OLIGARCHY USA...

Oligarchies Masquerading as Democracies

By Gary North

Mexico is an oligarchy. Look at photos of every President who was not a military dictator. He looks like a European by ancestry. That’s because he was.

Mexico pretends to be a democracy. The photos say otherwise. No one who looks like a Mexican is ever elected President by Mexicans.

Americans who are aware of this anomaly — and few are — shrug it off as a curse of Latin America. “It can’t happen here.”

Ho, ho, ho. And, I might add, ha, ha, ha.

SCREENING AND TRAINING AN OLIGARCHY

Oligarchies are born. But those that survive in an economically competitive world must recruit bright young men to overcome the regression to the mean: the average sons of the oligarchs.

This is done through educational screening. That is the message of The Bell Curve. It is also the message of Superclass.

Where did America’s Presidents attend school? I have marked with an asterisk those who were not Ivy League graduates or military academy graduates.


1904: T. Roosevelt (Harvard/Porcelian)


1908: Taft (Yale/Skull & Bones — 2nd generation — father was a founder)


1912: Wilson (Princeton — student and president)


1920: *Harding (no college)


1924: *Coolidge (Amherst — Harvard lite)


1928: *Hoover (Stanford — West Coast Ivy League)


1932: F. Roosevelt (Harvard)


1948: *Truman (no college)


1952: Eisenhower (West Point)


1960: Kennedy (Harvard)


1964: *Johnson (Southwest Texas State Teacher’s College)


1968: *Nixon (Duke Law School)


1976: Carter (Annapolis)


1980: *Reagan (Eureka College)


1988: Bush I (Yale/Skull & Bones)


1992: Clinton (Yale Law School)


2000: Bush II (Yale/Skull & Bones)


2008: Obama (Harvard Law School)

Note: T. Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, and Johnson were Vice Presidents who became President. Reagan was the outsider. He sneaked up on them. But his staff was controlled by James Baker III, who was allied with the family of Bush I.

What we see here is an oligarchy: an oligarchy based on academic screening.

The symbolic year was 2004, when two Skull & Bones members were nominated — an organization that initiates 15 men a year. A Bonesman had to be elected in a nation of 100 million adult males. Random? I don’t think so.

WE THE PEOPLE

Voters like to imagine that they are sovereign. That illusion goes back to the most effective political deception in American history, the ultimate bumper sticker slogan: “we the people.” It was coined by James Madison (Princeton). It was attached to a document produced by a closed meeting in Philadelphia in which Madison took the official notes, which were not allowed to be released until every member had died. The last member to die was Madison (1836). Convenient.

The woman who was the best political female mind of the American Revolution was Mercy Otis Warren. She was the cousin of the best female political mind, Abigail Adams. She was an Anti-Federalist. In an anonymous article published in 1788, just prior to the ratification of the Constitution by the Virginia convention, she wrote this.

But the most sagacious advocates for the party have not by fair discusion, and rational argumentation, evinced the necessity of adopting this many headed monster; of such motley mixture, that its enemies cannot trace a feature of Democratick or Republican extract; nor have its friends the courage to denominate a Monarchy, an Aristocracy, or an Oligarchy, and the favoured bantling must have passed through the short period of its existence without a name, had not Mr. Wilson, in the fertility of his genius, suggested the happy epithet of a Federal Republic. . . .It is an undisputed fact that not one legislature in the United States had the most distant idea when they first appointed members for a convention, entirely commercial, or when they afterwards authorized them to consider on some amendments of the Federal union, that they would without any warrant from their constituents, presume on so bold and daring a stride, as ultimately to destroy the state governments, and offer a consolidated system, irreversible but on conditions that the smallest degree of penetration must discover to be impracticable. . . .

But it is needless to enumerate other instances, in which the proposed constitution appears contradictory to the first principles which ought to govern mankind; and it is equally so to enquire into the motives that induced to so bold a step as the annihilation of the independence and sovereignty of the thirteen distinct states. — They are but too obvious through the whole progress of the business, from the first shutting up the doors of the federal convention and resolving that no member should correspond with gentlemen in the different states on the subject under discussion; . . .

Warren understood that there had been a conspiracy in Philadelphia.

She ended it with this — a kind of epitaph.

And while the statesman is plodding for power, and the courtier practising the arts of dissimulation without check — while the rapacious are growing rich by oppression, and fortune throwing her gifts into the lap of fools, let the sublimer characters, the philosophic lovers of freedom who have wept over her exit, retire to the calm shades of contemplation, there they may look down with pity on the inconsistency of human nature, the revolutions of states; the rise of kingdoms, and the fall of empires.

There is a time for contemplation. That time is now.

There have been several major falls of empires. There is one to go.

Patience. Washington’s checks have not yet bounced. They will.

THE SHOWDOWN

Warren had it right. Alexander Hamilton proved it in 1791: the absorption of state debts by the federal government (consolidation of both debt and power) and the creation of the Bank of the United States.

Madison consolidated this with the creation of the Second Bank of the United States in 1816.

Andrew Jackson challenged the oligarchy three times: his election in 1828, his veto of the renewal of the charter of the Second Bank in 1832, and the creation of a debt-free government in 1836.

The first confrontation was a symbolic turning point: inauguration night at the White House, when the unwashed hordes invaded. It is described as such in the history textbooks. That was political symbolism. The democrats recaptured the country that the oligarchs had stolen in 1788.

The second confrontation is not described in the textbooks as a democratic revolt against the oligarchy: the veto was a death wound to the national financial oligarchy. The historians are officially democratic, but they are agents of the oligarchy. The textbooks universally excoriate and ridicule Jackson's veto.

The third confrontation was Jackson's last year in office: the only year when the federal government's debt was zero.

The Civil War re-established this debt as permanent. The creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 was the re-establishment of the oligarchs' lender of last resort. That meant that the federal debt would become the foundation of the entire economy: debt purchased by the central bank to balloon the monetary base. To pay off the debt would create mass deflation and depression. The oligarchs now have immunity. Congress will not order an independent audit of the FED.

The model is the Bank of England. It has been the chief insurance agency of the Anglo-American oligarchy ever since 1694. The "Glorious Revolution" of 1688/89 was in fact the symbolic triumph of the oligarchs over the king. They have never surrendered power to the people -- Cromwell's detested people. The City -- the financial district -- is still legally independent of Parliament. That is where the Bank of England resides in sovereign comfort. The little old lady of Threadneedle Street has more sovereignty than the little old lady of Buckingham Palace.

CONCLUSION

There are only two economic movements opposed to the oligarchy of central banking: Greenbackers and Austrian school economists. Greenbackers want to see the Federal Reserve replaced. So do Austrian economists. But what, if anything, should replace it?

Greenbackers call for 100% fiat money under Congress. They trust Congress. Austrian economists call for a market-based money system with no state or federal licensing. They trust the consumers.

Greenbackers believe in democratic political power: one man, one vote. Austrians believe in democratic economic power: one dollar, one vote.

Oligarchs trust Congress. That is because they bought it. They do not trust the unregulated free market. Consumers would control it.

Greenbackers dream of a Congress 100% dependent on the voters, not on the oligarchs. Austrians dream of a Congress presiding over a bankrupt federal government and the repeal of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

Whose dream do you think is more likely?

Link:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/14465.cfm