CHAPTER 6: AMERICA, WON AND LOST.
After the United States gained its independence from Britain, it became powerful in the world in two very different ways: as an idea, and as a reality.
‘America the idea’ is a land of freedom and democracy, equality and opportunity, promoting these aspirations and values across the world.
‘America the reality’ is an international power. It was built on genocide and slavery. Today, a carefully managed monetary system allots wealth to those who do no productive work. In the wider world, America destabilizes popular governments, promotes tyrannies, creates dollars to purchase foreign resources for corporate exploitation and sponsors foreign wars to establish new bases of military and financial power.
For a long time ‘American the idea’ successfully camouflaged the activities of ‘America the reality’. Today the camouflage is wearing very thin indeed.
‘America the reality’ became stronger than ‘America the idea’ as the powers of money and corporate industry won out over the idealism and the good intentions of many of its ‘founding fathers’[1] and of countless others. Central to this development was the adoption of British banking as a way of creating money.
The adoption of British banking by America has an interesting history. After Independence, the American elite opted for the method favoured by their old colonial masters and rejected homegrown approaches to money-creation, some of which had been both just and efficient (see below).
The new elite liked British banking for the same reason it was loved by the British parliament – because it favoured government power and private wealth. The collusion of finance and government power, via circulating credit, is a very resilient form of concentrated power, because although everyone can see the bad effects, few people understand how it works. Governments across the world have since adopted the method for the same reasons: to augment their own power, and to make it easy for their supporters to increase their own wealth.
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