Buried on page 83 of the 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the U.S. Administration on June 17 is a recommendation that the new Financial Stability Board strengthen and institutionalize its mandate to promote global financial stability. Financial stability is a worthy goal, but the devil is in the details. The new global Big Brother is based in the Bank for International Settlements, a controversial institution that raises red flags among the wary . . . .
Read more here –
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/big_brother_basel.php
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary |
WEB OF DEBT BLOG 
Dear Ellen,
We have a group of 20 who have spent the last 12 weeks studying your book! When can you come and speak with us and a much larger audience?
Thanks,
John
PS Do you have a speaking schedule. Is it online? How much of an honorarium would you want?
Thanks John, that’s great! Where are you?
“BIG BROTHER IN BASEL: ARE WE TRADING OUR NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY FOR FINANCIAL STABILITY?”
The article / essay of this title by Ellen Brown asks profoundly important questions about money, banking, law and accounting, sovereignty, democracy, and most of all — do we, as individuals in America or any of its trading partners, have reason to trust the processes of human thought and governance?
Or must we look to fiction by George Orwell and Jack London for the smarts to avoid slavery, wage slavery, and fates worse than death, of the kind that adorn our history?
I will not look to fiction — albeit historical stories like “War and Peace” tell us aspects of the human condition more important to learn than ordinary accounts of battles and their results.
National sovereignty and financial stability went out the window of all nations on earth the day the atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima. All things learned before that date mean nothing.
The power conferred by science on one man or woman in Russia and one in America have changed all calculations that writers ever entertained for the amusement of readers forever.
Now the bankers of the world have blundered. Some will go to prison. The rest will, as before, work for leaders like Napoleon and his heirs today in the capitals of nations with the greatest power and will to use it.
Still, the issues of political and economic democracy, and especially of individual human rights, remain front and center in the consideration to be entertained by serious citizens who inhabit the planet. Ellen Brown want us to never forget this.
Somewhere in between human rights, (especially the ones we know we have and the economic rights we wish we had, ) and the strategies of Napoleon’s, Roosevelt’s and Obama’s, lie the list of concerns Ellen presents in her article attributable to the G20 and BIS current efforts to achieve necessary financial stability.
I do not repeat them here (because I failed to copy them moments ago) but they were one liners, Ellen called them vague. I call them exquisitely general.
Generals get the job done, that is why we give them four or five stars on their shoulders. More than general, gets into particulars that must be flavored with events fresh up to NOW. Else we will attempt to have anticipated every possible event–which would be a fools errand.
I consider todays article / essay as truly important: it brings the issues before us from which there is no escape. There is also no likely quick path to agreement. We may expect the goal of financial stability to remain around for centuries — especially in light of the potential for natural disasters to destroy assets and installed systems in a moment of time.
The goal of National Sovereignty is already a thing of the past. America and Russia are married. They will soon enough invite into bed several other partners with populations and weapons that require the menage to be good to each other or perish.
Exquisitely general list referred to above copied from Ellen’s article:
* Money and financial policy transparency
* Fiscal policy transparency
* Data dissemination
* Insolvency
* Corporate governance
* Accounting
* Auditing
* Payment and settlement
* Market integrity
* Banking supervision
* Securities regulation
* Insurance supervision
(When I was in government I once made such a list in a plan that was approved for action. My boss and I liked it. One guy for whom I had no respect thought so general a list was inadequate — he wanted to tell generals what to do months ahead of when they would do it.
No doubt some plans have necessary detail as well as lists. But lists carry a lot of meaning when to attempt more is really not possible.)
I do not think the suspicions of Marilyn Barnewall are justified. She is quoted in the main article as follows:
Marilyn Barnewall, who was dubbed by Forbes Magazine the “dean of American private banking,” writes in an April 2009 article titled “What Happened to American Sovereignty at G-20?”:
“It seems the world’s bankers have executed a bloodless coup and now represent all of the people in the world. . . .
President Obama agreed at the G20 meeting in London to create an international board with authority to intervene in U.S. corporations by dictating executive compensation and approving or disapproving business management decisions.
Under the new Financial Stability Board, the United States has only one vote.
In other words, the group will be largely controlled by European central bankers. My guess is, they will represent themselves, not you and not me and certainly not America.”
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America’s relationship to the group’s consensus will not be defined as subordinate, in my view, especially in light of the difficulty that followed the mark to market rule.
We may define it as fully protected the way we are in the UN and NATO.
I think there is some resemblance between our need to seek global financial stability and our need to establish domestic consumer protection. This was the subject of Obama’s weekly radio address.
In both cases, the individual is up against distant authors of text that may be unintelligible yet still can ruin your life.
The President promised to clean up the text that has bit us badly at the bank when we applied for a mortgage or credit card.
I wrote him my approval of his promises which was posted to his blog.
Subject: Consumer Protection Agency
Thank you Mr. President for a radio address I can believe in. What you promised I believe you and our nation can deliver to protect us all from exploitation by unreadable material and unknowable economic mistakes in business and government both.
Forgive me if I liken many bankers’ products to the government’s internal revenue code.
Along this line, I would like to see an economic security agency, like your Consumer Protection Agency, and the existing National Security Agency, that would examine enough data relating to macro and micro economics for the Treasury and central bank to be better prepared to guide the American economy — and to prevent its race to the bottom because we have no agency to make us aware of our course, and of the storms and shoals in our path.
The global economy is a battlefield where all the nations are blindfolded and thrashing around as though history had told us nearly nothing at all.
Slightly tangential to solutions that will be necessary for individuals to oppose institutional exploitation of each of us (as may be threatened by the BIS and the “money power”, ) is the current major effort at the URL below to enter its PARTICIPATION phase.
The phase has just begun.
Can we get on board, the time for this phase is short?
I believe this blog can supplement individual efforts to participate in our overlapping missions here and at the White House.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/
This is an example (a contribution to the White House call for participation) of an approach to jobs and self-employment loans that might protect people from the “money power”.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND PARTICIPATION:
Most of the newest new media aims at making new friends and expressing yourself to others whom you do not know but want to connect with.
Such media has been successful as a money-raising tool by savvy newest media gurus, activists and natural born adapters.
Some new media list jobs. Some new media help with micro-loans by reaching borrowers or their local micro-loan lending activity and by reaching and connecting to would-be individual and collective lender-investor sources.
We once had the United States Employment Service.
But, because private employment agencies paid taxes in support of the USES, their private sector trade association successfully lobbied to kill the USES.
What we need now is help from an activity like Open Government to combine JOB SEEKING, MICRO-LOANS, and FOLLOW THROUGH (on both) — as an information intensive area — where government would connect, support and simplify, as much as possible, the FIND WORK solutions (that self-starters do,) for their slower cousins, who also must earn a living on their job or in self-employment.
Because this need for help is so immense, it would have to be decentralized. The fifty states and thousands of counties would make appropriate units for organizing the help.
Google and their like would probably be pleased to partner, with the Departments of Labor and Commerce, in starting the first prototype approach to the solutions needed.
In your article you mention that political colonialism is now a thing of the past. I wonder if that is a true statement or not considering the fourteenth amendment. In an article Judge L.H. Perez writes:We learned that the 14th Amendment was: 1) fraudulently, unlawfully, illegally proposed by the U.S. Congress rendering it null and void at the outset; 2) ratified in the Southern states by ‘rump legislatures’, literally by military force at bayonet point — threat, duress and coercion — rendering it null and void in the second instance; 3) had nothing to do with giving freed slaves citizenship status and instead created a new status of citizenship for all Americans (U.S. citizens rather than Citizens of our respective states) which in effect enslaved us all; 4) dissolved and replaced constitutional law with the ‘Laws of Commerce and Admiralty’… and 5) in a very real sense became a new constitution within the constitution.
This seems to be a valid argument by many sources. If you want more information on the unconstitutionality of the fourteenth amendment here is the link:http://www.sweetliberty.org/fourteenth.amend.htm
It is also argued that the banking interest were behind the drafting of the amendment.
Thanks for actually reading the report, Ellen, and bringing to the forefront the subtext that other commentators have ignored. One doesn’t hear this news from Michael Hudson, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, Danny Schechter, etc, warm-hearted individuals all. This is a sad thing, perhaps tragic, that the forest gets lost in the trees.
Globalization is a con-game. The vision of one human family and global common purpose that has arisen with electronic communications in the past 100 years has been co-opted by the financial elite that controls this media. And it is astonishing what an anti-democratic, feudal, mindset this group has. I sometimes think David Icke is right and they’re all reptilian shape-shifters. Of course the Queen of the Reptiles hands out copies of 1984! Orwell’s tubercular vision of global despair fills her with joy!
This financial elite, the 6 million or so global superclass,, has a vision and does see the forest for the trees. I have noticed the word “populist” bandied about by the agents of globalization as a term of fear and loathing. Populism is fanaticism, narrow-mindedness, rabble rousing. Our Founders regarded democracy as rule-by-the-rabble, which is why they designed a fake democracy called a “republic”, as a bulwark against “mob rule”, and handed over the money power to the bankers immediately.
The democratic promise of our country has not been realized because of this stubborn contempt of the elite for the common people. They rule by divine right and precedent and use the people as chattel. They fear populist ( democratic ) rule above all and have nightmares of revolution when the debtors arise and take off their heads.
And when we speak of “them”, the media trumpets “conspiracy theory!!!” with the mere press of a button.
We must be XYZ country. We must take back our power. Globalization is a trap. It is a global debtor’s anonymous, in which every nation confesses its failure to stand on its own feet and administer its own affairs. It is a fiendishly clever trap that appeals to weakness and ensnares us with our own failures of character. In a word, globalization is a cult, a vast Jonestown.
There an be no genuine coming together without sovereignty, personal & national. We need a breakdown of this phony globalist system to force us to embrace our traditional values: self-reliance, self-sufficiency, our wonderful Emersonian values of yore. Then we can deal with other nations as equals and be done with this ugly feudalism forever!
Power to the People!
I’m with John Root, the first poster. I’m trying to get people together and carry on the essential work of education. Eventually, I hope that we can host a talk by you, Ellen. Know any people in Asheville, NC?
Thanks Joseph, and yes I do in fact! I’ll write to her.
Joseph Danison has friends everywhere when he opposes globalization of trade and commerce that results in moving production to China and making America survive as a consumer of Chinese products bought partly with money borrowed from China.
Chinese workers oppose it — they are underpaid and cannot buy the product of their own labor. Moreover, Americans without a good income stop buying enough Chinese products to keep the Chinese employed.
But globalization is not a word invented by the free traders and traitors — who today are de-industrializing the former arsenal of democracy.
Globalization (the word) is most often used by people who despise it — people who would change “free trade” to “trade” that would benefit producers of all trading partners — more or less as though it were barter and workers owned all the factories where they worked.
Danison blames the “elite” for betraying this nation and its workers to satisfy the custom of forcing down wages if employers can get away with it. I would say the system of using cheap labor has gotten out of control.
It is up to us, the real elite in values and understanding, to re-invent trade that looks to results and prohibits bad results. Not an easy task. It requires re-thinking wages and prices. Brain research has found the human brain rebel at having to change any habit.
That would work to our advantage if only we had the habit of receiving high wages and preventing cheap imports that threatened national and social security.
Obama know all of these facts. But his brain rebels at the thought of demanding the changes he promised. He could demand the American people protect their own jobs and values. But he sees no way to do this and be greeted with applause by almost all the American people.
I would applaud. Would you?
The spirit of the XIV-th Amendment requires the bill of rights to extend to every State in this nation of 50 sovereign states. It requires such rules as those that define due process of law be afforded to individuals in all 50 States.
The amendment is supported by almost everybody. But the actual cases that apply it may take a trained lawyer to appreciate them. Almost all law is that way. It is not an easy thing to read a legal opinion that now is case law and feel you really know all the history, experience, logic and emotion behind it. It helps if such reading is your hobby or profession.
Ellen…after what you write in this article, do you still support Obama? What do you think about him?
That’s a good question. My woman’s instinct says he is sincere. Anyone who could say in an interview, “I inhaled. Often. That was the point,” has to be sincere. But he is surrounded by advisers, and no doubt that was the deal when he got elected — we’ll support you, but you’ll support our interests in return. Plus, the only reason I know what’s going on in Basel, etc., is that I spend all my time peering closely to find out. He’s got speeches and travel and family. How can a politician possibly have the time to read sufficiently to figure out what’s really going on? He gets briefings, but from whom? My hope is that if enough information trickles out and up, it will reach people with the power and the will to do something about it; or it will reach enough people at the bottom that there will be a groundswell and those at the top will have to listen.
Ellen…that is scary. According to you, he is making policy and making us liable to it without even understanding what it means? So how can we trust what he says if you think that he doesn’t even know what he is signing on to?
How much does any politician know about what he is signing? How much time do they have? What about those 3000 page bills that get signed overnight? They’ve got to rely on their advisers and aides, and the lobbyists who drafted the things. I feel I’m part of what used to be called the “leisure class” in the Middle Ages. They thought it was their duty to research and write and do creative works, because they had the time to do it and the working classes didn’t. I feel it’s my duty to peer closely and report what I’ve found, because most people don’t have the time to do it.
Ellen…I am very glad that you do what you do. I respect you very much. Your book “Web Of Debt” is the best treatise on the subject of the Federal Reserve and our (and the global) Monetary System. I follow your work very closely and I appreciate your analysis. I totally understand about the voluminous bills being past, many pages added at the last minute and even Congress isn’t given time to read it. Take for example this latest Global Warming bill and of course the Patriot Acts.
Thanks Steve! I still harbor this secret hope that Obama will one day burst free of his handlers, rip off his shirt and show his Superman T underneath, but I have to admit there are increasing reasons to doubt.
“What about those 3000 page bills that get signed overnight? They [our leaders and lawmakers] have got to rely on their advisers and aides, and the lobbyists who drafted the things …”
Ellen Brown, quoted above, brings up the matter of legal reform — which ranks high, along with money reform, as great unfinished tasks in modern democracy.
We are victims, not only of human evil, greed, mandarinism, pettiness and ignorance, but of professional legal and accounting procedures that make economic democracy an awesome and even doubtful enterprise.
There have been and are reform efforts to simplify our language and its use for law and commerce. Interestingly, money itself, the thing about which the Web of Debt is troubled, is a human invention that oversimplifies everything.
We get to the bottom line. And there we are with all our mistakes canceled out — as an aggregate number of dollars is said to an answer.
Were we able to account for each and every penny of toil and trauma buried in that aggregate, we might be willing to right our wrongs.
The answer to laws that are a thousand times longer than the Constitution is reform of statutory law as well as changes in the concept of precedent — a practice that will grow the restatement of law to infinite size.
When we finally outsource all hard labor to machines and automated production lines, we shall have to outsource reading to AI machines and allow people to think with maps and diagrams at hand to offer coherent logical paths from problems to solutions.
We may hope at that time there will be ways to condense history and useful knowledge to something less daunting than it is today, and suggests it will be in another thousand years.
NEVERTHELESS — President Obama and the government we have, have not sold America to European central bankers. We must be on guard against lobbyists and false prophets, as well.
A paid lobbyist is a professional liar — usually.
The establishment normally shuns reform and promotes the status quo. But there is legitimate performance of duty — and most of us do that most of time.
When compared to the evil done when the center fails, the American experience has spoken for progress.
Slavery in the past was partially paid for in blood and suffering. Debt remains; and I, for one, would vote to pay more now in money.
Wage slavery in the present, and un- and under- employment today remain monstrous American crimes.
But they are NOT emanating from th likes of Obama or the G20. They are inherited diseases we are all bound by birth to try to cure.
What is going on in Basel that Obama is watching and still promoting is either in America’s and the world’s interest or in the interest of “BIG BROTHER” or a “CABAL”.
Well there is no BIG BROTHER or CABAL.
Marylin Barnewell is quoted without contradiction by Ellen as follows: “In other words, the group [BASEL} will be largely controlled by European central bankers. My guess is, they will represent themselves, not you and not me and certainly not America.”
Obama at the moment believes the BIS under guidance from the G20 will represent America and the rest of the world (as they employ a monetary system of production) as best they can.
Money reform is not explicitly front and center. But liquidity is. That is half the battle. All things point to more and more liquidity. Not enough to make up for a less than full employment budgeting system. But more than ever before.
The full battle is to follow up adequate liquidity AT FULL EMPLOYMENT with effective price control to prevent hyperinflation as liquidity is adjusted to legitimate pursuits of economic growth.
Ellen’s contribution to missing global scholarship is substantial and appreciated. But what is needed is economic theory we already have from Abba Lerner and Maynard Keynes, and economic information we lack that will some day be on the order of our military intelligence database.
We need planning agencies for nations, and others for the UN and even for some watchdog NGO’s and individual theorists, to know vital facts about people, resources and supply chains everywhere —
….. ….. so that we never again find democracy threatened by economic distress that gives birth to Hitlers, Stalins and assorted crazies who mobilize distressed but capable industrial alliances to make war or rebellion against civilization.
BIG BROTHER IN BASEL , the subject of our concern, does present an established central bankers’ association positioned to author CONTROL in favor of capital over labor — if the workers of the world drop their guard.
Ellen began with the warning:
….. “Financial stability is a worthy goal, but the devil is in the details. The new global Big Brother is based in the Bank for International Settlements, a controversial institution that raises red flags among the wary .”
Does she fear the BIS embodies money power with a Eurocentric capitalist agenda?
….. The European Central Bank serves so many nations, Parliaments inside the EU have far less power to rule and empower capital over, say, political rhetoric or religion, — THAN — the giant nations’ governments OUTSIDE the EU, such as our own, China’s and Japan’s.
Still. the, European banking examples of “money power” allied to “military power”, where capital ruled and labor was conditioned to suffer, (as men built great cities owned by their betters,) have also been around — as industrial power has moved from Europe to America to Asia.
Niall Ferguson, the Scottish scholar writer historian at Harvard., argued in his controversial, “War of the World” that the Kaiser, Czar, Clemenceau, Hitler, Churchill and Roosevelt, contrary to intent, introduced their heirs to the new age of Asian preeminence, not American individualism or European enlightenment.
From Wikipedia–“The War of the World, published in 2006, had been ten years in the making and is a comprehensive analysis of the savagery of the 20th century. Ferguson shows how a combination of economic volatility, decaying empires, psychopathic dictators, and racially / ethnically motivated (and institutionalized) violence resulted in the wars, and the genocides of what he calls History’s Age of Hatred.
“The New York Times Book Review named War of the World one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2006, while the International Herald Tribune called it ‘one of the most intriguing attempts by an historian to explain man’s inhumanity to man’
“Ferguson addresses the paradox that, though the 20th century was ‘so bloody’, it was also ‘a time of unparalleled [economic] progress’ “.
Is BIG BROTHER a descendant of Rothschild or Karl Marx?
Ellen saw red flags. But are there any RED flags of communism. Maoism, or isms of any stripe, whose agenda is more than the result of the power of cheap Asian exports that Basel hates but knows no way to curb?
The English Speaking Union that never was established, the English speaking central bankers whose lessons were well learned in Tokyo and Shanghai, all have had a chance to protect the middle class from itself. That class did and does, after all, have the votes.
Yet our middle class gave us Lincoln and now Obama– two champions of “the people”, who oppose purchase of the law by the richest among us.
If WE cannot make money our servant, and cannot overcome low cost production profits as MINDLESS masters with NO AGENDA in support of the West, then what are we to do?
Are we to find BIG BROTHER where there is none?
Are we to find economic democracy where we want one?
Are we capable of following two Scotsmen, Ferguson and Galbraith, to allow their popular economic literature to lead us, away from PROFIT for profit’s sake, toward production to end poverty, pollution and war via rational open minded thought?