I’m speaking of rational ‘conspiracy theorists’ which means those who claim, rightly, that power-elites develop and are quite capable of engaging ruthlessly in focused criminal conspiracies when their interests are threatened. I don’t even know how to make a pitch to those who think there is a tight-knit conspiracy run by Satan or Jesuits or Freemasons or the like. To carry out such a conspiracy would require that the central managers would be able to fully understand and control this world. It would require they be as smart as the Creator.
Something of a rational and more limited conspiracy is not only plausible but likely in a world where some would control the rest of us for their own purposes. In terms used by Thomas Jefferson: exploiters divide themselves out and try to form a class that dominates the producers. Jefferson seemed too willing to assume that some Providence or providence would protect American producers and keep the exploiters under control. His friend, then non-friend, then friend again, John Adams, agreed about the division between exploiters and producers but didn’t think there was much chance the exploiters could be controlled unless the United States recognized an aristocratic class of some sort and put specific constraints upon them, even if only the constraints of honor which have done a fair amount of good in channeling the exploiters in somewhat better directions. Of course, when Vikings are attacking there is an obvious role of honor for warlords. It’s not clear what legitimate role there could be for our modern-day central banks and big-city banks. They seem to exist only for their own purposes.
Our modern bankers and other financiers who sit heavily in the centers of our modern day spider-webs have no skills, at least none they exercise, but those of wrapping governments, companies, and individuals in fibers of debt. Let the victims sit in those fibers until they soften up, rot a little. That works better for a hungry, liquid-sucking spider than it does for an entire banking industry. Predatory bankers tend to destroy the societies they would use for their own enrichment.
I, of course, am not speaking of honest banks that still, even in this age of corruption, try to turn local savings into local mortgages or business loans. I’m not speaking of banking operations which finance ongoing or new companies by loaning on inventory or by offering even risky loans. I’m speaking of banks, and other investing operations, which seek control of wealth created by others. Kodak and Apple aren’t likely as start-up operations nowadays. If some corporation doesn’t back-engineer and steal their product, an investment banker will steal the company as soon as it needs a loan to meet payroll. Local savings banks aren’t set up for that sort of work. Maybe they can help the local grocer through cash-flow problems but not a start-up manufacturer.
There have been other periods when bankers, and their allies amongst high-spending politicians, were dominant. There were still other periods dominated by warlords or by tribal or nationalist politicians more interested in expansion of various sorts than they were in looting their own people. There were even periods dominated by the producers, such as the Colonial Age of North America and the succeeding century or so. That even led into a mixed period when we had, in a manner of speaking, Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie mixing with J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller.
Bankers have not always been dominant, not even in sophisticated societies. Even so recently as the criminal conspiracy of the British government to sucker the Germans into sinking the Lusitania shows us the men with the guns can tell the rich guys where to shove their bundles of bonds. There were members of some rich and powerful families on the Lusitania and their families were never allowed to see their bodies said to be riddled by the bullets and shrapnel from all the British armaments in the lower holds — some say the British probably took care to position the crates so the bullets and other projectiles were pointed towards the passenger compartments. After recovering the bodies without allowing civilians to help, the British soldiers welded shut all the caskets and buried in a guarded cemetery in Ireland. True it is that those soldiers were commanded by a hierarchy including a lot of men from the power-elite but they were willing to kill some of their own to trick the Americans into the war.
Even when bankers, financiers in more general terms, dominate, the men with guns can get their way at times. And there are times when the men with guns, or the barbarians with spears, will rule. Still, it’s true that rich societies eventually get soft and corrupt so that bankers of a certain type can obtain vast sums of money and gain great power over productive assets and also governments. We’re children of our age and even rational observers tend to think the ways of our age are the ways of every age. We live in a corrupt age, an age of moral decay, when bankers and corporate cams and political cogs rule.
So, I’m going to firm up a recommendation I’ve made in a loose manner before. I’ll break it down into a few points.
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Humanity tends to separate into at least two classes: exploiters and producers to use the terms of Thomas Jefferson.
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The exploiters fight against other exploiters for power and wealth, mostly being united in their belief that the common folk are there only for the skinning.
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The failure to recognize and properly constrain powerful families has resulted in an illusion of secret conspiracies though a little knowledge of history would tell us that members of the exploiter class regularly have committed crimes out of passion or to achieve goals. They are what they are partly because of the belief that they own the earth and the rest of us are tolerated to the extent we can serve them.
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There is no occult, superhuman, supernatural core to these social processes. The exploiters are human beings from families founded by aggressive men of some high levels of talents. They are human beings. Often the talent of the founder isn’t transmitted to sons or grandsons.
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I repeat: the men from exploiter classes commit crimes. In some periods, they have no reason to pretend otherwise. Warlords can freely murder peasants or have their way with the daughters of the tradesmen in villages. In such periods of history, there is no recourse that doesn’t involve death to those in the lower classes. Nowadays, the exploiters have good reasons to commit their crimes, say the murder of President Kennedy, as mafioso-style criminal conspiracies.
So what does this mean? A lot of the conspiracy theorists are intelligent and well-read men and women who know a bit of history. Yet, they concentrate fully on the present danger at a time when the present danger might be disappearing to make room for the next danger. In terms from military strategy: We should be careful about putting our greatest efforts into preparing to fight the last war. While I would like to believe we will be heading into a period dominated by producers, it seems likely to me we’ll be entering a period dominated by local warlords who can provide police and military protection. The would-be bankers might have to return to honest work as merchants and traders, even having to bear risk themselves without having politicians on the payroll who can cover losses with taxpayers’ money. I make no claims to be reliable in my predictions, but the main point is that we should try to anticipate the future well enough to see the dangers we’ll be facing there rather than concentrating on the dangers in the rear-view mirror.