07: The Incomplete Revolution

Chapter Seven of How to Dismantle an Empire is the final chapter in Section TWO: Two Ways to Make a Slave. I talk about Jekyll Island and how the scam was perpetrated—running Teddy Roosevelt as a third party to draw votes away from Taft and get in Wilson. The Federal Reserve printing press enabled WWI to be funded with taxpayer debt. I examine global land monopoly, US foreign military bases, weapons 'r US, and the debt drain.

As I say in the video, some of my views have changed since I wrote this chapter. In particular, the use of the climate change and fossil fuel narratives to usher in a New World Order certainly makes them suspect as another psyop—a word I didn’t even have back in 2019. Now those psyops are popping (I first wrote pooping, perhaps more accurate) like bubbles.

I’ve chosen to leave in the positions where I’ve changed my mind as a testimony to being wrong. I know there’s something I’m wrong about right now that, a year from now, I’ll say, “I can’t believe I believed that.” So revision would be a never-ending process rather than taking this as a starting point and building from there.

The important revelations I came to in this chapter—that land ownership is the key to sovereignty and a consumer society depends on invisible slaves—I still believe. And that’s the foundation we need to end all ways to make a slave, including the ones being used on us.

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The State represents violence 
in a concentrated and organized form. 
The individual has a soul but 
as the State is a soulless machine,
it can never be weaned from violence
to which it owes its very existence.

—MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

Whoever heard of a revolution where they 
lock arms . . . singing “We Shall Overcome”? 
Just tell me.

You don’t do that in a revolution.
You don’t do any singing;
you’re too busy swinging.

It’s based on land.
A revolutionary wants land
so he can set up his own nation,
an independent nation.
These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. 
They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.

—MALCOLM X

Donna: [Ood is] a great big empire built on slavery. 
The Doctor: It’s not so different than your time. 
Donna: Oi, I haven’t got slaves!
The Doctor: Who d’ya think made your clothes?

—DR. WHO, PLANET OF THE OOD EPISODE

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The Incomplete Revolution

From the birth of democracy in Greece to the overthrow of kings in Britain to the revolt of colonial America to “off with their heads” in France, not one revolution freed the foreign slaves. Some flattened the pyramid a little at the top, turning a monarchy (monos- one, archon ruler) into an oligarchy (oligos- few, arkhia rulers) that required consent of the elite. Others distributed the spoils of war—the slave-made commodities—a little more widely, increasing the standard of living for citizens or complicit foreigners and aggressively promoting commerce. Some forbid slavery at home or in recognizable forms like chattel or indentured. But in each case the revolution was incomplete and never reached the colonized, occupied, or oppressed.

When abolitionists ended the slave trade, imports of sugar, cotton, and tobacco increased. England abolished slavery only to replace it with colonial and corporate rule. After the San Domingo slaves freed themselves, France ensnared them again with debt for their own slave-price. And African slaves, although freed by Northern soldiers, became landless pawns in the strategy to bring ‘market coercion’ to the South.

In a complete revolution consumers would have partnered with producers to give farmers ownership of the food they harvested, the fields they cultivated, and the goods they produced. They would have invested in worker cooperatives made up of former slaves and been repaid in trade items, cutting out the masters, speculators, and middlemen. At the time of these historical revolutions, both the laborers in the factories and the laborers in the field made plenty of goods to trade if both had been worker-owned. It would have given better choices for everyone.

With each turn of the capitalist screw, the consumer class became more removed from slave-wage producers, so that by the late twentieth century most people in the developed world no longer made anything to trade. Competition drove the cost of land up and the price of goods down, so independent tradesmen and smallholder farms could no longer afford to produce. Most importantly, the banking system withheld the medium of exchange, which was like draining the oil from a machine. Let’s take a final look at how the banks brought community self-reliance to a halt.

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jekyll to hide

The 19th century was a time of boom-and-bust money cycles that were manipulated by the bankers. Those wild swings culminated in the panic of 1907. In The Web of Debt, Ellen Brown writes,

The panic of 1907 was triggered by rumors that the Knickerbocker Bank and The Trust Company of America were about to become insolvent. Later evidence pointed to the House of Morgan as the source of the rumors. The public, believing the rumors, proceeded to make them come true by staging a run on the banks. Morgan then nobly helped to avert the panic by importing $100 million worth of gold from Europe to stop the bank run. The mesmerized public came to believe that the country needed a central banking system to stop future panics.

To exploit the agitation they’d created for a central bank, powerful representatives of the two banking competitors, Morgan and Rockefeller, met at Morgan’s estate on his privately owned Jekyll Island. It was hosted by Rockefeller’s father-in-law and Morgan’s business associate, Senator Nelson Aldrich. The Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury was present, as was Paul Warburg, representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and brother to Max Warburg, head of the banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.

They named their proposal the Aldrich Federal Reserve Plan and the Senator introduced the bill in Congress. Its most articulate opponent was William Jennings Bryan, who insisted that allowing private banks to issue public money would give Wall Street control of the government. Only the US Treasury, he stated, should issue currency to be guaranteed and controlled by Congress. The legislature agreed and Congress voted to defeat the bankers’ bill.

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hoodwinkle the moose

But even if it had passed, President Taft had been unlikely to sign it. Taft was a Rockefeller man but his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt was a Morgan man. Roosevelt had broken up Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which was known as the shadow government. Taft had retaliated by filing antitrust suits against Morgan’s International Harvester and United States Steel. Competition between the greedy was working to the people’s advantage. Clearly it was time to compromise—for the greater good of the bankers.

In 1912 Taft was a sure bet for reelection. So Morgan created a third party, called the Progressive or Bull Moose Party, and ran Teddy Roosevelt to divert some of Taft’s votes. The divide-and-crumble strategy worked and Morgan’s real candidate, Woodrow Wilson, won the election while the duped and discarded Bull Moose stomped back to the tundra.

Three days before Christmas in 1913, the Aldrich Plan was reintroduced as the Currency Bill or Owen-Glass Act. Congress had been struggling with the need for a sovereign currency since the summer; the Act was seen as a compromise and was worded so confusingly that no representative had time to decipher it. William Jennings Bryan believed that the banks had given in. Triumphantly, he assured the House that control of the money had not been relinquished to the bankers. It passed overwhelmingly the same day, supported by the anti-banker Democrats and opposed by the pro-banker Republicans.

On the last day before the Christmas break, Santa Senate approved it and Wilson signed it into law with pomp and circumstance. With one wave of the pen, Wilson gave the bankers the power of the purse strings. It was later renamed The Federal Reserve Act.

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war and the expandable purse

William Jennings Bryan ran twice for president on a platform of coining silver and staying out of foreign wars. In 1915 he resigned as Secretary of State because of President Wilson’s headlong rush to enter World War I. Wilson had found that the expandable purse of the Federal Reserve made diplomacy optional. While Bryan responded to the sinking of the Lusitania in a manner designed to avert escalation, Wilson overrode him with a threatening letter. . . and the rest is history.

In 1919 Ludwig von Mises wrote, “Inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly.” With it, however, the military budget could reach heights that would make a statesman’s head spin. By 1920 the money supply had doubled, allowing WWI to be funded 23% through money creation, 56% by Fed-backed borrowing, and only 21% through taxes.

Had not 79% of the true costs been deferred by printing new money and using the taxpayer’s credit card, the US may never have entered WWI, which set the Versailles stage for WWII. The carnage goes on from there: in the 98 years from 1913 until 2011 there have been 98 foreign interventions, not including actions against native tribes within the United States. There is no end in sight.

Although dilution of the dollar—deceptively called inflation—and debt postponed the economic impact of war, it caught up. There have been eighteen recessions in the century since the Act passed, of durations that, combined, amount to recessions for half of the country’s history.

The purchasing power of a dollar in 1913 would buy an item in 2013 that cost less than 5 cents, if such an item still existed. It’s as if 95 cents in trade value was leached out of every dollar and diverted to the banks. The rate of inflation over the century came to 1000% of its 1913 value. To picture this, if one’s great-grandparents made $5000 a year in 1913, one would need to make $100,000 a year in 2013 in order to have the same purchasing power.

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remote-control slaves

How are inflation and slavery related? Inflation increases the debt of the consumer class but also widens the wage gap between consumers and third-world producers, making it harder for either to break out of their roles. As more money is generated in an economy, it increases the capacity to take on more debt, accelerating the bidding for things that can’t be outsourced to other countries, such as housing and healthcare.

A family in 1913 that needed to make $5000 a year could consider running a small farm or business, but not a 2013 family that needed $100,000 in order to have comparable housing, healthcare, educational opportunities, and retirement security. Instead of a single “breadwinner,” the modern family needs both parents working, since they are bidding against other two-income families for a house. Their health insurance is dependent on their employers, their children graduate with debt, and their retirement is at risk in the stock market.

Paying for these essentials leaves them with less disposable income, as Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi document in The Two-Income Trap. They show that the 2013 couple spends a smaller percentage than their grandparents on food, appliances, cars, clothing and vacations. The food and goods that they do buy are cheap— cheaply made, mass-produced, and sold at big-box stores. Their access to stuff is greater than ever, but the quality of their goods and their ability to produce have both been wiped out.

The result is that the citizenry of the United States produces almost none of our own food and goods, while consuming 20% of the world’s production with 5% of the world’s population. We produce no surplus except through immigrant labor, who might be seen as the commodity slaves at home. But there is one thing we do produce, which goes back to E.D. Morel’s clues to invisible slavery abroad: we produce weapons. Lots of weapons.

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weapons ’r us

In the words of former US President Jimmy Carter during his 1976 election campaign:

We can’t have it both ways. We can’t be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of arms.

The global arms trade has always been a booming business but in the decade after September 11, 2001, world military spending shot up by a whopping 50%. According to the Stockholm International Peace Institute, in 2011 it reached a cumulative $1.7 trillion, or $236 for every person in the world. Fifteen countries accounted for 81% of the total, with the US alone covering 41%. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council— the US, the UK, Russia, China and France—made up 60% of military spending as a whole.

While the US government spent two out of every five dollars that the world devoted to militarization, US weapons manufacturers raked in four out of every five dollars that the rest of the world spent on arms. The US tripled its arms sales in 2010, primarily due to a major sale to the House of Saud, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. This brought the US up from 44% of the market share to 79% under President Obama. Since then, President Trump has outdone his predecessor.

The Grimmett Report, which is presented to Congress annually, shows that just two or three major suppliers brokered most of these weapons deals. A 2005 report from the World Policy Institute found that 80% of the top US arms clients were undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.

With well over 100 nations to which the US is selling weapons, arms were the top US export of the last decade. What would slavery sleuth E.D. Morel say to this? When he saw the ships leaving Antwerp with their cargo of rifles and ammunition, he knew that what happened on the other shore wasn’t trade. Sherlock Holmes might draw on his pipe and murmur, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

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stealing home base

Morel saw the export of weapons as a means of controlling a foreign country’s political process. In America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, William Blum begins with a numerical count of US foreign interventions from WWII until 2013. His summaries include:

• Endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most . . . democratically elected

• Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries

• Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders

• Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries

• Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.

Blum follows the list by filling in the details of many of these actions, counting US interventions in 71 countries in the 70 years since 1945. He compares the American people to the children of a Mafia boss who don’t know what their father does, nor do they want to know, but are shocked that someone would throw a firebomb through their window.

In a 2011 article entitled “Empire of Bases 2.0,” Nick Turse counts the number of US military bases dotting the globe as somewhere between 1,077 and 1,180, with 750 officially listed by the Pentagon. He writes:

What we do know is that, on the foreign outposts the U.S. military counts, it controls close to 52,000 buildings, and more than 38,000 pieces of heavy infrastructure like piers, wharves, and gigantic storage tanks, not to mention more than 9,100 “linear structures” like runways, rail lines, and pipelines. Add in more than 6,300 buildings, 3,500 pieces of infrastructure, and 928 linear structures in U.S. territories and you have an impressive total.

Yet US citizens are yawningly unconcerned on both sides of the political aisle. In the 2012 election only two percent of a bipartisan sample ranked war and foreign conflicts as the most important issue. Five percent favored morality, which meant opposing gay marriage and abortion. The vast 82% majority prioritized the domestic issues of the economy, jobs, healthcare, immigration and education. This is close to the nine people out of ten in 1787 who didn’t think that slavery was wrong.

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a slave to one’s stomach

Morel’s final proof that slavery had supplanted trade was lack of ownership over “the land and the produce which it yields.” In How the Other Half Dies, Susan George writes:

The most pressing cause of the abject poverty which millions of people in the world endure is that a mere 2.5% of landowners with more than 100 hectares control nearly three quarters of all the land in the world—with the top 0.23% controlling over half.

As can be attested by the Landless Worker’s Movement in Brazil or the Landless People’s Movement in South Africa or the dispossessed people of Palestine, land is freedom. Without land, hunger is the ultimate cruel master.

In a 2008 open letter, Michael Pollan reported that more than thirty nations had experienced food riots within the previous few months. By 2013 the UK Guardian explained why food riots were likely to become the new normal: climate change (or geo-engineering, as I’d say now) has caused droughts in Africa, Russia, and India. There have been floods in Pakistan and heat waves across Australia. Rice yields are down 10-20%, wheat production is down 3%, and corn crops have lost 13% of their yield. Scientists at Stanford and the University of Washington predict that by mid-century harvests will fall by 20-40% due to rising temperatures. By 2019 these predictions are on target.

But sooner than that the biophysical limits of the soil will be reached as a result of industrial farming, which is heavily dependent on the dwindling efficacy of petrofertilizer. In the meantime, predatory food speculation takes advantage of short supplies by driving up the prices for staple foods.

The World Food Programme explains why this has a discrepant impact on the global poor. A loaf of bread in the developed world calculates 86% of its cost on advertising, packaging, transportation, and retail sales. If the cost of wheat doubles, it only affects the remaining 14%. People on the margins of the monetary system, however, would more likely buy wheat directly to make bread and, moreover, might spend up to 60-80% of their income on food alone. If wheat doubles, all they can do is cut out costlier foods like proteins, fruits, and vegetables, or reduce their daily meals to two or one or none.

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the legal migration of money

The final test for commodity slavery is whether the servants would be better off without the masters. Are producers in third-world countries getting a fair return, or anything in return for what they make? Rather than calling countries “developed” vs. “developing,” perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to consumer and producer nations. It’s not just that food and goods that go in one direction and money in the other; all three flow in the opposite direction of the weapons. In the documentary The End of Poverty?, economist Susan George explains:

SubSaharan Africa, which is the poorest part of the world, is paying $25,000 every minute to northern creditors. Well, you could build a lot of schools, a lot of hospitals . . . you could make a lot of job creation if you were using $25,000 a minute differently from debt repayment. So there’s this drain and I think people don’t understand that it is actually the South that is financing the North . . . to the tune of about $200 billion every year.

Foreign credit extracts goods, resources, and the labor represented by the currency. Without the US weapons sold to undemocratic regimes, the annual foreign intervention, and the over one thousand military bases, the third world would surely be better off and certainly self-sufficient. The market manipulation of food production has left them hungrier than ever. They don’t need the foreign corporations that monopolize their land.

Rather than buying and selling whole people, as in chattel slavery, we now buy slave labor in our market commodities. Instead of taking the people away from their land, the market paradigm has taken the land away from the people. Yet this paradigm has also subjected us to an escalating cost of living that makes us increasingly dependent on our foreign slaves. We can no longer afford our own labor.

If any of these revolutions had gone all the way and freed the slaves, giving the land back to those who worked it, we would be capable of supporting our lives today—if not our current lifestyles. But the revolution continues, with or without us, among those who do the work and are not fooled by free market rhetoric. And among those not fooled is nature herself. Capitalism might steal all the bases but nature still bats last.

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CHAPTER 7 EXERCISES

Using examples from the book, or from your own research, logic, and experience, comment on the following and what it means today:

Paradigm Shift #7

• Consumers revolt over distribution of money;

• Producers revolt over distribution of land.

• Without slaves, who produce with no right to consume,

• there could be no consumers with no need to produce.

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Lexicon

Explain how the following definitions change the dialogue around social problems. Is this concept used in discussion of the examples to which it applies? If not, how does this affect the potential solutions?

the State: a government with the authority to use the violence of police, prisons, and military along with institutions, laws, and money.

oligarchy: rule by the few over the many.

central bank: a private cartel of wealthy individuals who issue the credit and currency on which a nation depends.

Federal Reserve: the central bank of the US, started by the Rockefellers and Morgans, and passed in Congress a century ago. The Federal (or centralized) Government has no control over it, even to report the amounts of credit issued.

divide-and-crumble strategy: the introduction of a third candidate into a biparti- san election in order to use dissatisfaction with both candidates to elect the less popular of the two. Could be solved with ranked voting, if the major parties were motivated to do so.

Federal Reserve Act (1913 Currency Bill or Owen-Glass Act): the Christmas Eve coup that gave the bankers the power to issue the credit and print the bills that trade as money in the United States.

inflation: the dilution of the value of the currency in relationship to the assets that back it, primarily housing.

the two-income trap: a term coined by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter to indicate that, as incomes rise, so do expenses for the same commodities, driven up by the bidding war on houses. Therefore, while women won the right to work in one generation, giving them more choices, they lost the ability to raise a family on one income in the next.

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Questions for Reflection and Discussion

What do you think of Gandhi’s assertion that the state owes its very existence to violence and can never be weaned from it? What would it mean on a practical level to recognize that all states are a form of concentrated and institutionalized violence?

Is there a small enough size where this isn’t true, or safeguards that could enable a state without violence? Is violence sometimes necessary? Who gets to decide when and to whom?

What are your thoughts about Malcolm X’s claim that revolutionaries want land to start a new nation and Negroes are trying instead to “crawl back on the plantation”? What do you think about the Black Panthers or black-led movements during the Emancipation era whose demands were for sovereignty? Are there black-led initiatives today that are focused on land, farming, and self-determination?

Compare the 1913 Banking & Currency Act, later called the Federal Reserve Act, to the 1764 British Currency Act, written by the merchant-bankers, that forced the colonies to rely on gold- and silver-backed specie for their internal exchange.

If the 1764 British Currency Act triggered the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), as Franklin claims, why do you think there was little response to the 1913 Federal Reserve Act a century and a half later?

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For more on the right of self defense and the duty to protect others:

Nefahotep has outlined important lessons from the Bhagavad Gita for today. I add onto those from A Course in Miracles, the gnostic Gospel of Philip, Vanessa Beeley on the ICJ ruling and Myriam Charabaty’s article on Resistance Justified: Unmasking Deceptive Neutrality.

Responding to Russell's interview of Edward Snowden, called The Greatest Conspiracies Are In Plain Sight, I give my list of the three biggest conspiracies: tax havens, financial derivatives and money itself. I explain what Mafia techniques are used with tax havens, how one building in Delaware houses 280,000 companies, why the interest rate makes me hot, and who stole the right to make money out of nothing and own your home for free. But to start, I find a common 'rub' between pole dancing, online dating, and capitalism.