Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites and in Eurasia Critic magazine. His book on monetary reform, entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, will be published soon by Tendril Press.
http://globalresearch.ca, June 30, 2008
Much of the world's history over the last century has been dominated by the United States. But by the turn of the millennium in 2000-2001, the "American Century" had begun to descend into a chamber of horrors.
The years since then have been marked by the huge financial bubbles engineered by the U.S. Federal Reserve System and the virus of predatory global capitalism. We have the looming worldwide economic crisis with rising bankruptcies, credit disruptions, and soaring fuel and food prices. Alongside has been the thinly-disguised but continuing attempt by the U.S. to conquer the Middle East by force of arms under the heading of the "War on Terror."
Some have argued that the U.S. at war is nothing new and that we have always been a nation of aggression and militarism. While this may be true, the expansion of the original thirteen states to cover much of the North American continent was done with far less violence than the constant fighting among the European nations over the centuries for domination.
The key event was President Thomas Jefferson's choice to purchase the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, thus turning America 's energy to westward expansion rather than competition with the European powers for colonial empires. The long-term result has been a nation that has led the world in science, technology, social and political innovation, and individual prosperity and freedom.
Still, there seems to have been a critical change that took place in both America and the world in the early 1900s.
To many, the arrival of the 20th century seemed to be a time of great hope. There had not been a major international conflagration since the Napoleonic Wars which ended with the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. Despite inequities in income, the industrial age showed promise of raising the standard of living everywhere. Four large nations whose territory had been consolidated during the latter part of the 19th century-the U.S., Russia, Germany, and Italy -were flourishing.
But by 1914, the worst war in history-World War I-had begun. A century of conflict and chaos, which has not yet ended, was underway, with hundreds of millions of non-combatants eventually losing their lives through war, famine, epidemics, or genocide. The modern world has seen many holocausts in addition to the one befalling European Jewry during World War II.
Alongside miracles of medicine, agriculture, sanitation, engineering, transportation, communications, and information technology have come terrible weapons of mass destruction, the latest being depleted uranium. There have been appalling refinements in the diabolical arts of assassination, torture, propaganda, mind control, and political manipulation.
Economic crime has occurred on an epic scale, including currency manipulations, privatization of public resources, the aforesaid financial bubbles, involvement of governments in the illicit drug trade, attacks by financiers on national economies, the creation of offshore tax havens, money laundering, destruction of entire industries to benefit global capitalism, human trafficking, cornering of markets on food and other vital commodities, speculative hedge funds whose managers earn a billion dollars a year, and looting of private companies and pension funds by highly-paid CEOs and executives..
What then happened, especially during the latter part of the "American Century," to turn so much promise into the continuing spectacle of prosperity for some side-by-side with recurrent catastrophes for others? Likely this question will be debated for centuries.
It would appear, however, that once it became apparent how much wealth the industrial revolution was capable of generating, the world's economies began to develop so fast that the traditional means of resolving the distribution of power and wealth among and within nations and social classes fell apart. Because human beings were not capable of exercising the wisdom, generosity, fairness, and restraint to master the industrial genie that was now out of the bottle, the worst inclinations of individuals and society exerted themselves. The history of the 20th century and the battles among nations and blocs for supremacy resemble nothing so much as neighborhood gang wars among Mafia dons, the latest being the Bush-Cheney cabal that has controlled the U.S. government since 2001.
Another gang has been those among the world's money-lenders who became experts at parasitic high finance and got rich through the explosive growth of fractional reserve banking. These people have dominated the economies of nations through such institutions as the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), and other central and commercial banks, currency and commodity exchanges, and stock and bond markets.
The bankers on the one hand and the political racketeers on the other merged over a century ago under the oversight of figures associated with the creation of the Anglo-American Empire, such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Milner, Colonel House, Winston Churchill, the House of Windsor, and, as examples of families involved, the Rothschilds, Schiffs, Morgans, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Myers, and Bushes. Among the major projects of the empire in recent decades have been the creation and maintenance of both the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the state of Israel as Western bridgeheads of influence, power, and wealth in the Middle East.
This has led to the ongoing campaign by the U.S. to exercise complete military control of that region, with Israel the principal beneficiary. It is an astonishing spectacle to watch the "world's greatest superpower" bankrupt itself financially and in its world reputation because its politicians are too corrupt and cowardly to take a stand against the domestic Jewish lobby.
....to be Continued....
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