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When the Aristocracy Leaves the Commoners in the Dust, The Empire Is Doomed
When the Aristocracy Leaves the Commoners in the Dust, The Empire Is Doomed
We all know the barriers between the commoners and the Elite rise higher every year, despite the claims of the corporate media and the Power Elite aristocracy.
Historian Peter Turchin identified “the degree of solidarity felt between the commons and aristocracy” as a key ingredient of the Republic of Rome’s enormous success. Turchin calls this attribute of social structure vertical integration, a term that usually refers to a corporation owning its supply chain.
In Turchin’s meaning, it refers to the sense of purpose and identity shared by the top, middle and bottom of the wealth/power pyramid. One measure of thisvertical integration is the degree of equality/inequality between the commoners (shall we call this the lower 90% of American households by income?) and the Power Elite aristocracy (top .5%, or perhaps top .1%).
The vertical integration of the Roman Republic’s social strata is striking. In his book War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, Turchin tells this anecdote:
“Roman historians of the later age stressed the modest way of life, even poverty of the leading citizens. For example, when Cincinnatus was summoned to be dictator, while working at the plow, he reportedly exclaimed, ‘My land will not be sown this year and so we shall run the risk of not having enough to eat!'”
Can you conjure up the image of any presidential hopeful in a field actually working to grow food for his/her family?
Turchin goes on to say this vertical integration is a feature of all successful empires:
“(This) lack of glaring barriers between the aristocracy and the commons seems to be a general characteristic of successful imperial nations during their early phase.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
America’s Biggest Lie – Dictatorship Or Democracy?
America’s Biggest Lie – Dictatorship Or Democracy?
The Deceit About Being A ‘Republic’ Versus A ‘Democracy’
One of my recent articles at several sites, “Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy” generated many reader-comments (such as here) saying things like, “The US has always been a republic. There are no true democracies in the modern world.” This will be my response to all who expressed that view:
You miss the point that Carter made, and that I there documented to be true, which is no semantic issue (“democracy” versus “republic”), but which instead concerns the basic lie about what the United States of America really is now:
Is this a representative democracy, such as its Founders intended and such as it was famous and honored throughout the world for being, until at least around 1980?Or, is it instead a nation that’s ruled by a tiny elite, an aristocracy, which in this country consists of its 500 or so billionaires, who buy the politicians whom ‘we’ ‘elect’?
Is the U.S. now, basically, a fraud? Is it a dictatorship, instead of a democracy? Is it some kind of aristocracy, which controls the government here?
That’s not a semantic issue, at all. America’s first political party was called the “Democratic Republican Party,” but could as well have been called the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, because those two terms are essentially synonymous in any nation that has a large population, in which the public elect representatives to represent them, instead of directly vote on the policies that the government is to pursue — to place into its law, and to enforce by its duly authorized police or otherwise, and to adjudicate by democratically appointed judges and/or juries.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Constitution of the EU’s Dictatorship
The Constitution of the EU’s Dictatorship
It’s here:
http://www.esm.europa.eu/pdf/ESM Treaty consolidated 13-03-2014.pdf
That’s the treaty establishing (which was originally done in 2012) the ultimate lending-fund for what the EU now officially considers to be a permanent economic crisis in Europe, of member-nations that are experiencing “severe financing problems,” and that are therefore continually ripe for asset-stripping by aristocrats.
It’s called the European Stability Mechanism.
It’s anything but that. Here is what it actually does:
In other words: it establishes the European bureaucracy to serve global aristocrats, so as to help them asset-strip the European populations of corrupt member-nations. These bureaucrats get transferred back-and-forth between this bureaucracy and the big financial institutions (which also are dependent upon the same billionaires), so that these bureaucratic servants of the aristocracy can themselves gradually emerge as aristocrats, basically joining (now becoming principals, no longer merely agents of) the aristocratic financial war stripping the public.
Here are some key provisions of this “Treaty,” or Europe’s (or the EU’s) new constitution:
Article 34. Professional secrecy. The Members or former Members of the Board of Governors and of the Board of Directors and any other persons who work or have worked for or in connection with the ESM shall not disclose information that is subject to professional secrecy. They shall be required, even after their duties have ceased, not to disclose information of the kind covered by the obligation of professional secrecy.
Article 35. Immunities of persons. 1. In the interest of the ESM, the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents. …
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Collapse, Part 1: Greece
Collapse, Part 1: Greece
When systems are broke and broken, collapse is the only way forward.
The theme this week is collapse. It’s a big, complex topic because there are as many types of collapse as there are systems. Some systems appear stable on the surface but collapse suddenly; others visibly decay for decades before finally slipping beneath the waves of history, and some go through stages of collapse.
The taxonomy of collapse is broad, and each unsustainable system (i.e. a system that will fail despite claims to the contrary) has its unique characteristics.
Which brings us to Greece.
I have written extensively about Greece and the doomed financial arrangement known as the euro for many years–for example: Greece, Please Do The Right Thing: Default Now (June 1, 2011).
When Debt is More Important Than People, The System Is Evil (February 18, 2012)
Greece at the Crossroads: the Oligarchs Blew It (January 27, 2015)
Greece and the Endgame of the Neocolonial Model of Exploitation(February 19, 2015)
When Europe Gets Greece’s Jingle Mail: Dealing with Default (May 15, 2015)
With the bankruptcy of Greece now undeniable, we’ve finally reached the endgame of the Neocolonial-Financialization Model. There are no more markets in Greece to exploit with financialization, and the fact that the mountains of debt are unpayable can no longer be masked.
Europe’s financial Aristocracy has an unsolvable dilemma: writing off defaulted debt also writes off assets and income streams, for every debt is somebody else’s asset and income stream. When all those phantom assets are recognized as worthless, collateral vanishes and the system implodes.
The peripheral nations of the EU are effectively neocolonial debtors of the core, and the taxpayers of the core nations are now feudal serfs whose labor is devoted to making good on any loans to the periphery that go bad. (see chart of Greece’s debtors below)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
CFR Says China Must Be Defeated And TPP Is Essential To That
CFR Says China Must Be Defeated And TPP Is Essential To That
Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations has issued a major report, alleging that China must be defeated because it threatens to become a bigger power in the world than the U.S.
This report, which is titled “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China,” is introduced by Richard Haass, the CFR’s President, who affirms the report’s view that, “no relationship will matter more when it comes to defining the twenty-first century than the one between the United States and China.”
Haass gives this report his personal imprimatur by saying that it “deserves to become an important part of the debate about U.S. foreign policy and the pivotal U.S.-China relationship.” He acknowledges that some people won’t agree with the views it expresses.
The report itself then opens by saying: “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals, first on the North American continent, then in the Western hemisphere, and finally globally.” It praises “the American victory in the Cold War.” It then lavishes praise on America’s imperialistic dominance: “The Department of Defense during the George H.W. Bush administration presciently contended that its ‘strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor’—thereby consciously pursuing the strategy of primacy that the United States successfully employed to outlast the Soviet Union.”
The rest of the report is likewise concerned with the international dominance of America’s aristocracy or the people who control this country’s international corporations, rather than with the welfare of the public or as the U.S. Constitution described the objective of the American Government: “the general welfare.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How America’s Aristocracy Extends Its Global Control
How America’s Aristocracy Extends Its Global Control
As has been well documented even by the BBC, in their 1992 classic documentary about the CIA’s (still-ongoing) Gladio Operation, America’s CIA basically took control of the international racist-fascist (i.e., ideologically nazi) movement after World War II, by protecting and hiring Hitler’s Nazis and their key aristocratic eastern European supporters undercover. The Gladio Operation was just one branch of a broader CIA strategy, developed by Allen Dulles and originally carried out by his protégé James Angleton, to use, for the purposes of America’s aristocracy, nazis’ intense racism, by retargeting it away from Jews and toward Russians, so as to weaken first the Soviet Union, and, then, after the end of that, Russia itself. (U.S. President Barack Obama’s involvement with Ukraine is very much a result of this post-WW-II pro-nazi Dulles-Angleton program.)
There were many other branches of this strategy, one being by the World Bank and IMF to introduce capitalism into the former Soviet states in a manner that would privatize their formerly government-owned assets to aristocrats in the West and in the formerly Soviet nations by means of insider fire-sales which enabled these state-assets to be picked up by cooperating local insiders at non-market super-low prices and thereby have these new “oligarchs” (the local copies there of Western capitalism’s own aristocrats) as being secret agents of the U.S. aristocracy, who would thus be extending the American aristocracy’s control eastward. Mark Ames has succinctly recounted this operation, and David McClintick did the major report on it prior to Ames.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
