“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
Albert Einstein

“What you don’t know, or rather you can’t know, is more important than what you know. Darkness does not destroy what it conceals.”
Anonymous

“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Isaac Newton

“Everyone sees what he/she knows.”
Bruno Munari

“Music teaches us the most important thing there is: listening.”
Ezio Bosso

“Learning is not compulsory; it's voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it's voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.”
“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.”
William Edwards Deming

“Dostoyevsky taught us to let humility be preceded by humiliation. By feeling the shame of ourselves we find ourselves. If guilt has a use, it is that of letting us feel at cogniting fault. And it's guilt that sparks into ourselves the desire of knowledge.”
Andrea Caterini, Gli autori moderni che si vantano di non avere mai letto i classici (Modern authors that boast about having never read the Classics, author's note)

“There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.”
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

“Sapere Aude. (Have the courage to know, author’s note)”
Latin Proverb, from la.wikiquote.org

“Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang:
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,
But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.”
Dante Alighieri

“On the subject of learning itself, the first datum to learn and the primary obstacle to overcome is: You cannot study a subject if you think you know all about it to begin with.
A student who thinks he knows all there is to know about a subject will not be able to learn anything in it. …
This is true for a student of any subject.
If one can decide that he does not already know everything about a subject and can say to himself, ‘Here is something to study, let’s study it,’ he can overcome this obstacle and be able to learn.”
“All the answers are basically simple.”
“The REAL WHY opens the door to a solution.”
L. Ron Hubbard

“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Henry Ford, as quoted in: Jim Marrs, Rule by Secrecy

“I have reached the conclusion that everything I’ve been taught about economics at the university by the experts in the field proved itself to be … totally false!”
F. D. Roosevelt, confidentially to Sir Halifax on 10 august 1941 during the Atlantic Round, re−translated as quoted in nandoioppolo.org,

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready−made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”
Joan Robinson, from en.wikiquote.org

“Science is a long history of learning how not to fool ourselves.”
Richard Feynman, as quoted in Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism

“In the modern world there are enough raw materials, work, plants, skilled labour, scientific and technological notions and, in general, enough wealth to feed – or rather to overfeed – its inhabitants. And nevertheless in the aforementioned modern world, "economic" crises and workers' unemployment repeat unfailingly, periodically, with their corollary: hunger. The official economic science excuses this alternation of phases of prosperity and recession, slurring about fictitious wealth and about production excess, and attaining the astonishing conclusion that it is logical and natural to see people swaying out of hunger and misery beside stores full of any kind of goods. Personally, I came to the conclusion that the so−called contemporary economic science represents […] a pyramid "bluff" that nonetheless almost no one dares to expose for fear to look incompetent, uninformed, backward−looking, etc. in the eyes of the conformist mass, kneeled down in adoration of the codified ideas. Whatever the possible objections, it's unnatural – and thus impossible – that people starve to death for having produced too many consumer goods.”
Joaquin Bochaca, La finanza y el poder (Finance and Power)

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
Gospel of Matthew, from en.wikiquote.org

“Our analysis found that for every £1 in value created, £7 worth of value is destroyed by a highly paid City banker. In summary, our calculation is derived from the following:
Factors in value created:
1 Average annual contribution of the City to UK economic activity, as measured by gross value added;
2 Tax contributions to the Exchequer;
3 Jobs provided in the wholesale finance sector.
Factors in value destroyed:
1 The cost of the current financial crisis in terms of loss to UK gross domestic product and economic capacity;
2 The cost of that crisis in terms of the negative impact on the public finances.
We might also have thrown the net wider and included other impacts, not least the negative impact on the global economy of the activities of highly paid investment bankers and traders. Far from being "wealth creators", City bankers are being handsomely rewarded for socially damaging activity. They are not just overpaid; they are overpaid at the expense of others.
… our research finds that we reward hospital cleaners very badly for what they contribute. For every £1 we pay them they generate over £10 in social value.”
New Economics Foundation (neweconomics.org), from report “A Bit Rich: Calculating the real value to society of different professions”

“The most difficult thing to confront is Evil.”
“That which a person can confront, he can handle.
The first step of handling anything is gaining an ability to face it.
…
We are looking here at the basic anatomy of all problems. Problems start with an inability to confront anything. Whether we apply this to domestic quarrels or to insects, to garbage dumps or Picasso, one can always trace the beginning of any existing problem to an unwillingness to confront.”
“There are several choices in English on the meaning of "confront". These include the right one: To face without flinching or avoiding.
…
In essence it is an action of being able to face.
If one cannot, if he avoids, then he is not AWARE.
Awareness is the ability to perceive the existence of.
…
We are moving out of the range of language when we want to say:
«He could stand up to things and wasn’t always shrinking back into himself and avoiding, so he could be fully conscious of the real universe and others around him.»
And that’s what Confront means.
If one can confront he can be aware.
If he is aware he can perceive and act.
If he can’t confront he will not be aware of things and will be withdrawn and not perceiving. Thus he is unaware of things around him.”
“… the world begins anew by regaining the ability to confront.”
L. Ron Hubbard

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
Benjamin Disraeli, as quoted in: Jim Marrs, Rule by Secrecy

“The idea that a small, wealthy ruling elite — an oligarchy — controls America appears to be well supported by the facts. A disproportionate amount of America's resources is controlled by a handful of its 265 million population. According to a 1983 study by the Federal Reserve Board, a mere 2 percent of U.S. families control 54 percent of the nation's wealth, and only 10 percent of the people own 86 percent of the net financial assets. The majority of American families — 55 percent — have zero or negative net worth. This study excluded the net worth of institutions, most of which, are owned or controlled by the above−mentioned 2 percent.
This cycle of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer has been accelerating since the 1960s through both Republican and Democratic administrations. It gained more momentum in the 1990s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. From 1992 to 1994, the wealthiest 5 percent's share of the national income rose 14 percent, nearly twice that of everyone else's gain during the previous twenty−five years.
Current figures are even more gruesome. The average worker's median pay in 1998 — adjusted for inflation — is one full dollar below the 1973 hourly rate. During the past twenty years, the income gap between males with a college education and those with none has grown from 42 percent to 89 percent. Union jobs have borne the brunt of this "downsizing." In 1970, the unions representing steel and auto workers counted nearly three million members. Today, membership is below one million.
«We have evolved into a two−tier society where people in the knowledge industries prosper, and those without a college education or technical skills fall by the wayside,» noted U.S. News & World Report's editor−in−chief Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Many are now questioning if this winnowing of the American middle class is truly natural evolution or conscious planning for a "New World Order."”
Jim Marrs, Rule by Secrecy

“There is a transnational ruling class, a "Superclass", that agrees on establishing a world government. The middle class is targeted for elimination … The goal of the Superclass is not to lose their wealth and power to a transnational middle class, but rather to extinguish the notion of a middle class, and transnationalize a lower, uneducated, labor oriented class, through which they will secure ultimate wealth and power. The global economic crisis serves these ends, as whatever remaining wealth the middle class holds is in the process of being eliminated, and as the crisis progresses, the middle classes of the world will suffer, while a great percentage of lower classes of the world, poverty−stricken even prior to the crisis, will suffer the greatest, most probably leading to a massive reduction in population levels, particularly in the "underdeveloped" or "Third World" states."”
Andrew Gavin Marshall, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, as quoted in howtheworldreallyworks.info

“The global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes. The richest 1% now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Power and privilege is being used to skew the economic system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest.”
oxfam.org, briefing paper: An Economy for the 1%, 18 January 2016

“Follow the money, follow the power.”
Marco Saba, O la Banca o la Vita (Your Bank or your Life, author’s note)

“During the past two centuries when the peoples of the world were gradually winning their political freedom from the dynastic monarchies, the major banking families of Europe and America were actually reversing the trend by setting up new dynasties of political control through the formation of international financial combines… these banking dynasties had learned that all governments must have sources of revenue from which to borrow in times of emergency. They had also learned that by providing such funds from their own private resources, they could make both kings and democratic leaders tremendously subservient to their will.”
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, as quoted in howtheworldreallyworks.info

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”
Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild, as quoted in: Jim Marrs, Rule by Secrecy

“I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”
Nathan Mayer Rothschild, as quoted in Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, The London Connection

“What Mr. Rothschild had discovered was the basic principle of power, influence, and control over people as applied to economics. That principle is «when you assume the appearance of power, people soon give it to you.»”
Lyle Hartford Van Dyke, Jr., Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

“… if we understand the real meaning of money we have understood everything, we understand the why of wars, and of apparently liberal and progressive revolutions, we hold in our hands the key that explains the great historical transitions.”
Mauro Di Sabatino, preface to Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money

“Inflation can be likened to a game of Monopoly in which the game’s banker has no limit to the amount of money he can distribute. With each throw of the dice he reaches under the table and brings up another stack of those paper tokens which all the players must use as money. If the banker is also one of the players — and in our real world that is exactly the case — obviously he is going to end up owning all the property. But, in the meantime, the increasing flood of money swirls out from the banker and engulfs the players. As the quantity of money becomes greater, the relative worth of each token becomes less, and the prices bid for the properties goes up. The game is called monopoly for a reason. In the end, one person holds all the property and everyone else is bankrupt. But what does it matter. It’s only a game.
Unfortunately, it is not a game in the real world. It is our livelihood, our food, our shelter. It does make a difference if there is only one winner, and it makes a big difference if that winner obtained his monopoly simply by manufacturing everyone’s money.”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered … I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. They already came to the point of appointing themselves as a money aristocracy defying the government. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Thomas Jefferson, as quoted in Jim Marrs, Rule by Secrecy, Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money, Joaquin Bochaca, La finanza y el poder (Finance and Power, author’s note)

“The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate a honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the revolution.”
Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in Peter Joseph’s film, Zeitgeist: the Movie, Part III

“The essence of the contemporary monetary system is creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks …”
Martin Wolf, awarded the Commander of the British Empire, associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, article on Financial Times, 9^thNovember 2010

“What determines how much of their reserves the banks will take out in cash?
No bank would normally take its reserves in cash except to the extent that it has to do so in order to meet the demands of its customers for cash, and, of course, to have a small amount of cash on hand so as to be able to meet its customers' demands on a day−to−day basis. Historically, the reason why the banks do not like to take their reserves in cash is that for each dollar they reduce their reserve accounts by taking cash, their privilege of creating money, to acquire income−producing assets, is reduced.”
Wright Patman, U.S. Congressman, Chairman of Committee on Banking And Currency and of Subcommittee on Domestic Finance, A Primer On Money, Printed for use of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 1964

“I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.”
Reginald Mc Kenna, British politician, then Chairman of the Midland Bank, speech delivered to Midland Bank, January 1924, as quoted in Joaquin Bochaca, La finanza y el poder (Finance and Power)

“At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments, and, thanks to the privileges they received, were in a position to advance money to the State. Hence, the accumulation of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the stock of these banks, whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in the 1694.”
Karl Marx, Capital

“The most significant phenomenon that took place with the French Revolution was not the Constitutional Charter, but the central bank with the concomitant replacement of gold money with token money. That was not a simple mutation of the commodity−related structure of the symbol, but the substitution of a legal paradigm with another. When money was made of gold, the bearer was its owner; with token money, the bearer has unknowingly become its debtor. All the token money is issued by the central banks by loaning it: hence all the money in circulation is burdened with debt to the central banks.”
“Paying back a money debt with other money issued on debt is impossible; in the long run one will pay with one's goods, or with one's unpaid work: hence, with slavery.”
“Monetary slavery: a historical monstrosity born in 1694 with the Bank of England.”
Giacinto Auriti, also as quoted in Marco Saba, Moneta Nostra (Our Money, author’s note)

“You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest.”
“You may charge a foreigner interest, but you may not charge your brother interest, that the LORD your God may bless you in all that you undertake in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.”
“For the LORD your God will bless you, as he promised you, and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow, and you shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you.”
“The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”
Deuteronomy, 23 and 15; Proverbs, 22:7

“The verbal root NASHACH which is translated as "lending at interest" has as its first meanings, "bite, cause loss" (Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew …).”
Mauro Biglino

“The story of the Life of Christ shows that he loved ALL people except one particular group. He hated the money−lenders with an intensity that seems strange in a man of so mild a character. Jesus repeatedly admonished the money−lenders for their practice of usury. … He said they were of the Synagogue of Satan. … He emphatically expressed His extreme hatred of the money−lenders when he took a whip and drove them out of the Temple. He admonished them in these words: «This Temple was built as the house of God … But you have turned it into a den of thieves.» By performing this act of vengeance on the money−lenders Christ signed his own death warrant.”
William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game

“Devil has his churches, too: banks.”
Fragmentarius

“Banks – The greatest fraud in human history.”
Anonymous

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.”
Sir Josiah Stamp, in the 1920's the second wealth of England, President of British Railways, President of the Bank of England, speaking at the Commencement Address of the University of Texas in 1927, as quoted in Joaquin Bochaca, La finanza y el poder (Finance and Power)

“If the Government can issue bonds, why can't it issue money and save the interest?
A few clearheaded and firm individuals, such as Abraham Lincoln, have insisted that the Government can.
The late Thomas A. Edison once stated the matter this way:
«If our nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20 percent, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way.
It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay: But one promise fattens the usurers, and the other helps the people.»
… Thus there is little opposition to the Government's printing bonds and then permitting the banks to create the money with which to buy those bonds; but proposals that the Government itself create the money instead of the bonds have always set off tremendous political upheavals. Bankers are politically very powerful, even in wartime. For example, Abraham Lincoln set off a political furor when he insisted upon having the Government issue $346 million in money (the so−called greenbacks) instead of issuing interest−bearing bonds and paying interest on the money.
What would the Government have paid in interest costs if the "greenbacks" issued in Abraham Lincoln's administration had been issued as bonds?
Abraham Lincoln's administration issued a total of $450 million in "greenbacks", or "U.S. notes", as it was authorized to do by an act of February 25, 1862. If instead of issuing "greenbacks", the Lincoln administration had issued interest−bearing bonds, as urged, naturally, these bonds would still be a part of the Federal debt today. Assuming that the Government had paid an average 5 percent interest a year on this amount of bonds, it would have paid out $2.3 billion by 1964, or approximately five times the amount of money the Government would have borrowed. It is a fallacy to think, as many do, that the "greenbacks" were inflationary. In the only sense that matters, the relative or comparative sense, they were not. That is, $450 million in "greenbacks" is no more or less inflationary than $450 million in bank deposits or any other bank money created to pay for $450 million in interest−bearing bonds.”
Wright Patman, U.S. Congressman, Chairman of Committee on Banking And Currency and of Subcommittee on Domestic Finance, A Primer On Money, Printed for use of the Committee on Banking and Currency, 1964

“All cartels, however, have an internal self−destruct mechanism. Sooner or later, one of the members inevitably becomes dissatisfied with his agreed−upon piece of the pie. He decides to compete once again and seeks a greater share of the market. It was quickly recognized that the only way to prevent this from happening was to use the police power of government to enforce the cartel agreement. The procedure called for the passage of laws disguised as measures to protect the consumer but which actually worked to ensure the elimination of competition. Henry P. Davison, who was a Morgan partner, put it bluntly when he told a Congressional committee in 1912: «I would rather have regulation and control than free competition.» John D. Rockefeller was even more to the point in one of his often repeated comments: «Competition is a sin.»
This trend was not unique to the banking industry. Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman provide the historical perspective:
After 1896 and 1900, then, America entered a progressive and predominantly Republican era. Compulsory cartelization in the name of "progressivism" began to invade every aspect of American economic life. The railroads had begun the parade with the formation of the ICC in the 1880s, but now field after field was being centralized and cartelized in the name of "efficiency," "stability," "progress," and the general welfare… In particular, various big business groups, led by the J.P. Morgan interests, often gathered in the National Civic Federation and other think tanks and pressure organizations, saw that the voluntary cartels and the industrial merger movements of the late 1890s had failed to achieve monopoly prices in industry. Therefore, they decided to turn to governments, state and federal, to curb the winds of competition and to establish forms of compulsory cartels, in the name, of course, of "curbing big business monopoly" and advancing the general welfare.
…

THE JEKYLL ISLAND PLAN
As summarized in the opening chapter of this book, the purpose of that meeting was to work out a plan to achieve five primary objectives:
1. How to stop the growing influence of small, rival banks and to insure that control over the nation’s financial resources would remain in the hands of those present;
2. How to make the money supply more elastic in order to reverse the trend of private capital formation and to recapture the industrial loan market;
3. How to pool the meager reserves of all the nation’s banks into one large reserve so that at least a few of them could protect themselves from currency drains and bank runs;
4. How to shift the inevitable losses from the owners of the banks to the taxpayers;
5. How to convince Congress that the scheme was a measure to protect the public.
…
To convince Congress and the public that the establishment of a banking cartel was, somehow, a measure to protect the public, the Jekyll Island strategists laid down the following plan of action:
1. Do not call it a cartel nor even a central bank.
2. Make it look like a government agency.
3. Establish regional branches to create the appearance of decentralization, not dominated by Wall Street banks.
4. Begin with a conservative structure including many sound banking principles knowing that the provisions can be quietly altered or removed in subsequent years.
5. Use the anger caused by recent panics and bank failures to create popular demand for monetary reform.
6. Offer the Jekyll Island plan as though it were in response to that need.
7. Employ university professors to give the plan the appearance of academic approval.
8. Speak out against the plan to convince the public that Wall Street bankers do not want it.
…

And so it came to pass that the monetary scientists carefully selected their candidate and set about to clear the way for his victory. The maneuver was brilliant. Who would suspect that Wall Street would support a Democrat, especially when the Party platform contained this plank: «We oppose the so−called Aldrich Bill or the establishment of a central bank; and … what is known as the money trust.»
What irony it was. The Party of the working man, the Party of Thomas Jefferson — formed only a few generations earlier for the specific purpose of opposing a central bank — was now cheering a new leader who was a political captive of Wall Street bankers and who had agreed to the hidden agenda of establishing the Federal Reserve System. As George Harvey later boasted, the financiers «felt no animosity toward Mr. Wilson for such of his utterances as they regarded as radical and menacing to their interests. He had simply played the political game.»
William McAdoo, Wilson’s national campaign vice chairman, destined to become Secretary of the Treasury, saw what was happening from a ringside seat. He said:
«The major contributions to any candidate’s campaign fund are made by men who have axes to grind — and the campaign chest is the grindstone… The fact is that there is a serious danger of this country becoming a pluto−democracy; that is, a sham republic with the real government in the hands of a small clique of enormously wealthy men, who speak through their money, and whose influence, even today, radiates to every corner of the United States.
Experience has shown that the most practicable method of getting hold of a political party is to furnish it with money in large quantities. This brings the big money−giver or givers into close communion with the party leaders. Contact and influence do the rest.»”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“This [Federal Reserve Act] establishes the most gigantic trust [trust, meaning here: so large an economic entity or group of entities, so concentrated its control, regardless of how formally monolithic or partitioned, that it is a monopoly, oligopoly or nearly so.] on earth. When the President Woodrow Wilson signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized … the worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill.” “Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created. The present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical equation.”
Charles August Lindbergh, Sr., Congressman and Member of the House Banking and Currency Committee, as quoted in Peter Joseph’s film, Zeitgeist: the Movie, Part III and en.wikipedia.org [text and definition in square brackets: author's notes]

“A world banking system was being set up here … a superstate controlled by international bankers … acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure. The FED has usurped the government.” “It [the Great Depression, author’s note] was a carefully contrived occurrence. International bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair, so that they might emerge the rulers of us all.” “Some people think the Federal Reserve banks are United States Government institutions. They are not government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers. The Federal Reserve banks are the agents of the foreign central banks. Henry Ford has said, «The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debts.» The truth is the Federal Reserve Board has usurped the Government of the United States by the arrogant credit monopoly which operates the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks.”
Louis Thomas McFadden, Chairman of the House of Representatives Banking and Currency Committee, The Federal Reserve: A corrupt institution. Remarks in U.S. Congress, United States House Congressional Record, June 10th, 1932, as quoted in Peter Joseph’s film, Zeitgeist: the Movie, Part III, and in Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, The London Connection

“[Our] great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men… who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world − no government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of a small group of dominant men.”
Ex President Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in Peter Joseph’s film, Zeitgeist: the Movie, Part III

“… all the wars and rebellions fought from 1640 to 1689 were fomented by the International money−lenders for the purpose of putting themselves in position to control British politics and economy. Their first objective was to obtain permission to institute a Bank of England and consolidate and secure the debts Britain owed them for loans made to her to fight the wars they instigated. History shows how they completed their plans.
… Great sums of money are needed to fight wars. By loaning the Crowned Heads of Europe the money required to fight wars they fomented, the Internationalists were enabled to rapidly increase the National Debts of all European Nations. The chronological sequence of events from the execution of King Charles in 1649 to the institution of the Bank of England in 1694, shows how the National Debt was increased. The International Bankers used intrigue and cunning to throw Christians at each others throats.
… In the final analysis, none of the countries and people involved in the wars and revolutions obtained any lasting benefits. No permanent or satisfactory solution was reached regarding the political, economic, and religious issues involved. THE ONLY PEOPLE TO BENEFIT WERE THE SMALL GROUP OF MONEY−LENDERS WHO FINANCED THE WARS AND REVOLUTIONS, AND THEIR FRIENDS AND AGENTS, WHO SUPPLIED THE ARMIES, THE SHIPS, AND THE MUNITIONS.
… The international bankers never intended that England be allowed to pay off the national indebtedness. The plan was to create international conditions which would plunge ALL nations concerned deeper and deeper into their debt.
If such a policy is carried to its logical conclusion it is only a matter of time before the international moneylenders control the wealth, natural resources, and man−power of the entire world. History shows how rapidly they have progressed toward their goal since 1694.”
William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game

“… in Federal Germany, 70% of all shares with voting rights are controlled by three commercial banks; two hundred British industries representing 85% of all production and one hundred and fifty companies encompassing 75% of export rest with fifteen big banks; in the United States, five out of the 13,000 banks hold 90% of the oil industry, 66% of the iron and steel industry and machinery production companies, and 75% of all chemical businesses…”
Charles Levinson, as quoted in Joaquin Bochaca, La finanza y el poder (Finance and Power)

“And what hurts our eyes in the first place is that in our times there is not only concentration of wealth, but moreover the accumulation of an immense power, of a despotic rule over the economy in the hands of a few, often not even owners, but merely trustees and administrators of the funds, that they have at their disposal according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. This power becomes more despotic than ever in those who, having the money under control, lord it over; hence somewhat they are the suppliers of the very blood the economic organism lives on, and have in their hands, so to speak, the soul of the economy, so no one could even breathe against their will.”
Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, quoted in Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money

“On a spring day in 1918 several government agents entered a printshop at Washington, D. C., where the original edition of this book was being printed. “Destroy all the Lindbergh plates in your plant,” they told the head of the institution. He was forced to comply. The hysteria of war−time brooked no delays. Not only were the plates of this book “Why Is Your Country at War ?“ destroyed, but also the plates of Congressman Lindbergh’s book "Banking and Currency," written in 1913 and attacking the big bankers and Federal Reserve Law.”
Walter E. Quigley, Introduction to Charles August Lindbergh, Sr., Congressman and Member of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Why Is Your Country At War and What Happens to You after the War and Related Subjects

“The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.”
“I have two great enemies, the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions, in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is the greatest enemy… I see in the future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.”
Abraham Lincoln

“It is interesting to note how many assassinations of Presidents of the United States follow their concern with the issuing of public currency; Lincoln with his Greenback, non−interest−bearing notes, and Garfield, making a pronouncement on currency problems just before he was assassinated.”
Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, The London Connection (Originally written long before John F. Kennedy and Aldo Moro, author's note.)

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”
James Madison

“On June 25, 1863, exactly four months after the National Bank Act was signed into law, a confidential communique was sent from the Rothschild investment house in London to an associate banking firm in New York. It contained an amazingly frank and boastful summary:
«The few who can understand the system [of fractional reserve banking, bank loans earning interest and also serving as money] will be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.»”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve
Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism. A Scientific, Mathematical, & Historical Exposé, Critique, and Manifesto

“The issue of conspiracy also lies at the heart of how one views history. Here there are only two views: accidental or conspiratorial.
The former view is that history is simply a series of accidents, or acts of God, which world leaders are powerless to alter or prevent.
… The conspiratorial view, on the other hand, could more accurately be called the "cause and effect" view. Obviously, accidents occur. Planes, trains, and cars crash. Ships sink. But in history, it is clear that human planning most often precipitates events.
… «Conspiracy theories try to put the pieces back together,» wrote Jonathan Vankin, a journalist who has studied a wide variety of conspiracy theories involving the U.S. government.
Conspiracy theories are an attempt to grasp the "big picture" of history.

… So why haven't we heard more about such secret planning?
According to conspiracy researchers Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen the American public's attitudes are shaped by a sanitized "Disney" view of both history and current events. «The "Disney version" of history could just as easily be called the "New York Times version" or the "TV news version" or the "college textbook version,"» they wrote. «The main resistance to conspiracy theories comes not from people on the street but from the media, academia, and government — people who manage the national and global economy of information.»
Anthony C. Sutton, a London−born economics professor who was a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover institution, agreed that an "Establishment history" dominates textbooks, publishing, the media, and library shelves. «During the past one hundred years any theory of history or historical evidence that falls outside a pattern established by the American Historical Association and the major foundations with their grantmaking power has been attacked or rejected — not on the basis of any evidence presented, but on the basis of the acceptability of the arguments to the so−called Eastern Liberal Establishment, and its official historical line,» he commented. «Woe betide any book or author that falls outside the official guidelines. Foundation support is not there. Publishers get cold feet. Distribution is hit and miss, or non−existent.»
Jim Marrs, Rule by Secrecy

“A moment’s reflection on the events described in this section leads us to a crossroads of conscience. We must choose between two paths. Either we conclude that Americans have lost control over their government, or we reject this information as a mere distortion of history. In the first case, we become advocates of the conspiratorial view of history. In the latter, we endorse the accidental view. It is a difficult choice.

The reason it is difficult is that we have been conditioned to laugh at conspiracy theories, and few people will risk public ridicule by advocating them. On the other hand, to endorse the accidental view is absurd. Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception.
The industrialized nations of the world are being bled to near death in a global transfer of their wealth to the less developed countries. Is it being done according to plan? Or is it an accident? It is not being done to them by their enemies. It is being done by their own leaders. The process is well coordinated across national lines and perfectly dovetails with the actions of other leaders who are doing the same thing to their respective countries. Furthermore, these leaders regularly meet together to better coordinate their activities. Could anything that complex be accomplished by accident? Or would some kind of a plan be required?
A spokesman from the IMF would answer, yes, there is a plan, and it is to aid the less developed countries. But, after forty years and hundreds of billions of dollars, they have totally failed to accomplish that goal. Would intelligent people believe that pursuing the same plan will produce different results in the future? Then why do they follow a plan that cannot work? The answer is they are not following that plan. They are following a different one: one which has been very successful from their point of view. Otherwise, we must conclude that the leaders of the industrialized nations are, to a man, just plain stupid. We do not believe it.
There is little room to escape the conclusion that these men and women are following a higher loyalty than the self interest of their respective countries. In their hearts they may honestly believe that, in the long run, the world will be better for it, including their fellow countrymen. But, for the present, their goals and their methods are not shared by those who have placed them in office. Under those circumstances, they must conceal their plan from public view. If their fellow citizens really knew what they were doing, they would be thrown out of office and, in some cases, might even be shot as traitors. Add all that together and it spells CONSPIRACY.

The only other explanation is that it’s all accidental: no plan, no cooperation, no goal, just the blind forces of history following the path of least resistance. For some it will be easier and more comfortable to accept that model. But the evidence speaks loudly against it.”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the U.S. Presidents] once said «In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.» He was in a good position to know. We believe that many of the major world events that are shaping our destinies occur because somebody or somebodies have planned them that way. If we were merely dealing with the law of averages, half of the events affecting our nation’s well−being should be good for America. If we were dealing with mere incompetence, our leaders should occasionally make a mistake in our favor. We shall attempt to prove that we are not really dealing with coincidence or stupidity, but with planning and brilliance. …
Those who believe that major world events result from planning are laughed at for believing in the "conspiracy theory of history." Of course, no one in this modern day and age really believes in the conspiracy theory of history — except those who have taken the time to study the subject. When you think about it, there are really only two theories of history. Either things happen by accident neither planned nor caused by anybody, or they happen because they are planned and somebody causes them to happen. In reality, it is the "accidental theory of history" preached in the unhallowed Halls of Ivy which should be ridiculed. Otherwise, why does every recent administration make the same mistakes as the previous ones? Why do they repeat the errors of the past which produce inflation, depressions and war? … If you believe it is all an accident or the result of mysterious and unexplainable tides of history, you will be regarded as an "intellectual" who understands that we live in a complex world. If you believe that something like 32,496 consecutive coincidences over the past forty years stretches the law of averages a bit, you are a kook!”
Gary Allen, None Dare Call It Conspiracy

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
William James, as quoted in Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism

“None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as quoted in Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. … Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.”
Edward Bernays, Propaganda

“The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting economic power.”
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
Aldous Huxley, lecture to The California Medical School, San Francisco, 1961, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“The book (The Proper Study of Mankind by Stuart Chase, 1948.) discusses in some detail the theory that by manipulating society you can change not only society itself but also the people in it. Theoretically, says the book, a society could be completely made over in something like fifteen years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising crop of youngsters.”
Hearings of Special Committee to Investigate Tax−Exempt Foundations and comparable organizations, House Resolution 217, 83rd Congress, 1st Session, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“We worry about so many dangers to our children – drugs, perverts, bullies – but seldom notice the biggest menace of all: the multibillion−dollar marketing effort aimed at turning the kids into oversexed, status−obsessed, attention−deficient little consumers.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, cover blurb for Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“The average person in the US watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world’s highest−paid cognitive psychologists. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mindset. What they’re doing, day in and day out, thirty thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged…”
Duane Elgin, interview with Arnie Cooper, The Sun Magazine, August 2002, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“What people are interested in is not always what is to their interest; the troubles they are aware of are not always the ones that beset them… It is not only that [people] can be unconscious of their situations; they are often falsely conscious of them.”
C. Wright Mills, quoted in Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint will no longer be felt by him.”
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own ‘logic−proof compartments’, his own absolutism are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction.”
Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“The frightening thing is that it has become clear now that simply recognizing the artificiality of something does not ensure immunity to that thing. Simply knowing that you’re an object of propaganda is not enough, in itself, to armor one against the appeals of propaganda. That’s really the message of 1984… everybody’s aware that the propaganda is ongoing – that’s what doublethink is, that’s what the concept of doublethink means: with one part of your mind you can see that it’s just a crock, and you don’t fall for it, but with the other part of that same mind, you adhere blindly to it.”
Mark Crispin Miller, quoted in Consuming Images, part one of Bill Moyers, The Public Mind: Image and Reality in America, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“High−tech mass persuasion has achieved levels of sophistication far beyond what most individuals imagine. Most still desperately cling to the delusion that they think for themselves, determine their own destinies, exercise both individual and collective free will (the great myth that underlies democratic ideology); that advertising works in the interest of the consumer; and perhaps the greatest self−deception of all – that they can easily discriminate between fantasy and reality.”
Wilson Bryan Key, The Age of Manipulation, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risk of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.”
Michael Rivero, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“The problem of obedience, therefore, is not wholly psychological. The form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do with it. There was a time, perhaps, when men were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor among men, things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of overall direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own action.”
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.”
Daniel Boorstin, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“They who have put out the peoples eyes reproach them of their blindness.”
John Milton, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“To deny the possibility of false consciousness is to assume there has been no indoctrination, no socialization… no control of information and commentary, no limitation of the topics to be considered in the national debate, no predetermination of issue agendas, and that a whole array of powers have not helped prestructure how we see and define our own interests and options.”
Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“You can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”
George W. Bush, ‘joking’ at a Gridiron Club dinner, Washington, D.C., March 2001, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty−Four, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“… there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, ‘and this will always be the man in the street.’ Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology… Hatred and contempt must be directed at particular individuals.”
Hugh Trevor−Roper, ed., The Goebbels Diaries, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“To ignore the evidence, and hope that it cannot be true, is more an evidence of mental illness.”
William Blase, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“People avoid the truth because the first bit of truth uttered and lived would draw more truth into action and so on indefinitely, and this would rip most people right off the customary tracks of their lives. But people, basically, know what is true and what is not, even if they so often render help to the lie. They support the lie because the lie has become a crutch without which life would not be possible. Therefore, in common human intercourse, the truth, and not the lie, is suspected as being phony.”
Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half−baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
Martin Luther King, Strength to Love, as quoted in zhibit.org/diemythographer

“Experience has prevent [proven, author's note] that the simplest method of securing a silent weapon and gaining control of the public is to keep the public undisciplined and ignorant of the basic system principles on the one hand, while keeping them confused, disorganized, and distracted with matters of no real importance on the other hand.”
Lyle Hartford Van Dyke, Jr., Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

“Whether they're called "liberal" or "conservative," the major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. … The media are only one part of a larger doctrinal system; other parts are journals of opinion, the schools and universities, academic scholarship and so on. … [It] has two distinct targets. One target is what's sometimes called the "political class," the roughly 20% of the population that's relatively educated, more or less articulate, playing some role in decision−making. … Then there's the other 80% or so of the population. These are … "spectators of action," … referred to as the "bewildered herd." They are supposed to follow orders and keep out of the way of the important people. They're the target of the real mass media: the tabloids, the sitcoms, the Super Bowl and so on. These sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable −− if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it. That's not to say that the media can't be influenced by the general population. … Independent (alternative) media can also play an important role … in the same way that popular organizations do: by bringing together people with limited resources who can multiply their effectiveness, and their own understanding, through their interactions – precisely the democratic threat that's so feared by dominant elites.”
Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, as quoted in Marcello Pamio, Il lato oscuro del nuovo ordine mondiale (The Dark Side of the New World Order, author’s note)

“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” (misattributed) “The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.”
Joseph Goebbels, from en.wikiquote.org

“This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound−tracks, cartoons, photographs – to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.” “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty−Four

“No man knows the meaning of ANYTHING published in any newspaper if he doesn't know which interests control the newspaper.”
“We NEVER know enough.”
Ezra Pound, from it.wikiquote.org, some quoted in Giacinto Auriti, Il Paese dell'Utopia (The Land of Utopia, author’s note)

“The media monopoly deals with its opponents in one of two ways; either frontal assault of libel which the average person cannot afford to litigate, or an iron curtain of silence, the standard treatment for any work which exposes its clandestine activities.”
Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, The London Connection

“… it is the villains' attorneys and the media legal departments the ones that de facto decide what you will get to know, taking advantage of the just fear of many a journalist which risk the ruin of their families if they tell the truth.”
Paolo Barnard, Censura Legale (Legal Censorship, author's note), as found at paolobarnard.info

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Malcom X, from en.wikiquote.org

“The highly socialised modern mind, which makes a kind of composite god out of the rich, the government, the police and the larger newspapers…”
“The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.”
George Orwell

“Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”
Winston Churchill

“One of the biggest challenges for human beings is that physiologically we are designed to operate in recency. It’s the fight or flight response. It’s literally in my cells. Literally. And so that when I’m in the wild, it’s about I need to look for something to eat or make sure I don’t get eaten. And how that translates into the modern world is that we think only about what’s happening immediately in front of us. And so we think a long time is last week. In the world of YouTube and Facebook and instant messaging, we think three seconds is a long time, like: Did you get the post already? I already posted it. And the reality is that if you look at history – I don’t mean a week, I don’t mean a month, I mean decades, I mean a hundred years, I mean a couple of hundred years, I mean more than a couple hundred years – you can start to see some patterns, you can see some things that are going on; because history repeats itself there are some trends and there are some movements that you can learn from. And you literally have to go outside of your human instincts to look at history, because we just want to focus on right now, because I said that’s about either eating or being eaten, so we’re gonna go beyond that, and that means not just focusing on the here and now, but learning some real powerful stuff and what’s happened, because there just might be some indicators there as to what’s gonna happen in the future.”
Scott Harris, from hiddensecretsofmoney.com

“The Americans hold that in every state the supreme power ought to emanate from the people; but when once that power is constituted, they can conceive, as it were, no limits to it, and they are ready to admit that it has the right to do whatever it pleases… The idea of rights inherent in certain individuals is rapidly disappearing from the minds of men; the idea of the omnipotence and sole authority of society at large rises to fill its place…
The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind…
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing…
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd…
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all−powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading−strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, as quoted in G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“In our dreams we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers of mental learning or of science. We have not to raise from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one: To train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are… in the homes, in the shop, and on the farm.”
General Education Board (one of the first foundations established by John D. Rockefeller, Sr.), Occasional Paper No. 1, 1904, as quoted in G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“Like all my father’s lessons, this one had broad applications beyond our immediate task. Ultimately, it was a lesson in the principle of selfreliance, which my father insisted that America had forgotten sometime between his own childhood and mine. Ours was now a country in which the cost of replacing a broken machine with a newer model was typically lower than the cost of having it fixed by an expert, which itself was typically lower than the cost of sourcing the parts and figuring out how to fix it yourself. This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.
…

If most of what people wanted to do online was to be able to tell their family, friends, and strangers what they were up to, and to be told what their family, friends, and strangers were up to in return, then all companies had to do was figure out how to put themselves in the middle of those social exchanges and turn them into profit. This was the beginning of surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it. Now, it was the creative Web that collapsed, as countless beautiful, difficult, individualistic websites were shuttered. The promise of convenience led people to exchange their personal sites — which demanded constant and laborious upkeep — for a Facebook page and a Gmail account. The appearance of ownership was easy to mistake for the reality of it. Few of us understood it at the time, but none of the things that we’d go on to share would belong to us anymore. The successors to the e−commerce companies that had failed because they couldn’t find anything we were interested in buying now had a new product to sell. That new product was Us.
…
The data we generate just by living — or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living — would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and advertisers.
…
Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti−scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.
…
We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary.”
Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (mostly)

“Anyone of us can be the gardener of self, or leave the garden uncultivated, or else can reach the end of the line without ever waking up to the awareness of having that possibility. Certainly a well−kept and well−developed garden resists better than an uncultivated one to the attempt of invasion by another gardener, while the garden of the sleeper won’t offer any resistance at all. But the first requirement of the effective defense is the awareness that we can be influenced, that our psyche is more like a malleable and opaque lump of clay than a hard and transparent crystal.”
Marco Della Luna, Paolo Cioni, Neuroschiavi (Neuroslaves, author’s note)

“There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow−mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities.”
John Dalberg−Acton, 1st Baron Acton, from en.wikiquote.org

“An unthinking human worries me more than a thinking robot.” Enrico Bertolino

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
Stephen Bantu Biko, from en.wikiquote.org

“«In the technetronic society the trend would seem to be toward the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotion and control reason.» Zbigniew Brzezinski, as quoted in Richard Condon's Foreword;
«Many observers of the contemporary scene … feel strongly that we are headed squarely in the wrong direction – that the combination of certain social forces and the weapons against the mind now available will inevitably lead to the destruction of the democratic way of life and the freedom of mind which goes with it, unless we recognize clearly what is happening and put counter−forces into operation.» Edgar Schein, Journal of World Politics, April 1959, as quoted;
“Summing up a carefully constructed semantic argument, psychologists often say, «A person cannot be made to do anything against his will or basic moral precepts.» That statement, taken at face value, is certainly true. A normal person would not wittingly kill a friend. But if he was made to hallucinate that his friend was an enemy, and it was a "kill or be killed" situation, he would initiate a natural response to preserve his own life. In the process he might even take the imagined enemy's life. … This criminal act would be considered in one sense, an act of will; but the real cause of the action would not be understood outside the hallucinated state. …
George Estabrooks (qualified in the same reference as chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, author's note) had evidence which made him conclude that «one in every five of the human race are highly suggestible, at least half are suggestible to a very considerable degree.» And he warned, « … mere figures do not tell the story. That one fifth has a power far beyond its numbers; for this type of man, acting under direct suggestion, is no mere average person. He is a fanatic, with all that fanaticism may imply for good or evil.» …

Believing in Estabrooks' logic, pragmatists in the government began to explore the possibilities of ways to change belief and motivate behavior. They let scores of contracts for research into hypnosis, behavior modification, conditioning, and virtually anything that held even a slim chance of being able to give them control over the individual human mind and will. …
Tex was an army sergeant stationed in the Mediterranean area. He came back from service with amnesia. But in his dreams a vivid scene was replayed again and again: …
«My buddy is marched into an open area in front of us with his hands tied behind his back. He is blindfolded and some Ay−rab is talking to him or reading to him. Another Ay−rab comes up and hits him behind the knees with a rifle butt and he falls to a kneeling position. Then, while he's on his knees, one of the Ay−rabs takes a big sword and cuts his head off. … That's when I always wake up …»
In their sleep, the memories of atrocities surface to vivid awareness among the victims of mind control. Night after night terrible images, suppressed by deeply conditioned responses, emerge as terrifying nightmares. Are they mythological? The stuff of dreams? Or are they recovered memories? Tex's dream is a mere fragment of many thousands of pages of such testimony.”
Walter H. Bowart, Operation Mind Control

“In handling men you can put them in an hypnotic, automaton state by posing rapidly a series of factors they then see they cannot of themselves evaluate, then getting them to a point where they are in an anxiety for you to make the decision. Depress them low enough in this wise and they obey like robots. Thus do not ruin your [fellows].
…
AXIOM 142. AN ORGANISM IS AS HEALTHY AND SANE AS IT IS SELFDETERMINED.”
L. Ron Hubbard, Advanced Pocedures and Axioms

“The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
Personal independence is a virtue and it is the soul out of which comes the sturdiest manhood. But there can be no independence without a large share of self−dependence, and this virtue cannot be bestowed. It must be developed from within.
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all−absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. … Men might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
Frederick Douglass

“All of past history shows that the shift from a mass army of citizen−soldiers to a smaller army of professional fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline in democracy. When weapons are cheap and easy to obtain and use, almost any man may obtain them, and the organized structure of the society, such as the state, can obtain no better weapons than the ordinary, industrious, private citizen. This very rare historical condition existed about 1880, but is now only a dim memory, since the weapons obtainable by the state today are far beyond the pocketbook, understanding, or competence of the ordinary citizen.
When weapons are of the "amateur" type of 1880, as they were in Greece in the fifth century B.C., they are widely possessed by citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will. With such an "amateur weapons system" (if other conditions are not totally unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford to possess or can learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who control such "specialist" weapons can dominate the majority who lack them. In such a society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality in control of weapons will be established.”
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

“America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy.
…
The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called "liberty" and during the Internet Revolution is called "privacy."
…
In contemporary life, we have a single concept that encompasses all this negative or potential space that’s off−limits to the government. That concept is "privacy." It is an empty zone that lies beyond the reach of the state, a void into which the law is only permitted to venture with a warrant — and not a warrant "for everybody," such as the one the US government has arrogated to itself in pursuit of mass surveillance, but a warrant for a specific person or purpose supported by a specific probable cause.
…
Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy.
…
The constitutional system only functions as a whole if and when each of its three branches works as intended. When all three don’t just fail, but fail deliberately and with coordination, the result is a culture of impunity.
…
When we’ve got these people who have practically limitless powers within a society, if they get a pass without so much as a slap on the wrist, what example does that set for the next group of officials that come into power? To push the lines a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, and we’ll realize that we’re no longer citizens — we’re subjects.
…

something that is devastating for the public can be, and often is, beneficial to the elites.
…
The First All−Union Census of the Soviet Union, in 1926, had a secondary agenda beyond a simple count: it overtly queried Soviet citizens about their nationality. Its findings convinced the ethnic Russians who comprised the Soviet elite that they were in the minority when compared to the aggregated masses of citizens who claimed a Central Asian heritage, such as Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmen, Georgians, and Armenians. These findings significantly strengthened Stalin’s resolve to eradicate these cultures, by "reeducating" their populations in the deracinating ideology of Marxism−Leninism.
…
America was born from an act of treason. The Declaration of Independence was an outrageous violation of the laws of England and yet the fullest expression of what the Founders called the "Laws of Nature," among which was the right to defy the powers of the day and rebel on point of principle, according to the dictates of one’s conscience.
…
In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state.
…
The government should be afraid of the people, the people shouldn’t be afraid of the government.”
Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (mostly)

“When the government fears the people, you have liberty; when the people fear the government, you have tyranny.”
Thomas Jefferson (supposedly), as quoted in: Malcom Ieuan Roberts, Why? Motives Driving Climate Fraud

“It is the duty of the Patriot to protect his country from its government.”
Thomas Paine, as quoted in: Malcom Ieuan Roberts, Our Two Core Challenges

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety [and they will very quickly lose both].”
Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in: Malcom Ieuan Roberts, Our Two Core Challenges

“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”
John Philpot Curran

“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

“The price of freedom: Constant alertness. Constant willingness to fight back. There’s no other price.”
“The basic flaw in organization is INSPECTION BEFORE THE FACT. That means inspection before anything bad has happened.
Violations are so harmful that they destroy every great civilization – the Roman, the British, the lot.
For every flow is slowed or stopped.
… Passports, customs, safety regulations, general government interference before anything bad has occurred, add up to a SUPPRESSIVE SOCIETY and therefore, soon enough, a dead one.
Penalty after the fact has occurred disciplines the criminals and does not pull down the majority to criminal level.” (6 February 1968, Organization—The Flaw)

“4. A group member must exert and insist upon his rights and prerogatives as a group member and insist upon the rights and prerogatives of the group as a group and let not these rights be diminished in any way or degree for any excuse or claimed expeditiousness.
9. A group member must insist upon his right to have initiative.
12. A group member should have a working knowledge of all technologies and skills in the group in order to understand them and their place in the organizational necessities of the group.
16. The group member should not permit laws to be passed which limit or proscribe the activities of all the members of the group because of the failure of some of the members of the group.” (The Credo of a True Group Member)
“The primary aberration in situations that are being mishandled is: the person is unable to recognize Source.”
“Look, don’t listen.”
L. Ron Hubbard

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Jesus, Gospel of John, from en.wikiquote.org

“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
Malcom X, from en.wikiquote.org

“The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
John F. Kennedy

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
George Orwell

“Therefore it takes beginning to learn again, as if we were three−years old, to notice the difference between the construction of current reality administered by politicians and academics and the actual reality.”
Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money

“You might think, again as we did, that scientists are impartial and that the aim of science is nothing other than to get to the truth. Neither of these things are true, as we discovered. …
Support for this thinking comes from The Journal of Health Psychology when it says, «Originally, the tobacco industry opposed the makers of NRT [Nicotine Replacement Therapy], but now both industrial enterprises seem to be finding common ground as tobacco and NRT have begun reinforcing each other and keeping the addiction to nicotine alive.» (Robin Hayley’s Introduction) …
Because doctors are the accepted experts on the damage that smoking causes to health, they are also assumed to be the experts on helping smokers to quit.
In fact, their knowledge consists of a mishmash of ignorance, illusion and myth. For years, they have brainwashed smokers to believe it is very difficult to quit and that it takes enormous willpower. Their whole attitude is:
Try this method! If that doesn’t work, try another!
This is a perfectly reasonable strategy in the absence of anything better. However, when I discovered a system that would enable any smoker to quit easily, immediately and permanently, they ignored it. … Unbelievably, 23 years later, they are still perpetuating the same ignorance, myths and illusions that keep nicotine addiction flourishing. …

Many doctors encouraged by the pharmaceutical industry, the Government, the medical establishment, the NHS, ASH and QUIT, actually prescribe nicotine in order to help smokers escape from nicotine addiction. They call it NICOTINE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (NRT). I'm referring to products that contain nicotine, such as gum, patches, inhalers and sprays, which claim to help smokers to quit. The expression itself is, of course, a falsehood. The nicotine isn't replaced! On the contrary, it is maintained and there is no therapy.
But the market for nicotine maintenance – now worth more than a billion dollars a year – is so great that people will try anything just to get a slice of it. …
Pharmaceutical companies use their vast wealth to fund conferences into tobacco and nicotine. They pay doctors to do the clinical studies and they even define what success means in those studies. They aren't interested in getting people off nicotine. How can they be, if their first obligation is to their shareholders and they are making a fortune by selling nicotine? …
The very term Nicotine Replacement Therapy is a misnomer. Nicotine is not being replaced and there is nothing therapeutic about it. It should be called Nicotine Continuation Treatment. It is not in the interests of the pharmaceutical companies to cure nicotine addiction – they are selling nicotine! …
As we have seen, more money is spent in the US promoting drugs to doctors than is spent by all the medical schools combined in educating them. In the UK, the parliamentary inquiry into the industry's influence found the Department of Health spends around £4.5 million a year providing independent medicines information to prescribers. This, they said, represents 0.3 per cent of the approximately £1.65 billion a year that the pharmaceutical industry spends promoting their drugs to doctors. …

Unfortunately society spent the 20th century brainwashing our youth into believing the incalculably damaging illusion that we are basically weak and incapable of either enjoying life or coping with stress without the assistance of drugs. …
It is nicotine that plants this seed in our bodies and minds, suggesting we are incomplete and need something to fill the void. What people fail to realize is that:
NICOTINE CREATES THAT VOID
Nicotine therefore creates the conditions that often lead to other drugs. Once you have belief in the ability of your mind and body both to enjoy life to the full and cope with stress effectively, all drugs cease to be necessary or desirable. …
We should explain that it’s a confidence trick and that’s why they’ll enjoy life so much more, and be better able to cope with stress, while they are free from slavery …
We have just one problem: three powerful institutions [governments, the established medical profession, the media] who continue to perpetuate myths and illusions about smoking, all of whom are ifluenced by powerful pharmaceutical companies, which have a huge financial interest in perpetuating nicotine addiction.
Allen Carr, The Nicotine Conspiracy

“The area of maximum cultural manipulation, carried out chiefly by institutions, in the form of false cognitions and false interpretative models, is probably just that: the area of monetary and credit economics.”
Federico Caffè, as quoted in Marco Della Luna, Paolo Cioni, Neuroschiavi (Neuroslaves)

“… Welcome to the [white] rabbit hole. We are entering a period of financial crisis that is the greatest the world has ever known. The wealth transfer that will take place during this decade is the greatest wealth transfer in history. Wealth is never destroyed, it is merely transferred … I believe that the best investment that you can make in your lifetime is your own education. Education on the history of money. Education on finance. Education on how the global economy works. Education on how all of these guys, the central bankers, the stock market, how they can cheat you. How they can scam you.”
Michael Maloney, from hiddensecretsofmoney.com [text in square brackets added by the author]

“Money, or some equivalent, is … a necessity in any civilisation or community above the stage where everyone produces all that he or she consumes. But it is a dangerous necessity … only too apt to engender … politic social diseases potent enough to bring the proudest nations to the dust. It substitutes for the natural inalienable right of the worker to the produce of his toil a vague generalised claim upon the totality of the fruits of the community’s efforts – a highly indefinite quantity, which opens the door to every kind of abuse. On the moral side, it divorces the conception of wealth from the dignity of labour …
The variation of the purchasing power of money exposes the community to wholesale injustice on the one side and undeserved gain on the other. … But worse than all, it paves the way to the economic subjugation of humanity to monetary power because of the confusion in the minds of people between money and wealth. … it tries to condemn to eternal slavery generations not yet born. It is therefore of the utmost importance that all those who wish to understand social problems should understand and make themselves masters of the subject of money. That no one yet understands it is a truism. Least of all those who have made a special study of it … seem able to answer intelligibly the simplest questions about it that it would occur to the veriest tyro to ask. …

(all orthodox economists are necessarily eminent, as otherwise they would be incredible) …
Those who want to understand how a conjurer performs his tricks should take the advice of one conjurer to another, and watch the other hand, not the one to which the attention of the audience is being so volubly and persuasively directed. …
Since wealth cannot be created out of nothing, but is a product of human effort expended on the raw material and sources of energy of the globe, no individual should be able to manufacture a new money claim to wealth out of nothing, and the purchaser should give up something equal in value to (as difficult to come by as) that which he so acquires. It is in this vital point that the modern methods of multiplying claims to wealth fail.
But even more fatal to democracy has been its failure to provide any proper authority and mechanism for the making and issue of money, as and when it is required, to keep pace with the growth of its wealth. National money – whatever it is made of – does not bear, and never has borne, interest, which is the raison d’être for the issue of most modern money. Whatever ends it may be supposed to subserve, bank money is created primarily for that end, and, what is worse, then decreated again when that end is served. But a sovereign issued in the reign of George III is now worth no more than when it was issued, and obeys the ordinary law of the conservation of matter. It does not mysteriously appear and as mysteriously disappear like bank money. …
This is the pons asinorum of banking, and at this point its apologists always seem to be distracted from the principles that money is supposed to subserve in a community to an ex parte defence of the system. It certainly does seem odd to a tyro to discover that the law proceeds with the utmost severity against the fraudulent counterfeiter for uttering new money tokens, but allows the banks in effect to create it wholesale to lend at interest by these methods, which is a far more profitable business and infinitely more serious in its consequences to the general community than counterfeiting. To any other age it would have been the most obvious form of treason against the State. …

most people who have any experience of responsible administration would probably agree that an administrative Government without any real power over finance, and with that power located elsewhere, can be little more than a figurehead. …
At this stage it may be helpful to revert once again to the critical point that the banking system, without uttering a single false coin, can and does multiply the money of the country for usury many times. …
The banks have usurped the Prerogative of the Crown with regard to the issue of money, and corrupted the purpose of money from that of an exchange medium to that of an interest−bearing debt … It has been connived at by politicians of all parties, who have betrayed the people and without their knowledge or consent have abdicated the most important function of government and ceased to be the de facto rulers of the nation. The issue and withdrawal of money should be restored to the nation for the general good and should entirely cease from providing a source of livelihood to private corporations. Money should not bear interest because of its existence, but only when genuinely lent by an owner who gives it up to the borrower. …
We have thus reached a very interesting conclusion: that whereas the old form of metal money could not and did not bear interest to the owner, and could only bear interest when he parted with the ownership of it and lent it to another, the new form of credit money … has no existence, but imagined to exist and lent to borrowers as though it existed for the purpose of bearing interest. This non−existent money passes by sale into the hands of those who give up something in exchange for it, and who now therefore own what is not in existence. Absurd as this description may appear, it is none the less undeniable. Let everyone with money that is his very own – borrowed from or lent by nobody – present himself at the bank at the same time and ask for it. The proof of the statement whether this money does or does not exist will then be apparent. …

As the owners of it have not got the money they own, and as the banks have not got it, and as the people who borrowed it have not got it, where is it? Obviously nowhere. It is imagined to exist for the purpose of charging interest upon it.
No doubt there are still many people, if not the majority, who will be frankly incredulous that money vastly exceeding in amount the total national money can be, and is created and destroyed by the moneylender with a stroke of the pen. … those who still pretend to believe that the banks only lend their customers’ unused money. Indeed, to some people it seems sufficient to prove this that a bank’s balance−sheet balances. Whereas, of course, when a bank credit is created, both sides of the balance−sheet are written up to the same extent. It is not merely the old lady of fable who overdrew her account and sent her banker a cheque for the amount. Her misfortune was merely that she was not her own banker. …
If we look ahead, … the purchasing power of money is settled in the long run … by the proportion of his earned income the worker permits to be taken from him by the rentier.
These considerations may serve to show how little is known as to the facts of the existing monetary system, but they are probably sufficient to give a general idea of the order of quantity involved, and, in so far as the evils afflicting society are monetary in origin, to suggest reform. The foregoing brief analysis of the origin of modern money reveals that a complete and unsuspected alteration has come over the very nature of it with the discovery of financial devices for economising the use of currency. It is necessary therefore to regard it as an entirely new phenomenon and to go back to first principles in examining it. Almost by accident, certainly as a byproduct unforeseen when the cheque system originated, the power of issuing and withdrawing currency has passed entirely beyond the control of the nation into the hands of the banker.

If anyone claims that this power is exercised, according to a properly thought−out and intelligible system, to distribute the abundant wealth a modern community is empowered by scientific methods to produce in order that the members may obtain wealth for consumption, let him look around. The money is now issued primarily for usury. …
The continued coexistence of unemployment and poverty in a scientific era is its sufficient condemnation. …
To any business man a knowledge of the truth ought to be sufficient to condemn the system according to the canons of ordinary competitive business. Where else in the whole realm of human activity is it possible to create capital by an act of imagination and to derive from its supposed existence a perennial revenue, just as though it were real wealth put to productive use? … What, then, in "cultivated society" is the difference between the utterer of false coin and the banks? … But this is only a minor question in comparison with the effect it has in making the banker the real ruler of the nation.
The moratorium declared in this country in 1914, actually before a shot had been fired in the Great War, showed that banking has become so vital to the interests of the nation that the banks can call upon the national credit to save them and their depositors from ruin in the face of any great emergency. The public at that time not only shouldered the burden, but lost their right to demand gold in exchange for their money, and suffered the debasement of the currency. So both restrictions to the expansion of credit have now been removed. The banks need not fear a run on their cash reserves, nor is there any automatic regulation of the gold−value of money. That their policy at the moment is to deflate rather than inflate the currency is beside the question. It is they and not the political Government which really regulate the economic affairs of the country. They make the profits and the taxpayers and citizens shoulder the losses under the system.

Democracy so far has but seized the shadow and has yet to grasp the substance of sovereignty or be discredited for all time. Its first step must be to end the conspiracy of silence in its organs of publicity and instruction concerning the one prerogative of government which underlies and controls all effective political action, and to insist upon its monetary system being as public and open to criticism and conscious alteration as its political system.
The failure of the nations to use to the full, for the enrichment of life, the ample powers conferred upon them by the progress of scientific and technical knowledge is traced primarily to the private issue of money and the mistaken principles which govern it. …
That is the only real issue – Are people artificially to be kept poor by the money system or allowed naturally to prosper?”
Frederick Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt. The Solution of the Economic Paradox

“… people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. … every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?” “Subprime default was once again not just burned wealth and ruin, no. That was just one side of the medal and was just for some. It was actually a wealth TRANSFER.”
book/film The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine/The Big Short, paraphrased, or from en.wikiquote.org

“The following quotation was reprinted in the Idaho Leader, USA, 26 August 1924, and has been read into Hansard twice: by John Evans MP, in 1926, and by M.D. Cowan M.P., in the Session of 1930−1931.
In 1891 a confidential circular was sent to American bankers and their agents, containing the following statements:
‘We authorise our loan agents in the western States to loan our funds on real estate, to fall due on September 1st 1894, and at no time thereafter.
On September 1, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration.
On September 1st we will demand our money — we will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession.
We can take two−thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi and thousands of them east of the great Mississippi as well, at our own price.
We may as well own three−fourths of the farms of the west and the money of the country.
Then the farmers will become tenants, as in England.’”
Len Clampett, Hand Over Our Loot, No. 2, as found at freedom−school.com

“And the century of focus on technique and overproduction shall witness the coexistence of misery and stores brimming with goods. Social classes blame one another; strikes and lockouts arise and nobody – or a very few – realize who is responsible for the disaster. They do not notice that the modern alchemists of the bank, with their "promissory notes" committing them to pay what they do not have, debilitate, dishearten and let go to pot their victims, that is, the whole mankind. The root of all the economic evils is but the creation of credits by the banking institutions that do not have enough money to fulfil their "promissory notes". All the bankers of the world … are in a state of permanent insolvency.”
Joaquin Bochaca, La finanza y el poder (Finance and Power)

“The largest cost borne by those who create money out of thin air is that to prevent people from realising it.”
Marco Saba

“The world main economic and political activity consists in the extraction from the society, by the private banking system, of the purchasing power produced by society itself. It is conducted thanks to a mental and cultural manipulation that makes it unrecognizable, or rather invisible.”
“… the actual, even though not declared, role of the state is indeed that of constantly siphoning off the wealth of the general populace to the owners of the state itself.”
Marco Della Luna, Paolo Cioni, Neuroschiavi (Neuroslaves)

“We have the greedy trusts, and they are operating under conditions that enable them to appropriate the products of our industry and create wealth which is concentrated into the hands of a few who not only levy a most burdensome toll on the present generations but possess the legal privilege and apparently the opportunity to enforce the same conditions upon future generations. … In no case has government so signally neglected its function as in its failure to issue money and control the charges made for its use. Banks and individuals have been permitted to set up a system for financial action which is supported by credits and the products of the people’s industries. Through its use they are enabled to collect exorbitant dividends, interest and profits on what they do not produce.
From the testimony given by George F. Baker (President of the First National Bank of New York City) before the committee appointed to investigate the Money Trust, we learned that the operations of a single bank produced, in fifty years profits equal to $86,000,000, or 172 times its original capital. If that bank continues to do business and is allowed to pile up profit in that geometrical progression, it alone, in less than 100 years, will extort from the people all of their property and that bank is but one of the 30,000 banks operating on an uneconomic system.
The total capitalization … of 30,000 banks in 1913 was considerable over $4,000,000,000 and dividends compounded on that sum, as is the custom of banks, will, if allowed to do so by the indifference of the people to their own rights, consume the balance of the nation's wealth.
The accumulated holdings of all the trusts that centralize wealth would immensely reduce the time it will take for the interest and dividends on these holdings to absorb all of our present property, and all of what we earn in the future …
So, you see there is competition even between the trusts, and this competition is resulting in their absorption of each other. Anyone with a little imagination and reasoning power can look ahead and see what would be the outcome of that competition if the interests are allowed to carry it to its finish. …

It is easily apprehended that the banking institutions alone, by the geometrical progression of accumulation of interest, dividends, and profits, would if left free to do so, take the most of our earnings and property holdings and utterly exhausting means.
… each separate trust by the geometrical progression in accumulated interest, dividends and profits, will require only time in which to consume our present property as well as our accruing earnings, and, if we allow it, force upon us a state of bankruptcy, because the geometrical progression is impossible to be carried out without so doing. … we still have the absurdity of our courts holding that a certain percentage should be a reasonable profit and anything less unfair. If this law were enforced it would ultimately create abject slaves and bankrupts of our children, and we, the parents, should be made to work toward that end. …
The several trusts cannot of course, absorb all, but after legally (and otherwise) seizing the principal part of our earnings, they swallow up the smaller of their own kind. The big fishes eat the little ones. As a result, the trusts become less and less in number, but their holdings become greater and greater, the same as the number and holdings of the English landowners. …
In 1829 the land in England was owned by 165,000 people. One−half of the land in the whole kingdom is now owned by less than fifteen persons. Less than a dozen persons in our own country dominate its finances. …
The Government has given its support to the banks by delegating to them the power to issue a substitute for money, and besides that advantage they are depositories for the cash of the people, with which they command a large credit. As a consequence, they have had the inside track in this unequal commercial struggle and they are now largely the masters of business, with the results which I have described.
That is why all of the great trust builders have themselves become bankers. …

There is one class of property however, … the farm interests … at the present time diffused among millions of holders, but a geometrical progression of interest, dividends, and profits, in favor of the farmers has never been decreed by the courts. … They must take their chances with the sun, rains and storms, and no court decree has given to them "profits commensurate with the risks" as it has to the railroads and other trusts. The farmer, like the wage earner, lives but to be fleeced by the beneficiaries of the present system. The two, the farmer and the wage earner support the whole burden of a system which leads continually to immense wealth for the few and bankruptcy or poverty for the rest of us. Farm property has been subject to the highest rates of interest, while all the great industrial properties have been used as a basis for comparatively low rates of interest when money has been loaned on them. Therefore I repeat my earlier statement that the only excuse for government is the facility it affords its citizens for securing advantages that operate for the common welfare, which could not be secured with the same degree of equability through independent individual action.
Instead of that our government which is of our own creation, has insured to the banks and other trusts a system which renders it easy for them to oppress the masses. It enables the few to live as non−producers and exorbitant spenders, while almost the entire burden falls on the rest of us. Such a condition is impossible of long tolerance by the proud, honest and intelligent citizens of our country. We must seek for a remedy.”
Charles August Lindbergh, Sr., Congressman and Member of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Banking and Currency and The Money Trust

“Wars are seldom funded out of the existing treasury, nor are they even done so out of increased taxes. If governments were to levy taxes on their citizens fully adequate to finance the conflict, the amount would be so great that many of even its most ardent supporters would lose enthusiasm. By artificially increasing the money supply, however, the real cost is hidden from view. It is still paid, of course, but through inflation, a process that few people understand.”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“The American soldiers fighting in the trenches, the people working at home, the entire nation under arms, were fighting, not only to subdue Germany, but to subdue themselves. That there is nothing metaphysical about this interpretation becomes clear when we observe that the total wartime expenditure of the United States government from April 6, 1917, to October 31, 1919, when the last contingent of troops returned from Europe, was $35,413,000,000. Net corporation profits for the period January 1,1916, to July, 1921, when wartime industrial activity was finally liquidated, were $38,000,000,000, or approximately the amount of the war expenditures. More than two−thirds of these corporation profits were taken by precisely those enterprises which the Pujo Committee had found to be under the control of the "Money Trust."”
Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families, as quoted in G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“What in the public eye looks like a sacrosanct principle, pay taxes, is actually a systematic plundering the nation’s wealth to benefit some private individuals who have been granted the privilege of issuing money.
A real wealth transfer upward, disguised as a social duty …
The taxes currently do not have any logical reason than to give to the 1 percent more than half of the wealth produced by 99 percent. …
Taxation is a consequence of the present monetary system and not an objective necessity. … coming out of the system of private money monopoly to observe the situation with the point of view of what money and its function really are, in view of the popular ownership of money, here the situation is reversed and taxation appears in its reality of enslavement and impoverishment of the nation…”
Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money

“… First of all, the federal income tax is completely unconstitutional, as it is a direct unapportioned tax; all direct taxes have to be apportioned to be legal based on the constitution.
Secondly, the required number of States to ratify the amendment to allow the income tax was never met. And this is even been cited in modern court cases. («If you … examined [the 16th amendment] carefully, you would find that a sufficient number of states never ratified that amendment.» U.S. District Court Judge James C. Fox 2003)
Third, at the present day roughly 35% of the average worker's income is taken from them via this tax, that means you work four months out of the year to fulfil this tax obligation. And guess where that money goes? It goes to pay the interest on the currency being produced by the fraudulent Federal Reserve Bank, a system that does not have to exist at all. The money you make in four months out of the year fills almost literally into the pockets of the international bankers who own the private Federal Reserve Bank.

And fourth, even with the fraudulent government claim as to the legality of the income tax, there is literally no statute, no law in existence that requires you to pay this tax, period. («I really expected that of course there's a law that you can point to, in the law book, the code, that requires you to file a tax return, of course there is. I was at that point where I couldn't find a statute that clearly made a person liable, least not me, and most people I know, and I had no choice in my mind except to resign. I haven't filed a federal income tax return since I left.» Joe Turner, former IRS agent)
(«Based on the research that I did throughout the year 2000, and that I'm still doing, I have not found that law. I'd ask Congress, who'd ask a lot of people in the IRS, IRS Commissions helpers: they can't answer, because if they answer, the American people are going to know that this whole thing is a fraud. I have not filed the tax returns since 1999.» Sherry Jackson, former IRS agent)
The income tax is nothing less than the enslavement of the entire country.”
Peter Joseph’s film, Zeitgeist: the Movie, Part III

“It is important to remember that no sooner was the Dutch General sitting upon the throne of England than he persuaded the British Treasury to borrow £1,250,000 from the … bankers who had put him there. The school book history informs our children that the negotiations were conducted by Sir John Houblen and Mr. William Patterson on behalf of the British Government with money−lenders WHOSE IDENTITY REMAINED SECRET.
Search of historical documents reveals that in order to maintain complete secrecy the negotiations regarding the terms of the loan were carried on in a church. In the days of Christ the money−lenders used the Temple. In the days of William of Orange they desecrated a church.

The international money−lenders agreed to accommodate the British Treasury to the extent of £1,250,000 providing they could dictate their own terms and conditions. This was agreed to.
The terms were in part:
1. That the names of those who made the loan remain secret; and that they be granted a Charter to establish a Bank of England. 2. That the directors of the Bank of England be granted the legal right to establish the Gold Standard for currency by which —
3. They could make loans to the value of £10 for every £1 value of gold they had on deposit in their vaults.
4. That they be permitted to consolidate the national debt; and secure payment of amounts due as principal and interest by direct taxation of the people.
Thus, for the sum of £1,250,000, King William of Orange sold the people of England into economic bondage. The … money−lenders gained their ambitions. They had usurped the power to issue and control the currency of the nation. And, having secured that power, they cared not who made the laws.”
William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game

“The objective, says Groseclose, was not to bring «the money mechanism under more intelligent control, but to provide means outside the onerous sources of taxes and public loans for the financial requirements of an impecunious government.»
There were two groups of men who saw a unique opportunity arise out of this necessity. The first group consisted of the political scientists within the government. The second was comprised of the monetary scientists from the emerging business of banking.
…

The two groups came together and formed an alliance. No, that is too soft a word. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a cabal as "A conspiratorial group of plotters or intriguers." There is no other word that could so accurately describe this group. With much of the same secrecy and mystery that surrounded the meeting on Jekyll Island, the Cabal met in Mercer’s Chapel in London and hammered out a seven−point plan which would serve their mutual purposes:
1. The government would grant a charter to the monetary scientists to form a bank;
2. The bank would be given a monopoly to issue banknotes which would circulate as England’s paper currency;
3. The bank would create money out of nothing with only a fraction of its total currency backed by coin;
4. The monetary scientists then would loan the government all the money it needed;
5. The money created for government loans would be backed primarily by government I.O.U.s;
6. Although this money was to be created out of nothing and would cost nothing to create, the government would pay "interest" on it at the rate of 8%;
7. Government I.O.U.s would also be considered as "reserves" for creating additional loan money for private commerce. These loans also would earn interest. Thus, the monetary scientists would collect double interest on the same nothing.
The circular which was distributed to attract subscribers to the Bank’s initial stock offering explained: «The Bank hath benefit of interest on all the moneys which it, the Bank, creates out of nothing.» The charter was issued in 1694, and a strange creature took its initial breath of life. It was the world’s first central bank.

Rothbard writes:
«In short, since there were not enough private savers willing to finance the deficit, Paterson and his group were graciously willing to buy government bonds, provided they could do so with newly−created out−of−thin−air bank notes carrying a raft of special privileges with them. This was a splendid deal for Paterson and company, and the government benefited from the flimflam of a seemingly legitimate bank’s financing their debts… As soon as the Bank of England was chartered in 1694, King William himself and various members of Parliament rushed to become shareholders of the new money factory they had just created.»”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“Cordell Hull remarks in his Memoirs: «The conflict forced the further development of the income−tax principle. Aiming, as it did, at the one great untaxed source of revenue, the income−tax law had been enacted in the nick of time to meet the demands of the war. And the conflict also assisted the putting into effect of the Federal Reserve System, likewise in the nick of time.»
One may ask, in the nick of time for whom? Certainly not for the American people, who had no need for "mobilization of credit" for a European war, or to enact an income tax to finance a war. Hull’s statement affords a rare glimpse into the machinations of our "public servants".”
Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, The London Connection

“Today the debt, public and private, is nothing more than an artificial construction based on a usurocratic propaganda, an invention with which peoples are enslaved to work and to a useless production with the sole purpose of maintaining power by a small elite.”
Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money

“The president of New York's Bowery Savings Bank said that teaching the young to spend on credit «is something like teaching the young to use narcotics.»”
Vance Packard, The Waste Makers, also as quoted in Serge Latouche, Breakdown Guaranteed. The reasons for planned obsolescence

“Mankind is burning itself out in chasing a value which is already its own, but alas it has been hidden, privatised, and debited to its legitimate owner, mankind indeed, by a small elite of bankers.”
Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money

“By 1698, the British Treasury owed 16 million pounds sterling to the Bank of England. By 1815, principally due to the compounding of interest, the debt had risen to 885 million pounds sterling.”
“… the Federal Reserve System is not Federal; it has no reserves; and it is not a system at all, but rather, a criminal syndicate. From November, 1910, when the conspirators met on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to the present time, the machinations of the Federal Reserve bankers have been shrouded in secrecy. Today, that secrecy has cost the American people a three trillion dollar debt, with annual interest payments to these bankers amounting to some three hundred billion dollars per year, sums which stagger the imagination, and which in themselves are ultimately unpayable. Officials of the Federal Reserve System routinely issue remonstrances to the public, much as the Hindu fakir pipes an insistent tune to the dazed cobra which sways its head before him, not to resolve the situation, but to prevent it from striking him.”
Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, The London Connection

“The main function of the Federal Reserve is to regulate the supply of money. Yet, if no one is able to define what money is, how can we have an opinion about how the System is performing? The answer, of course, is that we cannot, and that is exactly the way the cartel wants it.
The reason the Federal Reserve appears to be a complicated subject is because most discussions start somewhere in the middle. By the time we get into it, definitions have been scrambled and basic concepts have been assumed. Under such conditions, intellectual chaos is inevitable. If we start at the beginning, however, and deal with each concept in sequence from the general to the specific, and if we agree on definitions as we go, we shall find to our amazement that the issues are really quite simple. Furthermore, the process is not only painless, it is — believe it or not — intensely interesting.”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“3. Debt has thus become not only a means of pushing these countries into extreme poverty, but also a tool for domination and exploitation, phenomena that one might have supposed to have disappeared along with colonialism. Worse still, it has facilitated a transition from public to private colonization, virtually a return to slavery as we knew it in the nineteenth century. …
38. The current debt management process will also enable the transnational corporations to put paid to any notions that the debtor countries might have about affirming their sovereignty and determining their own path to development. Because of the role it plays nowadays, debt is a terrifying instrument of domination that transnational companies wield against developing countries to dangerous effect. … This failure, coupled with the policies of the transnational corporations and the selfishness of the developed States, has led to the creation of two harmful and destructive practices, namely, structural adjustment programmes and, more recently, the devaluation of developing countries’ currencies.”
United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights, Sub−Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Effects of debt on human rights, Working paper prepared by Mr. El Hadji Guissé, as found at cetim.ch and quoted in Marco Saba, O la Banca o la Vita (Your Bank or Your Life)

“The policies of the IMF over the past 20 years advocating unfettered free trade, privatizing industry, deregulation and slashing government investments in health, education, and pensions have been a complete failure for low income and middle class families in the developing world and in the United States. Clearly, these policies have only helped corporations in their constant search for the cheapest labor and weakest environmental regulations.” “IMF Bailout for Brazil is Windfall to Banks, Disaster for US Taxpayers.”
Bernard Sanders, United States Congressman, Ranking Member of the International Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee, congressional press release regarding a call for an immediate Congressional investigation of the recent $30 billion International Monetary Fund bailout of Brazil, 1998, as quoted by Patrick Wood on newswithviews.com, and in Marco Saba, O la Banca o la Vita (Your Bank or Your Life)

“As it happened, she didn’t actually know what the IMF was, so I offered that the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world’s debt enforcers — You might say, the high−finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs.”
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Beyond the wasted money and the environmental devastation, there was an even more sinister side to the Bank during the McNamara years: the World Bank's predilection for increasing support to military regimes that tortured and murdered their subjects, sometimes immediately after the violent overthrow of more democratic governments. In 1979, Senator James Abourezk, a liberal Democrat from South Dakota, denounced the Bank on the Senate floor, noting that the Bank was increasing «loans to four newly repressive governments [Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and the Philippines] twice as fast as all others.» He noted that 15 of the world's most repressive governments would receive a third of all World Bank loan commitments in 1979, and that Congress and the Carter administration had cut off bilateral aid to four of the 15 – Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Ethiopia – for flagrant human rights violations. He blasted the Bank's "excessive secretiveness" and reminded his colleagues that «we vote the money, yet we do not know where it goes.»
Kevin Danaher, 50 Years is Enough: The Case Against The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as quoted in Marco Saba, O la Banca o la Vita (Your Bank or your Life)

“Corrupt Ministers of Finance and dictatorial Presidents from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are tripping over their own expensive footwear in their unseemly haste to "get adjusted." For such people, money has probably never been easier to obtain than it is today; with the venal, the cruel and the ugly are laughing literally all the way to the bank. For them structural adjustment is like a dream come true. No sacrifices are demanded of them personally. All they have to do — amazing but true — is screw the poor, and they’ve already had plenty of practice at that.”
Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business, as quoted in G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“How can the [World] Bank's managers continue in conscience to fund such genocidal regimes? Part of the answer is that they are not permitted to have a conscience. David Dunn, head of the Bank's Ethiopia Desk explained: «Political distinctions are not something our charter allows us to take into account.» The greater part of the answer, however, is that all socialist regimes have the potential for genocide, and the [World] Bank is committed to socialism. The brutalities of these countries are all in a days work for serious socialists who view them as merely unfortunate necessities for the building of their utopia. Lenin said you cannot make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. George Bernard Shaw, one of the early leaders of the Fabian Socialist movement, expressed it this way:
«Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.»”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“By controlling the money since its creation and debiting it to the people, the banks then place themselves above any democratic state, establishing de facto the usurocracy and the government through the medium of money. The usurocracy is therefore the private appropriation by a very small elite of the Fourth Power of the State, the Monetary Power, the only one able to achieve the other three powers on which a democracy is founded. The usurocracy, through the power of private money, has de facto absorbed the goverments and the media, establishing the most pernicious of dictatorships, the invisible tiranny of false freedom, making use of the same forms of propaganda of the full−blown dictatorships that it claims to be fighting, and there is no mistake in stating openly the modern States and citizens as being under the totalitarianism of banks’ government and the tiranny of their debt economy.”
Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money

“Credit, the great rival of cash, is completely controlled by the Banks, and distributed by them as suits their discretion.
«In copying England» says Mr. Jefferson «we do not seem to consider that like premises induce like consequences. The Bank mania is one of the most threatening of these imitations: it is raising up a monied aristocracy in our country which has already set the Government at defiance, and although forced to yield a little on the first essay of their strength, their principles are unyielded and unyielding. They have taken deep root in the hearts of that class from which our legislators are drawn, and the sop to Cerberus, from fable has become history. Their principles take hold of the good, their pelf of the bad, and thus, those whom the Constitution has placed as guards to its portals, are sophisticated or suborned from their duties. That paper money has some advantages must be admitted: but its abuses are also inveterate; and that it, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied. Shall we ever be able to put a constitutional veto upon it?»

«Of all aristocracies,» said a Committee of the New York Legislature, in 1818, «none more completely enslave a people than that of money; and in the opinion of your committee, no system was ever better devised so perfectly to enslave a community, as that of the present mode of conducting Banking establishments. Like the Syren of the fable, they entice to destroy. They hold the purse strings of society; and by monopolizing the whole of the circulating medium of the country, they form a precarious standard, by which all property in the country, houses, lands, debts and credits, personal and real estate of all descriptions, are valued; thus rendering the whole community dependent on them; proscribing every man who dares to expose their unlawful practices: if he happens to be out of their reach, so as to require no favors from them, his friends are made the victims. So no one dares complain.»
«The committee, on taking a general view of our State, and comparing those parts where Banks have been for some time established, with those that have had none, are astonished at the alarming disparity. They see, in the one case, the desolations they have made in societies that were before prosperous and happy; the ruin they have brought on an immense number of the most wealthy farmers, and they and their families suddenly hurled from wealth and independence into the abyss of ruin and despair.»
«If the facts stated in the foregoing be true, and your committee have no doubt they are, together with others equally reprehensible and to be dreaded, such as that their influence too frequently, nay, often already begins to assume a species of dictation altogether alarming, and unless some judicious remedy is provided by legislative wisdom, we shall soon witness attempts to control all selections to offices in our counties, nay the elections to the very Legislature. Senators and members of Assembly will be indebted to the Banks for their seats in this Capitol, and thus the wise end of our civil institutions will be prostrated in the dust of corporations of their own raising.»”
William M. Gouge, A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States

“Hence the bank is a crime syndicate that passes off its felonies as a bargain for the victims. … Upon their issue the Central Bank, in order to maintain control on monetary values, created by citizens (and that therefore ought to be credited to them), issues them by lending them, thus charging them, in the hugest fraud of all times. In this manner the great usury has turned peoples from owners to debtors of their own money.”
Giacinto Auriti, Il Paese dell’Utopia (The Land of Utopia)

“If a covert plan of economic warfare has been waged, it may have international rather than mere national implications as various commentators have charged. Counterfeiting on a national level is a treasonous crime against that nation. However, it seems reasonable to classify international scale economic warfare as a "crime against humanity."”
Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism

“…the greatest crime against Humanity of all times. As you know, over the last few years the lost output from the policies of austerity, the families and businesses and rights destroyed, and lives lost, the total loss to Humanity, has been greater than all the losses from all the wars in the history of the world combined. And thanks to you, to your selfless efforts, the political leadership has lost any possibility of innocence.”
Warren Mosler

“The causes of evil are as numerous as the varieties of evil. The Banking system must be regarded as the principal cause of social evil in the United States; but it is by no means the only one. There are other positive institutions in our land which are very pernicious. Remove the Banking system, and the extent in which most other evil institutions operate, will become evident. The application of the proper remedies will then be an easy task.”
William M. Gouge, A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States, also quoted in Arthur Nussbaum, A History of the Dollar

“Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
George Orwell

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
John Dalberg−Acton, 1st Baron Acton, from en.wikipedia.org

“The aim and function of political movements is capitalising the good faith of the base to the advantage of the bad faith of the top. A person is innocent until proven guilty; a politician is as guilty until proven innocent as much as he or she is powerful.”
Author’s note

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.”
Noam Chomsky, paraphrasing John Dewey, How The World Works

“When the total nation hasn't or cannot obtain enough food for its people, that nation is poor. When enough food exists and people cannot get it by honest labour, the state is rotten, and no effort of language will say how rotten it is. But for a banker or professor to tell you that the country cannot do this, that or the other because it lacks money is as black and foetid a lie, as grovelling and imbecile, as it would be to say it cannot build roads because it has no kilometres. (I didn't invent that phrase, but it is too good to leave idle.) …

The doctrine of Capital, in short, has shown itself as little else than the idea that unprincipled thieves and antisocial groups should be allowed to gnaw into the rights of ownership. This tendency "to gnaw into" has been recognised and stigmatised from the time of the laws of Moses and he called it neschek. And nothing differs more from this gnawing or corrosive than the right to share out the fruits of a common cooperative labour.
Indeed USURY has become the dominant force in the modern world.”
“The politicians are the waiters of bankers.”
“You can’t do a good economy with a bad ethics.”
“The treasure of a nation is its honesty.”
Ezra Pound, What is Money For?, and from it.wikiquote.org, some quoted in Giacinto Auriti, Il Paese dell'Utopia (The Land of Utopia)

“That the politician is today – as Pound said – the «banker's waiter» emerges from the obvious consideration that, if the Governor of the Central Bank and the Head of government are compared, the first can lend or deny all the money he wants, the second can only borrow it or not, solely on loan. It is therefore obvious that the second is the waiter of the first, but not because he is a servile soul, but because the rules of the game do not permit otherwise.”
Giacinto Auriti, as quoted in Marco Saba, Moneta Nostra (Our Money, author’s note)

“We absolutely know that no people can (on the past and present basis) produce so−called capital and centralize it in individual ownership, along with the right of the owners to tax us by the rule of geometrical progression of accumulative interest dividends and rents, without making of us a nation of insolvents and creating a condition of poverty for all men. … Also, we absolutely know that the trusts, as a result of the centralizing of the control of the industrial agencies and material resources operated in connection with their juggling of credits and money, have made us dependent upon the trusts for employment. This is the industrial slavery that the capitalistic interests prefer to chattel slavery. If we were chattel slaves they would have to care for us in sickness and old age, whereas now they are not concerned with us except for the time during which we work for them. …

THE CAPITALISTS DEMAND A SOCIALISM OF DOLLARS, THEY TO OWN THEM − IN OTHER WORDS, A MONEY TRUST, AND THEREFORE THEY ARE OPPOSED TO THE PEOPLE BECOMING SOCIALISTS IN THEIR OWN RIGHT. … Let us understand this clearly. The capitalists all denounce the existence of socialistic tendencies of whatever kind, if they are held by the majority of the people. But they are socialists themselves as their absolute control of concentrated capital will show. … Yes, that is socialism operated in the interests of the selected few. Socialism for them means their absolute control of the material products resulting from the toil of the people, − the right to charge for the use of this material and to make of us industrial slaves.”
Charles August Lindbergh, Sr., Congressman and Member of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Banking and Currency and The Money Trust

“The post−World War II Kilgore Committee of the United States Senate heard detailed evidence from government officials to the effect that,
… when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they found that long strides had been made since 1918 in preparing Germany for war from an economic and industrial point of view.
This build−up for European war both before and after 1933 was in great part due to Wall Street financial assistance in the 1920s to create the German cartel system, and to technical assistance from well−known American firms. …
The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities.

For instance, in 1934 Germany produced domestically only 300,000 tons of natural petroleum products and less than 800,000 tons of synthetic gasoline; the balance was imported. Yet, ten years later in World War II, after transfer of the Standard Oil of New Jersey hydrogenation patents and technology to I. G. Farben (used to produce synthetic gasoline from coal), Germany produced about 6 1/2 million tons of oil – of which 85 percent … was synthetic oil using the Standard Oil hydrogenation process. Moreover, the control of synthetic oil output in Germany was held by the I. G. Farben subsidiary, Braunkohle−Benzin A. G., and this Farben cartel itself was created in 1926 with Wall Street financial assistance.
… The business press [in the United States] was aware, from 1935 on, that German prosperity was based on war preparations. More important, it was conscious of the fact that German industry was under the control of the Nazis and was being directed to serve Germany's rearmament, and the firm mentioned most frequently in this context was the giant chemical empire, I. G. Farben.
… The evidence presented … suggests that not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Nazism, but for its own purposes aided Nazism wherever possible (and profitable) – with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States. …
It was [Hitler's financial genie, Hjalmar Horace Greeley] Schacht … who conceived the idea which later became the Bank for International Settlements. …
The B.I.S. apex continued its work during World War II as the medium through which the bankers – who apparently were not at war with each other – continued a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas, information, and planning for the post−war world. As one writer has observed, war made no difference to the international bankers:

The fact that the Bank possessed a truly international staff did, of course, present a highly anomalous situation in time of war. An American President was transacting the daily business of the Bank through a French General Manager, who had a German Assistant General Manager, while the Secretary−General was an Italian subject. …
The three largest loans handled by the Wall Street international bankers for German borrowers in the 1920s … were for the benefit of three German cartels which a few years later aided Hitler and the Nazis to power. American financiers were directly represented on the boards of two of these three German cartels. …
The three dominant cartels … were as follows: Allgemeine Elektrizitats−Gesellschaft (A.E.G.) (German General Electric), Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steelworks), American I.G. Chemical (I.G. Farben).
Looking at all the loans issued, it appears that only a handful of New York financial houses handled the German reparations financing. Three houses – Dillon, Read Co.; Harris, Forbes & Co.; and National City Company – issued almost three−quarters of the total face amount of the loans and reaped most of the profits. …
The two cartels, I.G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, produced 95 percent of German explosives in 1937−8 on the eve of World War II. This production was from capacity built by American loans and to some extent by American technology.
The I. G. Farben−Standard Oil cooperation for production of synthetic oil from coal gave the I. G. Farben cartel a monopoly of German gasoline production during World War II. …
In brief, in synthetic gasoline and explosives (two of the very basic elements of modern warfare), the control of German World War II output was in the hands of two German combines created by Wall Street loans …

Moreover, American assistance to Nazi war efforts extended into other areas. The two largest tank producers in Hitler's Germany were Opel, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (controlled by the J.P. Morgan firm), and the Ford A. G. subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. The Nazis granted tax−exempt status to Opel in 1936, to enable General Motors to expand its production facilities. General Motors obligingly reinvested the resulting profits into German industry. Henry Ford was decorated by the Nazis for his services to Nazism. Alcoa and Dow Chemical worked closely with Nazi industry with numerous transfers of their domestic U.S. technology. Bendix Aviation, in which the J.P. Morgan−controlled General Motors firm had a major stock interest, supplied Siemens & Halske A. G. in Germany with data on automatic pilots and aircraft instruments. As late as 1940, in the "unofficial war," Bendix Aviation supplied complete technical data to Robert Bosch for aircraft and diesel engine starters and received royalty payments in return.
In brief, American companies associated with the Morgan−Rockefeller international investment bankers – not, it should be noted, the vast bulk of independent American industrialists – were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry. It is important to note … that General Motors, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and the handful of U.S. companies intimately involved with the development of Nazi Germany were – except for the Ford Motor Company – controlled by the Wall Street elite – the J.P. Morgan firm, the Rockefeller Chase Bank and to a lesser extent the Warburg Manhattan bank. This … is not an indictment of all American industry and finance. It is an indictment of the "apex" – those firms controlled through the handful of financial houses, the Federal Reserve Bank system, the Bank for International Settlements, and their continuing international cooperative arrangements and cartels which attempt to control the course of world politics and economics.”
Antony Cyril Sutton, Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler

“«Dear Mr. President:
I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as that best suited for the Russian people…»
(Letter to President Woodrow Wilson, October 17, 1918, from William Lawrence Saunders, chairman, Ingersoll−Rand Corp.; director, American International Corp.; and deputy chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York)
… Bolsheviks are at the left end of the political spectrum and Wall Street financiers are at the right end; therefore, we implicitly reason, the two groups have nothing in common and any alliance between the two is absurd. Factors contrary to this neat conceptual arrangement are usually rejected as bizarre observations or unfortunate errors. …
On the other hand, it may be observed that both the extreme right and the extreme left of the conventional political spectrum are absolutely collectivist. … Both systems require monopoly control of society. While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to "go political" and make society go to work for the monopolists — under the name of the public good and the public interest. This strategy was detailed in 1906 by Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions of a Monopolist. …
Therefore, an alternative conceptual packaging of political ideas and politico−economic systems would be that of ranking the degree of individual freedom versus the degree of centralized political control. Under such an ordering the corporate welfare state and socialism are at the same end of the spectrum. Hence we see that attempts at monopoly control of society can have different labels while owning common features.
Consequently, one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and socialists. …

There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists — to their mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved largely because historians — with a few notable exceptions — have an unconscious Marxian bias and are thus locked into the impossibility of any such alliance existing. The open−minded reader should bear two clues in mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez−faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers. … Would not this be the logical twentieth−century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century?
… We have … a continuing working relationship between Bolshevik banker Olof Aschberg and the Morgan−controlled Guaranty Trust Company in New York before, during, and after the Russian Revolution. In tsarist times Aschberg was the Morgan agent in Russia and negotiator for Russian loans in the United States; during 1917 Aschberg was financial intermediary for the revolutionaries; and after the revolution Aschberg became head of Ruskombank, the first Soviet international bank, while Max May, a vice president of the Morgan−controlled Guaranty Trust, became director and chief of the Ruskombank foreign department …
and the Ruskombank promptly appointed Guaranty Trust Company its U.S. agent.
… Moreover, there is evidence of transfers of funds from Wall Street bankers to international revolutionary activities. For example, there is the statement … by William Boyce Thompson — a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a large stockholder in the Rockefeller−controlled Chase Bank, and a financial associate of the Guggenheims and the Morgans — that he (Thompson) contributed $1 million to the Bolshevik Revolution for propaganda purposes. …

Further, Wall Street firms including Guaranty Trust were involved with Carranza's and Villa's wartime revolutionary activities in Mexico. We also identified documentary evidence concerning a Wall Street syndicate's financing of the 1912 Sun Yat−sen revolution in China, a revolution that is today hailed by the Chinese Communists as the precursor of Mao's revolution in China. …
The American Red Cross Mission to Russia was a private venture of William B. Thompson, who publicly proffered partisan support to the Bolsheviks. British War Cabinet papers now available record that British policy was diverted towards the Lenin−Trotsky regime by the personal intervention of Thompson with Lloyd George in December 1917. We have reproduced statements by director Thompson and deputy chairman William Lawrence Saunders, both of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, strongly favoring the Bolshevists. …
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York was at 120 Broadway. The vehicle for this pro−Bolshevik activity was American International Corporation — at 120 Broadway. … Ludwig Martens, the Soviet's first ambassador, had been vice president of Weinberg & Posner, which was also located at 120−Broadway. Guaranty Trust Company was next door at 140 Broadway but Guaranty Securities Co. was at 120 Broadway. In 1917 Hunt, Hill & Betts was at 120 Broadway, and Charles B. Hill of this firm was the negotiator in the Sun Yat−sen dealings. John MacGregor Grant Co., which was financed by Olof Aschberg in Sweden and Guaranty Trust in the United States, and which was on the Military Intelligence black list, was at 120 Broadway. The Guggenheims and the executive heart of General Electric (also interested in American International) were at 120 Broadway. We find it therefore hardly surprising that the Bankers Club was also at 120 Broadway. …

What motive explains this coalition of capitalists and Bolsheviks?
… In the late nineteenth century, Morgan/Rockefeller, and Guggenheim had demonstrated their monopolistic proclivities. … So the simplest explanation of our evidence is that a syndicate of Wall Street financiers enlarged their monopoly ambitions and broadened horizons on a global scale. The gigantic Russian market was to be converted into a captive market and a technical colony to be exploited by a few high−powered American financiers and the corporations under their control. What the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission under the thumb of American industry could achieve for that industry at home, a planned socialist government could achieve for it abroad — given suitable support and inducements from Wall Street and Washington, D.C.
Finally, lest this explanation seem too radical, remember that it was Trotsky who appointed tsarist generals to consolidate the Red Army; that it was Trotsky who appealed for American officers to control revolutionary Russia and intervene in behalf of the Soviets; that it was Trotsky who squashed first the libertarian element in the Russian Revolution and then the workers and peasants; and that recorded history totally ignores the 700,000−man Green Army composed of ex−Bolsheviks, angered at betrayal of the revolution, who fought the Whites and the Reds. In other words, we are suggesting that the Bolshevik Revolution was an alliance of statists: statist revolutionaries and statist financiers aligned against the genuine revolutionary libertarian elements in Russia.
… It would be a gross misinterpretation to assume that assistance for the Bolshevists was ideologically motivated, in any narrow sense. The financiers were power−motivated and therefore assisted any political vehicle that would give them an entree to power: Trotsky, Lenin, the tsar, Kolchak, Denikin — all received aid, more or less. All, that is, but those who wanted a truly free individualist society.

Neither was aid restricted to statist Bolsheviks and statist counter−Bolsheviks. John P. Diggins, in Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, has noted in regard to Thomas Lamont of Guaranty Trust that:
Of all American business leaders, the one who most vigorously patronized the cause of Fascism was Thomas W. Lamont. Head of the powerful J.P. Morgan banking network, Lamont served as something of a business consultant for the government of Fascist Italy.
Lamont secured a $100 million loan for Mussolini in 1926 at a particularly crucial time for the Italian dictator. We might remember too that the director of Guaranty Trust was the father of Corliss Lamont, a domestic Communist. This evenhanded approach to the twin totalitarian systems, communism and fascism, was not confined to the Lamont family. For example, Otto Kahn, director of American International Corporation and of Kuhn, Leob & Co., felt sure that «American capital invested in Italy will find safety, encouragement, opportunity and reward.» This is the same Otto Kahn who lectured the socialist League of Industrial Democracy in 1924 that its objectives were his objectives. They differed only — according to Otto Kahn — over the means of achieving these objectives.
Ivy Lee, Rockefeller's public relations man, made similar pronouncements, and was responsible for selling the Soviet regime to the gullible American public in the late 1920s. We also have observed that Basil Miles, in charge of the Russian desk at the State Department and a former associate of William Franklin Sands, was decidedly helpful to the businessmen promoting Bolshevik causes; but in 1923 the same Miles authored a profascist article, "Italy's Black Shirts and Business." «Success of the Fascists is an expression of Italy's youth,» wrote Miles while glorifying the fascist movement and applauding its esteem for American business.

The Marburg Plan, financed by Andrew Carnegie's ample heritage, was produced in the early years of the twentieth century. It suggests premeditation for this kind of superficial schizophrenia, which in fact masks an integrated program of power acquisition. …
The governments of the world, according to the Marburg Plan, were to be socialized while the ultimate power would remain in the hands of the international financiers. …
From these unlikely seeds grew the modern internationalist movement, which included not only the financiers Carnegie, Paul Warburg, Otto Kahn, Bernard Baruch, and Herbert Hoover, but also the Carnegie Foundation and its progeny International Conciliation. The trustees of Carnegie were, as we have seen, prominent on the board of American International Corporation. … Woodrow Wilson came under the powerful influence of — and indeed was financially indebted to — this group of internationalists. As Jennings C. Wise has written, «Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson… made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport.»
… Trotsky was for world revolution, for world dictatorship; he was, in one word, an internationalist. Bolshevists and bankers have then this significant common ground — internationalism. Revolution and international finance are not at all inconsistent if the result of revolution is to establish more centralized authority. International finance prefers to deal with central governments. The last thing the banking community wants is laissez−faire economy and decentralized power because these would disperse power.
… This handful of bankers and promoters was not Bolshevik, or Communist, or socialist, or Democrat, or even American. Above all else these men wanted markets, preferably captive international markets — and a monopoly of the captive world market as the ultimate goal. They wanted markets that could be exploited monopolistically without fear of competition from Russians, Germans, or anyone else — including American businessmen outside the charmed circle. This closed group was apolitical and amoral. …

Today the objective is still alive and well. John D. Rockefeller expounds it in his book The Second American Revolution. … Rockefeller's book promotes collectivism under the guises of "cautious conservatism" and "the public good." It is in effect a plea for the continuation of the earlier Morgan−Rockefeller support of collectivist enterprises and mass subversion of individual rights.
In brief, the public good has been, and is today, used as a device and an excuse for selfaggrandizement by an elitist circle that pleads for world peace and human decency. But so long as the reader looks at world history in terms of an inexorable Marxian conflict between capitalism and communism, the objectives of such an alliance between international finance and international revolution remain elusive. So will the ludicrousness of promotion of the public good by plunderers. If these alliances still elude the reader, then he should ponder the obvious fact that these same international interests and promoters are always willing to determine what other people should do, but are signally unwilling to be first in line to give up their own wealth and power. Their mouths are open, their pockets are closed.
This technique, used by the monopolists to gouge society, was set forth in the early twentieth century by Frederick C. Howe in The Confessions of a Monopolist. First, says Howe, politics is a necessary part of business. To control industries it is necessary to control Congress and the regulators and thus make society go to work for you, the monopolist. So, according to Howe, the two principles of a successful monopolist are, «First, let Society work for you; and second, make a business of politics.» These, wrote Howe, are the basic "rules of big business."
… Wall Street, or rather the Morgan−Rockefeller complex represented at 120 Broadway and 14 Wall Street, … went to bat in Washington for the Bolsheviks. It succeeded. The Soviet totalitarian regime survived. In the 1930s foreign firms, mostly of the Morgan−Rockefeller group, built the five−year plans. They have continued to build Russia, economically and militarily … [for] the Korean War and the Vietnam War — in which 100,000 Americans and countless allies lost their lives to Soviet armaments built with this same imported U.S. technology. … A farsighted, and undoubtedly profitable, policy for a Wall Street syndicate, became a nightmare for millions outside the elitist power circle and the ruling class.”
Antony Cyril Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution

“«If we do not develop our automobile industry, we are threatened with the heaviest losses, if not defeats, in a future war.» Pravda, July 20, 1927.
At the end of World War II the U.S. government appointed an interagency committee to consider the future of the German automobile industry and its war−making potential. This committee concluded that any motor vehicle industry in any country is an important factor in that country's war potential.
… «The Committee recognized without dissent that [Germany's] motor vehicle industry was an important factor in her waging of war during World War II.»
… These conclusions have been ignored for the Soviet automobile industry, even while the Soviets themselves officially stated their intention to use foreign automobile technology for military vehicles as early as 1927. V. V. Ossinsky, a top planner, wrote a series of articles for Pravda (July 20, 21 and 22, 1927) with the following warning:
«If in a future war we use the Russian peasant cart against the American or European automobile, the result to say the least will be disproportionately heavy losses, the inevitable consequences of technical weakness. …»
Almost all — possibly 95 percent — of Soviet military vehicles are produced in very large plants designed by American engineers in the 1930s through the 1970s.
… In May 1929 the Soviets signed an agreement with the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. The Soviets agreed to purchase $13 million worth of automobiles and parts and Ford agreed to give technical assistance until 1938 to construct an integrated automobile−manufacturing plant at Nizhni−Novgorod. Construction was completed in 1933 by the Austin Company … Today this plant is known as Gorki. …

Furthermore, U.S. equipment has been shipped in substantial quantifies to Gorki and subsidiary plants since the 1930s — indeed some shipments were made from the United States in 1968 during the Vietnamese War.
… the Ford−Gorki plant has a continuous history of production of armored cars and wheeled vehicles for Soviet army use: those used against the United States in Korea and Vietnam.
In addition to armored cars, the Ford−Gorki factory manufactures a range of truck−mounted weapons. …
in 1964 Gorki produced the first Soviet wire−guided missile antitank system. …
On April 19, 1972, the U.S. Navy photographed a Russian freighter bound for Haiphong with a full load of military cargo … (Human Events, May 13, 1972). Thus the "peaceful trade" of the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s was used to kill Americans in Vietnam, and commit genocide in Afghanistan.
… Possibly there may have been doubt as to Soviet end−use of truck plants back in the 20s and 30s, but the above information certainly was known to Washington at least by the mid 1960s …
Many major American companies have been prominent in building up the Soviet truck industry. The Ford Motor Company, the A. J. Brandt Company, the Austin Company, General Electric, Swindell−Dressier, and others supplied the technical assistance, design work, and equipment of the original giant plants.
… «The (American) businessmen who built the Soviet Kama River truck plant should be shot as traitors.» — Avraham Shifrin, former Soviet Defense Ministry official.

… Who were the government officials responsible for this transfer of known military technology? The concept originally came from National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who reportedly sold President Nixon on the idea that giving military technology to the Soviets would temper their global territorial ambitions. How Henry arrived at this gigantic non sequitur is not known. Sufficient to state that he aroused considerable concern over his motivations. Not least that Henry had been a paid family employee of the Rockefellers since 1958 and has served as International Advisory Committee Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, a Rockefeller concern.
The U.S.−Soviet trade accords including Kama and other projects were signed by George Pratt Shultz, later to become Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration and long known as a proponent of more aid and trade to the Soviets. Shultz is former President of Bechtel Corporation, a multi−national contractor and engineering firm.
American taxpayers underwrote Kama financing through the Export−Import Bank. The head of Export−Import Bank at that time was William J. Casey, a former associate of Armand Hammer and now (1985) Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Financing was arranged by Chase Manhattan Bank, whose then Chairman was David Rockefeller. Chase is the former employer of Paul Volcker, now Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. …
We cite these names to demonstrate the tight interlocking hold proponents of military aid to the Soviet Union maintain on top policy making government positions.
On the other hand, critics of selling U.S. military technology have been ruthlessly silenced and suppressed.
… For two decades rumors have surfaced that critics of aid to the Soviet Union have been silenced. Back in the 1930s General Electric warned its employees in the Soviet Union not to discuss their work in the USSR under penalty of dismissal.
In the 1950s and 1960s IBM fired engineers who publicly opposed sale of IBM computers to the USSR.

… It is paradoxical that an Administration that was noisy in its public anti−communist stance, and quick to point out the human cost of the Soviet system, was also an Administration that gave a gigantic boost to Soviet military truck capacity.
Possibly campaign contributions had something to do with it. Multinationals listed … as prime contractors on Kama River were also major political contributors. However, the significant link never explored by Congress is that Henry Kissinger, the key promoter of the Kama River truck plant at the policy level, was a former and long−time employee of the Rockefeller family — and the Rockefellers are the largest single shareholders in Chase Manhattan Bank (David [Rockefeller, author’s note] was then Chairman of the Board) and Chase was the lead financier for Kama River.”
Antony Cyril Sutton, The Best Enemy Money Can Buy

“In 1870, a wealthy British socialist by the name of John Ruskin was appointed as professor of fine arts at Oxford University in London. He taught that the state must take control of the means of production and organize them for the good of the community as a whole. He advocated placing control of the state into the hands of a small ruling class, perhaps even a single dictator. …
Lenin taught that the masses could not be trusted to handle their own affairs and that a special group of disciplined intellectuals must assume this role for them. That is the function of the Communist Party, which never comprises more than about three per cent of the population. Even when the charade of free elections is allowed, only members of the Party — or those over whom the KGB has total control — are permitted to run for office. The concept that a ruling party or class is the ideal structure for society is at the heart of all collectivist schemes, regardless of whether they are called Socialism, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, or any other "ism" which may yet be invented to disguise it. …

Here, then, was the classical pattern of political conspiracy. … At the center, there is always a tiny group in complete control, with one man as the undisputed leader. Next is a circle of secondary leadership that, for the most part, is unaware of an inner core. They are led to believe that they are the inner−most ring.
In time, as these conspiracies are built from the center out, they form additional rings of organization. Those in the outer echelons usually are idealists with an honest desire to improve the world. They never suspect an inner control for other purposes, and only those few who demonstrate a ruthless capacity for higher leadership are ever allowed to see it. . …
Eugene Lyons had been a correspondent for United Press in revolutionary Russia. He began his career as highly sympathetic to the Bolsheviks and their new regime, but six years of actual living inside the new socialist utopia shattered his illusions. In his acclaimed book, Workers’ Paradise Lost, he summarizes the true meaning of the October Revolution:
«Lenin, Trotsky, and their cohorts did not overthrow the monarchy. They overthrew the first democratic society in Russian history, set up through a truly popular revolution in March, 1917… They represented the smallest of the Russian radical movements… But theirs was a movement that scoffed at numbers and frankly mistrusted the multitudes. The workers could be educated for their role after the revolution; they would not be led but driven to their terrestrial heaven. Lenin always sneered at the obsession of competing socialist groups with their "mass base." ‘Give us an organization of professional revolutionaries,’ he used to say, ‘and we will turn Russia upside down.’ …
Even these contingents were pathetically duped, having not the remotest notion of the real purposes for which they were being used. They were striking out, they thought, for the multi−party Soviets, for freedom, equality, and other goals which their organizers regarded as emotional garbage…

Within a few months after they attained power, most of the tsarist practices the. Leninists had condemned were revived, usually in more ominous forms: political prisoners, convictions without trial and without the formality of charges, savage persecution of dissenting views, death penalties for more varieties of crime than in any other modern nation. The rest were put into effect in the following years, including the suppression of all other parties, restoration of the internal passport, a state monopoly of the press, along with repressive practices the monarchy had outlived for a century or more.»
All of this, of course, is a departure from the main narrative, but it has been necessary to illustrate a fact that has been obscured by the passage of time and the acceptance of myth by mainstream historians. The fact is that Lenin and Trotsky were not sent to Russia to overthrow the anti−Semitic Tsar. Their assignment from Wall Street was to overthrow the revolution. …
And the circle is complete: From the American taxpayer to the American government to the "socialist" regime to the American businessman and, ultimately, to the American financier who funded the project and provided the political influence to make it all possible.”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“… the powers of financial capitalism had another far−reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle (BIS), Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations.

Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, as quoted in Marco Saba, O la Banca o la Vita (Your Bank or your Life)

“The bigger the sum, the easier the crime.”
John Le Carré, interviewed by Democracy Now!

“The real problem today is creating a world government.”
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, believed to be the true government of the United States), Foreign Affairs magazine, issue 2, 1922, as quoted in Matteo Simonetti, La verità sul Piano Kalergi (The Truth about the Kalergi Plan, author’s note)

“We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.”
banker James Paul Warburg, 17 February 1950, appearance before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, as quoted in en.wikipedia.org; Marcello Pamio, Il lato oscuro del nuovo ordine mondiale (The Dark Side of the New World Order, author’s note); Pietro Ratto, I Rothschild e gli altri (The Rothschild and The Others, author’s note)

“«Behind the visible government an invisible government sits on the throne that owes no loyalty to the citizens and does not have to account to them.» Theodore Roosevelt
«The world is divided into three cathegories: a very restricted number of men at the heart of what is going on, a slightly broader group ensuring its implementation and monitoring its development, and finally an overwhelming majority that will never get to know what did actually happen.» Nicholas Murray Butler, Nobel prize winner for Peace in 1931, member of Council on Foreign Relations, advisor to seven United States presidents, etc.

«A tax ought to be levied on every flag, so as to encourage the Nations to unite rather than to divide.» Robert Cooper, European Union General Manager for Foreign Affairs and Defense, interview published by El Mundo on 18th September 2008
«We're on the verge of a global transformation, all we need is the right global crisis and the nations will accept the new world order.» David Rockefeller, in a United Nations meeting with ambassadors on 14th september 1994
«Something has to take the place of governments and the private power seems to me the most appropriate subject.» David Rockefeller, published by Newsweek International on 1st february 1999
«Many governments must realise they lost their national sovereignty for some time now.» Mario Draghi, president of European Central Bank (ECB)
«We're at the end of an era, that of the affluent society.» George Soros”
Cristina Martín Jiménez, Perdidos. Los planes secretos del Club Bilderberg (Lost, The Secret Plans of Bilderberg Club, author's note)

“Revolution is a blow struck at a paralytic. … When the debt−grip has been firmly established, control of every form of publicity and political activity soon follows, together with a full grip on industrialists, [both management and labour]. The stage is then set for the revolutionary blow. The grip of the right hand of finance establishes the paralysis; while the revolutionary left hand that holds the dagger deals the fatal blow. Moral corruption facilitates the whole process.”
A.H.M. Ramsey, The Nameless War, as quoted in William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game

“The NSA has a $52 billion budget and the ability to monitor tens of millions of calls a second. You think they're not using it?”
book/film The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine/The Big Short, from en.wikiquote.org

“«Thank you for inviting me here and for giving me the opportunity to express my story. But let me give you some of my background. I spent about four years in the military, and then I went to the NSA, directly, so I ended up with about 37 years of service. … Fundamentally I started working with data, looking at data and data systems, and how you do that. I was developing this concept, and that was that you could lay it out in such a way that they could be coded and executed electronically, meaning you could automate analisys. … It must have been right after a few days, no more than a week after the 9/11 that they had decided to begin actively spying on everyone in this country. And they wanted that part of our program to run all the spying. So, that’s exactly what they did. And then they started taking telecom data, and they expanded there after that. I mean, the one I knew was AT&T, and that one provided 320 million records every day. That program was re−authorized every 45 days by what I call the "Yes Committee", which was Hayden and Tenet and the DOJ (Department Of Justice). That program was called STELLARWIND. So, first I went to the House Intellgence Committe, and the staff member that I personally knew there, and she then went to the Chairman of that Committee, Nancy Pelosi, who was the Minority Rep[resentative]. They were all briefed into that program at the time, by the way, and all the other programs that were going on, including all these CIA programs. I wasn’t alone in this, there were four others of the NSA; we were all trying to work internally in the government for all of these years, trying to get them to come around to being constitutionally acceptable, and take it into the Courts, and have the Courts’ oversight over that, too.

So we naively kept thinking that that could happen, and it never did. But, at any rate, after that and all the stuff we were doing, they decided to raid us to keep us quiet, threaten us, you know. So we were raided simultaneously, the four of us. In my case they came in with guns drawn, and I don’t know why they did, but they did.» William Binney, whistleblower, former NSA crypto−mathematician, speaking at a public conference
«What you know as STELLARWIND has grown. SSO, the Expanded Special Source Operations that took over STELLARWIND share the pie that’s spread all over the world, to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United States. Disturbingly, the amount of U.S. communications ingested by the NSA is still increasing. Publicly we complain that things are going dark but in fact our accesses are improving. The truth is that the NSA has never in its history collected more than it does now. I know the location of the most domestic interception points and that the largest telecommunication companies in the US are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove. We are building the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of Man yet its directors exempt themselves for accountability. NSA director Keith Alexander lied to Congress, which I can prove. Billions of U.S. communications are being intercepted. In gathering evidence of wrongdoing I focused on the wronging of the American people, but believe me when I say that the surveillance we live under is the highest privilege compared to how we treat the rest of the world. This I can also prove. On cyber operations the government public position is there is still lack of policy framework. This too is a lie. There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of Martial Law for cyber operations created by the White House. It’s called "Presidential Policy Directive 20" and was finalized the end of last year. This I can also prove. … I ask only that you ensure that this information makes it home to the American public.» Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, to Laura Poitras, documentary’s director

«There’s an infrastructure in place in the United States, and worldwide, that NSA has built, in cooperation with other governments as well, that intercepts basically every digital communication, every radio communication, every analogue communication that it has sensors in place to detect, and with these capabilities basically the vast majority of human and computer to computer communications, device based communications, which sort of form the relationships between humans are automatically ingested without targeting, and that allows individuals to retroactively search your communications based on self certifications. So, for example, if I wanted to see the content of your e−mail, your wife’s phone calls, anything like that, all I have to do is use what they call a "selector": any kind of thing in the communications chain that might uniquely or almost uniquely identify you as an individual: and I’m talking about things like e−mail addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, even passwords that are unique to you that aren’t used by anyone else, I could input those into the system, and it would not only go back through the database and go, ‘have I seen this anywhere in the past?’, it would basically put an additional level of scrutiny on it, moving into the future, that says, ‘if this is detected now or anytime in the future I want this to go to me immediately’ and alert me in real time that you’re communicating with someone or things like that.» Edward Snowden, commenting his documents with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, journalists
«Actually, given your geographic familiarity with the UK I’d like to point out that GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters, author’s note] has probably the most invasive network intercept program anywhere in the world. It’s called Tempora, T E M P O R A, and it’s the world’s first "full−take", they call it, that means content in addition to metadata on everything.» Edward Snowden, commenting his documents with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill

«The primary purpose of the second archive is to bring the focus over to SSO as opposed to PRISM. This is in general. SSO are the Special Source Operations: there’s this worldwide passive collection on networks, both domestic to the U.S. and international. There’s a lot of different ways they do it, but corporate partnerships are one of the primary things: they do it domestically, they also do this with the multinationals that might be headquartered in the USA, in a kind of coerce or just pay and they give them access. And they also do it bilaterally with the assistance of certain governments. And that’s basically on the premise that, ‘All right, we’ll help you set the system up if you give us all the data from it.’ XKEYSCORE is the front−end system that analysts use for querying that [… undiscernible expression, author’s note] ocean about all of that stuff where you can do that retroactive searches, live searches, and get flaggings, and all that. … As of fiscal year 2011 they could monitor one billion telephone and internet sessions simultaneously for one of these devices. And they could collect at a rate of about 125 Gigabytes a second. That’s for each one of these, yeah. Back then, there were twenty sites; there’s ten at DOD (Department Of Defence, author’s note) installations; but these are all outdated, we expanded pretty rapidly. But so, twenty sites that’s at least twenty billion.» Edward Snowden, commenting his documents with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
«This is CNN Breaking News. An explosive new report is re−igniting the concerns that your privacy is being violated to protect the America’s "security". It reveals a Court Order giving the National Security Agency a blanket access to millions of Verizon customer records on a daily basis. Early I had a chance to conduct the first TV interview with the reporter who broke the story wide open: Glenn Greenwald, of The Guardian. Explain for all the viewers why this is important.

It’s important because people have understood that the law that this was done under which is the Patriot Act enacted in the wake of 9/11 was a law that allowed the government very broad powers to get records about people with a lower level of suspicion or probable cause to traditional standards. So it’s always been assumed that under the Patriot Act if the government had any suspicion that you were involved in a crime or terrorism, they could get a lot of information about you. What this Court Order does, that makes it so striking, is that it’s not directed at any individuals who they believe or have suspicion of committing crimes or part of a terrorist organization. It’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call that they’ve made internationally and locally, so it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping. It’s a government program designed to collect informations about all americans, not just people where they believe there’s reason to believe that they’ve done anything wrong.» CNN News, interviewing Glenn Grenwald
«This is CNN Breaking News. Another explosive article has just appeared, this time in the Washington Post. It’s breaking news and it reveals another broad and secret U.S. Government’s surveillance program. The Washington Post and The Guardian in London reporting that the NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading internet companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Report says they’re extracting audio, video, photographs, e−mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. Let’s discuss this latest revelation coming out with the former NSA official Bill Binney who had quit back in 2001, when you were angry for what was going on, and now known as a whistleblower. Now, Bill, what do you tink about this Washington Post story? Well, I assume it’s the continuation of what they’ve been doing all along. So you’re not surprised? No. you don’t have any idea who’s leaking this information? (his attorney speaks for him) I don’t know who leaked this. I have no doubt that the administration now launch an investigation, not into who approved these programs, but into who leaked the information.» CNN News, interviewing William Binney

«We’re talking about tens of millions of Americans who weren’t suspected of doing anything who were surveilled in this way.» CNN News
«There are 1.2 million people on various stages of their watch list. … That could raise a profile of this whole political situation with whistleblowing to a whole new level. I actually think that’s a great thing. I think people are going to see what’s been hidden again, again and again by a totally different part of the government.» Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden discussing about new sources and leaks
«Recent reports have revealed that the NSA have access to the encryption keys and have paid tech companies to introduce backdoors in encryption protocols. So we’re going to talk about the ways in which we can defend against governments spying on us.» 2013 hearings of the European Parliament to investigate NSA surveillance on EU citizens and companies, introduction to the speeches of Ladar Levison and Jacob Appelbaum
«There’s maybe some technical basis on which they can say that we are not actively collaborating, or they don’t have what we consider in our definitions to be direct access to our servers, but what I do know is that I’ve talked to more than one person who has sat at a desk, at a portal, and typed there commands and reached into their servers from a distance. So, whatever they want to call that, that’s what’s happening. … This is the single greatest infringement of America civil liberties, probably of all times, isn’t it? … When you have secret codes, secret operations like PRISM, secret investigations which go in every single cough of the Americans’ life without any member of the American public knowing about it, that’s not freedom, is it?» interview and comment in CNN News
«Snowden was charged … principally under a World War I era criminal law called the Espionage Act. … It was only used to prosecute people who had been accused of acting with a foreign power. Spies, not whistleblowers. And it’s a very unusual legal representation…

The Espionage Act does not distinguish between leaks to the press in the public interest and selling secrets to foreign enemies for personal profit. So under the Espionage Act it’s not a defence if the information that was disclosed should not have been withheld in the first place, that it was improperly classified; it’s not a defence if the dissemmination was in the public interest, that it led to reforms. Even if the Court determines that the programs that were revealed were illegal or unconstitutional, that’s still not a defence under the Espionage Act. … So, when we state that the trial wouldn’t be fair … We’re saying the law essentially itself eliminates any kind of defence that Snowden might be able to make and essentially would equate him with a spy. … And I think that we all recognize … that it’s probably 95% politics and 5% law how this would be resolved.» Ben Wizner, Snowden’s ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) lawyer
«What do you think they’re doing to reporters, those of us that are working directly with Snowden documents? How do you think they will approach with people like us? You’re on a cast−iron covered list. Which means every electronic device you use, that they can attach to you, the record and capture all that data. And what do they do with that data? They’re just trying to figure out what we’re doing? Well, that’s part of it, but the other part, primary part for them, I think is to find the source of the information you’re getting. So if I had a confidential source who’s giving me information as a whistleblower, and he worked for the U.S. government, and he’s concerned about what he perceives as violation of the Constitution, and he gets in touch with me... From there on, they would nail him, and start watching everything he did. And if he started passing data, I’m sure they would take him off the street.» William Binney, interviewed by Jeremy Scahill, journalist

«My service was designed to remove me from the possibility of being forced to violate the persons’ privacy. … In that surveillance would have to be conducted on the target, either the sender or the receiver of the messages. But I was approached by the FBI quite recently, and told that, because I couldn’t turn over the information from that particular user, I would be forced to give up those SSL keys and let the FBI collect every communication on my network without any kind of transparency. … Think about that. I believe in the rule of law, I believe in the need to conduct investigations, but those investigations are supposed to be difficult for a reason. It’s supposed to be difficult to invade somedody’s privacy, because of how intrusive it is, because of how disruptive it is. If we can’t, if we don’t have a right to privacy, how do we have a free and open discussion? What good is the right to free speech, if it’s not protected, in the sense that you can’t have a private discussion with somebody else about something you disagree with. Think about the chilling effect that that has. Think about the chilling effect it does have on contries that don’t have a right to privacy.» Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit, at the 2013 hearings of the European Parliament to investigate NSA surveillance on EU citizens and companies
«First of all, Americans’ justification for everything since the September 11 attacks is terrorism. Everything is in the name of national security to protect our population. In reality, it’s the opposite. A lot of the documents have nothing to do with terrorism and national security, but with competition between countries, and with companies’ industrial, financial, or economic issues. Secondly, there’s XKeyscore. When we first started publishing articles, the US government’s defence was that it was not invading the content of communications, just taking the metadata. That means the names of the people talking, who is calling whom, call durations… But if I know all the people you are communicating with, and everyone they are communicating with, where you are when you are communicating, the call duration and the position, then I can learn a lot about your personality, your activity and your life. This is a major invasion of privacy.

In reality, that defense is totally false. The US Government has the ability to get not only metadata, but the actual content of your emails or what you say on the phone, the words you type in Google searches, the websites you visit, the documents you send to colleagues. This system can track nearly everything that every individual is doing online. So if you’re a journalist investigating the American government, if you work for a company with American competitors, or if you work in human rights involving the American government, or any other field, they can very easily intercept your communication. If you’re an American living in the US, they have to seek permission from a court, but they always get it. But if you’re not American, they don’t need anything, no special permission at all. I think the consequences of eliminating privacy are difficult to predict, but we must understand that this will have an enormous impact. The population’s ability to make demonstrations or to organize is greatly reduced when people don’t have privacy.» Glenn Greenwald, Brazilian Senate hearing on NSA spying
«Who here actually feels like they are under surveillance pretty regularly? Everyone inside of Occupy… [the Occupy Wall Street movement, author’s note] How many people have been arrested, and, at their Court day they had their phone taken into the backroom? How many people here had their retina scanned? Wow. … This is the concept that is key to all that we’ll talk about today. And it’s called linkability. Take one piece of data, and link it to another piece of data. So, for example, if you have you metro card and you have your debit card, if you have those things you can draw a line between them, right? So that’s not a scary thing. Except your debit card is linked to everything you do during the day. So now they know where you’re going, when you make purchases.

So when they decide to target you, they can actually recreate your exact steps. With a metro card and a credit card alone. Like, literally where you go, and where you buy, and potentially by linking that data with other people on similar travel plans, they can figure out who you talk to and who you met with. When you then take cell−phone data which logs your location, and you link up purchasing data, metro card data, and your debit card, you start to get what you could call metadata: an aggregate over a person’s life. In metadata, aggregate is content. It tells a story about you, which is made up of facts, but it’s not necessarily true. So, for example, just because you were on the corner and all those data point to it, it doesn’t mean you committed the crime. So, it’s important to note that if someone has a perception that you have done a thing, he will now follow you for the rest of your life. So, just keep in mind that what happens to you guys, for example, with your fingerprints, and retins scans, and photographs, that is what is going to happen to people, in the future, when they resist policy changes, and when they try to protest, in a totally constitutionally protected way.» Jacob Appelbaum, encryption and security software developer and journalist, speaking at the Digital Anti−Repression Workshop on Surveillance, from Democracy Now!
«I feel that it’s important to testify about what’s really going on behind the scenes in the intelligence communities around the world. Not just in NSA. All these programs that Edward Snowden has exposed fundamentally are ways of acquiring information. Every dictatorship down through history has always done that. One of the first things they need to do is to try to acquire knowledge of their population, and that’s exactly what these programs do. I see this as the most major threat to our democracies all around the world.» William Binney, testifying as expert witness in a 2014 German parliamentary inquiry to investigate NSA spying

«I’ve noticed a really interesting discussion point which is, what people used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And we say, in the same breathe that privacy is dead. This is something that really concerns me about my generation, especially when we talk about how we’re not surprised by anything. I think that we should consider that when we lose privacy we lose agency, we lose liberty itself, because we no longer feel free to express what we think.» Jacob Appelbaum, at the 2013 hearings of the European Parliament to investigate NSA surveillance on EU citizens and companies
«I remember what the Internet was like before its being watched, and there’s never been anything in the history of Man that’s like it. I mean, you could, again, you can have children from one part of the world have an equal discussion where, you know, they were granted the same respect for their ideas and conversation with experts in the field from another part of the world on any topic anywhere anytime, all of the time. And it was free and unrestrained. And we’ve seen the chilling of that, the cooling of that, the changing of that model towards something in which people self−police their own views and they literally make jokes about ending up on "the list" if they donate to a political cause or if they say something in a discussion. And it’s become an expectation they’re being watched. Many people I’ve talked to have mentioned that they’re careful about what they type into search engines because they know that it’s being recorded, and that limits the boundaries of their intellectual exploration. And I’m more willing to risk inprisonment or any other negative outcome personally than I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me, whom I care for equally as I do for myself. And again that’s not to say that I’m self−sacrificing, because it gives me, I feel good in my human experience to know that I can contribute the good of others.» Edward Snowden, commenting with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill

«I feel the modern media has a big focus on personalities, and I’m a little concerned the more we focus on that the more there it is that is a distraction.» Edward Snowden, commenting with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
«For me, it all comes down to State power against the people’s ability to meaningfully oppose that power. I’m sitting there, every day, getting paid to design methods to amplify that State power, and I’m realizing that if, you know, the policies, which is, there are the only thing that restrain these States, were changed, there, you couldn’t meaningfully oppose this. I mean, you have to be the most incredibly sophisticated [… undiscernible expression, author’s note] in existence, I mean, I’m not sure there’s anybody, no matter how gifted you are, who could oppose all of the offices, all the bright people, even all the mediocre people out there with all their tools, and all their capabilities.» Edward Snowden, commenting with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
«I’ll come out just to go, Hey! You know, this is not a question of this talking around in shadows, these are public issues. These are not my issues, you know, these are everybody’s issues. And I’m not afraid of you. You’re not gonna bullying me into silence as you’ve done to everybody else. And if nobody else is going to do it I will. And hopefully when I’m gone, whatever you do to me, there’ll be somebody else who will do the same thing. It will be the sort of Internet principle of the Hydra: you can stop one person, but there’s gonna be seven more of us.» Edward Snowden, discussing with Glenn Greenwald
«I think it is powerful to come out and be like, Look, I’m not afraid, and I don’t think other people should either. I was sitting in the office, right next to you last week; you know we all have a stake in this, this is our country, and the balance of power between the citizenry and the government is becoming that of the ruling and the ruled, opposed to that of the elected and the elector. … I didn’t try to hide the footprints because, again, I intend to come forward. … I want that to be … the fearlessness and the fuck you to the bullying tactics that have completely pervaded everything we do. … It’s inverting the model the government has laid out where people who were trying to say the truth skulk around and they hide in the dark, and they quote anonymously, and I say, fuck that, let’s do it.» Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, discussing”
Laura Poitras, CITIZENFOUR documentary film

“This, to my thinking, actually represented the great nexus of the Intelligence Community and the tech industry: both are entrenched and unelected powers that pride themselves on maintaining absolute secrecy about their developments. Both believe that they have the solutions for everything, which they never hesitate to unilaterally impose.
…
Direct engagement, which can be harsh and emotionally draining, simply doesn’t happen that much on the technical side of intelligence, and almost never in computing. There is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a screen. Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limit any meaningful confrontation with their consequences.
…
Tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned.
…
I was reminded of what is perhaps the fundamental rule of technological progress: if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been.
…
Terrorism, of course, was the stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force.
…
These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.
…

If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search engine — and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example — then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.
…
Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons.
Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four−shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL, handles "passive collection," making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in charge of "active collection" — that is, actively tampering with the users.
You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as "anonymous Internet proxy" or "protest."

If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits — malware programs — to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you.
Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.
…
PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web−browsing content, search engine queries, and all other data stored on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators. Upstream collection, meanwhile, was arguably even more invasive. It enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private−sector Internet infrastructure — the switches and routers that shunt Internet traffic worldwide, via the satellites in orbit and the high−capacity fiber−optic cables that run under the ocean.
…
Study after study has shown that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively *are* less free.
…

In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in digital history: the move by both government and businesses to link, as intimately as possible, users’ online personas to their offline legal identity. Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is precisely the only environment in which you can grow up — by which I mean that the early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the "offender" to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.
…
The NSA’s conventional wisdom was that there was no point in collecting anything unless they could store it until it was useful, and there was no way to predict when exactly that would be.
…
the agency’s ultimate dream, which is permanency — to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced for perpetuity, and so create a perfect memory. The permanent record.
…
At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration — any future rogue head of the NSA — could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.
…

Of course, our consciously created memories, the records that we choose to keep, comprise just a sliver of the information that has been wrung out of our lives — most of it unconsciously, or without our consent — by business and government surveillance. We are the first people in the history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that our collected records might have an eternal existence. This is why we have a special duty. We must ensure that these records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our children.”
“Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right…”
“To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a "private" business. … There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything — including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.

Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor — or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.”
“I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.”
“I participated in the most significant change in the history of … espionage — the change from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations. I helped make it technologically feasible for a single government to collect all the world’s digital communications, store them for ages, and search through them at will.”
“If those data are collected, someone will abuse them.”
Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (mostly)

“It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,
so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.
This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.”
The Bible, Revelation, Chapter 13, Verses 16 to 18

“The fundamental crime is BEING THERE AND COMMUNICATING.”
L. Ron Hubbard

“And it becomes understandable as well why a suppressive is fixated on things like keeping others … under a useless, obsessive, absurd, spasmodic, ruthless — in other words, suppressive — control…
A suppressive permanently sees anyone else as an active enemy to either kill or be killed by, and potential trouble sources [potential trouble source: one who is subject to a suppression and who can't do anything about it to fight back. (By use of the initials, an individual under such a condition is also referred to as PTS, and the condition as PTSness.)] are suppressed enough to relay and amplify the suppressive's intention instead of detecting it and stopping it; consequently, as long as there are unhandled suppression and PTSness, whatever social structure such as governments will be constantly twisted to aim at absolute power, absolute control, and ultimately at suppression. Simple as that.
…
Speaking of the root of things, more commonly known as common denominator, or as constant as opposed to variables, it has been said that the tendency of all human governments is to reduce the bulk of society to mere automatons of misery. And it has been said as well that the fundamental crime is BEING THERE AND COMMUNICATING. We now know how a suppressive sees ALL his or her fellow humans, and why. It therefore becomes obvious and crystal clear why there is such a universal tendency, and why there is such a fundamental crime in the first place. Suppression? Not exactly; not quite. PTSness. Too much PTSness. Too many of us too much PTS.”
Author’s note

“Coercive engineered migrations (or coercion−driven migrations) are «those cross−border population movements that are deliberately created or manipulated in order to induce political, military and/or economic concessions from a target state or states.» … It is likely, at least in part as a consequence of its embedded and often camouflaged nature, that its prevalence has also been generally underrecognized and its significance, underappreciated. …
In fact, well over forty groups of displaced people have been used as pawns in at least fifty−six discrete attempts at coercive engineered migration since the advent of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention alone. …
A failure to appreciate the relative pervasiveness of a frequently employed policy weapon can actively impede the ability of both scholars and policymakers to understand, combat, and respond to potential threats, as well as to protect those victimized by its use.
… Like immigration and refugee policy more generally, real and threatened migration crises tend to split societies into (at least) two mutually antagonistic and often highly mobilized groups: the prorefugee/migrant camp and anti−refugee/migrant camp. What it means to be pro− or anti−refugee/migrant varies depending on the target and the crisis. … The bottom line is that, because targets cannot simultaneously satisfy demands both to accept and reject a given group of migrants or refugees, leaders facing highly mobilized and highly polarized interests can find themselves on the horns of a real dilemma, whereby it may be impossible to satisfy the demands of one camp without alienating the other.
… Under such conditions, leaders may face strong domestic−level incentives to concede to coercers’ international−level demands. …
In fact, would−be coercers often do more than simply exploit extant heterogeneity within target states. They may also aim to increase target vulnerability over time by acting in ways designed to directly or indirectly catalyze greater mobilization, heighten the degree of polarization between groups, and thereby reduce the available policy options open to targets. …
In other words, would−be coercers can effectively engage – with the (often unintentional) assistance of the pro−refugee/migrant camp – in a kind of norms−aided entrapment, whereby humanitarian norms are used as coercive cudgels by actors with selfish, self−serving motives as well as those with more altruistic aims, often simultaneously.”
Kelly M. Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration

“Let’s read the very words of Kalergi … in the Wiener Freimaurerzeitung nr. 9/10 of 1923: «For the united Europe I hope for a future eurasian−negroid race …» Let’s further recall for a moment the timeline: in 1923 Kalergy writes Paneuropa, in that same year he joins the Freemasonry and the profitable meeting with Rothschild and Warburg takes place. In 1924, with the beginning of the publication of Paneuropa, Kalergi puts to good use the endowment obtained, while of 1925 is Praktischer Idealismus the "inconvenient" book where … these theories will be covered more extensively.”
Matteo Simonetti, La verità sul Piano Kalergi (The Truth about the Kalergi Plan, author’s note)

“… the inhabitants of the future "United States of Europe" will be not the original populations of the old country, but rather a sort of a sub−humankind made beastly by the racial mishmash … it is necessary to crossbreed the European populations with Asian and coloured races, to create a multi−ethnic herd without qualities easily dominated by the power elite. … The future eurasian−negroid race … will replace the plurality of populations with a plurality of personalities.”
Richard Nikolaus De Coudenhove−Kalergi (one of the earliest instigators and founders of the European Union), Praktischer Idealismus (Practical Idealism, author’s note, 1925), as quoted in ecplanet.com, disinformazione.it, etc.

“What people everywhere must do is practice birth control and miscegenation (racially mixed marriages) in order to create one race in one world under one government.”
George Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist, first Secretary General of United Nations' World Health Organization, first head of World Federation of Mental Health, from U.S.A. magazine, 1955

“A report from Europe carries the following speech of Rabbi Emanuel Rabinovich before a special meeting of the Emergency Council of European Rabbis in Budapest, Hungary, January 12, 1952:
«… You remember the success of our propaganda campaign during the 1930’s, which aroused anti−American passions in Germany at the same time we were arousing anti−German passions in America, a campaign which culminated in the Second World War. A similar propaganda campaign is now being waged intensively throughout the world. A war fever is being worked up in Russia by an incessant anti−American barrage, while a nationwide anti−Communist scare is sweeping America. This campaign is forcing all of the smaller nations to choose between the partnership of Russia or an alliance with the United States.
… Within five years, this programme will achieve its objective, the Third World War, which will surpass in destruction all previous contests. … when both sides are devastated and exhausted we will arbitrate, sending our Control Commission into all wrecked countries. …
Our Control Commissions will, in the interests of peace, and wiping out inter−racial tensions, forbid the whites to mate with whites. The white women must cohabit with members of the dark races, the white men with black women. Thus the white race will disappear, for mixing the dark with the white means the end of the white man, and our most dangerous enemy will become only a memory. … Our superior intelligence will easily enable us to retain mastery over a world of dark peoples.
… There will be no more religions. Not only would the existence of a priest class remain a constant danger to our rule, but belief in an after−life would give spiritual strength to irreconcilable elements in many countries, and enable them to resist us. We will, however, retain the rituals, and customs …, as the mark of our hereditary ruling caste. …

We may have to repeat the grim days of World War II, when we were forced to let the Hitlerite bandits sacrifice some of our people, in order that we may have adequate documentation and witnesses to legally justify our trial and execution of the leaders of America and Russia as war criminals, after we have dictated the Peace. …
To convince you of the certainty of that leadership, let me point out to you how we have turned all of the inventions of the white man into weapons against him. His printing presses and radios are the mouthpieces of our desires, and his heavy industry manufactures the instruments which he sends out to arm Asia and Africa against him. …»
This speech also confirms what I have contended in regard to the manner in which the Secret Powers have deliberately stirred up anti−Semitism to suit their purposes and also anti−Communism. It proves my contention that [they]… have used Communism, Zionism, and Fascism to further their secret ambitions. And they will, if they can, use Christian−Democracy against Communism to bring about the next phase of their long range plan … World War Three. But the most illuminating feature of the speech is the fact that it discloses the manner in which [they]… use a Jewish Rabbi to convince other co−religionists that they will be the governing class in the New World Order — a fact that past history would indicate is very doubtful.”
“This is another illustration of how even a Professor of History can fall into the Anti−Semitic pitfalls set by the conspirators. Admittedly the majority of people believe that all the International Bankers and Tycoons are Jews, but this is incorrect. The majority are not Jews, either by blood, racial descent or religion. They actually foster Anti−Semitism because they can use all Anti−movements to further their diabolical plans.”
William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game

“The alchemists of ancient times vainly sought the philosophers’ stone which they believed would turn lead into gold. Is it possible that such a stone actually has been found? Can it be that the money alchemists of our own time have learned how to transmute war into debt, and debt into war, and both into gold for themselves?
In a previous section, we theorized a strategy, dubbed the Rothschild Formula, in which the world’s money cabal deliberately encourages war as a means of stimulating the profitable production of armaments and of keeping nations perpetually in debt. This is not profit seeking, it is genocide. It is not a trivial matter, therefore, to inquire into the possibility that our elected and non−elected leaders are, in fact, implementing the Rothschild Formula today.
…
It is one of the least understood realities of modern history that many of America’s most prominent political and financial figures — then as now — have been willing to sacrifice the best interests of the United States in order to further their goal of creating a one−world government. The strategy has remained unchanged since the formation of Cecil Rhodes’ society and its offspring, the Round Table Groups. It is to merge the English−speaking nations into a single political entity, while at the same time creating similar groupings for other geopolitical regions. After this is accomplished, all of these groupings are to be amalgamated into a global government, the so−called Parliament of Man. And guess who is planning to control that government from behind the scenes.
…
AGENTS OF A HIGHER POWER
When reviewing this aspect of the Fed’s history, questions arise about the patriotic loyalty of men like Benjamin Strong. How is it possible for a man who enjoys the best that his nation can offer — security, wealth, prestige — to conspire to plunder his fellow citizens in order to assist politicians of other governments to continue plundering theirs?

The first part of the answer was illustrated in earlier sections of this book. International money managers may be citizens of a particular country but, to many of them, that is a meaningless accident of birth. They consider themselves to be citizens of the world first. They speak of affection for all mankind, but their highest loyalty is to themselves and their profession.
That is only half the answer. It must be remembered that the men who pulled the financial levers on this doomsday machine, the governors of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, were themselves tied to strings which were pulled by others above them. Their minds were not obsessed with concepts of nationalism or even internationalism. Their loyalties were to men. Professor Quigley reminds us:
«It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called "international" or "merchant" bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks.»
So, we are not dealing with the actions of men who perceive themselves as betraying their nation, but technicians who are loyal to the monetary scientists and the political scientists who raised them up. Of the two groups, the financiers are dominant. Politicians come and go, but those who wield the power of money remain to pick their successors.
…

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?
There is a tendency to read about these trends with a kind of detached fascination: Isn’t that interesting! But where is the relevance? Why get excited over such technicalities and abstractions? So what if the government is mired in debt? Who cares if the interest will never be paid? What of it if we have a world currency or a world government? What difference will any of it make to me?
The first step toward answering those questions is to see what difference it already has made. Our upcoming trip into the future will merely extend those lines.
As illustrated in previous sections of this book, there has been a long−term policy at the highest levels of government to shift economic resources away from the United States. That policy has been successful. Based on doomsday predictions of environmental disaster, government has saddled private companies with such burdensome expenses for eliminating waste products that heavy industry, once the mainstay of American prosperity, has fled our shores. Because of concern over the natural habitat of the spotted owl and the desert kangaroo rat, millions of acres of timber and agricultural land have been taken out of production. High taxes, rules beyond reason for safety devices in the work place, so−called fair−employment practices, and mandatory health insurance are rapidly destroying what is left of America’s private industry. The result is unemployment and dislocation for millions of American workers.
Federal taxes, including social−security, now take more than 40% of our private incomes. State, county, and local taxes are on top of that. Inflation feeds on what is left. We spend half of each year working for the government.

A study by the AFL−CIO in 1977 revealed that, in spite of wage increases in terms of dollars, the real wages of the average American — in terms of what he can buy with those dollars — were going down. That trend was confirmed in 1980 by the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1992, the Consumers’ Union analyzed how many hours one had to work to buy common items compared to thirty years previously. Some low−priced items — such as long−distance phone calls, gasoline, food products, and wrist−watches — were cheaper in 1992 in terms of hours worked to acquire them. But the higher−priced items — such as housing, college educations, and health care — were far more costly than ever. The report concludes:
«The average U.S. household has maintained its living standard largely because families are working more hours. Millions of women entered the work force in the past 25 years. In 1970, about 21 million women worked full time. Now that figure is over 36 million. That has helped to keep family buying power fairly stable. But for many families, it now represents the labor of two earners rather than one.»
The message here is that real wages in America have declined. Young couples with a single income now have a lower standard of living than their parents did. In spite of two incomes, the real net worth of the average household is falling. The amount of leisure time is shrinking. The percentage of Americans who own their homes is dropping. The age at which a family acquires a first home is rising. The number of families counted among the middle class is falling. The size of the family savings is smaller. The number of people living below the officially defined poverty level is rising. The rate of personal bankruptcy is triple of what it was in the 1960s. Over 90% of all Americans are broke at age 65.

THE NEW WORLD ORDER
None of this is happening by accident. Chapters five and six documented the currently unfolding plan to create a functional world government within the framework of the United Nations. Often referred to as The New World Order by its advocates, the proposed global government is designed upon the principles of socialism. It is the dream−come−true for the world’s socialist theoreticians, politicians, and technicians who see it as the ultimate laboratory for their social experiments upon mankind.
There are two weapons of control now being readied at the UN. One is a world military command which eventually will control all national armies and super weapons. That is being accomplished under the slogans of peace and disarmament. The other is a world central bank, now called the IMF/World Bank, with the ability to issue a common money which all nations must accept. That is being accomplished under the slogans of international trade and economic growth.
Of the two weapons, monetary control is the most important. The use of military force is viewed as a crude weapon in the arsenal of world government, to be used only as a last resort. The effect of monetary control is more powerful than mega−tons of atomic energy. It reaches into every shop and home, a feat that could never be accomplished by standing armies. It can be used with precision against one nation, one group, or even one person while sparing or benefiting all others. Military force may be irresistible but it causes resentment and political unrest that can smolder for decades. Since monetary manipulation is seldom understood by its victims, it does not incur their wrath. In fact, the manipulators enjoy high social status and financial reward. For these reasons, monetary control is the weapon of choice in The New World Order.

A future world parliament based upon the concept of minimum coercion and maximum freedom could be a wonderful advent for mankind. Without trying to cram all nations into a centrally−directed beehive, it would welcome cultural and religious variety. Instead of trying to place the world into a collectivist straight−jacket of rules, regulations, quotas, and subsidies, it would encourage diversity and freedom−to−choose. Instead of levying ever−larger taxes on every conceivable economic activity and destroying human incentive in the process, it would encourage member nations to reduce the taxes that already exist and thereby stimulate production and creativity.
A world parliament, dedicated to the concept of freedom, would have to withhold membership from any government that violated the basic rights of its citizens. It could be the means by which totalitarian governments would be encouraged to abandon their oppressive policies in order to obtain the economic and political advantages of acceptance in the world body. It could become the greatest force for peace and prosperity and freedom we have ever known.
But The New World Order that is now incubating at the United Nations is an entirely different creature. Its members represent just about every dictator and warlord in the world. Its philosophy is built upon the socialist doctrine that all good flows from the state. Those who do not conform must be bent to the government’s will or be eliminated. It cannot oppose totalitarianism for the simple reason that it is totalitarianism.
AMERICA IS THE TARGET
The New World Order cannot become a functional reality so long as the United States remains able to go it alone. America is viewed as a potential bull in the china shop. Right now, it is safely under control, but the world planners are worried it might break loose in the future. If the American people were to awaken to the realities of world politics and regain control over their government, they still would have the military and economic power to break away.

Among the world planners, therefore, it has become the prime directive to weaken the United States both militarily and economically. And this directive has come from American leaders, not those of other countries. CFR members sitting in the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Treasury are now working to finalize that part of the plan. It is yet one more doomsday mechanism that, once it gains sufficient momentum, will pass the critical point of no return.
…
Most of the stratagems outlined in The Report from Iron Mountain are to be found in Orwell’s narrative, but Orwell described them first. The think−tank was even willing to credit Orwell as the source of some of its concepts. For example, on the subject of establishing a modern, sophisticated form of slavery, the group at Iron Mountain said:
«Up to now, this has been suggested only in fiction, notably in the works of Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and others engaged in the imaginative anticipation of the sociology of the future. But the fantasies projected in Brave New World and 1984 have seemed less and less implausible over the years since their publication. The traditional association of slavery with ancient preindustrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to advanced forms of social organization.»
From this we see that Orwell’s work is far more than an entertaining novel. It is relevant to our present journey in time. Our would−be masters have studied him carefully. So should we. This is what he wrote:
«… The primary aim of modem warfare … is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. … From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations…

But it was also clear that an all−around increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed in some cases was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction… Such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance…
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent…» …
Once again, it is clear that Orwell’s grim narrative was a primary model for The Report from Iron Mountain. The authors of that blueprint for our future spoke at length about the value of planned waste as a means of preventing the masses from improving their standard of living. They wrote:
«The production of weapons of mass destruction has always been associated with economic "waste." The term is pejorative, since it implies a failure of function. But no human activity can properly be considered wasteful if it achieves its contextual objective…
In the case of military "waste," there is indeed a larger social utility…

In advanced modern democratic societies, the war system … has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes. As economic productivity increases to a level further and further above that of minimum subsistence, it becomes more and more difficult for a society to maintain distribution patterns insuring the existence of "hewers of wood and drawers of water."…
The arbitrary nature of war expenditures and of other military activities make them ideally suited to control these essential class relationships… The continuance of the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of power.» …
«When asked how best to prepare for the advent of peace, we must first reply, as strongly as we can, that the war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until 1) we know exactly what it is we plan to put in its place, and 2) we are certain, beyond reasonable doubt, that these substitute institutions will serve their purposes in terms of the survival and stability of society… It is uncertain, at this time, whether peace will ever be possible. It is far more questionable … that it would be desirable even if it were demonstrably attainable.»
…
As mentioned previously, the think−tank and talent pool for the implementation of this strategy has been the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1996, the Managing Editor of the CFR’s monthly journal, Foreign Affairs, was Fareed Zakaria, who offered the following rationalization:
«Yes, it’s tempting to get rid of Saddam. But his bad behavior actually serves America’s purposes in the region… If Saddam Hussein did not exist, we would have to invent him… The end of Saddam Hussein would be the end of the anti−Saddam coalition. Nothing destroys an alliance like the disappearance of the enemy… Maintaining a long−term American presence in the gulf would be difficult in the absence of a regional threat.»

That is about as clear a statement of the Rothschild Formula as one is apt to find. Yet, many people cannot believe it is real, even Congressmen. For example, Representative James Traficant from Ohio, speaking before the House on April 29,1997, exclaimed:
«America gives billions to Russia. With American cash, Russia builds missiles. Russia then sells those missiles to China. And China, who gets about $45 billion in trade giveaways from Uncle Sam, then sells those Russian−made missiles to Iran.
Now Iran, with those Russian−made missiles sold to them by China, threatens the Mideast. So Uncle Sam, who is concerned about Iran threatening the Mideast because of those Russian−made missiles sold to them by China that we financed by American cash sends more troops and sends more dollars… Mr. Speaker, this is not foreign policy. This is foreign stupidity.»
Traficant is on target with his analysis of the problem, but he missed the bull’s eye regarding the cause. American leaders are not stupid. They merely are implementing the Rothschild Formula. To justify world government, it is necessary to have wars and the threat of wars. Wars require enemies with frightful weapons. Saddam Hussein is one of the best enemies money can buy.
If it is true that Western leaders are deliberately funding their own enemies, we must assume they have considered Lenin’s prediction that, by so doing, they are preparing their own suicide — ours, also, by the way. We must also conclude that they are confident of avoiding that destiny. Whether they are right or wrong is not the issue here. The point is they believe they are correct and, further, they are building a world order which they are confident of being able to control. How they plan to bring that to pass is the subject of a later section, but perpetual war is an important part of it. Unless we are able to break the grip of these strategists, the Rothschild Formula will continue to play a major role in our future.
…

ENVIRONMENTALISM A SUBSTITUTE FOR WAR
It is beyond the scope of this study to prove that currently accepted predictions of environmental doom are based on exaggerated and fraudulent "scientific studies." But such proof is easily found if one is willing to look at the raw data and the assumptions upon which the projections are based. More important, however, is the question of why end−of−world scenarios based on phony scientific studies — or no studies at all — are uncritically publicized by the CFR−controlled media; or why radical environmental groups advocating socialist doctrine and anti−business programs are lavishly funded by CFR−dominated foundations, banks, and corporations, the very groups that would appear to have the most to lose. …
People of the industrialized nations have been subjected to a barrage of documentaries, dramas, feature films, ballads, poems, bumper stickers, posters, marches, speeches, seminars, conferences, and concerts. … No one questions the damage done to the economy or the nation. … Not one in a thousand will question that underlying premise. How could it be false? Look at all the movie celebrities and rock stars who have joined the movement.
While the followers of the environmental movement are preoccupied with visions of planetary doom, let us see what the leaders are thinking. The first Earth Day was proclaimed on April 22, 1970, at a "Summit" meeting in Rio de Janeiro, attended by environmentalists and politicians from all over the world. A publication widely circulated at that meeting was entitled the Environmental Handbook. The main theme of the book was summarized by a quotation from Princeton Professor Richard A. Falk, a member of the CFR. … He said: «The basis of all our problems is the inadequacy of the sovereign states to manage the affairs of mankind in the twentieth century.» The Handbook continued the CFR line by asking these rhetorical questions: «Are nation−states actually feasible, now that they have power to destroy each other in a single afternoon? … What price would most people be willing to pay for a more durable kind of human organization — more taxes, giving up national flags, perhaps the sacrifice of some of our hard−won liberties?» …

CFR member, Lester Brown, heads up another think tank called the Worldwatch Institute. In the Institute’s annual report, entitled State of the World 1991, Brown said that «the battle to save the planet will replace the battle over ideology as the organizing theme of the new world order.» …
How many times does it have to be explained? The environmental movement was created by the CFR. It is a substitute for war that they hope will become the emotional and psychological foundation for world government.
HUMANITY ITSELF IS THE TARGET
The Club of Rome is a group of global planners who annually release end−of−world scenarios based on predictions of overpopulation and famine. Their membership is international, but the American roster includes such well−known CFR members as Jimmy Carter, Harlan Cleveland, Claiburne Pell, and Sol Linowitz. Their solution to overpopulation? A world government to control birth rates and, if necessary, apply euthanasia. That is a gentle word for the deliberate killing of the old, the weak, and of course the uncooperative. Following the same reasoning advanced at Iron Mountain, the Club of Rome has concluded that fear of environmental disaster could be used as a substitute enemy for the purpose of unifying the masses behind their program. In their 1991 book entitled The First Global Revolution, we find this:
«In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill… All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.»
Socialist theoreticians have always been fascinated by the question of controlling population growth. It excites their imagination because it is the ultimate bureaucratic plan. If the real enemy is humanity itself, as the Club of Rome says, then humanity itself must become the target.

Fabian Socialist Bertrand Russell expressed it thus:
«I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing… War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full… A scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is world government… It will be necessary to find ways of preventing an increase in world population. If this is to be done otherwise than by wars, pestilences and famines, it will demand a powerful international authority. This authority should deal out the world’s food to the various nations in proportion to their population at the time of the establishments of the authority. If any nation subsequently increased its population, it should not on that account receive any more food. The motive for not increasing population would therefore be very compelling.»”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“Ezra Pound, in an April 18, 1943 broadcast over Radio Rome stated, «… and men in America, not content with this war are already aiming at the next one. The time to object is now.»”
Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, The London Connection

“The war which is coming
Is not the first one. There were
Other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people
Starved. Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.”
Bertold Brecht, Kriegsfibel (War Primer, author's note)

“…
He who rules the world
Besides power
Wants your agony
And you’ll have to suffer
And you’ll be coerced to obey
…
There's a dictatorship of illusionists fake economists equilibrists
Terrorists rulers of the world worse than Nazis
Who forged just as many sad social climbers Stakhanovites
The illusionists that deceived us
With the words freedom and democracy into apathy
Creating into the masses a fat mass of weapons and mass division
Media, objects, names, colours, symbols, we see eye to eye but we're divided individuals
We sleep well under our quilts we're servants to these grinning shits
…
Freedom and the fight against injustice aren't right−wing nor left−wing
…”
Povia, Chi comanda il mondo (Who’s in charge of the world − who rules the world, author’s note)

“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there.”
Malcom X, from en.wikiquote.org

“The pacifists who refuse to investigate the economic causes of war make common cause with the gunrunners.”
“The wars are made to create debts.”
Ezra Pound, from it.wikiquote.org, some quoted in Giacinto Auriti, Il Paese dell'Utopia

“An eye for an eye
Makes the world blind”
Anonymous, Piece of Graffiti

“Divide et impera (Divide and rule)”
Latin saying

“If my sons did not want war, there would be none.”
Gutle Schnapper Rothschild, as quoted in veja.it

“It's commonly known that the diabolical element is the divisive one par excellence. The word devil, after all, derives from the Greek verb diaballein, which means to divide, to separate.”
Diego Fusaro

“WHILE IT IS COMMONLY BELIEVED TO TAKE TWO TO MAKE A FIGHT, A THIRD PARTY MUST EXIST AND MUST DEVELOP IT FOR ACTUAL CONFLICT TO OCCUR.
…
"Underlying causes" of war should read "hidden promoters."
There are no conflicts which cannot be resolved unless the true promoters of them remain hidden.”
L. Ron Hubbard, The Third Party Law

“I do not suggest that you bankers are criminals… I assert it!”
Giacinto Auriti to the director of Banca d'Italia of Rieti, as quoted in cogitoergo.it

“Because debt is the actual currency, you can never stay out of debt. The total of all debt and interest owed always exceeds the total money supply.
So you see, this debt based currency system is actually nothing but a massive pyramid scheme. We international banking and media kingpins sit on the top. Our wholly owned politicians, professors, & reporters sit on the levels below. While you worker bees are stuck on the bottom levels – toiling away to perpetually support the crushing weight of our fraudulent structure.

It's like a game of musical chairs, where the number of players always exceeds the amount of chairs. I start and stop the music at my pleasure as you exhaust yourselves running around in circles for my amusement. I stimulate the "booms" (blowing bubbles), and the "busts" (letting some air out), profiting from both.
Now you know the secrets of my success and power. You're probably wondering why I would reveal the truth and indict myself like this. Right?
It's simple. It's because I do not respect you. I know that no matter how badly I screw you, no matter how much I steal from your kids' mouths… you won't do a damn thing about it.
It would never even cross your mind to take the personal initiative to spread this story around to your friends and family. If everyone who read my confession passed it on to 10 others, my game would be up in no time. But I know you won't do that. As long as there is a ballgame or a reality TV show to entertain you… as long as you have a few beers in your refrigerator… I can do or say whatever I want… forever.”
Mark S. King, as found at tomatobubble.com

“Essentially, the current creation of money ex nihilo operated by the banking system is identical to the creation of money from counterfeiters. In practice, the results are the same. The sole difference is, those who profit from it are different.”
Maurice Félix Charles Allais, physicist and economist, 1988 Nobel winner in Economic Sciences, as quoted in Danilo Peronio, La piaga nascosta del signoraggio bancario (The hidden plague of banking seigniorage, author's note)

“The actual process of money creation takes place primarily in banks. [In order to describe the money−creation process as simply as possible, the term "bank" used in this booklet should be understood to encompass all depository institutions.

Since the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, all depository institutions have been permitted to offer interest bearing transaction accounts to certain customers. Transaction accounts (interest bearing as well as demand deposits on which payment of interest is still legally prohibited) at all depository institutions are subject to the reserve requirements set by the Federal Reserve. Thus all such institutions, not just commercial banks, have the potential for creating money.] As noted earlier, checkable liabilities of banks are money. These liabilities are customers' accounts. …
In the absence of legal reserve requirements, banks can build up deposits by increasing loans and investments so long as they keep enough currency on hand to redeem whatever amounts the holders of deposits want to convert into currency. This unique attribute of the banking business was discovered many centuries ago.
It started with goldsmiths. As early bankers, they initially provided safekeeping services, making a profit from vault storage fees for gold and coins deposited with them. People would redeem their "deposit receipts" whenever they needed gold or coins to purchase something, and physically take the gold or coins to the seller who, in turn, would deposit them for safekeeping, often with the same banker. Everyone soon found that it was a lot easier simply to use the deposit receipts directly as a means of payment. These receipts, which became known as notes, were acceptable as money since whoever held them could go to the banker and exchange them for metallic money.
Then, bankers discovered that they could make loans merely by giving their promises to pay, or bank notes, to borrowers. In this way, banks began to create money. More notes could be issued than the gold and coin on hand because only a portion of the notes outstanding would be presented for payment at any one time. Enough metallic money had to be kept on hand, of course, to redeem whatever volume of notes was presented for payment.
Transaction deposits are the modern counterpart of bank notes. It was a small step from printing notes to making book entries crediting deposits of borrowers, which the borrowers in turn could "spend" by writing checks, thereby "printing" their own money.

… Suppose the Federal Reserve System … buys $10,000 of Treasury bills from a dealer in U. S. government securities. … the Federal Reserve Bank pays for the securities with a … check drawn on itself. … The Federal Reserve System has added $10,000 of securities to its assets, which it has paid for, in effect, by creating a liability on itself in the form of bank reserve balances. These reserves on Bank … books are matched by $10,000 of the dealer's deposits that did not exist before. …
If the process ended here, there would be no "multiple" expansion … However, banks are required to maintain reserves equal to only a fraction of their deposits. …
All banks together have $10,000 of deposits and reserves that they did not have before. … All they need to retain, under a 10 percent reserve requirement, is $1000. The remaining $9,000 is "excess reserves." This amount can be loaned or invested. …
Of course, they do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created. What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to the borrowers' transaction accounts. …
Carried through to theoretical limits, the initial $10,000 of reserves distributed within the banking system gives rise to an expansion of $90,000 in bank credit (loans and investments) and supports a total of $100,000 in new deposits under a 10 percent reserve requirement. The deposit expansion factor for a given amount of new reserves is thus the reciprocal of the required reserve percentage (1/.10 = 10). … The multiple expansion is possible because the banks as a group are like one large bank in which checks drawn against borrowers' deposits result in credits to accounts of other depositors, with no net change in the total reserves.”
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Modern Money Mechanics
["invested" meaning here: $9,000 that did not exist before will be credited to someone's deposits and thus added to deposits and reserves of all banks considered together, of whom in the next spin on the stage floor $900 will be "retained" as "reserves", and the remaining $8,100 that did not exist before will be invested and credited and added to deposits and reserves, and so on, on and on, and all the while every "Dollar" that did non exist before is new purchasing power sprung into existence out of nothing in the hands of its "creator";

cherry on top, the icing on the cake, interest is charged by the "creator" who "earned" this purchasing power out of thin air on loaning it, too; an interest that will have to be scraped together from some other purchasing power source elsewhere. author's note]
“The defendants hereby on their own accord plead guilty of all charges:
counterfeiting (for usurping and monopolising the arbitrary privilege of creating and appropriating money out of nothing),
fraud (for cultivating untruth, muddle, mistery, superstition and subjection in people to befuddle, subjugate and keep them as far away as possible from the truth of their crimes),
misappropriation (for using, exploting and profiting from purchasing power of others as if it were their own),
theft (for stealing other people's purchasing power by creating and appropriating further purchasing power and infinite debt traps out of nothing and for seizing their properties and their lives and souls with them),
robbery (for creating, manipulating and exploiting odious debt to undermine, bankrupt and foreclose the properties, lives and souls of people),
criminal conspiracy (for enticing, co−opting and unleashing the worst among the people against people),
global economic suppression (for creating, manipulating and exploiting unfair competition, oligopolies and monopolies, conflicts and wars, and for doing it to the ultimate goal of owning and crushing everything and wveryone),
high treason against humanity (for being the root and the main force behind all plagues that push people's existences towards hell , death and extinction).
The most premeditated, concealed, relentless, continuous, widespread, long−lasting, devastating, crippling, dooming and lethal case of global economic suppression and high treason against humanity in generally known history.”
author’s note

“You know those art collections owned by banks they graciously grant fruition of to us? Art is one of our most elevated dimentions, in which we express who we are in what we conceive, create and share. If you saw a criminal, scammer, usurper and thief, delighting in flaunting to the robbed the part of the loot relating to their most elevated dimension, would you settle for calling it insult added to injury, or you’d prefer more diabolical terms? And how would you feel about restoring justice?”
author’s note

“Things do not just happen. Things are caused.”
“Intention is cause.”
“There are certain characteristics and mental attitudes which cause about 20 percent of a race to oppose violently any betterment activity or group.
Such people are known to have antisocial tendencies.
When the legal or political structure of a country becomes such as to favor such personalities in positions of trust, then all the civilizing organizations of the country become suppressed and a barbarism of criminality and economic duress ensues. …
The social personality wants to survive and wants others to survive, whereas the antisocial personality really and covertly wants others to succumb. …
As they only comprise 20 percent of the population and as only 2½ percent are truly dangerous, we see that with a very small amount of effort we could considerably better the state of society. …
If society were to recognize this personality type as a sick being as they now isolate people with smallpox, both social and economic recoveries could occur.
Things are not likely to get much better so long as 20 percent of the population is permitted to dominate and injure the lives and enterprise of the remaining 80 percent.
As majority rule is the political manner of the day, so should majority sanity express itself in our daily lives without the interference and destruction of the socially unwell. …
Unless we can detect the social personality and hold him safe from undue restraint and detect also the antisocial and restrain him, our society will go on suffering from insanity, criminality and war, and man and civilization will not endure.
Of all our technical skills …, such differentiation ranks the highest since, failing that, no other skill can continue, as the base on which it operates — civilization — will not be here to continue it.

Do not smash the social personality — and do not fail to render powerless the antisocial in their efforts to harm the rest of us.
Just because a man rises above his fellows or takes an important part does not make him an antisocial personality. Just because a man can control or dominate others does not make him an antisocial personality.
It is his motives in doing so and the consequences of his acts which distinguish the antisocial from the social.
Unless we realize and apply the true characteristics of the two types of personality, we will continue to live in a quandary of who our enemies are and, in doing so, victimize our friends. …
As the society runs, prospers and lives solely through the efforts of social personalities, one must know them as they, not the antisocial, are the worthwhile people. These are the people who must have rights and freedom. Attention is given to the antisocial solely to protect and assist the social personalities in the society.
All majority rules, civilizing intentions and even the human race will fail unless one can identify and thwart the antisocial personalities and help and forward the social personalities in the society. For the very word "society" implies social conduct and without it there is no society at all, only a barbarism with all men, good or bad, at risk.
The frailty of showing how the harmful people can be known is that these then apply the characteristics to decent people to get them hunted down and eradicated.
The swan song of every great civilization is the tune played by arrows, axes or bullets used by the antisocial to slay the last decent men.
Government is only dangerous when it can be employed by and for antisocial personalities. The end result is the eradication of all social personalities and the resultant collapse of Egypt, Babylon, Rome, Russia or the West.”
L. Ron Hubbard, Two Types of People

“Everyone knows that economics is the dismal science. And almost everyone knows that it was given this description by Thomas Carlyle, who was inspired to coin the phrase by T. R. Malthus’s gloomy prediction that population would always grow faster than food, dooming mankind to unending poverty and hardship. While this story is well−known, it is also wrong, so wrong that it is hard to imagine a story that is farther from the truth.”
David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, The Secret History of the Dismal Science, as found at econlib.org

“All criminals are equal but some are more equal than others. All suppressives are equal but some are more equal than others.”
author’s note, paraphrased from George Orwell, Animal Farm

“When people of this class are stricken by guilt feelings while plotting world wars and economic depressions which will bring misery, suffering and death to millions of the world’s inhabitants, they sometimes have qualms. These qualms are jeered at by their peers as "a failure of nerve". After a bout with their psychiatrists, they return to their work with renewed gusto, with no further digressions of pity for "the little people" who are to be their victims.”
“… the enormous guilt of the bankers and the long record of suffering and misery for which they are responsible would suggest that no punishment might be too severe for their crimes against their fellowmen.”
Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, The London Connection

“So what is the purpose of this letter?
… [it] is to let you know that I know. The blindfold has come off. I know what you’ve done and I know what you are doing. As far as I am concerned, you can take your … and shove it!
And, you know? Eternity is a very long time and it is ahead of us. …
I am confronting you today, but you will have to confront me some day and pay for your crimes. And pay you will.”
Luis A. Garcia, "A Letter From Garcia" (to David Miscavige, author’s note)

“We know who you are
We know what you are
We know what you’re doing
We know how you’re doing it
We know why you’re doing it
And we know what to do
We know
And we know better than you”
Author’s note

“The hardest task one can have is to continue to love his fellows despite all reasons he should not.
And the true sign of sanity and greatness is to so continue.
For the one who can achieve this, there is abundant hope.
For those who cannot, there is only sorrow, hatred and despair. And these are not the things of which greatness — or sanity or happiness are made.
A primary trap is to succumb to invitations to hate. …
Seeking to achieve any single desirable quality in life is a noble thing. The one most difficult — and most necessary — to achieve is to love one’s fellows despite all invitations to do otherwise. …
True greatness merely refuses to change in the face of bad actions against one — and a truly great person loves his fellows because he understands them.
After all, they are all in the same trap. Some are oblivious of it, some have gone mad because of it, some act like those who betrayed them. But all, all are in the same trap — the generals, the street sweepers, the presidents, the insane. They act the way they do because they are all subject to the same cruel pressures of this universe.
Some of us are subject to those pressures and still go on doing our jobs. Others have long since succumbed and rave and torture and strut like the demented souls they are.
We can at least understand the one fact that greatness does not stem from savage wars or being known. It stems from being true to one’s own decency, from going on helping others whatever they do or think or say and despite all savage acts against one, to persevere without changing one’s basic attitude toward Man.
… Why should one change and begin to hate just because others have lost themselves and their own destinies are too cruel for them to face?

Justice, mercy, forgiveness, all are unimportant beside the ability not to change because of provocation or demands to do so.
One must act, one must preserve order and decency. But one need not hate or seek vengeance.
It is true that beings are frail and commit wrongs. Man is basically good, but Man can act badly.
He only acts badly when his acts, done for order and the safety for others, are done with hatred. Or when his disciplines are founded only upon safety for himself regardless of all others; or worse, when he acts only out of a taste for cruelty.
To preserve no order at all is an insane act. One need only look at the possessions and environment of the insane to realize this. The able keep good order.
When cruelty in the name of discipline dominates a race, that race has been taught to hate. And that race is doomed.
The real lesson is to learn to love.
He who would walk scatheless through his days must learn this — never use what is done to one as a basis for hatred. Never desire revenge.
It requires real strength to love Man. And to love him despite all invitations to do otherwise, all provocations and all reasons why one should not.
Happiness and strength endure only in the absence of hate. To hate alone is the road to disaster. To love is the road to strength. To love in spite of all is the secret of greatness. And may very well be the greatest secret in this universe.”
L. Ron Hubbard, What is greatness?

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
“The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”
Albert Einstein, from en.wikiquote.org

“It may be that you are not responsible for the situation in which you find yourself, but you will become if you do nothing in order to change.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbour will risk his position, his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others.”
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Martin Luther King Jr.

“If one permits injustice in a group, one is permitting the destruction of the group.”
paraphrased from L. Ron Hubbard

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
…
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Hollow Men, also as quoted in the film Apocalypse Now

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. (I am a human being, nothing human is foreign to me.)”
Publius Terentius Afer

“What man is a man who does not make the world a better place?”
Anonymous, piece of graffiti (presumably inspired by a movie where a slightly more intransigent Latin original, «Nemo vir est qui mundum non reddat meliorem», translates as, «No one who does not make the world better is a man»)

“One's measure is the distance from the top, the bottom, the others and self. But not one's own. Everyone's.”
author’s note

“The purpose in life is not to win. The purpose in life is to grow and to share. When you come to look back on all that you have done in life, you will get more satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought into other people's lives than you will from the times that you outdid and defeated them.”
Harold Kushner

“There’s people making babies to my music. That’s nice.”
Barry White

“Life is the victory.”
Pia Jarach, Track 21 Memorial

“Who watchtes the watchman?”
old saying

“… the people have not taken a sufficient part in the government, even though the government is entirely their business and they are to blame for the frauds perpetrated upon them. …
The survival of party government, instead of the administration of the government by the people for themselves, is due to the people's neglect of their own best interests. … The great special interests have encouraged, both by direct and indirect means, the division of legislative bodies up into factions each of which supports some certain political party. They have furnished aid to the leading politicians in every possible manner. … There is no sure rule by which to know who is or is not friendly to the people's government. It requires eternal vigilance, and even that sometimes does not make timely discoveries. …
The remedy for our social evils does not consist so much in changing the system of government as it does in increasing the general intelligence of the people so that they may learn how to govern.”
Charles August Lindbergh, Sr., Congressman and Member of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Banking and Currency and The Money Trust

“We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, … our people … must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty−four, give our earnings of fifteen of these to the government, … have no time to think, no means of calling our mis−managers to account; but be glad to obtain sustenance by hiring ourselves out to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow−sufferers… And this is the tendency of all human governments … till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery… And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”
Thomas Jefferson, in a 1816 letter to Sam Kercheval, as quoted in G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholsome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”
Thomas Jefferson, as quoted in tjrs.monticello.org, David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government, etc.

“The basic building block of a society is the individual. From individuals groups are built. And this is the society. No society is better than its basic building blocks.”
L. Ron Hubbard

“Every citizen shall have the duty, according to personal potential and individual choice, to perform any activity or function contributing to the material or spiritual progress of society.”
Constitution of The Italian Republic

“Let’s stop it once and for all with the only dangerous crisis, which is the tragedy of being not willing to fight to overcome it.”
Albert Einstein, from it.wikiquote.org

“No servomechanism, no expedient, no surrogate will ever do; only you and I rolling up our sleeves will.”
“One can control nothing without assuming full responsibility for it. … Full responsibility is not fault; it is recognition of being cause. … When one speaks of responsibility he means "the determination of the cause which produced the effect". … An individual is evidently designed to be cause. … One does not send to find for whom the bell tolls without full willingness to have tolled it and to have caused the cause of its tolling.”
“When one cannot solve a problem, the only way to maintain an authoritative position about it is saying it cannot be solved.”
“YOU CAN ALWAYS do something about it.”
“My way to handle a problem is confronting it until I see it exactly as it is; at which point I go through it and it vanishes.”
“All the answers are basically simple.”
“The Real Why opens the door to a solution.”
L. Ron Hubbard (paraphrased or not)

“The comfort of agreements is no substitute for truth.”
“You want to find the "real why?" Go look in the mirror.”
Nickname

“It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.”
Winston Churchill

“An individual entering a world infected
By the puppeteers of the infinite debt trap
Is much like one entering an extermination camp
But the latter would notice the joke on the gateway:
«Arbeit Macht Frei», «The work sets you free»,
Whereas the first doesn’t even realize
Crossing a gateway carefully hidden
Where it’s up to you and me and to each of us all
To hang the sign of final shutdown:
«Suppressives and potential trouble sources,
Stolen monetary sovereignty,
Purchasing power out exchange,
Debt money,
Infinite debt traps,
Monopolies and oligopolies
Make us all
Slaves tortured to death.»
As the Poet said,
«Through me the way is to the city dolent;
Through me the way is to eternal dole;
Through me the way among the people lost.
All hope abandon, ye who enter in!»
… unless YOU
Wake up
And stand up.
If you don’t,
No one else will.”
author's note

“Higher minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss facts; mediocre minds discuss individuals.”
Socrates, as quoted in anticorpi.info

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
paraphrased from Albert Einstein

“A nation of 100 million people functions in a fundamentally different way to a band of a hundred individuals.
Take, for example, the Ultimatum Game – one of the most famous experiments in behavioural economics. This experiment is usually conducted on two people. One of them gets $100, which he must divide between himself and the other participant in any way he wants. He may keep everything, split the money in half or give most of it away. The other player can do one of two things: accept the suggested division, or reject it outright. If he rejects the division, nobody gets anything.
Classical economic theories maintain that humans are rational calculating machines. They propose that most people will keep $99, and offer $1 to the other participant. They further propose that the other participant will accept the offer. A rational person offered a dollar will always say yes. What does he care if the other player gets $99?
Classical economists have probably never left their laboratories and lecture halls to venture into the real world. Most people playing the Ultimatum Game reject very low offers because they are "unfair". They prefer losing a dollar to looking like suckers. …

The Ultimatum Game made a significant contribution to undermining classical economic theories and to establishing the most important economic discovery of the last few decades: Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. … If 30,000 years ago I helped you hunt a wild chicken and you then kept almost all the chicken to yourself, offering me just one wing, I did not say to myself: ‘Better one wing than nothing at all.’ Instead … my blood boiled, and I stamped my feet and shouted at the top of my voice. In the short term I may have gone hungry, and even risked a punch or two. But it paid off inthe long term, because you thought twice before ripping me off again. We refuse unfair offers because people who meekly accepted unfair offers didn’t survive in the Stone Age. …
Yet once you observe the behaviour of human masses you discover a completely different reality. Most human kingdoms and empires were extremely unequal …
As Frederick watched his troops assemble for the invasion, he told one of his generals that what struck him most about the scene was that «we are standing here in perfect safety, looking at 60,000 men – they are all our enemies, and there is not one of them who is not better armed and stronger than we are, and yet they all tremble in our presence, while we have no reason whatsoever to be afraid of them». …
Why did the … Prussian soldiers act so differently than we would have expected on the basis of the Ultimatum Game …? Because large numbers of people behave in a fundamentally different way than do small numbers. What would scientists see if they conducted the Ultimatum Game experiment on two groups of 1 million people each, who had to share $100 billion?

They would probably have witnessed strange and fascinating dynamics. For example, since 1 million people cannot make decisions collectively, each group might sprout a small ruling elite. What if one elite offers the other $10 billion, keeping $90 billion? The leaders of the second group migh well accept this unfair offer, siphon most of the $10 billion into their Swiss bank accounts, while preventing rebellion among their followers with a combination of sticks and carrots. The leadership might threaten to severely punish dissidents forthwith, while promising the meek and patient everlasting rewards in the afterlife. This is what happened in … eighteenth−century Prussia, and this is how things still work out in numerous countries around the world.
Such threats and promises often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass−cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the inevitable laws of nature or the divine commands of God, rather than just human whims. All large−scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity.”
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow

“… the causes of the current multidimentional crisis … the ultimate cause of the current crisis at the ecological, but also economic, political and, more widely, social level is not, as one is used to saying, the industrial revolution, technology, overpopulation, productivism, consumerism, etc. In my view, in actual fact, all these alleged causes are the symptoms of a much more serious distress called "concentration of power".

… if we accept the explanation of the crisis in terms of concentration of power, then the project of an inclusive democracy, involving the equitable distribution of economic, political and social power, is not only a utopia, but the only way out of today's crisis whom, as one can foresee, threatens not only the current forms of social life, but life itself. This means that all the ongoing attempts to deal with the crisis … that do not include a serious effort to attack the current enormous concentration of the economic and political power are doomed to failure.
… The great problem of an emancipation policy lies in finding ways to unite the social groups forming the potential basis of the new liberation subject, to pool them around a common view of the world, around a shared paradigm that clearly attacks the current structures that continue to concentrate power at all levels and their value system.”
Takis Fotopoulos, La crisi dell’economia di crescita (The Crisis of the Growth Economy, author's note), also as quoted in Manifesto per una trasformazione radicale dell'attuale realtà economica, sociale, politica, culturale, relazionale; ovvero ipotesi di lavoro denominata: Democrazia Locale, al di là del politico, una rivoluzione dal basso (Manifesto for a radical transformation of the current economic, social, political, cultural, relational reality; namely, a working hypothesis called: Local Democracy, Beyond the Political, a Bottom−Up Revolution, author's note), 2012

“What any revolution in the world did is breaking the law, because it favours those in power and those wanting to hold it; but I believe that people, when majority, is above every law.”
Participant in the demonstrations of September 21th, 2017 in Barcelona, against arrests ordered by central government to obstruct the referendum on Catalan independence.

“One may well ask «How long are the people going to stand for such a state of affairs?» Revolution is not the answer. Revolution only plays into the hands of the powers of evil. Only the indignant voice of the masses of all free nations can insist that their elected representatives end the totalitarian plans of the money−lenders before they reach their goal.”
William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game

“Q. … If there’s a worldwide economic slavery or warfare system, why can’t I see it?
A. Maybe because it’s invisible. And note that scientific advancement (the "paradigm shift" cliché) is fundamentally about making the invisible visible …”
Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism

“All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”
John Adams

“If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the Commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are, absolutely, without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse, unless it becomes widely understood, and the defects remedied very soon.”
Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Georgia, as quoted in Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism , and in G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“When banks place credits into your checking account, they are merely pretending to lend you money. In reality, they have nothing to lend. Even the money that non−indebted depositors have placed with them was originally created out of nothing in response to someone else’s loan. So what entitles the banks to collect rent on nothing? It is immaterial that men everywhere are forced by law to accept these nothing certificates in exchange for real goods and services. We are talking here, not about what is legal, but what is moral. As Thomas Jefferson observed at the time of his protracted battle against central banking in the United States, «No one has a natural right to the trade of money lender, but he who has money to lend.»
Centuries ago, usury was defined as any interest charged for a loan. Modern usage has redefined it as excessive interest. Certainly, any amount of interest charged for a pretended loan is excessive. The dictionary, therefore, needs a new definition. Usury: The charging of any interest on a loan of fiat money.
Let us, therefore, look at debt and interest in this light. Thomas Edison summed up the immorality of the system when he said:
«People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of materials will collect more money … than will the people who will supply all the materials and do all the work.»
Is that an exaggeration? Let us consider the purchase of a $100,000 home in which $30,000 represents the cost of the land, architect’s fee, sales commissions, building permits, and that sort of thing and $70,000 is the cost of labor and building materials. If the home buyer puts up $30,000 as a down payment, then $70,000 must be borrowed. If the loan is issued at 11% over a 30−year period, the amount of interest paid will be $167,806. That means the amount paid to those who loan the money is about 2½ times greater than paid to those who provide all the labor and all the materials. It is true that this figure represents the time−value of that money over thirty years and easily could be justified on the basis that a lender deserves to be compensated for surrendering the use of his capital for half a lifetime. But that assumes the lender actually had something to surrender, that he had earned the capital, saved it, and then loaned it for construction of someone else’s house. What are we to think, however, about a lender who did nothing to earn the money, had not saved it, and, in fact, simply created it out of thin air? What is the time−value of nothing?”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“I simply call attention to certain facts that cannot be successfully disputed. I know and so does any careful student know, whether he admits it or not, that the fact that the government stamps legal tender privileges on gold creates an increased and artificial demand for it, and, consequently a merchantable value that is very much in excess of what it would be if the gold did not have impressed upon it this legal tender privilege. … It now partakes of the character of monopoly. Every additional cent of credit given to it above its intrinsic worth as an article of commerce, by reason of the Government’s stamping it legal tender, is first extorted from the people’s own credit, next accumulated in the form of so−called "capital," and after that becomes the basis for charging them compound interest for generations – perpetually – if they shall not emancipate themselves by an abandonment of this false practice. As far as the principle is concerned, there is no difference between the Government stamping gold as legal tender and giving the owner the advantage of its increased value, and the same stamping process being applied to plain paper.”
Charles August Lindbergh, Sr., Congressman and Member of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Banking and Currency and The Money Trust

“Aside from what can be inferred from the media, the current situation is dramatic based on at least two considerations: we have a dysfunctional type of monetary system like the American one before the American revolution – 1770 – and we have a public debt that absorbs over 50% of the State revenue, as in France in 1780, right before the French revolution. In 1763 Benjamin Franklin was visiting England and was interviewed by the Bank of England about the surprising economic prosperity of the colonies. Franklin answered: «It is very simple. In the colonies we print our money. They are called Colonial Scripts. We issue them in direct ratio to the needs of industry and trade to ease the exchange amongst producers and consumers. In that way we create the colonies' own money, control its purchasing power and owe no interest to anyone.»

The Bank of England was horrified to learn that America did find out the secret of money. The Bank threw all its influence in to have a law passed, the "Currency act of 1764". That law precluded the colonies' issuance of money, outlawing it. The ghost of poverty overrun the colonies and revolution broke out. As to exceeding the fateful threshold of 50% of revenues to serve the public debt of pre−revolutionary France, one need only remember that Italy in 2008 alone paid a good 307 billions euro (53% of revenue). To give an exmple of what may happen in Italy today, one can refer to how Argentina solved the problem over the period 2001−2003: a widespread inception of local moneys issued by private bodies, districts and municipalities, occupations and self−management of factories. How can the unions try to protect the workers from the consequences of the current crisis and take advantage from the system? The mechanism of unions acquiring shareholdings of businesses alone – through pension funds – is not sufficient, and highlighted the risk of cannibalism among workers precisely for the high cost of subjugation of businesses to the interests of the banking system. A banking system that does not redistribute to society but only to its business partners (the monetary income is concealed in the balance sheets and turns out to be tax−exempt). The ultimate test lies in this simple observation: in the last 30−40 years the production capacity has increased tenfold, but the purchasing power of wages halved at the very least. Where did the difference of value end up?”
Marco Saba, Moneta Nostra (Our Money, author’s note)

“As I'm Catholic, and I always deal with Catholics, I say: go and read the encyclical of Pope Benedict XIV, it's called Vix Pervenit, and it tells you, again: any lending at interest is usurious in nature, even though it was a poor lending to a rich, even though the borrower draws substantial profits. The only way to draw anything from money is going into business with the borrower. In that case you can have more, but that more goes with the enterprise risk. If you bring up interest instead, then the world laughed; today, it doesn't laugh any more. Interest is devastating; mental zero rate must be our course of action.”
Giovanni Lazzaretti

“Discerning "right" from "wrong" in economics is a matter of distinguishing mutualistic from parasitic relationships. The history of civilization chronicles the gradual erection of a system of laws banning parasitic economic behavior. … Hosts are victims. No victim ever chooses to be robbed, enslaved, or denied basic human rights. Economic parasites use secrecy, deception, brute force, and legal authority as their "hooks." By latching onto their unwilling hosts, they are able to extort profits that no mutually voluntary relationship would provide. … To the extent that parasitic behavior is curtailed, society benefits. A healthy capitalist economy is a community of interdependent mutualists. To create an environment where cooperation flourishes, the elimination of exploitation in all its forms should be the chief objective of a society's economic laws. But keeping antiparasite laws in step with a rapidly evolving economy isn't simple. Identifying the economy's true parasites and writing laws that destroy their hooks requires a bionomics perspective.”
“The current financial stripping of economies and environments across the world exhibits, in fact, all the hallmark characteristics of a carcinogenic invasion.”
“The cancer stage of capitalism is not a metaphor. It is a rigorous description of where we are.”
“The essential problem of any life−threatening cancer is that the host body's immune system does not effectively recognise or respond to the cancer's challenge and advance. This failure of our social immune system to recognise and respond to the cancerous form of capitalism is understandable once we realise that the surveillance and communication organs of host social bodies across the world, as they now function, are incapable of recognising the nature and patterns of the disease. That is, capitalist−organised media and information systems select for dissemination only messages compatible with the capitalist organisation of social bodies.”
“They control their hosts, becoming in effect their new brain, and turning them into new creatures. It is as if the host itself is simply a puppet, and the parasite is the hand inside.”
Michael L. Rothschild, John McMurtry, Susan George, John McMurtry again, Carl Zimmer, all as quoted in Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism

“An extraordinary problem with money parasitism is that arguably, laws against "money laundering" could conceivably be construed as parasitism enforcement mechanisms. So increasingly draconian measures to track all privately circulating currency are installed … «Big brother wants to look in your bank account». …
Some innovators are proposing and erecting new money systems that are locally−oriented and community−based. That is certainly a strong possibility, but again they may be illegal by invasive state laws that require reporting both gifts and barter transactions and subjecting both to taxation.
A parasitical money system fundamentally has three major requirements that are arguably now already fully installed worldwide: (a) any money must be exclusively in the form of the state−authorized currency, (b) all economic transactions are subject to taxation, and (c) loss of government control over the central bank.
Ultimately, the issue largely comes down to whether individuals have the right to make economic transactions between themselves free of state surveillance or interference. U.S. and international laws and legal administration currently do not appear to support such a right. Coincidentally this is precisely the same question surrounding the legitimacy of any taxation. Again, the issue is closely related to the circumstances surrounding the founding of the U.S. and «no taxation without representation.»
In any case, a new realization of fractional reserve banking as a kind of fractional integrity or vitality system must enter the mass consciousness, along with the full understanding that the modern economic and political systems based on it are therefore deeply and intrinsically flawed – to borrow the informal yet highly descriptive phrase, rotten at the core.

All the associated doublespeak must be discredited and cleared away for any meaningful or widespread changes to occur. Humanity finds itself entering the 21st century with a medieval money system. Maybe some of its intense energy directed toward technological innovation can be channeled toward a state−of−the−art money system upgrade – maybe money is the ultimate technological tool of humanity!
Note that some social mechanisms that might seem to fight off parasitism could in fact be useless or even excellent decoys for the parasite. For example, if many people engage in even peaceful demonstrations at world economic summits, what is accomplished relative to capitalistic or money reform? The activists may be fooling themselves into thinking they made progress by whether they "made the evening news." They might instead more productively find myriad ways of reducing "host psychological complicity" … How about organizing conferences instead of demonstrations? There does not seem to exist a single major conference in the world for an issue as uncontroversial as "money reform."”
Vladimir Z. Nuri, Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism

“In order to detect, handle or remedy situations one has to be able to understand and work out several things.
These are defining the ideal scene itself, detect without error or guess any departure on it, find out WHY a departure occurred and work out a means of reverting back to the ideal scene.
In order to resolve a situation fully one has to get the REAL reason WHY a departure from the ideal scene occurred. …
There are two scenes:
A. The ideal scene.
B. The existing scene.
These of course can be wide apart.
How does one know the ideal scene?

At first thought it would be VERY difficult for a person not an expert to know the ideal scene. …
By constantly pounding in the "naturalness" of an existing scene consisting of madness, crime, torture, seizure and murder, these mad "experts" PUT THE IDEAL SCENE SO FAR FROM REACH THAT IT APPEARED INCREDIBLE. It was so bad a situation that anyone proposing the ideal scene was actively resisted!
Yet the ideal scene is so easy to state that any citizen could have stated it at any time. …
The ideal scene in a society would be, probably, a safe environment wherein one could happily make his way through life. …
The gap between the ideal scene and the existing scene can be very wide …
However, approached on a gradient with skill and determination, it can be done. …
The mental awareness that something is wrong with a scene is the point at which one can begin reverting to the ideal scene. …
Violent revolution comes about when the actual ideal scene has not been properly stated and when it excludes significant parts of the group.
It’s no good having a revolution if the end product will be a FURTHER departure from the ideal scene.
Revolt is only an expression of too−long−unmended departures from the ideal scene of society. …
Let us look this over, this concept of the ideal scene, and see that it is not a very complex thing. One doesn’t have to be much of an expert to see what an ideal scene would be.
The complex parts of the whole may not make up the whole, but they are not really vital to conceiving an ideal scene for any activity, as small as a family or as big as a planet.
The entire concept of an ideal scene for any activity is really a clean statement of its PURPOSE.
All one has to ask is, ‘What’s the purpose of this?’ and one will be able to work out what the ideal scene of "this" is.”
L. Ron Hubbard, How to Find and Establish an Ideal Scene

“It’s time for the public opinion to realise that those who create the value of money are not those who print it or issue it, but those who accept it as a means of payment, that is, the community of citizens. The absence of this awareness ensures that it is not the peoples that appropriate the monetary value, but the international banking system… The well−known phrase of William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, «The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing», which looks unscrupulously sincere, actually hides the most inportant part of the truth, because it is not true that the bank enriches itself only out of the interest, but it also and primarily does out of money itself, whose value – as we have seen – is not created by the bank, but by the community.”
Giacinto Auriti, L’ordinamento internazionale del sistema monetario (The International Legal Order of Monetary System, author’s note)

“The only way to avoid the impoverishment of peoples is avoiding debt from its inception. The States must therefore stop monetizing on debt, and must begin to directly create money. To avoid national debt, no state bonds or any other similar instruments must be issued any more, and citizen−owned money must be issued instead. To avoid the private debt to banks, the creation of credit out of nothing must be forbidden, and alternatives must be sought that replace those medieval institutions.
The solution, therefore, does not lie in "saving", but in "measuring", in discovering what is the true function of money and in issuing it without any debt and citizen−owned.”
Daniele Pace, The Utopian Money

“Just three months prior to the opening of the convention, [George] Washington voiced his reasons for rejecting the notion of fiat money. In answer to the complaint that there was not enough gold coin (specie) to satisfy the needs of commerce, he replied: «The necessity arising from a want of specie is represented as greater than it really is. I contend that it is by the substance, not the shadow of a thing, we are to be benefited. The wisdom of man, in my humble opinion, cannot at this time devise a plan by which the credit of paper money would be long supported; consequently, depreciation keeps pace with the quantity of the emission, and articles for which it is exchanged rise in a greater ratio than the sinking value of the money. Wherein, then, is the farmer, the planter, the artisan benefited? An evil equally great is the door it immediately opens for speculation, by which the least designing and perhaps most valuable part of the community are preyed upon by the more knowing and crafty speculators.»
This was the prevailing view held by the great majority of delegates to the Convention. They were adamant in their resolve to create a constitution which would prevent any state, and especially the federal government itself, from ever again issuing fiat money. And they said so in unmistakable terms.
Oliver Ellsworth from Connecticut, who later was to become our third Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said: «This is a favorable moment to shut and bar the door against paper money. The mischief of the various experiments which have been made are now fresh in the public mind and have excited the disgust of all the respectable parts of America.»
George Mason from Virginia told the delegates he had a «mortal hatred to paper money.» Previously he had written to George Washington: «They may pass a law to issue paper money, but twenty laws will not make the people receive it. Paper money is founded upon fraud and knavery.»

James Wilson from Pennsylvania said: «It will have the most salutary influence on the credit of the United States to remove the possibility of paper money.»
John Langdon from New Hampshire warned that he would rather reject the whole plan of federation than to grant the new government the right to issue fiat money.
George Reed from Delaware declared that a provision in the Constitution granting the new government the right to issue fiat money «would be as alarming as the mark of the beast in Revelation.»
Thomas Paine, although not a delegate to the Convention, had written … that he was strongly opposed to fiat money, which he called counterfeiting by the state, and he especially abhorred legal tender laws which force people to accept the counterfeit. He said: «The punishment of a member [of a legislature] who should move for such a law ought to be death.»
An interesting thought.
…
The Tenth Amendment states: «The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.» The power to issue bills of credit is definitely not delegated to the United States, and it is specifically prohibited to the States. Therefore, if any power to issue fiat money legally exists at all, it is reserved for the people. In other words, individuals and private institutions, such as banks, have the right to issue lOUs and hope that the public will use them as money, but government, at any level, is clearly prohibited by the Constitution from doing so.”
G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jeckyll Island, A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

“In 1913 President Woodrow Wilson signed the document that created the Federal Reserve, and committed the American people to debt slavery until such time as they awake from their slumber and overthrow this vicious tyranny.
…
None of our problems will disappear until we correct the creation, supply and circulation of money. Once the money problem is solved, everything else will fall into place.”
Len Clampett, Hand Over Our Loot, No. 2 as found at freedom−school.com

“The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Thomas Jefferson

“Since democracy means popular political sovereignty, the people must have monetary sovereignty as well, which is a constitutive and essential part of the political sovereignty, in a system of actual or full democracy in which money is to be declared, on the basis of its origin, the property of citizens from the very moment of its emission.”
Giacinto Auriti, as found at simec.org

“Human rights will be truly achieved only after the recognition of the PEOPLE'S OWNERSHIP of MONEY.”
father Quirino Salomone, as found at simec.org

“It might be thought that the mix of government and money is too far gone, too pervasive in the economic system, too inextricably bound up in the economy, to be eliminated without economic destruction. Conservatives are accustomed to denouncing the "terrible simplifiers" who wreck everything by imposing simplistic and unworkable schemes. Our major problem, however, is precisely the opposite: mystification by the ruling elite of technocrats and intellectuals, who, whenever some public spokesman arises to call for large−scale tax cuts or deregulation, intone sarcastically about the dimwit masses who "seek simple solutions for complex problems." Well, in most cases, the solutions are indeed clear−cut and simple, but are deliberately obfuscated by people whom we might call "terrible complicators." In truth, taking back our money would be relatively simple and straightforward …

Our goal may be summed up simply as the privatization of our monetary system, the separation of government from money and banking. The central means to accomplish this task is also straightforward: the abolition, the liquidation of the Federal Reserve System – the abolition of central banking. …
A corollary step, of course, would be the abolition of the already bankrupt Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The very concept of "deposit insurance" is fraudulent; how can you "insure" an entire industry that is inherently insolvent? …
There has been a lot of focus on poor quality bank loans … But poor quality loans and investments are always the consequence of central bank and bank−credit expansion. The all−too−familiar cycle of boom and bust, euphoria and crash, prosperity and depression, did not begin in the 1980s. Nor is it a creature of civilization or the market economy. The boom−bust cycle began in the eighteenth century with the beginnings of central banking, and has spread and intensified ever since, as central banking spread and took control of the economic systems of the Western world. Only the abolition of the Federal Reserve System and a return to the gold standard can put an end to cyclical booms and busts, and finally eliminate chronic and accelerating inflation. …
Monetary inflation … not only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit; it also acts as a giant system of expropriation of the late receivers by the counterfeiters themselves and by the other early receivers. Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution. …
To save our economy from destruction and from the eventual holocaust of run away inflation, we the people must take the money−supply function back from the government. Money is far too important to be left in the hands of bankers and of Establishment economists and financiers. To accomplish this goal, money must be returned to the market economy, with all monetary functions performed within the structure of the rights of private property and of the free−market economy. …

We must have investment determined by voluntary savings on the market, and not by counterfeit money and credit issued by a knavish and State−privileged banking system. In short, we must abolish central banking, and force the banks to meet their obligations as promptly as anyone else. Money and banking have been made to appear as mysterious and arcane processes that must be guided and operated by a technocratic elite. They are nothing of the sort. In money, even more than the rest of our affairs, we have been tricked by a malignant Wizard of Oz.”
Murray N. Rothbard, Taking Money Back, Fractional Reserve Banking, The Solution, as found at rothbard.altervista.org

“The more any power is concentrated, the more it is likely to be used as a suppressive weapon by some few against all; hence, the less any power is concentrated, the better for all. Money power to begin with.”
“Translating Benjamin Franklin in terms of economic suppression, they that can be persuaded to whatever moneypulation, monopoly or surveillance to obtain a little oblivious consumerism deserve neither liberty nor safety and they will very quickly lose both — and together with theirs, traitorously, those of their fellow human beings as well.”
“Creating purchasing power out of nothing without due product is a crime against Humanity. Whoever is allowed to do it, or even monopolise it, or even worse set up an infinite debt trap, sooner or later will own and destroy everything and everyone.
As private monopolies have proven to be suppressive, public monopolies have proven to be big trouble sources, and the ultimate sovereignty is monetary sovereignty, the solution is: first, individual inalienable and non−delegatable monetary sovereignty; second, maximum civic−mindedness, minimum delegation rate and bottom up sovereignty; third, no oligo−monopolies, first of all in the split barter media such as money.”
Author’s note

“The term utopia is the most comfortable way to brush off what one lacks the will, the ability or the courage to do. A dream seems a dream until one starts somewhere, only then it becomes a purpose, that is, something infinitely greater.”
Adriano Olivetti, from it.wikiquote.org

“If you can dream it, you can do it.”
Tom Fitzgerald, Disney Imagineer

“All our dreams can come true – if we have the courage to pursue them.” “It's kind of fun to do the impossible.”
Walt Disney, from en.wikiquote.org

“The only thing which can actually alter self−determinism and reduce it is self−determinism itself. One can determine to be used or worked upon by the environ and its people but until one makes a determination to do so, one is not so affected.”
“Anyone can fix anything, anywhere, anytime. And he/she knows it. You will find this in every case.”
L. Ron Hubbard (paraphrased or not)

“A world with less Rothschilds and more Gaudís”
Anonymous, guestbooks of Casa Milà (La Pedrera) and Casa Battló

I think these quotes do speak for themselves, if one just faces their full scope. So now, assuming this point of view, let’s begin by calling things with their name, because the more precisely we identify something, the more likely we will be addressing that instead of something else, and thus the more able to actually handle it we will be.

This is the reason for the title of this essay:
“Crisis? Economic Suppression…”

What does crisis mean? Well, things are not or no more the way they should… you get the idea.

What does economic suppression mean… exactly? Both words may be less obvious than one may expect, and we’re going to investigate both rather thoroughly.

As to suppression, you are likely to face here its depths and its roots for the first time. As to economics, you may object you’ve been taught economics is a dull, boring subject; some even labelled it “the dismal science”. Well, once in the know, you may come to a couple of personal conclusions; one is that someone had very good – if as much shady – reasons to have you think so and thus have you stay away from it. And the other has to do with the meaning, the depth, and the use of these two terms combined: economic suppression.