Conspiracies. Don’t underestimate the number and importance of conspiracies in human history, conspiracies political or economic or even cultural but usually criminal and often highly immoral. Don’t overestimate their importance in the general scheme of things but don’t forget their sheer abundance indicates they play a role in God’s story—I’ll pass over a discussion of what that role might be but I’ve proposed before that men of high ambition and great energy, even Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and Caesar might sometimes be a yeast of sorts.
During periods of disorder, when human communities can’t protect themselves and when the less corrupted leaders of those communities are often clueless, conspiracies of tightly connected insiders can be quite effective. Trust and openness are destroyed by various factors and those who keep secrets are in their domain, sometimes describable as a sewer or swamp. Greater community loyalties, even to communities of religious faith or to nation, are overwhelmed those who hold a fanatical devotion to blood-relatives and brothers from fraternal organizations. New dependencies are forged for the disorganized masses, often using unsustainable promises by governments or corporations or religious institutions. The appearance of Obamacare, the culmination of `research’ done as early as the Nixon administration, is closely related to the previous six or so decades of a big Cold War, lots of little hot wars, political murders, invasions and destructions of countries powerless before the great powers, large-scale thievery of middle-class wealth by a coalition of politicians and bureaucrats and central bankers and others. [Obamacare is only one example. I’ve read that Bob Haldemann has written that a legalization of homosexual marriage was discussed during campaign strategy sessions of the Nixon insiders. This situation, as such, doesn’t argue for the goodness or badness of government-sponsored healthcare or expanded definitions of marriage, only that any alleged reforms can be tools for the expansion of power by elites.]
There are rational thinkers out there who know some history and as much of current events as can be known by outsiders. Most can be found in the alternative press rather than the mainstream press, though some, such as Seymour Hersh, work in both realms; others get published at least occasionally in mainstream media. One of the more important websites in the alternative press realm, potentially very dangerous to current power-holders, has published a short article about the changing but somewhat stable `dominant corporations’: These Are The Ten “People” Who Run The World (For The Last 20 Years).
I’d take the title for the above linked article as being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it does point to a problem in the alternative news-media. Even the most rational thinkers in that alternative media know enough history and see current events clearly enough to detect criminal conspirators but they often overestimate the competence of the conspirators and greatly overestimate their cohesion and even assume a level of organization like unto that of the 3rd Army as it marched across Europe during WWII. We are dealing with a situation more like that of an extreme separation of classes, such as Roman Patrician clans versus plebeian communities. But worse. As I’ll explain later, our elite is partially hidden, even when publicly known they act in many ways through their secret organizations whether fraternal organizations or government national security agencies. The entire system works to push our hidden elites toward outright criminal activities, worse in many ways than other abusive systems such as that of the Roman Republic.
Let me turn to a historian of a recent generation, Carroll Quigley. In Tragedy and Hope—available in larger libraries and also on the Internet as a pdf-file for free download, Quigley engaged in history verging on journalism. In the early sections, dealing with the period which happens to have been the time in which the American Empire was expanding outside of North America—the decades around 1900, Quigley claimed there to be three groups of elite power-holders, the bankers and the politicians and the monopolistic capitalists. In terms of the American turn to empire, three good examples are JP Morgan, William Howard Taft, and John D Rockefeller. (By `bankers’, Quigley meant not the mortgage officers at old-fashioned local banks; he meant investment or merchant bankers and the closely allied central bankers. And note that Rockefeller’s heirs were bankers, the result of a transition he began by moving from Cleveland to New York City where he began to control his largely industrial empire through banks.)
I don’t think Quigley’s scheme works for the world after 1950 or so and I think the power-holder groups were under transformative stresses for a couple decades or so before the breakdown. Yet, it is the only analysis of this sort I find fully convincing, as much as I respect the more recent analyses of those who write under the name of Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge, Sibel Edmonds, James Corbett, Peter Dale Scott, Alfred McCoy, and a surprisingly large number of others not writing at the New York Times or the Washington Post or their allegedly conservative little brothers. I find Scott’s general talk about the `deep state’ most convincing; basically, the deep-state is a sewer running under the governments and banks and other powerful institutions of the modern world; those sewers are inhabited by two-legged rats who move currency and arms and drugs for terrorists or for the `black operations’ guys at the CIA or the Mexican drug cartels or others of that ilk. Yet, even Scott’s analyses, as he himself acknowledges, don’t lead to a clear view of what’s driving the central institutions of our world; such a view likely might not be possible for a generation or more. And, maybe, the power-elites are currently as poorly organized and as ineffective as the above ground institutions such as the US Department of Justice or the MacArthur Foundation or Bank of America or Microsoft.
We need to gain some plausible view of the power-holders or power-elites if we are to protect our individual selves, our loved ones, our communities. If we set out to protect ourselves from falsely viewed power-holders, we’ll at best waste our energies and more or less consciously allow our attention to be wrongly directed. Even if our view is wrong but plausible, we can start to act in ways which might which might be effective as we will be re-forming our communities.
In any case, I find my analogy of modern gangsters of the state and banking complex and so forth more apt—parasites and cancers inside the bodies we call human communities. This is partly because of my Christian orientation and my updating and enlargement of the human understanding of the Body of Christ. As a consequence of this line of thought, I’ve moved in my mission of trying to understand God’s Creation toward an emphasis on human moral being—individual and communal. In a sense, my interest in these matters can be labeled as `abstract’ or `academic’, but that doesn’t at all dull my concerns, my feelings, about the various victims of the seemingly bumbling and out-of-control power-holders of the 21st century. My concerns are still more personal in that I count myself, as writer and thinker, among these victims and think there to be many out there who could contribute to a richer and more sustainable civilization and those writers and thinkers, artists and dancers, tinkerers and farmers, are more or less deliberately excluded from access to cultural and economic resources as much as the better sort of political and social and religious leaders—this is my reason for thinking of the large foundations, MacArthur and Ford and so on, as part of the mechanisms of confusion, perhaps intended by the elite to be instruments of control.
I’ve dealt with the issue of conspiracies in various places but first came to my current understanding of what is truly happening when I set out to learn about a man who had held that the human race is split between producers and exploiters, with the producers often being unaware they are living on a battlefield of sorts. That was Thomas Jefferson. His friend, John Adams, had a different take as I discussed in I Have a Problem with Many Conspiracy Theorists:
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.
Let me put this in more explicit terms. Americans decided in complicated ways, through political and other channels, that they wouldn’t tolerate any class system, however restricted, however much the upper classes would then be subject to codes of honor and other customary restrictions—which sort of restrictions have typically been more effective in other countries than positive laws. As a consequence, wealthy and powerful men went partially underground to protect their family’s wealth and power and to be able to pass it on more or less intact, which generally meant passing it on to a dominant son. More interesting in its dynamics was the way in which those sons and their brothers in blood or in class attitude formed conspiratorial fraternities at the great universities of the United States and somewhat similar institutions in New York City and other centers of wealth and power.
We ended up with such a strange entity as the Bush family, discussed in the book Family of Secrets by the journalist Russ Baker. Alongside, or perhaps behind, the Bushes are their Walker cousins and their allies such as the Dulles brothers (in the previous generation) and the Harrimans (also in the previous generation?) with their particular sub-house of the House of Rockefeller. Immense wealth and power held by men descended in part from those who’d made their fortunes as early as the 1700s in opium smuggling in Asia or capturing slaves on the western coast of Africa and transporting them (nasty business) to the slave-markets of the Americas. The natural and human resources of the northeastern states of the US, along with the Midwest and Great Lake regions and other regions such as Latin America, were developed partly by way of these criminal gains. It was hardly a break with their traditions when these families used the American Navy and Marine Corps to carry out labor negotiations in foreign lands and private armies as well as local police to shoot down strikers at American mines and factories.
Raised to honor a mixture of ordinary and noble and criminal ancestors, the young men of these families took to such activities as espionage and counter-espionage work, drug-smuggling in the modern style (the CIA in Southeast Asia starting in the Cold War and maybe the preceding hot war), weapons and currency and drug smuggling to support efforts to overthrow Castro or to put into power a variety of thugs in Latin America or other easily victimized areas of the world. They continued to receive training in brotherly loyalty and keeping secrets in the fraternities and other societies of a secret nature, such as Skull and Bones at Yale.
There is a peculiar sort of brotherhood to be found in pirate bands and mercenary bands and such criminal groups as the Mafia; this brotherhood is a perversion in many ways and a strong image in other ways of the complete and perfected brotherhood to be found only in the Body of Christ on the other side of the grave. In its corrupted form in this world, a brotherhood can teach a fanatical secrecy and can demand a loyalty overlapping family ties but overriding even patriotic ties. As John Adams feared, eventually Thomas Jefferson came to share this fear, this attitude on the part of the American elite, driven by the desire to pass on wealth and power in an egalitarian country and also the desire of young men for adventure, leads to a form of criminality not to be found in officially recognized aristocracies in the West. Think of Tom Sawyer playing not at being Robin Hood but rather at being a CIA ops guy organizing psychopathic young Saudis to kill Russian and Afghan civilians in order to sucker the Soviets into an very unwise invasion. Search on the Internet for Zbignew Brzezinski’s interview in the 1990s where he admitted it was the US which started the trouble in Afghanistan for the purpose of giving the Soviets their own Vietnam. I think that if he confessed to this, then the whole story is probably even nastier and might involve, as one possibility, the movement of CIA drug manufacturing to Afghanistan as the Communist government of Vietnam drove them out of Southeast Asia.
We Americans have apparently corrupted much of the world by making it more or less obligatory for our allies and enemies to have this mish-mash of investment bankers and related lawyers, national security apparatchiks, allied or subservient politicians, subservient judges and law-enforcement officials and journalists, even subservient cultural and religious leaders. We also damaged Latin American and some other regions of the world by financing and training some ruthlessly stupid (stupidly ruthless?) colonels and police-chiefs and presidents or Shahs or Poobahs. Human communities are never morally pure but we Americans seem to have set out to reduce the entire world to Caligula’s palace, rooms devoted to exercising absolute power in the cruelest and more arbitrary manner and other rooms devoted to various sorts of moral degeneracy.
The United States has a solid streak of criminality running through its national character. It is hardly a coincidence that this particular criminal streak likely developed first in the elite of the New England Puritans and other Christian communities of related Manichaeistic outlook. See The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for my take on early signs of the moral blindness which I think to underly the corruption of the American intellect and then moral character. I use “intellect” as defined by Jacques Barzun in House of Intellect: “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence.” I discussed this issue in Intelligence vs. Intellect.
I don’t think the American power-elite is a tightly organized hierarchy and it includes far more than those who have strong criminal inclinations, though many of those are willing to benefit from horrible crimes. It’s more of a class separated from the rest of us. Yet, it’s even more; they inhabit a different world even as they live among us. They fight against each other, Skull-and-Boner John Kerry against Skull-and-Boner George W Bush, but they unite when it counts—against the lower classes. And they occasionally admit new members, such as powerful, self-made industrialists or bankers or politicians, perhaps even one so truly lower-class as Bill Clinton.
So, I come around to asking: what are the powerful economic and political interest groups which correspond to the investment bankers, politicians, and monopolistic capitalists of 1900 or so? Do the traditional families who have summered at Newport or the Hamptons for generations still dominate? Does that pushy son of Italian immigrants with his Harvard MBA and his control of a major corporation enter automatically or does he sometimes remain outside the magic circles where men of rigid loyalties control voting rights in some of the secret decisions which determine the fate of industries or countries or rising politicians?
At the very least, we need to account for the national-security complex, with its especially strong links to the gangster undergrounds of our age, and also for the armaments-energy complex, if such is still one complex as it seemed to be for much of the Cold War era.
We would also need to account for what’s happened in politics—the traditional machines, such as the ethnic (Irish and Italian and so on) machines of Boston and New York City and Chicago, don’t seem to be tied in to the power elites in the 21st century. Does anyone other than the bankers and lobbyists get to say which politicians are the peoples’ favorites?
What about the strangeness of modern banking, especially at the money-creating central banks of various closely related types? Traditional bankers who make loans and collect payments of various sorts over years will favor deflation, as Quigley noted, but Morgan and allies created the Federal Reserve banking system which has always produced at least modest inflation. At times, in Germany and other countries during the 1920s and in many countries in the early part of the 21st century, central banks have created powerful inflationary forces, much of the actual damage not showing up fully as of 2013. But our economic systems seem to be a bit like tanks of highly pressurized gases which have not yet exploded and for which there is no known way to release the pressures. I think J P Morgan would be as confused by this situation as would be Nathan Rothschild or Lorenzo Medici. But I could be wrong as I clearly don’t understand this situation now that the bankers have run out of middle-class money to steal through crooked investments dumped into the public realm and private retirement funds and so on.
On the whole, I don’t feel confident that I could identify the groups which interact to form the power structures of the modern world though I’m sure that they are more than one and probably less than five.
American national-security complex? Almost certainly but they seem to be clownish in their own murderous and thieving ways and may lose power at any time.
Some power-hungry group masquerading as bankers? Almost certainly.
Armaments-energy complex? Likely.
Other corporate complexes? Maybe.
Something like a political machine? I don’t know, but such an insightful thinker as Angelo Codevilla seems convinced politicians are the most powerful part of the ruling class, dominating the corporations and banks. Codevilla, I should note, has experience in the centers of power and wealth having been an official in the Reagan administration and having seen, in his opinion and mine, an honest effort to return government to the citizens being sabotaged by action of members of the power elite who had worked their way into Reagan’s inner circle.
Military services? Not yet but our idiot politicians seem to be pushing them toward a coup with the formation of so many special operations groups verging on revivals of the SS.
Local police? Might be the regional warlords in a few decades if things get really bad, especially if they continue along the path of militarization.
Religious leaders? There is no one comparable to either the ruthless but devout Innocent III or the morally degenerate Alexander VI, no one who seeks to serve Christ by becoming Caesar—Augustus or Nero.
The question remains unanswered in my opinion: “Who Are the American Elites and Are They Conspirators?”