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| The ancient legend of the origin of chess explains exactly what is happening in the financial sector and in the highest echelons of crony capitalist power. |
Overall, coverage in the West in online segments of the press and news cable corporations showed less than 1 percent of total coverage. In comparison events like Wikileaks and the Arab Spring managed to capture over 50 percent of all news consumption online, in peak periods as much as 60 or 70 percent.
Reports from USA indicates that media coverage has only just begun, and it is mostly derisive, spinning it as a cultural phenomenon, a group of bewildered people with a very vague agenda, criticizing the movement for muffling its message.
Other countries got it down, even if coverage is sparse: Canada had the most coverage, and in the UK BBC did set aside a feature page, and The Guardian ran a Live Blog as if it was a real event. In Germany Focus Online ran an article, all of them explaining that the "Wall Street Critics Protested Increased Inequality."
That was too hard a message for media anchors to grasp in USA. The roaring silence can only make you suspect a direct stand-down order from the highest echelons of power to which the news editors are also sworn.
Since nobody really wants to explain the concept behind the 1% and the 99% and the urgency of what is taking place, allow yours truly to guide you through the simple version:
Fear of the Grim Regulator
The Great Recession is nothing like the Great Depression or even the Savings and Loans scandal. The subprime mortgage crisis had bankers and top industries collecting public welfare after collapsing the global economy to near death, thereafter paying out tremendous bonuses, and on top of it forging a movement to disrupt the debt ceiling debate, introduce austerity cuts along with IMF guidelines and generally assuring the American public of a dramatic decrease in living standards in the future.
Unemployment, not least among other ethnicities, is skyrocketing. The US industrial base is at the verge of faltering. Trillions from the public budget have been wasted on wars to make billions in profit for private contracters with informal ties to lawmakers, particularly in the Bush administration.
The public, particularly the protesters, are aware of this. It's very difficult to overlook that the only constant in this mudslide of economic events is that the financial and industrial elite must, at all times, keep the same amount of money in order for "the system to work."
But it's more than a problem of inequality, inability to maintain the public schooling system, roads and bridges or medicare. It is more than a certain level of aristocracy and nepotism at work. It is the single largest assault on the public sector in history, a historical attempt to wrestle absolute control from government and into a crony capitalist cabal carried out in the open through secret societies like Bilderberg, through the common lobbyism and special agreements between politicians and corporate owners, and through economic hitmen - de-regulators positioned in high places in industry and administration.
Why, some will ask, would they collapse the economy and make the financial sector a villain in the eyes of the world, in order to construct the neo-liberal paradise for the rich and nightmare for the working class? How could they hope to succeed or even to contain the crisis and curb the consequences?
Well, they knew regulators would come, and they feared that, because the corruption level is at this point equivalent or higher than the level of corruption in the Soviet Union in 1985. De-regulation was not an option, but a necessity to avoid tens of thousands of FBI cases for fradulent banking and stock market practices.
The sub-prime mortgage scheme was not a spontanous bubble. It was not an inevitable repitition of previous market bubbles, but the disciplined utilization of what had been learned from previous bubbles. It was the ultimate bubble, instigated by economic hitmen, financial de-regulators in public offices and in the financial industries.
They knew regulation laws would eventually be passed to block liar loans, so they pre-empted that legislation, cutting the power of the publicly elected government off by the knees by simply sabotaging the entire world economy. In a greed-driven market it is profoundly easy to introduce a scam, seduce people in all ranks of banking to establish and sell off toxic assets and make a bundle of money, while at the same time preparing the crisis story.
From 911/War on Terror to Financial Crisis/Recession
The grand narrative that defines the second decade of the 21st century AD is the Financial Crisis/Great Recession, just like 911/War on Terror was the grand narrative by which the same corporate powers led by the Koch Brothers established and maintained control of policy.
The crisis story, "staring into an abyss", was not a lie as such. It took place. The risk of a complete financial collapse was actual. It is still actual. It can only be explained as the gamble of desperate men with everything to lose, but also everything to gain.
Regulation and taxation would cut deep into the corrupted heart of the financial sector, and the fear of it is enough to motivate a cabal of converging interests. But there is also the added factor that a great financial crisis could be used to consolidate the political power of the global mobile elite - a crisis of this scale, forcing the government to abandon concerns of moral hazard and bail out the most profitable and unethical industries of modern society would render them able to take full control of government and become the de facto government.
This is where the Bretton Woods institutions enter the picture. On the backdrop of recession the public debt problem is added an ominous tint, which can be used by IMF - as it is done - to argue vehemently for public cuts in America as well as Europe. This reduces the living conditions and real wages of workers worldwide, busts the strength of the unions, weakens them in wage negotiations and, ultimately, lowers the minimum wage - all in all a very profitable development in short term for most big corporations.
But let's not fool ourselves - the most profitable production market is China, and no matter how destabilized the American society and work force cannot equitably compete with the enormous masses of destitute low skill workers in China. To kill of her own growth in order to be able to hire domestic workers for a cheaper price does not make a lot of sense, not even to the most cynical of industrialists.
But here's the ticker: What the corporate moguls want is to sit on public utility. A William Gibson-esque ultra-liberalistic society is the wet dream of the right wing, libertarians and neo-liberals alike. In such a society corporations regulate government functions. They own politicians and judges, define lawmaking before it even reaches Congress, has the protection of the police and the armed forces, and runs the prison-industrial complex.
It is totality of power, a de facto government of multinationalists, taking control first of Manhattan and then of Berlin.
The Two Towers: IMF and World Bank
Did they succeed? Yes, so far. Due to the crisis USA is under the thumb of IMF, and so are three countries so far in the Eurozone. These countries, including USA, has technically lost sovereignty in matters of national affairs.
Greece is the trigger or kill-switch, which may collapse the system entirely to a point, where either regulation or de-regulation is inevitable. Germany is the last obstacle, pressured to perform another exercise in moral hazard by bailing out Greece to avoid default, a further weakening of the Eurozone and escalating recession along all the fault lines.
This affects Wall Street and Washington alike. The so-called 1% know what is at stake. Their play is to pose a deal nobody can refuse, as the gangsters call it, by giving Europe the choice of either bailing out and parenting Greece into the control of IMF, or to let Greece default and suffer the consequences.
Germany, as I hinted, is not just the last buffer agains total dominion of the Transatlantic Alliance, but also a target.
One follows from the other, because only when Germany is under IMF total dominion is guaranteed. Austerity measures that work directly opposite to what is being said by leading experts and think tanks - echoed in the media, just like reports that "more jobs overseas (China, India, Haiti) means more jobs at home", a conclusion given in advance, calculated on very loose foundation and presented as fact against better knowledge and against obvious proof of the opposite.
IMF will be put in position as the large gun to enforce, through debt, specific measures that guarantees that the same mega-rich entities - persons and corporations - maintain the same level of wealth throughout any level of crisis. That is the only constant, hence the OWS reference to the 1%.
The discrepancy is obvious, but more than symbolic, more than a moral outrage as it is being interpreted by those with some sympathy for the counter-movement, the resistance against the crony capitalist cabal at work.
It is not just that it is unreasonable to bail out the bankers, because their institutions are "too big to fail" but refuse to bail out others, whether it be a country like Greece or the American or, in turn, European work force. It is not some camel to swallow in order to protect a system that has some minor errors that occasionally turn out as bubbles and stock market crashes.
No, it is a methodical onslaught on centralized government, a bid for power in the style of Latin American or Eastern European mobsters. It is the removal of all obstacles to unhinged privatization, monopolies on public utility - the perfect money machine, because the demand is constant - and corporate ownership of society's citizenry.
On the top level it is an actual cabal around an express agenda, but on levels below it is only a loosely knitted cabal of converging interests, which is relatively easy to enforce, because there is a short-lived individual interest to present to every player, almost like the classical pyramid schemes.
How to Appropriate Nations By Economic Warfare
It is the outlines of this monstrous plot many in the protest movement has discovered or at least detect on an intuitive level. The obvious discrepancy between "too big to fail" and "let them eat cake" has begun to open the eyes of workers and of the middle-class who are being turned into low wage, over-worked slave labor.
They sense intent behind the seemingly random series of political and financial motions and signals. They see a future outlined where they have no power to negotiate, only symbolic representation in parliaments and zero option to sanction their oppressor.
So, they turn socialist. Even people who are in favor of free market, who are not socialist and who may not even be economically threatened or marginalized, turn socialist. Paradoxically, this is the only option left to protect centralized administration against hostile takeover.
It is this mixture of common greed and speculation, loop-holes in the financial system, deliberate exploitation of human and systemic weaknesses, and a corporate-political agenda of colonalization revolving around the twin organizations of Bretton Woods that has triggered the upset, the stand-off.
The scope of the plot is is the reason behind the massive black-out, which resembles the full media compliance ahead of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Embedded journalism, photo bans and clever neologisms like "preemptive strike", "collateral damage", "rendition", "enemy combatant", you name it, to cover for a totalitarian agenda already fully manifest in the Western societies, even if not used to the maximum extent yet.
The surveillance grid is laid down and near-total. The prison-industrial complex is established to the point where development-stricken states compete for prospected maximum security facilities. The media have been horded on very few hands, equivalent to the Big Four and Big Five in the music and the movie industry.
Everything is tied together and fits neatly in the plan, except for people. The people revolt, because they are not sheep, and they are not trees you can cut down and expect to stay quiet, while you do it, because you have some sinister utilitarian ethic saying that 40 million American poor can be sacrificed for the greater good of the system.
The corruption is so intense, often legitimized by legislation, and the discrepancy between what moral hazard is allowed and what is not allowed, and the social inequality, has grown to a point, where the protesters are equated with and compared to the protesters against obvious tyranny in the Arab Spring.
The comparison, once more, is not symbolic or metaphysical similarity. It is very actual, first of all because it is about democracy and civil rights. The Arabs were protesting to gain democracy and civil rights, to have their minds freed and their bodies protected against abuse.
The American uprising, according to some also blacked out on Twitter, is about not losing the last remnants of democracy and civil rights in the so-called "free world."
But there is more than convergence of issues at work - in reality, opposite to what is most commonly shown in the media, the dictatorships of the Arab World are "our dictatorships", Western designed, Western sponsored and Western ruled sattrap regimes with whom our secret intelligence agencies work closely, among others on the rendition and torture industry.
At some level, which is very problematic to future diplomatic relations and to the dynamics of the uprisings, the Arabs are protesting us. Our governments. Our imperialism. This is a fact that can motivate forces like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to exceed their traditional course of remaining in the background of elections, curbing their own power to remain a cultural and moral influence on the populations they affect - and stimulate Arabs in the modern world to support or even urge a stronger anti-Western political course.
The baroque Western colonialization of its own societies is most apparent in the way country after country fall under IMF and this become equal to third world countries, which have been exploited, destabilized and on occasion destroyed by the Bretton Woods institutions in swell cooperation.
The Smart Tricks the Stupid
The debt bond, based on interests and a form of mathematics very few human beings - including politicians - can really comprehend, is what lies behind the pervasiveness of this new multinational corporate power-house.
Legend says that chess was invented by a Chinese mathematical genius, ordered by the emperor as an instrument to teach generals strategy and tactics. The genius in question came up with a board game played on a field with 64 squares, based on the ancient Book of Changes. He demanded as his price for the game only this: One gold coin for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, and so forth. The emperor, who was exceedingly wealthy, saw no problem in granting this wise man his request and promised him the payment - only to find out shortly after that he was bankrupt and the inventor of the game the de facto emperor.
In a fit of anger, condemning the genius as a traitor, the emperor turned around on his promise and had him executed.
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