“What do you think of usury—what do you think of murder?”
Cato, Roman Statesman, 234-149 B.C.
As we suggested in the previous article, capitalism makes usury not only sophistically alluring for the rich and powerful, but makes it legitimate, and for this purpose it has received widespread criticism.[1]
Capitalism is not just “wealth” or economic exchange in the free market. Soon or later usury is going to sneak in—the exclusion of ethical or moral values in the pursuit of usurious contracts.
As Israel Shamir rightly puts it:
“A capitalist may wish to sell drinking water, but Mammon wants to poison all water in order to force everybody to buy drinking water. A capitalist may build the mall; Mammon wants to destroy the world outside the mall, for the outside world interferes with the only meaningful occupation, shopping…
“Mammon will try to eliminate every distraction to shopping, be it churches, art, forest, rivers, seaside, fresh air, mountains.”[2]
Usury, at its eventual root, is essentially Mammon, and it will destroy whatever interferes with its ideological and economic goal. If destroying the lives of others will bring economic gains, then Mammon will pursue it, no matter how painful the outcome.
And this is where our study gets very interesting because political economy is essentially moral philosophy;[3] in the process, the particular oligarch is going to have to choose whether he wants to cheat the system or not.[4]
If he chooses to cheat the system, inexorably he is going to have to destroy the economic lives of others and ultimately suspend family formation.[5] If he chooses to cheat the system and sophistically suppress the poor, then he has to promote capitalism under the guise of economic exchange.
It must be noted in passing that Adam Smith was not an economist but a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, which had a colony of Whig oligarchy. Similarly, Israeli intellectuals like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who ended up receiving a Nobel Peace Prize in Economics in 2002, were not trained in economics.[6]
Christ told his followers that they cannot serve both God and Mammon at the same time precisely because God is in the business of giving life and abetting the lives of other creatures, namely the poor and needy.
Mammon, on the other hand, is in the business of destroying life sophistically and making people miserable. As a corollary, the love of Mammon will create the most evil act ever conceived. For this reason, the Apostle Paul declared thousands of years ago that “the love of money is the root of all evil.”
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Destroying life in a crude way is of course not acceptable in our society. For example, in 2008 some thieves walked into Harry Winston, Inc., and netted $18.6 million worth of jewels in Paris. The police force did indeed try to pursue investigation precisely because it was a crude criminal activity.[7]
But what if those thieves did use a sophisticated way of stealing? What if they were as deceitful and cunning as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan? What if they used advertising so that Harry Winston, Inc., would give them the jewelries of their own free will? Would the police be running after them if they actually use public relations in order to steal those jewelries?
As we shall see, the answer is no. Once again, what we are seeing here is that economics is essentially moral philosophy.
William Deresiewicz of the New York Times, summarizing the avarice and usurious activity of the rich over the past few decades, tells us unapologetically:
“Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal—just open up the business section on an average day.
“Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.”[8]
Indirectly agreeing with the belief that was popular among Christians for centuries, Deresiewicz moves on to say,
“Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones.
“Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.”[9]
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The thieves who stole millions of dollars worth of Jewels in Paris were not intellectually sophisticated. But one individual who actually used propaganda to dominate other people was none other than Edward Bernays, commonly known as “the father of public relations.”[10]
Bernays, whose uncle was none other than Sigmund Freud, wrote in his book Propaganda:
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”[11]
Although this form of control was widespread in secret societies such as Freemasonry and the Illuminati, although it was hermeneutically regurgitated in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis,[12] and although it was another version of Carl Jung’s occultism and Aryan cult,[13] Bernays was the first person to formulate it in a way that was conducive to mass propaganda. And sex advertising in the 1970s was no exception.[14]
By 1996, Christopher Simpson of American University argued that
“At heart modern psychological warfare has been a tool for managing empire, not for settling conflicts in any fundamental sense…In practice modern psychological warfare and propaganda have only rarely offered ‘alternatives’ to violence over the medium-to-long term.
“Instead, they have been an integral part of a strategy and culture whose premise is the rule of the strong at the expense of the weak, where coercion and manipulation pose as ‘communication’ and close off opportunity for other, more genuine, forms of understanding.”[15]
When the twentieth century progressively became “Jewish,”[16] all forms of propaganda, including sex propaganda, became the norm.
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But when Bernays began to dominate the masses, Wilhelm Reich, a Jewish revolutionary and an ardent student of Sigmund Freud who got kicked out of Germany during the Nazi era for sexually corrupting the masses, began to corrupt Catholic priests and seminarians.
Reich discovered very quickly that the best way to destroy the spiritual lives of priests and undermine their power is through sexual liberation, most specifically masturbation. Here is what the metaphysician observed:
“Let us return to our little girl. The compulsion to pray disappeared when she was made aware of the origin of her fear; this awareness made it possible for her to masturbate again without feelings of guilt.
“As improbable as this incident may appear, it is pregnant with meaning for sex-economy. It shows how the mystical contagion of our youth could be prevented.”[17]
Mystical contagion? Yes. Reich, like Freud, wanted to subvert the Catholic Church precisely because the Catholic Church has always stood against Jewish revolutionary movements. The Church’s teaching, then, was a problem for Reich. He declared,
“We concur, with the opinion of many researchers that all forms of religious mysticism mean mental darkness and narrow-mindedness…”[18]
“Sex economy” quickly became a weapon which eventually weakened the power of Catholic priests and Seminarians. Reich continued,
“We do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of God, we merely eliminate the sexual repressions and dissolve the infantile ties to the parents.
“The inescapable conclusion of all this is that a clear sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life must foredoom every form of mysticism; that, in other words, natural sexuality is the arch-enemy of mystical religion.
“By carrying on an anti-sexual fight wherever it can, making it the core of its dogmas and putting it in the foreground of its mass propaganda, the church only attests to the correctness of this interpretation.”[19]
We can say that Reich was indeed energizing the sexual revolution. As E. Michael Jones puts it,
“The crucial political struggle, according to Reich, was over who controlled sexual mores because Reich understood, like Nietzsche and Euripides before him, that he who controls sex controls the state.”[20]
Reich again put it quite bluntly:
“The uncovering of the sex-economic processes, which nourish religious mysticism, will lead sooner or later to its practical elimination, no matter how often the mystics run for tar and feathers. Sexual consciousness and mystical sentiments cannot coexist.”[21]
One individual who got infected by Reich’s sexual virus was Lisa Palac, who was raised Catholic. Reich revolutionized pop culture, and pop culture
“glued me [Palac] to my friends, expanded my vocabulary and, of course, tipped me off to the big world of sexual possibilities.”[22]
Palac was far from alone. “Sex economy” gradually became “sexual possibilities,” and that too took a life of its own. And by the 1980s and 1990s, much of Catholic universities such as the University of Notre Dame had succumbed to Reich’s virus. Moreover, Catholic priests such as Theodore Hesburgh “used Rockefeller money to fund secret conferences on contraception at the University of Notre Dame from 1962 to 1965…”[23]
E. Michael Jones was fired at St. Mary’s College for opposing abortion. Of all things! Academic freedom, as Jones gradually found out, did not mean that you give reason for your belief with evidentiary foundation; academic freedom meant sexual liberation—and opposing sexual liberation meant were either a bigot or an idiot or even both.
For example, several members of the school posted pro-choice flyers on their door; Jones, in turn, posed a pro-life flying on his door. But the chairman and others thought that it was Jones who was the bigot! After one year at St. Mary’s College, they kicked Jones out.
Michael W. Cuneo of Fordham University has made fun of what he sees as “graphic [sexual] expose of wrongdoing in the American church” in Jones’ writing. He moves on to say that “Jones has wasted few opportunities in driving it home.”[24]
Yet more than ten years later, Jones was right. Many priests and members in the Church are still locked up in Freudian-Reichian sexual manipulation.[25] And as Euripides noted, no country can survive when sexual liberation is unleashed.
And no religious institution can maintain its spiritual or political power when Reich’s “sex economy” has become a problem in the Church.[26]
Cuneo literally mocked Jones for writing about the Freudian/Reichian sexual drive that has become a spiritual and infectious disease among many priests and seminarians. He writes that “Civility and decorum…are qualities notably absent from the work of E. Michael Jones…”[27]
But Cuneo is also the author of the recent book One Last Kiss: The True Story of a Minister’s Bodyguard, His Beautiful Mistress, and a Brutal Triple Homicide—a grim picture of a series of unfortunate events that ended up in sexual murder!
Why hasn’t Cuneo wasted any opportunity in driving this point home? I am sure Jones is having a good laugh over Cuneo’s book.
After Jones was kicked out of St. Mary’s, he intended to tell his story for a magazine called The Wanderer. The president of the college was mobilized and asked that he, the president, review the articles before publication.
Jones said no because that would infringe upon the truth. The president replied, “Truth—Bullshit! Truth—Bullshit! Truth—Bullshit!” Jones never searched for an academic career after that incident, but started a magazine that “would be fully capable of telling the difference between truth and bullshit.”[28]
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It must also be emphasized that political Catholics were subverted by the neoconservative dream. Many of them ended up in neoconservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.
Others ended up writing for neoconservative magazines such as National Review, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, etc. Michael Novak and Rick Santorum are classic examples.
Since 1978, Novak in particular has been promoting the neoconservative ideology to naïve Catholics and thereby deconstructing the Church’s teachings on things like Capitalism, with its vampire teeth called usury.
Novak implicitly declared that economics is based on prior assumptions, i.e. moral philosophy:
“[P]olitics is prior to economics. Before you can have a dynamic economy, you have to have a system of laws based upon consent from the governed.”[29]
What Novak did not want to say was that that “system of laws” is the old usurious contract that has been ravaging mankind for centuries.
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What we are saying here is that Capitalism, like Marxism and Socialism, will eventually destroy nations. One anthropologist and historian who has studied this issue from the early centuries likened modern capitalism to “a structure designed to eliminate all moral imperatives but profit.”[30]
Werner Sombart’s 1911 study The Jews and Modern Capitalism linked Jewish revolutionaries to capitalism, arguing that “no colonial enterprise was complete without” Jewish participation.[31]
Sombart predicted that capitalism would eventually be pursued largely by Jewish intellectuals and businessmen, ultimately leading to the decline of culture. All we have to do is to read the newspaper to see whether Sombart was right or not. What did we learn from Goldman Sachs again?
“From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression — and they’re about to do it again.”[32]
Does the “vampire squid” really want to help their clients? Here is again the assessment of Greg Smith, a Jew who worked for the company as vice president for twelve years but became disillusioned with their covert activities. Smith argues that Goldman Sachs wants to persuade you, the client,
“to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit…Get your clients—some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t—to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them.
“I attend derivative sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them.
“If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all. It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets,’ sometimes over internal e-mail.”[33]
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Intellectual historian Richard Wolin condemns Sombart for linking American capitalism with the Jewish spirit and declares that “for the fascist intelligentsia during the 1930s, such associations would become commonplace.”[34]
Jewish historian Walter Laqueur declares that Sombart had a skewed view of Jewish history and faults Sombart for not talking about “the entrepreneurs who had been instrumental in developing the American economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”[35]
Yuri Slezkine indicts that since “Jews excelled under capitalism,” then “Sombart did not like the Jews,”[36] leaving the impression that somehow Sombart was an anti-Semite.
Both Wolin and Laqueur need to pick up a copy of Jerry Z. Muller’s book, Capitalism and the Jews, in which we read in the very first page and the very first sentence: “Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world.”[37]
The third sentence reads: “But Jews have had a special relationship with capitalism, for they have been particularly good at it.”[38]
Muller, himself a Jewish scholar, continues to say,“Jews have been a conspicuous presence in the history of capitalism, both as a symbol and as reality.”[39]
Muller goes on to cite Milton Friedman, who argued that capitalism has been good for the Jews.[40] Are Wolin and Laqueur willing to shoot themselves in the toes by saying that Muller and Friedman are anti-Semites? If not, why would they accuse Sombart of anti-Semitism?
Moreover, why would Sombart spend time talking about the twentieth century when his book came out in 1911? What is so interesting and laughable is that Muller himself was more than willing to commit intellectual promiscuity by lumping Sombart with anti-Semitism. He writes:
“Sombart’s identification of the Jews with the elements of capitalism that he most deplored provided a scholarly patina for what was already one of the most frequent motifs of anti-Semites…who held the Jews responsible for everything they despised about capitalism and the modern world.”[41]
Didn’t Muller cite Friedman early saying that capitalism has been good for the Jews?
In another publication, Muller again contradicted himself when he declared that anti-Semitism is rooted in the gospels and in Christian churches during the early centuries.[42] Jewish men like Georg Lukacs played an influential role in the 1917-1919 revolutions; for Muller, they did not consider themselves as Jewish but the anti-Semites continued to arrive at the conclusion that they were indeed Jewish.
Moreover, when eyewitness accounts documented the Jewish participation of the Hungarian Soviet, even giving descriptions of how “Christian professors” were replaced by “young Jewish intellectuals” in the revolt, Muller called the details “somewhat fanciful,” leaving the impression that reaction to Jewish participation in revolutionary activity has nothing to do with the Jewish revolutionaries themselves.
Muller moved on to dismiss all of this by saying,
“A clear-eyed analyst would have concluded that although Jews were conspicuously overrepresented in leadership positions, few Jews were communists, and most communists were not Jews.”[43]
If these ideas are true, then we might as well shut down the police department and all other government agencies which seek to draw connections between crimes, ethnicity, and criminal activity. All three elements play a vital role in forensic investigation.[44]
On what grounds, then, should historians, scholars, and people of reason suspend this method when it comes to examining Jewish participation in subversive activity?
Should we apply the method everywhere—even when examining terrorism in the Muslim world, when examining crimes in the black community—but ignore it when it comes to Jewish participation in revolutionary activity?
Moreover, is it rationally sound to quickly conclude that a person who does name names is by definition an anti-Semite?
There is certainly a logical breakdown here that can hardly be ignored. Gathering evidence and drawing logical conclusions from it is a logical step that cannot be dismissed with cheap shots.
Sombart quotes Marx frequently, who in his essay “On the Question of the Jews” wrote,
“What is the worldly basis of Jewdom? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly god? Money.”[45]
For Sombart to connect Jewish participation with capitalism would have been a problem had he provided no evidentiary foundation. Yet Sombart spent page after page laying out the historical backdrop, naming Jewish figures in the nineteenth century who had an influential role in colonial enterprise in South Africa and Australia.
Sombart, as a German economist and sociologist, was well aware of the scholarly literature in that particular field and cited many other scholars who assert the same thing. Moreover, Sombart’s analysis was not all negative, for he declared that
“it was the scientific knowledge of Jewish scholars which so perfected the art of navigation that voyages across the ocean became at all possible. Abraham Zacuto, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of Salamanca, completed his astronomical tables and diagrams, the Almanach perpetuum, in 1473.
“On the basis of these tables two other Jews, Jose Vecuho, who was court astronomer and physician to John II of Portugal, and one Moses the Mathematician (in collaboration with two Christian scholars), discovered the nautical astrolabe, an instrument by which it became possible to measure from the altitude of the sun the distance of a ship from the Equator…
“The scientific facts which prepared the way for the voyage of Columbus were thus supplied by Jews.”[46]
It is therefore irresponsible to say that Sombart’s book displays flashes of anti-Semitism for the same reason a person does not display anti-Americanism for criticizing American policies or Bush or Obama or any other president.
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If Wolin, Laqueur and Muller want us to take them seriously on the Jewish question, they need to tell Jewish revolutionaries to stay away from crimes and covert activities.
Moreover, they need to tell the Zionist regime and Israeli-run NSA (USA) and the GCHQ (UK) to stop manipulating virtually the entire world.[47] The best way to prove that you are not a murderer in court is for you to stay away from committing murder.
We have already seen how companies such as Goldman Sachs cheated clients in order to build their earthly kingdom of Mammon. Jewish economist Lawrence Dudlow admits,
“The heart of the business situation is always the outlook for profits. When the combination of rising costs and falling inflation squeezes profits, then production and employment must be cut back.”[48]
Darwin indirectly gave the intellectual elite a sophisticated tool to propagate capitalism. Michael Shermer himself writes that “Darwin scholars largely agree that he modeled his theory of natural selection after [Adam] Smith theory of the invisible hand.”[49]
There is a certain level of symbiotic relationship between usury and natural selection. We are told that given enough time, natural selection has enough power to create something new.
Through natural selection and long periods of time, magical things can happen: dinosaurs can morph into birds, cows can evolve to whales, etc.
With usury, the same magical thing is possible: given enough time, 30 pieces of silver can gradually become trillions upon trillions of dollars.
Andrew Carnegie understood that magical principle quite well. Carnegie was indeed a classic representative of the Protestant capitalist who dropped his Calvinist background when he discovered Darwin. Once “the tenets of Calvinist orthodoxy” was discarded, Carnegie had nothing left to hang on. He wrote,
“At this period of my life I was all at sea. No creed, no system reached me. All was chaos. I had outgrown the old and found no substitute.”[50]
When he first read Darwin’s ideas, the religious scales fell from his eyes. He declared,
“Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. ‘ALL is well since all grows better’ became my motto, my true source of comfort.”[51]
The new savior, then, was Darwin. But Carnegie was also “obsessed” with Hebert Spencer,[52] the man who actually coined the termed “survival of the fittest.” Biographer David Nasaw writes,
“For the rest of Spencer’s life, Carnegie referred to him in his writings and lectures, sought him out when he visited London, and showered him with letters and gifts…
“What counted most for Carnegie was not simply that Spencer had decreed that evolutionary progress was inevitable and industrial society an improvement on its forbears, but that this progress was moral as well as material.”[53]
For Carnegie, Darwin’s principle and Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” were like immutable physics and mathematics, and you tamper with them at your own peril. Nasaw continues,
“There was, for Spencer, a discernable order to the course of human events and the structure of human societies, study of which would reveal the existence of moral laws that were ‘like the other laws of the universe—sure, inflexible, ever active, and having no exceptions.’ Societies that obeyed these moral laws would prosper; those that disregarded them were doomed to failure.”[54]
Carnegie would often refer to Spencer as “my teacher,” “My Master,” and on some occasions ended his letters with kind words such as “to you reverence.”[55] Nasaw continues to say,
“The law of evolution provided a systematic way of answering [Carnegie’s] questions and explaining, without recourse to the supernatural…It provided a scientific basis for a belief in human progress.”[56]
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Nasaw writes that “Spencer offered Carnegie and his generation an intellectual foundation for their optimism,”[57] and after reading Spencer, Carnegie exclaimed, “Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection.”[58]
Henry Adams, Carnegie’s contemporary, felt almost the same way. He wrote that “for the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law should be evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order.”[59] Nasaw comments,
“Whether they read Spencer for themselves, as Carnegie had, or absorbed his teachings secondhand, his evolutionary philosophy provided the Gilded Age multimillionaires with a framework for rationalizing and justifying their outsized material success.
“In the Spencerian universe, Carnegie and his fellow millionaires were agents of progress who were contributing to the forward march of history into the industrial epoch. Carnegie was not exaggerating when he proclaimed himself a disciple of Spencer and referred to him, in almost idolatrous terms, as his master, his teacher, one of ‘our greatest benefactors,’ and the “great thinker of our age.’”[60]
But Spencer’s intellectual foundation was based primarily on “survival of the fittest,” which was congruent with usury.
But sophisticated form of usury does not eliminate the fact that the idea is evil and destructive. Even people such as Thorstein Veblen, who also wanted to apply the Darwinian ideology to economics, saw problems with it, calling it “the legal right to sabotage.”
The idea is that the rich and the powerful can ultimately stop “the free flow of economic activity in order to maintain the maximum net gain for invested capital.”[61]
Veblen saw that when the “industrial forces” run the country, they can manipulate the economy as they see fit and in the end it will “be ruinous for business.”[62]
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All of this economic mumbo jumbo was expected, since the leading figures of the Protestant movement made usury plausible. In fact, Darwin, Spencer, Carnegie, and more recently Michael Shermer, were all Protestants at one time. (Carnegie wooed Protestant writer Matthew Arnold into his capitalist circle.) And they all came up with a secular version of the Protestant form usury. Adam Smith himself bragged,
“Our forefathers kicked out the Pope and the Pretender [to] preserve the precious right of private judgment.”[63]
It was logical that generational children of the Whig oligarchs would implicitly be in agreement with Jewish revolutionaries to destroy “the Pretender” who traditionally condemned usury in all its form.
In fact, the WASP ruling classing—namely the Rockefellers—made a deal with the Rothschilds back in 2012. David Rockefeller himself acknowledged,
“Lord Rothschild and I have known each other for five decades. The connection between our two families remains very strong. I am delighted to welcome Jacob and RIT as shareholders and partners in the ongoing development of our investment management and wealth advisory businesses.”[64]
In a nutshell, the secularized and “scientific” version of usury (Darwin’s survival of the fittest) and the Protestant/Whig version of usury (Smith’s “invisible hand”) are ultimately two sides of the same coin, though there might be some slight variations here and there.
Darwin’s survival of the fittest had its heyday at the dawn of the twentieth century, during which it horridly massacred the poor, the needy and the powerless.[65]
But when the twentieth century completely became “Jewish,” to use Yuri Slezkine’s own word, the Darwinian/Whig coin ended up landing in the Jewish rabbit whole.
Amos Tversky himself started to think about economic theory through survival of the fittest. He declared that “growing up in a country that’s fighting for survival, you’re perhaps more likely to think simultaneously about applied and theoretical problems.”[66]
The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are other classic examples of the marriage or similarities between survival in the fittest and Jewish ideology. The net result is that both ended up slaughtering decent and innocent human beings.
Those human beings are still being liquidated in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; others are fleeing from their cherished homes.[67]
Moreover, the Jewish ideology is currently destroying other nations such as Syria.[68] It has already taken the lives of at least 73,000 in 2013 alone.[69] The same ideology is marching against Iran.[70]
Put simply, the WASP ruling class (with its secularized version) and Jewish economists will never be able to repudiate the usurious coin because, to parody the biological determinists, the usurious coin is in their DNA. How else? Didn’t their intellectual antecedents propound the same thing?[71] Didn’t Calvin and Luther produced sophisticated reasons for usurious contracts?
Dante would be pleased to put that usurious coin in hell.
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Last year, Pope Francis made the declaration that “unfettered capitalism” is the “new tyranny” on the block. This “idolatry of money” has been dignified by the intellectual elite and been blessed by the rich and powerful. He continued,
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.
“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses 2 points?
“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.
“I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor.”[72]
Pope Francis has been weak on many issues, but he definitely has a point here. The capitalist elite, building on the false dichotomy that you are either a Marxist/Socialist or a capitalist, and ignoring the traditional teaching of the Church that monks and priests and even nuns always value labor, immediately called Pope Francis a Marxist, even though he has made it clearly that “the ideology of Marxism is wrong.”[73]
Walter E. Williams, the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, wrote that the pope has a “tragic vision.”[74]
Being trapped in the perennial “either/or” dichotomy (Marxism/Socialism vs. Capitalism), Williams wrote articles such as “The Virtue of Greed” and “I Love Greed,” in which we read:
“YOU CAN CALL IT GREED, selfishness or enlightened self-interest, but the bottom line is that it’s these human motivations that get wonderful things done. Unfortunately, many people are naive enough to believe that it’s compassion, concern and ‘feeling another’s pain’ that’s the superior human motivation. As such, we fall easy prey to charlatans, quacks and hustlers.
“There’s probably widespread agreement that it’s a wonderful thing that most of us own cars. Is there anyone who believes that the reason we have cars is because Detroit assembly-line workers care about us?”[75]
Obviously Williams knew nothing about the Middle Ages, where compassion and love for the poor, the needy, and real labor actually built Western Civilization, including the most prestigious institutions in the West.[76] He obviously does not know that there is a rigorous alternative to Capitalism.[77]
Williams continues to propound his ignorance at an astronomical rate:
“Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. With the rise of capitalism, it became possible to amass great wealth by serving and pleasing your fellow man.”[78]
Serving and pleasing your fellow man? What in the world is Williams talking about? Please notice that Williams blatantly contradicts himself by making such a categorically false statement.
If car makers really do not care about us and that their primary motive is to make money, as Williams argues, could it be that this primary goal might be in conflict with “serving and pleasing” fellow men? If you doubt the seriousness of this statement, watch how Milton Friedman addressed a similar issue.[79]
Moreover, has Williams taken a look at what economist John Quiggin calls “Zombie Economics”?[80] Has he read Paul Craig Roberts’ recent book The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism?[81] And has he read the recent news about JPMorgan?[82]
What was so laughable was that instead of arresting the representatives of JPMorgan and putting them to jail for “bribery, mortgage fraud, investor fraud, credit card fraud, forgery, perjury, violation of sanctions against Iran and Syria,”[83] etc., the government just asked them to pay some fines! The BBC reported that “No individual executives were accused of wrongdoing.”[84] As Eric Eskow puts it,
“We’ve always been told that ‘crime doesn’t pay.’ Jamie Dimon and the Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase beg to differ.”[85]
In the same vein, Andrew S. Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle writes,
“No matter how egregious and systematic the malfeasance, no matter how many lives have been ruined, no matter how loud the calls for accountability, the big chiefs remain untouched. In Jamie Dimon’s case, they get rewarded…
“Forgotten, it seems, is the list of JPMorgan’s crimes and misdemeanors on Dimon’s watch – mortgage fraud, insurance fraud, illegal billing, kickbacks, manipulating California’s energy market, rigging the Libor benchmark interest rate, turning a blind eye to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme; and who can forget the London Whale? Isn’t another price in order?”[86]
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Rush Limbaugh, a quintessential representative of the capitalist system, declared of Pope Francis,
“But regardless, what this is, somebody has either written this for him or gotten to him. This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope. Unfettered capitalism? That doesn’t exist anywhere. Unfettered capitalism is a liberal socialist phrase to describe the United States. Unfettered, unregulated.
“The Catholic Church, the American Catholic Church has an annual budget of $170 billion. I think that’s more than General Electric earns every year. And the Catholic Church of America is the largest landholder in Manhattan. I mean, they have a lot of money. They raise a lot of money. They wouldn’t be able to reach out the way they do without a lot of money.”[87]
In the last paragraph, Limbaugh raised a serious issue that we will address in the final article on usury and capitalism.
We must say here that Limbaugh either does not know the traditional history of the church on money and how the Church got to possess a large sum of money, or he is deliberately misleading his listeners—or maybe even both.
I do not know which one is the case. I only know that Limbaugh has been pimping the capitalist system for a long time.
Some has decried that Pope Francis has not taken a strong stance against multiculturalism. But the same people could never bring themselves to the fact that capitalism and multiculturalism are in many ways compatible. You cannot have capitalism without cheap labor,[88] and you cannot have cheap labor without people who are willing to work for an unreasonable price. Hence, multiculturalism. And who is smuggling illegal children to the U.S.? Homeland Security.[89]
Pope Francis was still right in line with the traditional teaching of the Church when he articulated,
“Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new.
“Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the ‘leftovers.’
“In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.
“This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.
“To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.
“The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”[90]
Finally, Pope Francis put the final nail in the coffin when he declared,
“Today everything comes under the law of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. Such an economy kills.”
If the WASP ruling class and/or its secularized version want to attack the Pope on multiculturalism, then they must be willing to attack capitalism as well. I am waiting for them to do so. Until then, none of us should take them seriously.
[1] See Graeber, Debt, chapter 11.
[2] Israel Shamir, Cabbala of Power (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2007), 157.
[3] See for example E. Michael Jones, “Adam Smith and Moral Philosophy,” Culture Wars, July/August 2012.
[4] For a classic example, see “Student Debt Debacles,” NY Times, October 24, 2012.
[5] See for example Sabrina Tavernise, “Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.,” NY Times, May 17, 2012.
[6] Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market (New York: Times Books, 2008), 74.
[7] Gregory Viscusi, “Paris Police Find 2008 Winston Heist Jewels, France Soir Says,” Bloomberg, March 9, 2011.
[8] William Deresiewicz, “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths,” NY Times, May 12, 2012.
[10] “Edward Bernays, ‘Father of Public Relations’ And Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103,” NY Times, March 10, 1995.
[11] Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig Publishing, 2005), 71.
[12] See E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: Augustine’s Press, 2000).
[13] For a study on Jung’s occultism, see Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997).
[14] See for example Wilson Bryan Keys, Subliminal Seduction (New York: Signet, 1974); Media Sexploitation (New York: Signet, 1977); Subliminal Ad-Ventures in Erotic Art (Wellesely, MA: Branden Books, 1992); The Age of Manipulation (Lanham: Madison Books, 1989); The Clam Plate Orgy (New York: Signet, 1981); Dave Lakhani, Subliminal Persuasions: Influence and Marketing Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
[15] Christopher Simpson, The Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8.
[16] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[17] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), 260.
[24] Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 42.
[25] See for example Lizzy Davies, “Swiss Guard Veterans Claims Existence of ‘Gay Network’ at the Vatican,” Guardian, January 20, 2014.
[26] Don Lattin, “$30 Million Awarded men Molested by ‘Family Priests/3 Bishops Accused of Stockton Coverup,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 17, 1998; “Report: Accused Priests Shuffled Worldwide,” USA Today, June 19, 2004; “Sex Abuse Victim Accuses Catholic Church of Fraud,” USA Today, June 29, 2010; Yeganeh June Torbati, “Defrocked Priest Who Escaped Law for Years Died in Martinique,” Baltimore Sun, June 6, 2011; Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett, A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2003); E. Michael Jones, “The Many Faces of Cardinal Bernadin,” http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/Fidelity_archives/bernardin.html.
[27] Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan, 40.
[29] Michael Novak, “Who Are The Neoconservative?: A Conversation with Michael Novak,” Crisis Magazine, March 1, 2007.
[30] Graeber, Debt., 320.
[31] Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1913), 29.
[32] Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, July 9, 2009.
[33] Greg Smith, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” NY Times, March 14, 2012.
[34] Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 300.
[35] Walter Laqueur, The Modern Face of Anti-Semitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25.
[36] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 55.
[37] Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, 1.
[42] Muller, The Mind and the Market, 267.
[44] See for example Charles E. O’Hara and Gregory L. O’Hara, Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation, 7th ed. (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 2003), 491; James W. Osterburg and Richard H. Ward, Criminal Investigation, 6th ed.(New Providence, NJ: Matthew Bender, 2010), 520; Michael J. Palmiotto, Criminal Investigation (Lanham: University Press of America, 2004), 113; Stephen Tong, Robin P. Bryant, and Miranda A. H. Horvath, Understanding Criminal Investigation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 40; Gary W. Cordner and Kathryn E. Scarborough, Police Administration, 7th ed. (New Providence, NJ: Matthew Bender, 2010), 19; Joel Samaha, Criminal Procedure (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008), 105; John N. Ferdico, Henry F. Fradella, and Christopher D. Totten, Criminal Procedure for the Criminal Justice, 10th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2009), 427.
[45] Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, 58.
[46] Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism, 31.
[47] For a recent development, see James Ball, “Angry Birds and ‘Leaky’ Phone Apps Targeted by NSA and GCHQ for User Data,” Guardian, January 28, 2014; Salvador Rodriguez, “‘Angry Birds’ Used for NSA, British Spying Efforts, Documents Say,” LA Times, January 27, 2014; “Angry Birds Website Hacked After NSA-GCHQ Leaks,” BBC, January 29, 2014; John R. Quain, “‘Gaming’ the System: NSA Sucking Data from Apps Like ‘Angry Birds,’” Fox News, January 28, 2014.
[48] William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 450
[49] See for example Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market: How Biology and Psychology Shape Our Economic Lives (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2008), 24.
[50] Quoted in David Nassaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 227.
[51] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2000), 104.
[52] David Nassaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 226.
[61] Greider, Secrets of the Temple., 451.
[63] Quoted in Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xxii, 6, 197.
[64] Quoted in Laurie Bennett, “The Rockefellers and the Rothschilds Make a Deal,” Forbes, May 30, 2012.
[65] See for example Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Mark B. Adams, eds., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996); Frank Dikotter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Decline of Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002); Paul A. Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
[66] Shermer, The Mind of the Market, 74.
[67] See for example Nick Cumming-Bruce, “U.N. Sounds Alarm as Iraqis Flee Violence,” NY Times, January 24, 2014.
[68] See for example Amos Harel and Gili Cohen, “Israel Attacked Syrian Base in Latakia, Lebanese Media Reports,” Haaretz, January 27, 2014.
[70] Michael Crowley, “Hillary Clinton Discussed U.S. Approval of an Israeli Strike on Iran,” Time, January 16, 2014.
[71] E. Michael Jones has a good article on this: “John Law and Paper Money,” Culture Wars, April 2012.
[72] Quoted in Naomi O’Leary, “Pope Francis ‘Evangelii Gaudium’ Calls For Renewal Of Roman Catholic Church, Attacks ‘Idolatry Of Money,’” Huffington Post, November 26, 2013; see also Cheryl K. Chumley, “Rush Limbaugh Decries Pope Francis’ ‘Pure Marxism’ Teachings,” Washington Times, December 3, 2013.
[73] Lizzy Davies, “Pope Says He is Not a Marxist, But Defends Criticism of Capitalism,” Guardian, December 15, 2013.
[74] Walter E. Williams, “The Pope and Capitalism,” FrontPageMag.com, December 17, 2013.
[75] Walter Williams, “The Virtue of Greed,” Capitalism Magazine, January 5, 2001; emphasis in original.
[76] For an introductory survey on this, see for example Thomas E. Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (WA: Regnery Publishing, 2005).
[77] For those who would like to examine its tenets, see E. Michael Jones, “Adam Smith, The Jacobite Rising, and The Catholic Alternative to Capitalism,” Culture Wars, June 2012.
[78] Williams, “The Pope and Capitalism,” FrontPageMag.com, December 17, 2013.
[80] John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
[81] Paul Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2013).
[82] See for example Dina Elboghdady and Danielle Douglass, “JPMorgan’s Admission: A Symbolic Victory for the SEC, of Limited Use in Private Lawsuits,” Washington Post, September 19, 2013.
[83] Richard Eskow, “Crime Doesn’t Pay? JPMorgan Chase Begs to Differ,” Huffington Post, January 24, 2014.
[84] “JP Morgan to Pay $1.7bn to Victims of the Madoff Fraud,” BBC, January 7, 2014.
[86] Andrew S. Ross, “You Can Bank on It—A Raise for Dimon but Not Retribution,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 25, 2014.
[87] “Rush Limbaugh vs. Pope Francis: Talk Show Host Attacks ‘Pure Marxism’ Of ‘Evangelii Gaudium,’” Huffington Post, December 12, 2013.
[89] Stephen Dinan, “Homeland Security Helps Smuggle Illegal Immigrant Children into the U.S.,” Washington Times, December 19, 2013.