by “I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money…. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.”—Reginald McKenna, who had been chancellor of the Exchequer in 1915-1916, as chairman of the board of the Midland Bank to its stockholders in 1924
I have written about the weaknesses of liberal democracy, but I haven’t yet addressed this question: “If liberal democracy is so weak and the people living under it find it so difficult to assert their will; why then is it so successful?”
The answer is that this weakness is its strength; just as a docile temperament is a strength for a dog being chosen for breeding. The fact is that nationalist governments can and have taken back control of their financial infrastructure. This has occurred in recent history, but if you want an example of a liberal democracy throwing off the reigns of its financial masters, you might have to look as far back as the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
Nationalist governments have proven more effective than modern liberal democratic governments over and over. However, what the liberal democrat lacks in efficiency, he makes up for in scope. This was seen in World War II where the nationalists in Germany won almost every battle in terms of soldiers killed, but lost the war because they were overwhelmed.
Could this coalition be the liberal governments’ ability to win friends and form alliances? It’s not. Financial Capitalists have had a global coalition since the early twentieth century. It is they who organize international military coalitions, and it is they who have perhaps become the most potent and troubling force in the world.
Consider the average American’s level of interest in international politics. Is it this type of person who has directed us to become the world’s police force? And consider the motivations for the Iraq war—not only was it not a result of the popular will, it lacked coherent reasoning for our involvement and was the result of blatant trickery.
Actually our quest to “spread democracy” is not as much about spreading democratic ideology as it is spreading the financial system behind it. John Perkins, a self-professed former economic hit man explains:
I’m haunted every day by what I did as an economic hit man (EHM). I’m haunted by the lies I told back then about the World Bank. I’m haunted by the ways in which that bank, its sister organizations, and I empowered US corporations to spread their cancerous tentacles across the planet. I’m haunted by the payoffs to the leaders of poor countries, the blackmail, and the threats that if they resisted, if they refused to accept loans that would enslave their countries in debt, the CIA’s jackals would overthrow or assassinate them. I wake up sometimes to the horrifying images of heads of state, friends of mine, who died violent deaths because they refused to betray their people. Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, I try to scrub the blood from my hands.
So America has become the dog of the financial capitalists, enforcing and extending their reign. In my next article, I’ll explain some of the mechanisms of financial capitalism and how they work.
