[Firestarter]

Ingraham - Modern Anglo–Dutch Empire

I intend to show in this thread how the IMF and World Bank still enslave the third world. Some “conspiracy theorists” claim that the BIS is the most important bank in the world; I don’t expect to post much on the BIS...
Lyndon LaRouche’s publications often speak about the Anglo–Dutch banking system. The following relatively short book, shows how our “modern day” banking system evolved from Venice to Amsterdam to London.


Venice, until beginning 17th century
From the period of the first Crusade in 1099 until the founding of the Order of the Garter in 1348, Europe was dominated by the Venetian empire (now located in Italy). Venice with the Norman nobility of Europe, particularly from France and Angevin England, controlled Europe.

This allied nobility also controlled the Black Guelph (Welf) party of the northern Italian cities, allied with the Vatican.
In 1176, the Guelphs created the Lombard League, which came to include all the major cities of northern Italy (except Milan). These cities became the centers for the usurious Lombard banking system. The Lombard bankers became the de facto creditors and financial dictators of Europe.

The Lombard bankers first drove their victims into debt and then seized assets. For example, in 1325 the Peruzzi bank owned all the revenues of the Kingdom of Naples.
In Castile and England wool production was pledged as collateral for the Lombard loans. Naples and England were bankrupted, food production declined and by 1290 Europe began to depopulate (like we´re seeing these days...). Continent-wide famines struck in 1314-17, and again in 1328-9.
By the early 1400s, Lombard bankers were expelled from several countries: Arragon in 1401, England 1403, Flanders 1409, and France in 1410. The Venetian financial empire started to crumble.

In the midfifteenth century Venice was still the most powerful maritime nation in Europe, controlling Europe's slave and bullion trade. The Venetians created a new financial front to replace the now defunct Lombard bankers – the House of Fugger. Their agent Jacob Fugger was put in control of silver and copper mines in central Europe. From the vast wealth accumulated, Fugger created the most powerful banking house in Europe, and then bankrolled the Austrian Habsburgs (with many KG’s) to take control of the Holy Roman Empire.
In 1518, by a series of strategic marriages, the Habsburgs took control of Spain and the Fuggers became the bankers to the Spanish monarchy. After the Spanish bankruptcy of 1575, Genoa replaced the Fuggers as the financial controllers of the Spanish crown.

In 1461, Louis XI became King of France, allied with the Medici in Florence, and proceeded to build ports, roads, schools, printing houses, industry and infrastructure, which was based on Nicholas de Cusa's “Commonwealth” principle.
In 1485, Henry Tudor invaded England, overthrew the last of the Plantagenet kings, Richard III, and established Tudor rule. As King Henry VII, he adopted similar methods as Louis XI.
In France and England, food production, national income, and population all increased for the first time in more than a century. These initiatives were copied in the Iberian peninsula, Flanders, and elsewhere.

By the mid-16th century, Venice was threatened with the loss of her colonies and access to trade with the east, because of the Ottoman Turks. In 1573, Venice lost Cyprus and other colonies after a humiliating defeat by the Turks.
In the late 1570s, the Giovani (“youthful”) faction took over Venice emerged, by taking over the Senate.
In the 1590s, Paolo Sarpi became the intellectual leader of the Giovani faction, and his views determined the policies of Venice until his death in 1623. In this period, Venice was controlled from salons where the Giovani orchestrated their actions.

In 1587, the Giovanni founded the first “public” bank in Venice, the Banco della Piazza di Rialto (sometimes called the Bank of Venice).
In 1619, this was followed by a second bank, the Banco Giro.
These 2 banks were granted a monopoly by the Venetian government on issuing bank notes and bills of credit. These banks were really the beginnings of what today we call private central banking.
In 1620, Venice was still the most important European center for Bills of Exchange.
The Banco della Piazza di Rialto would later be imitated for the Bank of Amsterdam.

In 1638 the Venetian Grand Council, established the first state-owned gambling house (and bordello) in Europe, the Ridotto. At the Ridotto, aristocrats, prostitutes, pimps, usurers, degenerate gamblers, and foreign visitors rubbed shoulders, wearing masks to protect their identity. The Ridotto functioned as an ideal tool to corrupt and blackmail its guests.


From Venice to Amsterdam
In the 1520s, the Netherlands, which then included Belgium and Luxembourg, were under Spanish-Habsburg rule. In 1523, the first Protestant “heretic” was publicly burned and by the 1530s hundreds had been executed.
In 1567, the Duke of Alva arrived with 10,000 Spanish troops, to enforce the Inquisition and extract money that the Spanish Crown owed to its Fugger creditors. In years, Alva had more than 12,000 people executed. Alva also campaigns against cities like Mechlin, Zutphen and Haarlem in 1572 that were looted and burnt to the ground, with many people murdered, raped and tortured.

In 1576, the premier city of the Netherlands, Antwerp, was occupied, and over 8,000 civilians were slaughtered. In 1585, the Antwerp Bourse (stock exchange) was closed, followed by the " exodus" to the north provinces of the Netherlands, with most of the more than 19,000 merchants, bankers, and Bourse speculators settling in Amsterdam.
These emigrants included Jan de Wael, Jacob Poppin, and Isaac Le Maire, who would play a major role in founding the VOC (Dutch East India Company) in 1602.

In 1608, the Amsterdam Exchange (the New Bourse) and in 1609 the Amsterdamsche Wisselbank (Bank of Amsterdam) were founded. These financial institutions copied much of the Antwerp model.
The Wisselbank, like the Bank of Venice, was a privately owned public bank; with a monopoly on all exchange of specie, and trade in precious metals; a clearinghouse for bills of exchange; and owned the debt of the Dutch government.
It established the new "bank money" as the center of the city's securities trading.

The Bourse was a money market, a finance market, and a stock market.
This included trade in futures, options, margin loans, financial leverage, speculation in foreign securities, and derivatives (known as ductions).

By the second half of the 17th century, the Wisselbank had amassed an enormous financial power, which gave them the ability to expand the Empire and finance wars on a scale never seen before and made Amsterdam the financial centre of the world.
In the 1680s, when the Wisselbank ended the right of specie withdrawal, paper money was in effect. Since then, the Ango-Dutch bankers, have worked hard to make money the heart of the economy.
It is a system based on money, usury, and debt, where both the people and government, are controlled through the Central Bank’s power over money and debt.

In 1609, the Giovani-controlled Venetian Senate was the first government in Europe to recognise Dutch independence from Spain. In 1609, the Treaty of Antwerp was signed in which Spain recognised Dutch independence.
From 1610 to 1618, there was an undeclared war between Venice and Habsburg Spain, and Venice and the Netherlands began an unofficial military alliance. In the 1615-1617 war between Venice and Habsburg Austria, 5,000 Dutch mercenaries fought at the side of Venice, and 12 Dutch warships blockaded Spanish aid to Austria.
In 1613, arguably the most powerful man in Dutch government, founder of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, appointed Hugo de Groot (or Grotius) Pensionary of Holland, the second most powerful post in the government. Hugo de Groot was in correspondence with Sarpi for many years.

In 1618, Sarpi personally directed the signing of the Dutch-Venetian alliance, which included a mutual defense pack against the Habsburgs. In 1618, Van Oldenbarneveldt, wanted to extend the 12 year truce with Spain. Because the black nobility wanted war to erupt Europe-wide, Maurits of Nassau (Knight of the Garter, KG in 1612) had Oldenbarneveldt arrested and executed, while De Groot was imprisoned.
In exile, De Groot would become an active member of the empiricist Mersenne Circle, which included Thomas Hobbes and members of the Cavendish family, and was connected to Sarpi's secretary Micanzio.

In 1621, Maurits of Nassau resumed the war against Spain. Venice financed the Dutch government at The Hague with more than 1 million ducats.
This was all part of the plan of a war between the Dutch, James I of England, and the German Protestant princes on the one side against Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Papacy on the other. After the 1610 assassination of King Henry IV, the chaos could be used to rekindle the religious wars in France, so that Louis XI’s and Henry VII’s “commonwealths” could be eradicated.

The VOC was a private empire with the greatest maritime empire in the world, which had the right to wage war against nations, including their home country. The VOC dominated Asia trade for almost 2 centuries, it took until the late 18th century before the British East India Company surpassed is.
In 1605, the Dutch started their takeover of Indonesia, which would be looted for almost 350 years.
In 1621, the natives of the Island of Band refused to give the Dutch a nutmeg monopoly. In response, to protect “free trade”, the VOC Governor General Jan Pieterszoon had the population exterminated, and slaves were brought in to work the Dutch plantations.
In 1641, the Dutch established a monopoly on trade with Japan which lasted until 1853,
The VOC started pressing coins around 1650, both in the Netherlands and colonised parts of Asia.


In 1606, the first known Dutch slave ships sailed.
In 1621, the Vereenigde Westindische Compagnie (VWC, Dutch West India Company) was founded, to take over the African slave trade from Spain and Portugal. This was achieved by 1650, when the Dutch had seized most of the Spanish and Portuguese slave fortresses in West Africa. By 1700, the percentage of slaves was: 52% Batavia; 42% Capetown; 53% Colombo; 66% Makassar.
The Dutch took slaves from East Africa, Madagascar, New Guinea, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Between 1450 and 1850, at least 20 million Africans were either taken or killed as a result of the slave trade.
Of the total amount of slaves taken from Africa between 1500 and 1850, 70% were shipped between 1700 and 1800. The record was set in 1768, when 110,000 people were taken from Africa to be sold as slaves.

In 1650, Stadthouder Willem II (KG in 1645) died without successors. This initiated a 21 year period of civilian rule. From 1653 to 1672, Johan de Witt served as the Grand Pensionary of Holland and effectively ran the Dutch government, with his brother Cornelis de Witt.
In 1672, the French armies of Louis XIV occupied large parts of the Netherlands, who put Willem III of Nassau (KG in 1653) into power, who had the brothers De Witt executed...

Venice was not only alligned with Dutch “stadthouder” (city holder) Maurits of Nassau but also with the Venetian Party in London, grouped around Robert Cecil (1st Earl of Salisbury – KG in 1606; there have been 13 KG Cecils), Francis Bacon, and the Cavendish family.
In 1598, Sir Edwin Sandys was living in Venice and allegedly co-wrote a book with Paolo Sarpi. Nine years after leaving Venice, Sandys became one of the founders of the London Virginia Company, chartered by King James I, for the purpose of establishing English colonies in North America. From 1618 to 1623, Sandys effectively ran the company.

Under the rule of Paolo Sarpi’s friend Edwin Sandys, the Virginia Company brought the first slaves into Jamestown in 1618, and held the first public slave auction in 1638. By 1715, 24% of Virginia’s population were slaves. Sandys was also active in the British East India Company and later became an MP for many years where he introduced bills in support of “free trade”.
According to W.E.B. Du Bois, between 1600 and 1800, about 12 million slaves were brought into the Americas, about 60% of all trans-Atlantic emigration.

Many young British aristocrats traveled to Venice to meet Sarpi, including future British Prime Minister Robert Cecil, another founder of the London Virginia Company William Cavendish, and the “philosopher” Thomas Hobbes. The Cavendish family were the closest personal allies of Sarpi in England.
In 1603, James I became King of Scotland. His first Privy Council included Edward Wotton and Robert Cecil, who were on intimate terms with Sarpi’s Giovani leadership in Venice.

Another Sarpi ally was Henry Wotton, who would serve 3 times as the British Ambassador to Venice from 1604 to 1624. Wotton played an important role in recruiting and organising the Venetian circle at Oxford University, which included Robert Cecil, Thomas Walsingham, John Donne, and James Florio.
In 1614, William Cavendish accompanied Thomas Hobbes on a trip to Venice where they met Sarpi and his group. Cavendish maintained a 13 year correspondence with Sarpi and his secretary Micanzio, and introduced Francis Bacon to Sarpi. Bacon would spread Sarpi's method of “empiricism” into England.


From Amsterdam to London
Algernon Sidney had a close relationship with Dutch leader Johann de Witt. Sidney came under the influence of the English Ambassador William Temple and John Locke's employer, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Earl of Shaftesbury), who were orchestrating a Dutch coup in England.
In England, the group that was plotting to install the House of Orange on the English throne included: William Cavendish, Robert Spencer (2nd Earl of Sunderland, KG in 1687 installed by Charles II), Lord Orford (Edward Russell), and Bishop Compton.
William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle (1592 – 1676) became a Knight of the Garter in 1650. Since then at least 15 more members of the Cavendish family counts have become Knights of the Garter. Queen Elizabeth II counts the Cavendish family among her ancestors.

In 1666, Sidney – on the orders of Temple and Cooper - proposed to De Witt to launch an invasion of England to restore “Parliamentary rule”.
In 1678 a marriage was arranged between the Dutch Stadthouder Willem III of Orange and Mary, daughter of King James II, and the first in line of succession to the English throne. In 1679, Temple sent Algernon’s brother Henry back to the Netherlands to motivate the Dutch to invade; even offering the English crown to Willem III.
In 1682, Algernon Sidney was arrested for the “Rye House Plot” against King Charles II, and was executed along with several others.
In 1681, Henry Sidney became the English Ambassador to the Netherlands.

William Cavendish, First Duke of Devonshire (1640-1707), KG in 1689, was one of the “Immortal Seven” who signed the Letter of Invitation to Willem III of Orange in 1688, asking him to invade England:

If the circumstances stand so with your Highness that you believe you can get here time enough, in a condition to give assistances this year sufficient for a relief under these circumstances which have been now represented, we who subscribe this will not fail to attend your Highness upon your landing and to do all that lies in our power to prepare others to be in as much readiness as such an action is capable of...

In 1688, after Willem III landed in England, others rallied to the side of the Dutch, including John Churchill (Duke of Marlborough, KG in 1702), William Bentinck (Earl of Portland, KG in 1697) and Charles Montagu (Earl of Halifax, KG in 1714). Many of these Whig leaders were proteges of Anthony Ashley Cooper.
Dutch Stadthouder Willem III of Orange was crowned King William III of England and the Anglo-Dutch Empire was realised with the bloodiest penal code in Europe.

In 1690, John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government was published, to provide the “philosophy” for the transformation. The 2 banks of Venice and the Dutch VOC became the model for the Bank of England in 1694 and the VOC for “new” “British” East India Company in 1698.
While Amsterdam as a financial centre was already successful, in London the financial oligarchy became the de facto government. The Bank and East India Company were in private hands, and the third pillar of power, the Exchequer was effectively a fifth column of the oligarchy.
Even to this day, there is no British Constitution or a British “government” in any meaningful definition of that term.

William Paterson became the founder of the Bank of England. He had earlier been in Holland with Willem III, and was active in the Dutch invasion. The key government agent of the Bank of England was Charles Montagu, who had greeted Willem III at the dock when his invasion fleet landed. In 1697, the first of a series of Acts was passed by Parliament, with the end result being that the Bank had a total monopoly over banking in England.
In 1707, the Bank took over the national debt, which at £7 million was rising.
In 1742, Parliament gave the Bank of England the exlusive right to print money and for the next 80 years was the only jointstock bank allowed in England.

After 1690, and particularly after 1720, Dutch capital took over the English financial markets.
By the 1730s, 30% of East India Company (EIC) stock and 35% of Bank of England stock was in Dutch hands. Another 10% of these companies was held by Geneva-based Swiss investors.
By 1750, Dutch investors held 20% of the shares on the London Stock Exchange and 26% of England’s national debt.

In 1710, Jonathan Swift's faction, including Robert Harley, Henry St. John (Bolingbroke), Matthew Prior, and the Duke of Ormond, took control of the British government. In 1711, they founded the South Sea Company to challenge the Bank of England, and until 1713 £9.4 million of government debt were exchanged for South Sea stock, cutting the power of the Bank.
After Anne died in 1714, Harley and Prior were charged with treason and Bolingbroke and Ormond fled to France.
The "Act of Settlement" was used to make George I of Hanover the new British king. Within six months after his coronation, the Bank of England took over all government borrowing operations from the Exchequer, and by 1719 it controlled most government stocks. The manipulation of those stocks and loans to the government, were used to wage wars all over the globe.

Like the Dutch VOC, the East India Company had its own army, navy, to wage war, and take all the loot. In 1803, the EIC had a private army of about 260,000 — double the British Army.
In 1757, India - hundreds of millions of people - came under the rule of the EIC. India was its property.
With the defeat of the French in the Seven Years War in 1763, the EIC (also) took possession of the French colonies to establishe a worldwide private empire.
The East India Company coined its own money, see for example.



Conclusion
Because the last chapters in the book, from Chapter 11, are dedicated to praising the American System of Economics, it looks like the main conclusion of the writer Ingraham, is that the (protectionist) American System of Economics can protect us from the the British (Empire) System of Free Trade.
My most important conclusion is that the current system of bilateral treaties, World Bank, IMF, WTO, UN and privately owned state debt is really the consequence of what was started in the 17th century (or even before in Venice) in the Netherlands and Britain.

Bertrand Russell in 1952 wrote:

At present the population of the world is increasing ... War so far has had no great effect on this increase...
I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others...
If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full ... the state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it? Really high-minded people are indifferent to suffering, especially that of others.

From 1822 to 1838, the British-made Indian famines killed an estimated 29 million people.
The genocide against the people of Ireland was almost identical in method to that in India. In 1845, more than 75% of the Irish were tenant farmers, the equivalent of feudal serfs, owned by aristocratic Lords.
In 1846-1849, British officials exported from Ireland enough wheat, barley, oats, butter, pigs, and eggs to feed the entire population, while people were dying by the hundreds of thousands of starvation, causing more than 2 million Irish to die.
In 1844 the population of Ireland had been over 8 million. Today Ireland has an estimated population of 4.8 million...

By the 1830s, there were more than 10 million drug addicts in China; when in 1838 the Chinese government tried to wipe out the drug trade, the British responded by going to war.


Robert D. Ingraham - The Modern Anglo–Dutch Empire; its Origins, Evolution and anti-human Outlook (2008): http://wlym.com/archive/oakland/brutish/...Empire.pdf
(archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/2019051703563...Empire.pdf)

[Firestarter]

LaRouche – Ugly Truth About Milton Friedman

In this post my summary of a book by Lyndon LaRouche “… About Milton Friedman”; it’s more a history lesson on British monetary policy destroying mankind than about Friedman, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976.
LaRouche also tries to give “his” ideas on sound economics, based on Charles de Gaulle’s economic adviser Jacques Rueff, who he had worked with, which I don’t subscribe to. It sounds to me that his whole idea is investments and government spending to “fix” the economy…


Drugs, VOC, East-India
The British Empire was founded on the opium trade, as Kalimtgis, Goldman, and Steinberg document in “Dope, Inc.”: https://forums.richieallen.co.uk/showthr...p?tid=1363

The Jesuits reached the orient after the first Portuguese trade and military inroads at the end of the sixteenth century. When the Dutch drove the Portuguese out of Asian trade, they negotiated with the Jesuits on the Chinese trade. The Dutch took over the centuries-old dope-trading routes from the Portuguese, including opium between Canton, China's key port city, and Portuguese-controlled Macao.
The Dutch later negotiated an opium monopoly for north India with the Jesuit-influenced Mogul court. The monopoly permitted the Dutch to force Indian peasants to produce opium in exchange for taxes paid to the Mogul court.
A century later, the Dutch were shipping more than 100 tons of opium per year to Indonesia. The Dutch found opium "a useful means for breaking the moral resistance of Indonesians”. By 1659, the worldwide opium trade was second only to the spice trade.

In 1601, the (English) East India Company was founded that was dealing in opium by 1717. The East India Company only took over the opium trade after the British military victories in India in 1757 that put Bengal under British rule.
In 1784, Lord Shelburne started the reorganisation that turned the East India Company into a looting organisation, with the help of the "free trade" flank against the US. This had been proposed in 1772 in Adam Smith's supposed economic masterpiece “Wealth of Nations” in 1776.
Shelburne sent David Hume and Adam Smith to France for Jesuit training and then paid to create a "theory" of free trade, which meant the narcotics trade. The Jesuits continued the tradition of the Delphic Cult of Apollo, which in turn drew on the "secrets" of the priesthood of Babylon.
This "economical science" didn’t start with Smith and Bentham, who worked for Shelburne, but with the Order of St. John's group of pet intellectuals, the physiocrats, who rewrote Chinese zero-growth economics, based on Chinese texts brought to Europe by the Jesuits; like the work of Confucius and Mencius.

Scottish mafioso Henry Dundas, Pitt's secretary of state and an early patron of Adam Smith, directed the Board of Control for the East India Company, and in 1787 wrote a master plan to extend the opium traffic into China.
In his Wealth of Nations, Smith urged the colonies to not enter into manufacturing, and above all not to keep British goods out. He wrote:

Were the Americans either by combination or by any other sort of violence, to stop the importation of European manufactures and by this giving a monopoly to such of their own countrymen as could manufacture the like goods, divert any considerable part of the capital into this employment, they would retard instead of accelerating the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promoting the progress of their country toward real wealth and greatness. This would be still more the case, were they to attempt in the same manner to monopolize to themselves their whole exportation trade.

Britain used the the opium trade to conquer the USA. British banking families, including the Barings, who had intermarried with the Philadelphia Binghams, cut some Boston merchants in on the lucrative dope traffic to China. In 1816, John Jacob Astor was trading opium for the East India Company, and William Hathaway Forbes, of Boston, even joined the founding board of directors of the central opium bank, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. The Cabots, Lodges, Forbes, Cunninghams, and other leading Boston merchant families made their initial fortunes through Russell and Co., whose principal business were African slaves and opium to China.

The East India College at Haileyburg became the clearinghouse for the next generation of British economists, including James Mill, his son John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, and Parson Thomas Malthus. Jeremy Bentham was their intellectual leader until his death in 1821. Pitt encouraged the 1798 publication of Malthus' “Essay on Population, which argued for the extermination of "useless eaters". John Maynard Keynes later praised Malthus' Essay as "a work of youthful genius"
Malthus became the Chair of History and Political Economy at Haileyburg. A generation of Malthusians was put into controlling positions for the opium traffic in Asia. In his 1819 “Principles of Political Economy”, Malthus elaborated his depopulation program into a zero-growth approach to economy. India was basically a laboratory for zero-growth doctrines.

By the 1830s, opium was the largest commodity in international trade.
Britain imported cotton from American plantations (which it backed during the Civil War); turned into textiles in British mills; and exported the textiles to India for opium- that was then sold to China.
Because it was owned by the Crown, the East India Company couldn’t trade opium in its own name. It used a set of "cut-outs", intermediaries, who exported opium to China covertly for the company. The East India Company used a network of private dope traders to found the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in 1864.
India depended on opium for 30% of its exports, most of it to China. In British India, taxes on the opium trade provided almost 20% of total government revenues by 1880. Gross revenues from the opium traffic was about two thirds of the total exports from Britain from 1840 to 1890.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was importing 50% more than it exported — £450 million in imports against £300 million in exports. It made up the difference through opium. In 1890, the value of the British opium revenues in China alone equalled the entire home trade deficit!


Fabian Scoiety, Vienna, Chicago – zero growth in the 20th century
In a nice Orwellian twist, British "free trade" really means trade warfare.
In 1892, the University of Chicago was started as the chief American project of the Fabian Society. It incorporated both the "right-wing" economics of the Cobden Clubs and Thorstein Veblen's imitation of Ruskin-Morris socialism from the outset. The new Chicago university, launched with funds from Rockefeller, Schiff, and Field, transferred the Oxford economic crookery to the shores of Lake Michigan. The Fabian Society’s Beatrice Webb was its real founder.
One of John Ruskin’s students in economics, George Bernard Shaw, founded the “anti-capitalist” Fabian Society with Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Under the patronage of Opium War PM Lord Palmerston, the Fabian leaders really followed Oxford economics. Shaw beat the drum for the master race in “Man and Superman” (1901) long before Adolf Hitler arrived on the scene.

In 1912, Wesley Clair Mitchell went to Vienna for additional studies and shared Bohm-Bawerk's classroom with future Soviet official Nikolai Bukharin. In 1914, Mitchell tried to prove that inflation and depression are "not disruptions . . . but fluctuations systematically generated by economic organization itself". Mitchell forgot to mention that every American depression until the Panic of 1907 was the direct result of contractions in loans available on the London market. Mitchell helped to draft the “Report of the National Monetary Commission” that became the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
On the advice of banker Paul Warburg, Father of the Federal Reserve, President Woodrow Wilson named Bernard Baruch to create a War Industries Board, with powers similar to the present Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Bernard, grandson of B'nai B'rith founder Kuntner Baruch, was attorney for the Anglo-American Guggenheim firm and a personal friend of Winston Churchill.


Mont Pelerin – right wing Fabians
The Austrian School of monetarists later joined forces with Chicago in the Mont Pelerin Society and included Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. These products of the Viennese salons trained Milton Friedman's teachers, including the founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Wesley Clair Mitchell. Mitchell and his pupil, Milton Friedman, are really right-wing Fabians.
When Friedrich von Hayek gave the inaugural address of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, in his audience were most of Wesley Mitchell's boys: George Stigler, Henry Simons, Chicago professor Aaron Director and Milton Friedman (Director's brother-in-law).

The Mont Pelerin Society is never even mentioned in the newspapers but wields enormous power over the right wing of US politics. The Mont Pelerin Society is merely the economic arm of the "political" Pan-Europea Union that was co-founded by Otto von Habsburg. One of Von Habsburg's closest friends in the Mont Pelerin Society is William F. Buckley, Friedman's close collaborator throughout the 1960s.
Another Von Habsburg associate was the Nazis' puppet PM in wartime Hungary, Ferenc Nagy, who later founded the terrorist organisation Permindex (that was probably involved in the assassination of JFK).
In 1939, Von Hayek had already brought together the core for the Mont Pelerin Society under the name "Society for the Renovation of Liberalism".
In 1943, Von Hayek wrote the Mont Pelerin Society's founding document “The Road to Serfdom” in London. On the surface, Von Hayek shows the same concern for "individual liberty" against the "tyranny of the state" of Friedman, but behind the facade the policy recommendations lead to “serfdom” similar to feudal Europe.

In 1946, Abba Lerner published “The Economics of Control”, advocating the totalitarian state in which the state controls each facet of economic life. Milton Friedman himself argued that Lerner's totalitarianism was only the mirror image of his own economics, that: "totalitarian direction might achieve the same allocation of resources as a free price system" and achieve "a reasonable approximation of the economic optimum".
Mont Pelerin's European headquarters is directed by its secretary, Max von Thurn und Taxis, and by its president, Friedrich von Hayek. Von Hayek and Archduke Otto von Habsburg direct Mont Pelerin's German-speaking branch.

Milton Friedman became vice-president of Mont Pelerin. The Mont Pelerin Society's operatives infiltrate every “conservative” American institution. Besides Milton Friedman:
George Stigler of the University of Chicago, President of Mont Pelerin in 1980;
Glenn Campbell, and Martin Anderson, respectively director and economist of the Hoover Institution and both advisers to Ronald Reagan;
Robert M. Bleiberg, Barron's Magazine editor;
William F. Buckley, Jr., National Review editor;
Donald Kemmerer and John Exter, respectively president and board member of the National Committee on Monetary Reform;
Edward H. Levi, former US attorney general and Chicago professor;
Edwin McDowell, Wall Street Journal columnist;
Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Heritage Foundation director;
William J. Baroody, Sr., American Enterprise Institute president.

The Marshall Plan's official target was to reduce European imports from the US from $3 billion in 1938 to $2.7 billion for 1952-1953 and $6.7 billion in 1947.
Under the direction of British treasury official Sir Eric Roll, Harlan Cleveland (in 1980, chairman of the Aspen Institute), and George Kennan's State Department planners, the Marshall Plan reduced America's exports to trifling levels compared to those of other industrial countries. Britain made the US into a rentier instead of an industrial power.


From Nixon to Carter and Reagan
Milton Friedman pushed Richard Nixon into a disastrous money crunch in 1969, throwing the economy into recession and forcing the US to sever the dollar's link to gold, which Friedman had lobbied for.
In 1968, Friedman justified the floating rates regime on purely military grounds:

A really serious rearmament drive is almost certain to produce inflationary pressure, differing in degree from country to country because of differences in fiscal structures, monetary systems, temper of the people, the size of the rearmament effort, etc. With rigid exchange rates, these divergent pressures introduce strains and stresses that are likely to interfere with the armament effort.

Each of these steps is within the unilateral control of the U.S. No other country can by its action prevent us from taking them.

Friedman stopped monetary growth from June 1969 to December 1969, and the economy collapsed. Starting in the summer of 1969, industrial production fell, and unemployment rose from 3.5% in 1969 to 5% in May 1970.
On 15 August 1971, Nixon continued the Friedman program with the addition of the wage-price controls demanded by "populist monetarist" Henry Reuss.
In August 1971, to the disbelieve of some Europeans, Nixon took Friedman's advice, to set the dollar “free” at the urging of then Undersecretary of the Treasury Paul Volcker.

Ironically the US payments deficit didn’t benefit the US, but London as dollars were flowing to the Eurodollar market through British banks, which eventually grew to over $1 trillion, and gave the bankrupt City of London a new life.
In the 1950s, the “great” City of London was virtually a ghost town, where less than a dozen foreign banks did business. But after in 1962, Anglophile Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon and his Undersecretary Robert V. Roosa, presented the British with the “Interest Equalization Tax” that penalised American loans to foreigners and made it more lucrative to hold dollars in London than in New York.

See how “real” net investments in the 10 years since 1969 became negative.
Figure 10 - Productive fixed investment


From March 1979 to March 1980, Americans lost 8% of their purchasing power - the largest drop in real income levels since the Great Depression.
Instead of the forecast of a $40 billion deficit this fiscal year and a $16 billion surplus next fiscal year by the Carter administration, the Treasury now officially projects a $100 billion deficit in the 2 fiscal years, not counting an additional $80 billion in so-called “off-budget” borrowing.


Chile – who needs food?
Milton Friedman once explained on his “cure” for Chile: “My only concern is that they push it long and hard enough”.
Chile was made into a creditors' dictatorship. Between the coup in 1973 and the beginning of 1979, Chile's annual payment of debt service to international banks rose from $200 million annually to $1.6 billion. The Pinochet regime saved a lot of money (for the bankers) by eliminating food imports, effectively reducing average caloric consumption to less than 1,200 calories per day by 1975. In 1976, average per capita food consumption in Chile was about the same as it was in Nazi concentration camps.
In 1976, the Organization of American States reported:

Its most dramatic consequences are observed in the psycho-motor development of children. The spirit saddens to see a two-year-old seated on the ground, scarcely able to keep its balance. It cannot smile, or play, or look at its hands; it cannot stand, much less walk or speak.

In 1977, unemployment had reached 20% officially and more than 40% unofficially. Gross Domestic Product never recovered from the 13% fall that occurred in 1975 alone. Real wages fell in 1974 to a little more than half of 1971. In 1978, agricultural production was down 27%.
The Chicago Boys did score "successes": reduction of government expenditure from 15.8% of national consumption in 1972 to 12.1% in 1977. All the more impressive as consumption fell sharply in that period. And, of course, continued monetary austerity will produce a lower rate of inflation, in the same way that holding an influenza patient's head under water will ultimately “cure” influenza.


Adviser to British PM Thatcher
Milton Friedman also became the official adviser to the government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain.
In the single year, since Queen Elizabeth selected Thatcher as PM, the Bank of England brought money supply growth down from 15% to 7% per year, at the direction of Mont Pelerin Society members Geoffrey Howe and his deputy, John Biffen.

The result was completely the opposite of what they and Friedman had predicted, in a single year: Britain's rate of inflation rose from 6% to 22% and the industrial production index fell from 108.2 to 98.1. British living standards fell by a sharper margin than during the 1930s.
Milton Friedman's money crunch accomplished to drive up the cost structure of industry, including pay increases to workers (lower than inflation of course).

A good analogy of Friedman’s method is the following hypothetical case of a loan-sharking victim. A person with $20,000 earned income incurs $5,000 in debt service payment obligations to a loan shark. Unable to pay all of the $5,000, the victim "refinances" $2,000 of the debt service payment at 50 percent effective annual interest. He pays the $1,000 instead of the $2,000 portion of the $5,000; a total of $4,000. The following year, he owes $6,000 in current debt service, instead of $5,000. The next year $7,000, and so forth.

Figure 6 - Productivity and total debt



Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and David P. Goldman – The Ugly Truth About Milton Friedman (1980): https://archive.org/stream/the_ugly_trut...n_djvu.txt

[Firestarter]

Tata, drugs, JP Morgan and Fabians

Because of my experiences in the outsourcing of my department at the ABN AMRO bank to TCS, I first investigated the Tata family.
Because most of the links in my post about Tata’s connection to George Soros were deleted from the internet, I decided to continue my investigation: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/viewtop...3066#p3066

The Tatas have been linked to the Fabian Society and drugs for more than a century.
The Tatas have been connected to the drug trafficking David Sassoon, Sons & Co.

On 22 March 1887, opium dealers of David Sassoon, Sons & Co., Ruttonjee Dadabhoy Tata of Tata & Co and Hormusjee Meherwanjee Mehta petitioned the Hongkong Legislative Council:

The humble petition of Shellim Ezekiel Shellim, of the firm of David Sassoon, Sons & Co., Jacob Silas Moses, of the firm of E. D. Sassoon & Co., Ruttonjee Dadabhoy Tata, of the firm of Tata & Co., Marcus David Ezekiel, of the firm of Abraham, Ezekiel & Co., Mahomedbhoy Khetsey, of the firm of Tharia Topan, Jafferbhoy Khetsey, of the firm of Jairazbhoy Peerbhoy & Co., and Hormusjee Meherwanjee Mehta, of the firm of Framjee Hormusjee & Co., all of Victoria in the Colony of Hongkong, for and on behalf of the Opium Importers and wholesale Opium Merchants of the said Colony.

https://www.legco.gov.hk/1886-87/h870325.pdf
(archived here: http://archive.is/tBmO6)


The Jewish Sassoon family, originated from Baghdad (Iraq) before moving to Bombay (India) and then China, England, and other countries.

The Sassoon family was heavily involved in shipping and producing opium in China and India and the family were friends with later King Edward VII.
In 1844, Elias David Sassoon (1820–1880) was the first of the family to go to China. He later returned to Bombay, and established E. D. Sassoon in 1867, with offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
His brother, Albert Abdullah David Sassoon (1818–1896) ran the firm after his father’s death.

David Sassoon's son Arthur Abraham David Sassoon (1840-1912) married Louise Perugia, whose brother-in-law was Leopold de Rothschild (1845-1917).
David's grandson, Sir Edward Albert Sassoon (1856-1912), married Aline Caroline de Rothschild (1885-1908), daughter of Baron Gustave de Rothschild: https://guide-to-the-archive.rothschilda...oon-family


Also interesting is the Board of directors of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

Ratan Naval Tata is Chairman and also: on the international advisory boards of J.P. Morgan Chase; on the board of directors of Fiat and Alcoa; a member of the Global Business Council on HIV/AIDS; and the Program Board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's India AIDS Initiative.

Aman Mehta (related to Meherwanjee Mehta?) in 1967 joined the Bombay office of Mercantile Bank Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the money laundering Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and from January 1993 to 1999 served as several executive, director functions for the HSBC Bank.

Laura M. Cha is also the Non-Executive Chairman of the money laundering HSBC Investment Asia Holdings Limited.

Ron Sommer is allso a member of the International Advisory Board of The Blackstone Group: http://knowyourselves.blogspot.com/2011/...ctors.html
(archived here: http://archive.is/PMUg3)


Sidney and Beatrice Webb helped Jamsetji Tata to set up a company in Bombay, where a local Fabian society was located. In 1912, Tata funded the Sir Ratan Tata Department at the London School of Economics (LSE), whose first lecturer was Fabian Society member and later New Fabian Research Bureau chairman Clement Attlee.
The current chairman of LSE is Peter Sutherland, who is also chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Tony Blair himself became an adviser to J.P. Morgan and then became chairman of the International Advisory Council, whose members include, besides Ratan Tata: Henry Kissinger, Kofi Annan and Khalid Al-Falih (CEO of Saudi Aramco).

A little known fact is that none other than Mahatma Gandhi was a member of the Fabian Society. Gandhi supported India’s Caliphate Movement and became a member of the Central Khilafat Committee which aimed to restore the Muslim Empire.

In 1927, Fabian leader Bernard Shaw expressed his admiration for dictators like Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin. Shaw declared that “Bolshevism became Fabianism, called Communism”: http://www.freebritainnow.org/0/fabiansociety.htm
(archived here: http://archive.is/CWyZc)

[Firestarter]

Nazis, Austrian economics, Mont Pelerin Society

Here’s more information on Count Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europa Union (PEU) and the Mont Pelerin Society.

In 1923, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi launched the Pan-Europa Union of which Hjalmar Schacht became the first member. Coudenhove-Kalergi was financed by Rothschild, Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch. Coudenhove-Kalergi was related to Rothschild agent and the brother-in-law of Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (1847-1920), who made Kuhn, Loeb & Co. into a banking powerhouse, and was the architect of the Federal Reserve. The Warburgs also financed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
Other top Nazis and fascists that supported the PEU, included Walter Funk (Schacht's handpicked successor as finance minister) and Benito Mussolini. Other backers of Pan-Europa included Winston Churchill; Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler, leading patron of the Comintern's Frankfurt School; and American Fabian socialist Walter Lippman.
Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote in “Crusade for Pan-Europe: Autobiography of a Man and a Movement” (1943) that “ Haushofer, Schacht, and Funk did and probably still do everything to convince Hitler of the necessity of creating some kind of European federation under German hegemony”.

In October, 1926, Governor of the Bank of France, Emile Moreau, sent general manager of the Bank of France, Pierre Quesnay, to London to find out what Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, was up to.
Quesnay reported back:

The economic and financial organization of the world appears to the Governor of the Bank of England to be the major task of the Twentieth Century. In his view politicians and political institutions are in no fit state to direct with the necessary competence and continuity this task of organization which he would like to see undertaken by central banks, independent at once of governments and of private finance.

Carl Menger trained a generation of Austrian School economists, including Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich von Hayek. Von Hayek attended the Boehm-Bawerk seminars at Vienna--along with future Bolshevik leader Nickolai Bukharin. Von Hayek was strongly influenced by Austrian aristocrat Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973). Ludwig von Mises also participated in Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan Europe movement.
Von Hayek traced his own philosophical roots to the early eighteenth century Satanist, Bernard Mandeville. On 23 March 1966, Von Hayek lauded Mandeville as a “master mind”, the inventor of modern psychology, and as the true intellectual forbearer of David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Carl Savigny and Charles Darwin. Von Hayek called Mandeville's poem “The Fable of the Bees” perhaps the “greatest philosophical treatise ever composed”.

In 1931, Friedrich von Hayek was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the London School of Economics. During this period, he became part of the British Fabian Society.
In 1940, Von Mises migrated to New York, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Von Mises’ students at New York University included Arthur Burns, who would become Federal Reserve Chairman (1970-78), and Milton Friedman.

Then in 1939, Von Hayek initiated the Society for the Renovation of Liberalism, with Frank Knight and Henry Simons (who would later teach Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago); Walter Lippman; Viennese Aristotelian Society leader Karl Popper; fellow Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises; and Sir John Clapham, a senior official of the Bank of England who from 1940-46 was president of the British Royal Society. In April 1947, the Mont Pelerin Society was founded by Von Hayek in Switzerland as its new incarnation.
The sister organisation to Mont Pelerin was the Pan European Union. Leading Mont Pelerin figures, including Von Habsburg and Lippman, were also prominent in the Pan Europe movement.
The radical policy that Von Hayek proposed – strict monetarism, near-total deregulation, and Pan-European federalism – was almost the same policy as Hitler’s National Socialism. The concept of a Pan-European federation was a cornerstone of Von Hayek’s scheme.

The Mont Pelerin Society was originally financed by the top European aristocratic families, including the Thurn und Taxis, Wittelsbach, Habsburg and Kalergi families. The same families financed the Pan European Union. Today, the entire Mont Pelerin organisation is an asset of the House of Windsor-led Club of the Isles.
Among the other founders of the Mont Pelerin Society were:
Otto von Habsburg, Crown Prince to the Austro-Hungarian throne and cofounder of the PEU, later honorary professor of the University of Jerusalem, and recipient of the “International Humanitarian Award” of the Anti Defamation-League (ADL);
Max von Thorn und Taxis, the head of the 400-year-old Venetian aristocratic Thorn und Taxis family;
Walter Lippman, a German Jew who had been an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which was the basis for the Paris Peace Treaty and the foundation of the League of Nations;
Karl Popper, an Austrian Jew.
Other founders of the Mont Pelerin Society were prominent members of various Eugenics societies, whose agenda included population reduction by means of sterilisation, controlled breeding and genocide. This included Ralph Harris (1924-2006), a leader of the British Eugenics Society that had earlier helped draft Hitler’s race laws. Harris was also a director of Rupert Murdoch’s Times Newspapers from 1988 to 2001.

Friedrich von Hayek established a worldwide network of right-wing think tanks.
Antony Fisher was elected to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1954. In 1955, he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IAE) in London, as the first of dozens of front groups for Mont Pelerin. Other IEA founders included Von Hayek and Ralph Harris.
In recognition of the Mont Pelerin Society’s loyal service, Queen Elizabeth II made Ralph Harris a peer for life and knighted Antony Fisher and Allan Walters. Walters was given an office at 10 Downing Street as Thatcher’s resident economic advisor.

University of Chicago Professor Milton Friedman was president of the Mont Pelerin Society from 1970 to 1972. From 1981 to 1988, Friedman was an adviser to Ronald Reagan.
In 1973, Mont Pelerin orchestrated the launching of the Coors family think tank, the Heritage Foundation, in Washington. On 20 February 1980, Margaret Thatcher sent a letter to Fisher to endorse the project. On 8 May, Milton Friedman threw his support behind the international effort: “Any extension of institutes of this kind around the world is certainly something ardently to be desired”.
In 1981, Fisher launched the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in San Francisco, now headquartered on the George Mason University campus in Fairfax, Virginia near Washington. In February 1985, Fisher wrote of the need to transform the “extremist'' anti-government, radical free market policies of the von Hayek Mont Pelerin Society apparatus into the ‘new orthodoxy' through the launching of hundreds of small think tanks on every continent”.

Since 1977, Edwin Feulner was President of the Heritage Foundation, which launched the myriad of right-wing think tanks that litter the American political landscape today. From 1996-1998, Edwin Feulner was also President of the Mont Pelerin Society and Senior Vice President in 2000 and then the Treasurer..
Feulner also served on the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy (CNP) in 1982 and 1996 and the CNP Executive Committee in 1988 and 1994.

In 1981, the Hunt brothers funded the right-wing Moral Majority, headed by Jerry Falwell, and also provided the start-up money for the Council for National Policy, of which Nelson Bunker Hunt was the second president. The Hunt brothers funded the CNP to promote the Conservative Revolution which has corrupted the Christian Church with political activism and laissez faire economics.
Nelson Bunker was also a board member and leading financier of the John Birch Society and a member of a racial eugenics society, the International Association for the Advancement of Eugenics and Ethnology.
For more on the Council for National Policy: https://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=316358

In 1974, Fisher established the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada and the Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research in San Francisco in 1978. Sir Antony Fisher also cofounded the Manhattan Institute in 1977 with Friedrich von Hayek.
In 1994, Manhattan Institute scholar Charles Murray, co-authored “The Bell Curve”, to “prove” the intellectual inferiority of black races.

The enforcement arms for their policies are agencies like the Bank for International Settlements, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and United Nations: https://watch.pairsite.com/synarchy-4.html (archived here: http://archive.is/988BC)
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/vonhayek.htm (archived here: http://archive.is/V0XKh)


- EDIT -
During the beginning of World War II, while Otto von Habsburg was lecturing in the US, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi was setting up what would become the Mont Pelerin Society. The sponsors included William C. Bullit, Eustach Seligman, John W. Davis and Henry Morgenthau Sr. who planned the starvation of Germany.

Von Mises and Von Hayek had founded the following societies as the basis for the Mont Pelerin Society:
- Institute of Social and Economic Research (lISE);
- Free School of Law. Founded in the 1940s by Gustavo R. Velasco, a personal friend of Von Mises, the school included Jose Angel Conchello, who openly acclaimed the theories of Hjalmar Schacht;
- Institute of Iberoamerican Integration (III). This is one of the principal centres of recruitment for the paramilitary gangs deployed by Mont Pelerin.

In the early 1950s, Von Habsburg set up the Centre for Documentation and Information - an off¬shoot of the Coudenhove-Kalergi and Von Mises networks - in Madrid, Spain. The affiliation between the Pan-Europa Union and the Mont Pelerin Society was obvious as Mont Pelerin members would go to Madrid to meet Von Habsburg: https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1979/...bsburg.pdf

[Firestarter]

Henry C. Carey – The Slave Trade

In this post an interesting historic book by Henry C. Carey (1793−1879), born in Philadelphia, on how so-called “free races” are enslaved. It’s almost a prequel to William Engdahl’s book
The strange thing is that it’s from 1853 (165 years old) and most of it is still actual. It really explains why the United Nations, World Bank and IMF were founded. A lot of it is based on Adam Smith’s views. While Carey pinpoints a lot of strategies used against “us”, some of the solutions he presents miss the mark…

Under the Spanish system, labour is valuable so slaves continue to be imported. Under the English one, labour is valueless and men sell themselves for long years of slavery at the sugar culture in the Mauritius, Jamaica, and in Guiana.
England is engaged in a war against the labour of all other countries employed in other activity than raising raw produce to be sent to England, there to be manufactured into end products at the factories of her millionaires, who have accumulated their vast fortunes at the expense of Ireland, India, Portugal, Turkey, and other countries that have been ruined.
The nation that exports raw produce exhausts its land, and then it must export its men, leaving women and children to perish.

Cotton is produced in countries like India, Egypt, Brazil, the West Indies, and the Southern States of the US. It’s then made into cloth in England and becomes valuable. The trick is to keep the value of the raw material low and the end product high. In this way the rich of England become even richer, while the poor become poorer.
This also shows how deceptive calculations based upon statements on the value of exports and imports are; that always “prove” the growing prosperity of England.
If the people of Cuba, Brazil, India, and other countries produce cloth, iron, and other commodities for which they now depend on Europe, and thus diminish their need to export, it would increase the price of their products while making cloth and iron cheaper. This would make these “third world” countries more “free”.

Ever since India came under English rule, their condition has become hopelessly miserable. Cholera became very common.
The Hindu, like the black, is shut out from the workshop. If he attempts to make cloth, he’s heavily taxed, from which his wealthy English competitor is exempt. His iron ore and his coal must remain in the ground, and if he dares to collect the salt which crystallizes before his door, he is fined and imprisoned.
The sub-renter extorts whatever he thinks the unfortunate borrower could pay, for example 1% interest a week. In this way, no matter how large the crop, the poor borrower will never make a profit.

The very best parts of India were selected for the cultivation of the poppy. If the people refused, they were forced. The same company that forced them to grow opium, forced them to sell it back to them for the price they decided. It was exported to China. In 1839, the emperor of China finally seized a huge amount of opium to be destroyed. Then Britain started the “opium wars”, to force the Chinese to repay them for the destroyed opium.
Britain calls her opponents “despots”, while the British elite are the real despots.
Portugal, India, Turkey and Ireland yield to the British system, become poorer and weaker every year, and their people more enslaved.
In 1801, the copyright and patent laws of England were extended to Ireland, and publishing books was stopped. As a result Ireland couldn’t compete anymore. Irish workers were forced to go to England looking for a job to pay the rent at home. It is common to blame the rapid growth of population for the poor state of Ireland, but in reality this wasn’t the cause.
The Irish went from being land owners, to tenants. The land passed from many into the hands of the few. In the days of Adam Smith there were 220,000 English land-owners, in 1853 only 80,000 were left, while all the land of Scotland is accumulated in the hands of only 6000 people.

In Britain children were sold. Girls brought the highest price; girls aged 12 to 18 cost $500-800.
The poor enter their children in so-called “burial clubs”. A small sum is paid every year by the parent, and this entitles him to receive a larger sum when the child dies. Many parents enter their children in several clubs. One man in Manchester had his child in 19 different clubs.
Parents are so miserable that they actually kill their helpless little offspring to receive the reward from the “burial clubs”.

In 1825, Germany exported almost 30 million pounds of raw wool to England, where it was subjected to a duty of 12 cents per pound for the privilege of being manufactured into cloth.
Germany, Russia, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, and some other states, are trying to protect their farmers. The King of Prussia tries to strengthen his people by enabling them to find employment, manure for their farms, and strengthens Germany by the formation of a great Union, that gives 30 million people the freedom of internal trade.
In contrast, all the measures of England in India are to enslave a hundred million. Of course Russia and Germany haven’t bothered England anymore since the first and second World Wars…

According to Carey, the way to freedom is increasing the value of labour and land. He proposes to export machines to (for example) Africa to increase the labour “value” of Africans. I don’t agree with these ideas…
The additional profits from using machines go to the same elite that control the manufacture of machines. In the 21th century we have computer technology that has reduced the value of a human to an all-time low…
Increasing the value of land, makes the poor: slaves of (the interest rates of) the banks.

The Hindu sells his cotton for a penny a pound, and buys it back as cloth at 18-20 pence.
The Virginia slave sells tobacco for 6 shillings' worth of commodities, of which he and his owner obtain 3 pence.
The poor Irishman raises chickens which sell in London for shillings, of which he receives a pence.
A pound of sugar which had yielded the “free” black of Jamaica two pence, exchanges in Ireland for 2 chickens or 12 lobsters.
It would be much better if labour and capital would be locally applied, reducing exports. The home trade, instead of import-export would increase prosperity.

Henry C. Carey – The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: why it exists, and how it may be extinguished (1853): https://archive.org/stream/slavetradedom...e_djvu.txt
(or the 28 MB PDF: https://ia800603.us.archive.org/6/items/...01care.pdf)

[Firestarter]

Imperialism in America, Protocols

The following book from 1892 gives a good explanation on how the “imperialists” enslave us.
It’s focus is on the USA from roughly 1860-1891.

By controlling money, land and transportation it´s easy to control the labour of a population.
After gaining control of the money - with the power to inflate or contract it at pleasure - all other sources of wealth are at the command of the money monger.

In 1866 money contraction was commenced that resulted in the crash of 1873, and caused the American people to suffer for the next five years. They made bonded debt, established their national banks and destroyed two-thirds of the people's money.
In 1866, the total money supply was $1,803,702,726 – $50.76 per capita.
By 1877, the total money supply was $696,443,394 – only $14.60 per capita.

1864—This year the government sold bonds valued at $381,292,250, for which it received only—as gold was worth $2.01—$139,697,636, or less than one-half of their face value. The money speculators made a profit of $191,594,613. Add to this interest for ten years, $114,956,768, and they took from us that year $306,551,382.

1865—During that year the Government sold bonds to the value of $279,746,150, for which it received, however, only $208,213,090. The robbers retained for themselves $71,532,060. Adding the interest for nine years, $38,627,307, and they stole in 1865 $110,159,367.

1866—This year bonds were sold to the value of $124,914,400, for which we received only $88,591,773, giving the money sharks a net profit of $36,332,627. Add to this the interest for eight years, $17,434,556, and they made out of the people a total of $53,757,183.

1867 —This year bonds were sold to the value of $421,469,550, for which the purchasers paid the government only $303,s05,503, giving them a profit of$118,254,047. Add to this interest paid them for seven years, $48,671,494, and that year they stole a grand total of $167,915,741.

1868—This year the government sold bonds valued at $425,443,800, for which it received, however, only $312,626,326, leaving a profit to the speculators of $112,617,497. Add the interest for six years, $40,542,288, and we find the government gave to the speculators this year $153,159,765 more of the people's property.

According to the United States Treasurer's report of 1892 the total paid interest on bonds from 1862 to 1891 is $2,481,454,408. This is interest on the people's money which was destroyed.
This resulted in a total of $12,940,015,890 profits made on an original debt of $2,680,000,000! And the debt continues to grow every year.

The New York Times of 12 August 1877, proposed as the “solution” for the suffering farmer to become tenants of “their” land:

There seems to be but one remedy... It is a change of ownership of the soil, and the creation of a class of land-owners on one side, and of tenant farmers on the other, something similar in both cases to what has long existed, and now exists, in the older countries of Europe.

The following from the pen of Senator Sharon, published in the Nevada Chronicle, shows the determination of the money power to rob and enslave the toiling masses:

We need a stronger Government. The wealth of the country demands it. Without capital and the capitalists our government would not be worth a fig. The capital of the country demands protection ; its rights are as sacred as the rights of the paupers who are continually prating about the encroachment of capital and against centralization. We have tried Grant and tee know him to be the man for the place above all others. He has nerve.

As president he would be commander-in-chief of the army and navy, and when the communistic tramps of the country raised mobs to tear up railroad tracks and to sack cities on the sham cry of 'bread or blood,' he would not hesitate to turn loose upon them canister and grape. The wealth of the country has to bear the burdens of the Government, and it shall controlit. The people are becoming educated up to this theory rapidly, and the sooner this theory is recognized in the constitution and laws the better it will be for the people.

On 21 March 1892, the Chicago Daily Press published a dispatch from Wall Street, in which the capitalists instruct their henchmen:

We must proceed with caution and guard well every move made, for the lower orders of the people are already showing signs of restless commotion. Prudence will therefore dictate a policy of apparent yielding to the popular will—until all of our plans are so far consummated that we can declare our designs with out fear of any organized resistance. The Farmers' Alliance and Knights of Labor organizations in the United States should be carefully watched by our trusted men, and we must take immediate steps to either control these organizations in our interests, or to disrupt them. At the coming Omaha convention, to be held July 4, our men must attend and direct its movements, else there will be set on foot such antagonism to our designs as may require force to overcome. This, at the present time, would be premature; we are not yet ready for such a crisis.

Capital must protect itself in every possible manner, through combination and legislation. The courts must be called to our aid, debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through process of law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and easily governed—through the influence of the strong arm of government—applied by a central power of imperial wealth under the control of leading financiers. A people without homes will not quarrel with their rulers. History repeats itself in regular circles; this truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capital to govern the world. While they are doing this, the people must be kept in a condition of political antagonism. The question of tariff reform must be urged through the organization known as the Democratic party. And the question of protection, with reciprocity, must be forced to public view through the Republican party. By thus dividing the voters we can get them to expend their energies in fighting each other over questions of no importance to us, except as tethers to lead the common herd.
Thus, by discreet action, we can secure all that has been so generously planned, and thus far successfully accomplished.

In about the middle of the 19th century, Sir John Lubbock declared that "the money power of the world was making an effort by means of reduced wages to fasten a rule upon the masses and place them upon a footing more degrading and dependent than have ever been known in history".
With computer technology this aim appears to be fully achieved...

Sarah E. Van De Vort Emery - Imperialism in America: its rise and progress (1892): https://ia801902.us.archive.org/14/items...merica.pdf



According to the mainstream media the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is an anti-Semitic forgery. I believe that it’s a “real” document as in more than 100 years they haven’t been able to invent a single convincing argument that it is indeed fake...
The previous account reminds me of the “Protocols”, see the following excerpts.

PROTOCOL No. 6
7. To complete the ruin of the industry of the GOYIM we shall bring to the assistance of speculation the luxury which we have developed among the GOYIM, that greedy demand for luxury which is swallowing up everything. WE SHALL RAISE THE RATE OF WAGES WHICH, HOWEVER, WILL NOT BRING ANY ADVANTAGE TO THE WORKERS, FOR, AT THE SAME TIME, WE SHALL PRODUCE A RISE IN PRICES OF THE FIRST NECESSARIES OF LIFE, ALLEGING THAT IT ARISES FROM THE DECLINE OF AGRICULTURE AND CATTLE-BREEDING: WE SHALL FURTHER UNDERMINE ARTFULLY AND DEEPLY SOURCES OF PRODUCTION, BY ACCUSTOMING THE WORKERS TO ANARCHY AND TO DRUNKENNESS AND SIDE BY SIDE THEREWITH TAKING ALL MEASURE TO EXTIRPATE FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH ALL THE EDUCATED FORCES OF THE "GOYIM."


PROTOCOL No. 20
20. Economic crises have been producer by us for the GOYIM by no other means than the withdrawal of money from circulation. Huge capitals have stagnated, withdrawing money from States, which were constantly obliged to apply to those same stagnant capitals for loans. These loans burdened the finances of the State with the payment of interest and made them the bond slaves of these capitals .... The concentration of industry in the hands of capitalists out of the hands of small masters has drained away all the juices of the peoples and with them also the States ....

27. The reforms projected by us in the financial institutions and principles of the GOYIM will be clothed by us in such forms as will alarm nobody. We shall point out the necessity of reforms in consequence of the disorderly darkness into which the GOYIM by their irregularities have plunged the finances. The first irregularity, as we shall point out, consists in their beginning with drawing up a single budget which year after year grows owing to the following cause: this budget is dragged out to half the year, then they demand a budget to put things right, and this they expend in three months, after which they ask for a supplementary budget, and all this ends with a liquidation budget. But, as the budget of the following year is drawn up in accordance with the sum of the total addition, the annual departure from the normal reaches as much as 50 per cent in a year, and so the annual budget is trebled in ten years. Thanks to such methods, allowed by the carelessness of the GOY States, their treasuries are empty. The period of loans supervenes, and that has swallowed up remainders and brought all the GOY States to bankruptcy.

28. You understand perfectly that economic arrangements of this kind, which have been suggested to the GOYIM by us, cannot be carried on by us.
29. Every kind of loan proves infirmity in the State and a want of understanding of the rights of the State. Loans hang like a sword of Damocles over the heads of rulers, who, instead of taking from their subjects by a temporary tax, come begging with outstretched palm of our bankers. Foreign loans are leeches which there is no possibility of removing from the body of the State until they fall off of themselves or the State flings them off. But the GOY States do not tear them off; they go on in persisting in putting more on to themselves so that they must inevitably perish, drained by voluntary blood-letting.

30. What also indeed is, in substance, a loan, especially a foreign loan? A loan is - an issue of government bills of exchange containing a percentage obligation commensurate to the sum of the loan capital. If the loan bears a charge of 5 per cent, then in twenty years the State vainly pays away in interest a sum equal to the loan borrowed, in forty years it is paying a double sum, in sixty - treble, and all the while the debt remains an unpaid debt.
31. From this calculation it is obvious that with any form of taxation per head the State is baling out the last coppers of the poor taxpayers in order to settle accounts with wealth foreigners, from whom it has borrowed money instead of collecting these coppers for its own needs without the additional interest.

32. So long as loans were internal the GOYIM only shuffled their money from the pockets of the poor to those of the rich, but when we bought up the necessary person in order to transfer loans into the external sphere, all the wealth of States flowed into our cash- boxes and all the GOYIM began to pay us the tribute of subjects.
33. If the superficiality of GOY kings on their thrones in regard to State affairs and the venality of ministers or the want of understanding of financial matters on the part of other ruling persons have made their countries debtors to our treasuries to amounts quite impossible to pay it has not been accomplished without, on our part, heavy expenditure of trouble and money.

34. Stagnation of money will not be allowed by us and therefore there will be no State interestbearing paper, except a one per- cent series, so that there will be no payment of interest to leeches that suck all the strength out of the State. The right to issue interest-bearing paper will be given exclusively to industrial companies who will find no difficulty in paying interest out of profits, whereas the State does not make interest on borrowed money like these companies, for the State borrows to spend and not to use in operations.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/Kidd/th...tocols.pdf

[Firestarter]

Greg Palast - The Best democracy money can buy

This post is a summary of BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast’s book from 2002.


The strategy to destroy economies is something like: take money out of circulation to crash the economy, then the big bankers buy the economy pennies for dollars, while in the meantime the country has been indebted, and has to do what the World Bank tells them.
In 1983 the IMF forced Ecuador’s government to borrow $1.5 billion to take over the private debts of Ecuador’s elite. In return Ecuador had to hike prices in electricity and other necessities, and eliminate 120,000 jobs. Then in 2000, 2001 to finish Ecuador off, it was ordered to: 1) raise the price of cooking gas with 80%, 2) eliminate 26,000 jobs, 3) cut wages with 50%, 4) transfer its biggest water system to foreign operators, 5) allow British Petroleum’s ARCO to build an oil pipeline.

In Bolivia some riots broke out, when Bolivians couldn’t get drinking water. To “help” Bolivia: Samuel Soria deposited $10 million on a Citibank account in New York, that never returned to Bolivia. Water prices, could rise with 150% under the new owner, International Waters Ltd (IWL) of London.

In 2001 Argentina got ordered to cut their government budget deficit from $5.3 billion to $4.1 billion. Taking 1.2 billion dollar out of the economy already in recession, did wonders: by the end of March 2001, Argentina’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had already dropped with 2.1% compared a year earlier. Argentina had to reduce jobs, wages, and pensions. While the IMF offered an $8 billion aid package - Argentina had to pay $27 billion a year because of their debt of $128 billion (to the likes of Citibank). The French bought the water system and raised prices up to 400%. And Argentina got threatened with sanctions by the USA to liberalise the pharmaceuticals industry.

In 1973 General Pinochet took dictatorial control of Chile, and destroyed the economy. The CIA, since October 1970, had helped Pinochet to oust president Salvador Allende. US Ambassador to Chile, Edward Malcolm Korry explained that US companies used the CIA as an international collection agency. In 1973 Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%; by 1983, after 10 years of free market liberalisation, unemployment was at 22%, while wages had declined by 40%. In 1970 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty, by 1990 – when dictator Pinochet left office - this number had doubled to 40%. In 1982 and 1983, the GDP dropped with 19%, and foreign companies bought 85% of Chile’s profitable industries. The USA the State Department reported: “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management”. The respected economist Milton Friedman called this “The Miracle of Chile”.

In 1998 —the World Bank, IMF, Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Settlements — offered $41.5 billion credit to Brazil. The World Bank designed a “Master Plan for Brazil” to create a “flexible public sector workforce”: reduce Salary/Benefits; Pensions; Job Stability; Employment, and increase Work Hours. After the Brazilian real dropped with 40%: British Gas bought the SaoPaolo Gas Company, while Enron and Houston Industries bought the Rio and Sao Paolo electricity companies and a pipeline.


DEREGULATING ELECRICITY
In the 1970s British professor Dr. Stephen Littlechild invented a scheme to privatise British electricity utilities. In 1990 the England-Wales Power Pool, went into business.
From Atlanta headquarters, Southern’s executives learned they could charge in “deregulated” England double the price in Georgia. In 1995, Southern bought up England’s South Western Electricity Board. The cash rolled in and American companies grabbed the majority of the British electricity sector. Although (or because) the British consumers were terribly overcharged, the IMF and World Bank required deregulation of electricity if countries wanted assistance.
The USA had a regulatory system to keep tight lids on utility monopolies’ profits, with the result that Americans had about the lowest electricity prices in the world. In 1996 California tossed out this regulatory system. The parents of Palast saw their energy bill rise with a whopping 379% in the first year of deregulation. California’s electricity watchdog claims that electricity consumers were overcharged by $6.2 billion in 2001. After PG&E bankrupted California consumers had to pay off the speculators for some $35 billion.


GREAT BRITAIN – EVEN WORSE
Palast went undercover and got in touch with LLM and told them that he represented some wealthy American clients.
Derek Draper proudly boasted that LLM had given the US investment bank Salomon Brothers, a week advance knowledge, that the cap on total spending was 2.75% instead of the expected 2.5%. Salomon made a fortune.
PowerGen PLC wanted to buy a regional electricity company in violation of anti-monopoly regulations. Draper arranged a confidential meeting between a top adviser to Chancellor Brown with the chairman of PowerGen, Ed Wallis, which secured the PowerGen merger deal.

Roger Liddle is one of the important men in government, in charge of European affairs. Liddle told Palast that “Derek knows all the right people.” Liddle had been managing director at LLM, before he put his shares into a blind trust. Any new business Liddle gets Draper goes straight into his “blind” trust.
Here are some other deals in Britain Palast found out by going undercover: 1) Rupert Murdoch’s News International got valuable amendments to union recognition bills; 2) Tesco won exemption from a car park tax worth 20 million pounds per year; 3) Enron reversed a government plan to block new gas-fired power stations.


Greg Palast – The Best democracy money can buy (2002): http://web.archive.org/web/2017071106252...ast%20.pdf

[Firestarter]

BIT and Investor-State Dispute Settlement

When I started my investigation on how the third world is enslaved through the IMF and World Bank, TTIP was a controversial issue. Some links in this post refer to Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Treaty (TTIP), but this isn’t very relevant to this post.
This post is mostly about the effect of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) and the arbitration of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) of the World Bank. This gives companies the possibility to “sue” states, so they can get “compensation” if (democratically elected) parliaments make laws that they don’t like. This is the corner stone of modern day colonialism.


RESERVE REQUIREMENTS BANKS
American banks only have to back up investments (or loans) with a cash reserve ratio of 10%. This means with an American savings account for 10,000 dollar, the banks can invest an additional 90,000 dollar. In the European Union the reserve requirement is even lower with 1%, so European financial institutions can even invest 990,000 for 10,000 dollar. Great Britain has a 0% cash reserve ratio (so British banks can invest without limit).
On the other hand: Brazil has a reserve requirement of 45%, so with 10,000 dollar Brazilian banks can invest “only”12,222 dollar. In 1978 Turkey had a reserve requirement of 62.7%, so with 10,000 dollar it could only invest 5,949 dollar.


EXPLOITATION OF THE THIRD WORLD
The colonial forces still decide how the colonies are exploited, under the guise of international law.
A nice example is the protective measures by the European Union. With tax money the European industry is supported, so that the third world cannot compete with the EU. The EU lets the third world pay with import duties so the third world has to pay to export to the Euro zone. Here’s a description of how the EU uses protective measures against the third world: http://web.archive.org/web/2013020809311...asures.php

As a logical result these third world "banana republics" get financial problems, so need to borrow money from the World Bank and IMF to be able to make end meet, for which in return they do exactly what they are told. So their countries can be plundered even better.
One of the best tricks are trade agreements between countries, at the discretion of the white judges. From 1959 on, BITs became ever more popular; in the early years these BITs were based on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of 1947. In 1995 came the next big development in BITs with the General Agreement on Tariffs in Services (GATS), for investments in services. In March 2001, the WTO would design a system to replace democracy with article VIA of General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The GATS Disputes Panel decides if a law is “more burdensome than necessary”, in which case the WTO can simply set it aside.

From the end of the 1980s on there was some kind of explosion in BITs; no longer only between developed and developing countries, but also among and between developed countries, to exclude developing countries. Developing countries got forced to agree on BITs, because without it they couldn’t export, while foreign investors take all the money.

For the history of international treaties for investment see the story of Vandevelde from 2005: http://jilp.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/volume-12-1/van5.pdf

In the following story Anghie names exploitation of developing countries under the guise of international law "positivism": http://web.archive.org/web/2019051919070...ialism.pdf


WTO, TABD, TRIPS
Before transitory heads of state (like presidents) meet at the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) provides them with the details of their agenda. TABD pairs influential politicians to powerful CEOs. The corporate directors give the politicians a grade on “the scorecard”. In this way big corporations rule over politrics.
One TABD proposal would reverse the $5 billion judgment against Exxon for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. TABD’s Products Liability Group that, under the guise of eliminating “non-tariff” trade barriers, takes aim at American citizens’ right to sue corporations.

The WTO’s penal system to keep the colonies in slavery is the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The USA unilaterally exempts itself from TRIPS, so US retailers can still import cheap drugs. The WTO requires, on penalty of sanctions, that every nation pass laws granting patents on genetically modified seeds and drugs. When Thailand tried to register traditional medicines as intellectual property, the US Trade Representative wrote that this would “hamper medical research”, so Thailand got nothing.
Goldman Sachs chaired TABD when Peter Sutherland was president of WTO, and Sutherland went to Goldman Sachs after he left WTO.


ISDS
Based on the arbitration of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) multinationals can sue countries if they think their investments yield too little in return. The effect is that when countries take protective measures for environment, health, workers' rights or human rights, they can be sued by multinationals. If subsidies are granted or if subsidies are dropped, countries can be sued. As far as democratically elected parliaments have something to say, this is even further limited by the ISDS. It is the World Bank that decides on these disputes, in other words: by the ISDS arbitrations, the bankers (the biggest investors) become even more powerful at the expense of the taxpayer.
First the legal team of an investor looks for the most advantageous Treaty and arbitral tribunal for the claims that they were disadvantaged by a country. The ISDS disputes are judged by 3 arbitrators, of which both parties choose 1 arbitrator, who together choose the President of the arbitration tribunal. In order to give the arbitrators the leverage to judge arbitrarily, many treaties are rather vague. 69% of the arbitrators come from North America or Western Europe.

The most indicted country among ISDS is Argentina for hundreds of millions to billions, for the measures it took in 2001, the crisis in Greece was directed by the IMF and the World Bank and Greece was also indicted repeatedly. Most lawyers involved claim an hourly rate of over 500 dollars.

The next quote makes clear how “independent” the ISDS arbitration is, from a lawyer that bragged:

I've got a case right now in front of [a leading international arbitrator]. Every time I go to a conference, he's there. We read each other's books. My opponent on the case ... well, he hasn't got a clue [...]. Between all the partners in our group [...] we've appeared before every single arbitrator worth knowing. Not just once, but multiple times in the past few years and we have the inside knowledge as a result of that.

To ensure that the people do not know what is going on: both the ISDS provisions and TTIP negotiations are done in secret: http://corporateeurope.org/2012/11/chapt...troduction


THE COLONIAL WORLD BANK
It is the Board of Governors, in which all 189 countries represented, that makes the decisions in the World Bank. The catch is that these countries have a voting power based on their economic status. This means that countries that became rich by plundering the colonies now reward themselves with extra voting power.
The voting ratio depends on the matter concerned: 1) International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBPRD), 2) International Development Association (IDA), 3) International Finance Corporation (IFC) and 4) Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA).
I have made a sum of the total voting power for 11 Western European countries with the USA, Canada and Australia. This shows that these 14 countries (with less than 15% of the world's population) have 56% of the voting power on whole.
On MIGA these 14 countries account for a whopping 88% of the voting power. Also striking is that the English speaking USA, GB, Canada and Australia - together account for 36% of the total and 69% for MIGA.


KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS
I must be very proud that my home country the Netherlands not only had a starring role in the slave trade, but in 2014 was first place in the whole wide world in claims for the ISDS. Theoretically, a company only has to open a mailbox to use Dutch tax law and BITs.
The following advertisement of my “favourite” law firm De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, shows that the Netherlands is an ideal country to evade taxes and sue countries based on the many beneficial BITs for the rich and corrupt: http://www.debrauw.com/wp-content/upload...ergen-.pdf

[Firestarter]

Luxembourg Leaks

In the Luxembourg Leaks (LuxLeaks) financial scandal confidential information from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was made public in 2012 and November 2014 that showed that tax schemes for multinationals in Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland were used to avoid paying taxes. The confidential documents are available on the website of ICIJ: https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-...s-database

The European Commission decided that the tax deduction schemes for Fiat Finance from Luxembourg and Starbucks from the Netherlands are illegal state aid (naturally my former employer ABN AMRO bank was involved).

Since then the whistleblowers in LuxLeaks have been accused in a trial by PwC. Antoine Deltour, Raphael Halet (both whistleblowers from PwC), Edouard Perrin (a French journalist) and The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ: coordinated the release of this information) have to defend themselves in this court case.

For some reason the LuxLeaks scandal didn’t get much attention from our wonderful media. This is the best story I’ve read on this scandal: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30767...ng-charged

[Firestarter]

World Bank “helps” Yemen to destruction

The IMF and World Bank have been “helping” Yemen to destruction since at least the 1990s.
I have found a plan that details the strategy of the IMF and World Bank from 1999 to 2001 for Yemen.

First a short summary of this strategy.
The dirt poor Yemen must pay off their “debts” to the banks by increasing tax collection, while at the same time increasing prices. For example in 2005 protests broke out when the Yemeni government guided by the World Bank increased the prices of oil, diesel and gas with respectively 100, 200 and 50 per cent:
Increase the power of the legal system to protect the financial institutions
Decrease subsidy, so what’s left of the economy will collapse, but on the other hand increase the spending for hospitals and education (so that only the good slaves will survive).

Following is my (more detailed) summary of the strategy of IMF and World Bank for Yemen with excerpts.
Increase prices

raising subsidized prices despite lower world market prices (also for cereals), thereby significantly reducing subsidies, and by cuts in development expenditure (…)
the intensive civil unrest following the June 1998 increases in administered prices pointed to the need to enhance public awareness of the reform program to ensure that further progress on reforms is not delayed.

Increase taxes

the taxpayer identification number system (TIN) will be extended beyond the current range of major taxpayers to medium- and smaller-sized contributors and will be enforced through penalties for non-observance. In addition, the need for computerization to enhance the effectiveness of the TIN's use will be reviewed.

Reduce subsidies

in January 1999 the government eliminated the wheat subsidy by liberalizing the trading and pricing of wheat--well ahead of the initial target date--and plans to halve the flour subsidy through an increase in price early in 1999. The flour subsidy will be abolished in full by the start of 200

More hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and schools

GDP for 1999-2001 are to be increased to average 8.2 percent for education, 1.6 percent for health, and 1.2 percent for social safety net programs. In addition, reform programs will be implemented in the education and health sectors to ensure better management of scarce public resources (…)
To support this effort, trade in pharmaceuticals will be delegated to the private sector by eliminating the government procurement monopoly effective by the year 2000.

Increase repaying of debts and a strong legal system to protect the banks

The soundness of the banking system is vulnerable because of weak enforcement of prudential regulations, high levels of nonperforming loans in certain (mostly state-owned) banks, and a weak judiciary system
(…)
government gives immediate priority to introducing the legal, judiciary, and regulatory framework necessary to establish a free market environment for private sector activity and investment (…)
A new Central Bank Law will soon be approved by the cabinet with the goal to become effective by end-1999. It will give the central bank greater independence and focus its mandate on price stability through changes in the composition of the Board of Directors, allow it to issue its own securities, if needed, for open market operations, limit public sector financing to emergency loans, grant it freedom to define and adopt its own monetary and exchange rate policy, and require greater accountability (…)
Accordingly, the reform program over 1999-2001 will include specific steps aimed at advancing reintermediation in a competitive market environment and in particular to unblock the loan recovery process. Measures such as requiring that all court decisions be made in writing and published promptly, strengthening enforcement through introduction of a bailiff system, establishment of a quantitative system for monthly monitoring of court operations, and reducing the fee for filing a case in court will be considered. The delinquent borrower notification system implemented in 1997 will be continued.

https://www.imf.org/external/np/pfp/1999...ndex.htm#I
(http://archive.is/EuR9c)


In 2005, the World Bank and IMF policies led to riots in Yemen: https://www.dawn.com/news/148827/wb-imf-...s-in-yemen


And it’s not only the bombing and blockade that finishes the destruction of Yemen.
The situation is in turn used as an argument to stop the “humanitarian” aid to Yemen.
The banks simply block the transfer of money to import food. They don’t even disguise their sick plans!

In July 2016 importers couldn’t import food to Yemen, because more than $260 million of their credit couldn’t be transferred to foreign bank accounts.
In turn the traders must ship the money in cash to the food seller (for example by plane) to purchase food: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-...SKCN0ZU0F2
(http://archive.is/QrGZG)


In December 2016 wheat imports to Yemen were simply stopped due to a “crisis” at the Yemen Central Bank. They can’t import because it has “no access to foreign reserves at all”: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-...SKBN1450H6
(http://archive.is/tpJhf)


For more on the ignored genocide of Yemen: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/viewtop...f=7&t=1146