functions that were seen as necessary and inevitable but which in fact served the interests of the moneyed class. This was the first step toward self-imposed national debt slavery.

When the United States and other ostensibly democratic nations allowed their monetary systems to come under the direct control of the lending class, they took the next step. When their corporate-controlled governments renounced sovereignty over their own trade policies to an oligarchy of lenders who constructed the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, they took the next step toward creating a one world government that is totally out of control of the Peoples of the world. The World Trade Organization was created to promote a fictional free market that has never existed in reality. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, ostensibly formed to help emerging countries, became tools to make them nations of debt slaves. We are now witnessing the inevitable result of our allowing central control of the world economy: The United States and Europe too are becoming slaves in a fascist New World Order.
In Europe we can see the seeds of a revolt against an Empire controlled by the creditor class of international corporate terrorists. These are the parasites that control the governments of the US and its current allies in the War of Terror, which is being waged to control the resources necessary to prevent the rise of any challenge to their collective power. In Greece, the hardest hit of the nations of the European Union and the birthplace of democracy, the People have not forgotten that the right of the People to determine their own destiny is absolute. Rather than giving in to austerity measures that amount to paying tribute to the banking cartels that dictate to their government, they are standing up to demand economic and social justice.

In Iceland, the People have already spoken. They took back their own government and renounced the crushing debts imposed by the creditor class that controls the IMF, as Argentina did when subjected to the cruelties of the economic straightjacket the International Monetary Fund demands to bail out the very nations whose economies they have crushed. In Greece, Spain, Ireland and other nations threatened with economic devastation by a ruling class with no regard for their welfare, the People are rising in open revolt to the Anglo-American Empire that is threatening human civilization with its ability to wage world war economically and militarily.

Once upon a time in America there were nations where the People ruled themselves and where for the most part, nations lived together in peace and prosperity. These were the first truly democratic societies, with absolute equality, a voice for women in government, a natural aristocracy where the Peoples chose their leaders and a common recognition that the fate of each member of society could not be separated from the fate of the group, its neighbors, or the planet itself. This awareness led them to create a system of government where what was necessary for an individual to survive and thrive was considered the common property of all. These were the nations of the Native Americans.

The US constitution is a hodgepodge of compromises between leaders impressed by the governments they found in America and those who wanted to preserve the privileges of the wealthy and in particular the wealthy slave owners who lived in luxury from the toil of those who they forced to do their work for them. This grand compromise fell far short of the democratic ideal, but had the saving grace of incorporating a means of evolving as the nation progressed toward true democracy. It is through the amendment process that the US constitution has been altered to guarantee rights to former slaves and to women. Had the Supreme Court in its infinite arrogance not resisted the tide of history in granting constitutional rights to corporations, we might now be enjoying the blessings of freedom and democracy for ourselves and our posterity.

The price of the original sin of slavery was a bloody Civil War that cost the lives of more Americans than all of the wars before and since. This was the cost of achieving a more just nation, one which must ultimately repay the debt owed to the martyrs of that war by ensuring that the last, best hope for Mankind does not perish from the Earth. If we can end the current Civil War between liberals and conservatives, we can finish the Revolution by working together to pass a constitutional amendment that will abolish corporate personhood, wrest control of the US government from the hands of international corporate terrorists and for the first time in human history establish a true democracy.

We are fighting this time not only for the freedom of one group but for the freedom of Mankind. If we put aside the artificial distinctions that we allow to divide us, we can take back America for the People, help the nations of the world free themselves and together leave our children a future devoid of the threats of slavery, famine, environmental destruction and war.



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