There is an old social theory that in order to create a healthier planet, people everywhere must learn the value of collectivism. Its many proponents insist that individual rights and liberties pose a real threat to the health and safety of the “community at large. If we will just put the community before self-centered concerns, mankind can eliminate war and poverty. To many, it is our evolutionary destiny and our moral duty to comply with the spirit of community.

The founders of the Communitarian Network began “shoring up the moral, social and political environment” in the early 1990s. Today the communitarian theory is the basis for hundreds of new global rules and regulations eliminating individual rights, yet fewer than one percent of the affected population knows about it.

Communitarianism was embraced by leaders in every nation after it was financed by the international banking elite. Today the theory of community influences all aspects of life: news, science, money, law, land use, health, education, policing and employment, not to mention the arts, fashion, fundraising, causes and entertainment. Community is the buzzword on everybody’s lips these days.

Economist John Maynard Keynes

News & Opinion
Friday, March 13, 2009

More than half a century after his death, British economist John Maynard Keynes is back in vogue. Can Keynesian economics pull the world out of its slump?

Who was John Maynard Keynes?
The 20th century’s guiding light of liberal economic theory. Born in 1883, Keynes was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and became a prolific writer on subjects ranging from philosophy to probability. He joined the British Treasury during World War I, representing it in negotiations in Versailles over the treaty that ended the war. His experience in Versailles led him to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he condemned the onerous reparations imposed on Germany and sagely predicted the ruin that loomed ahead for Europe. Such unconventional views left him out of political favor for much of the 1920s. But the market crash of 1929 increased demand for his theories—and counsel—on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1936, he published his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which for decades exerted a profound influence on economic thinking and practice.

What was the core of his economic theory?
Disputing the classical free-market belief in an “invisible hand” that guides economies in a natural cycle, Keynes viewed recessions and depressions as symptoms of economic distress that must be treated. He also challenged the prevailing view that governments should always strive to balance budgets. Keynes said the proper response to economic slowdowns was to boost demand in the marketplace, and if the private sector was not investing sufficiently to create demand—as was the case throughout the 1930s—then government should fill the void by spending. It mattered not whether the government was building trains or pyramids—the point was to create jobs so citizens would have more money in their pockets, which would increase demand for goods and services and propel the economy forward.

Did this theory get a real-world test?
Yes. It was called the Great Depression. With the country’s economy in collapse, President Roosevelt followed Keynesian principles by spending heavily on public-works projects. In response, unemployment rates slowly declined through the 1930s, and the economy began to revive. But it wasn’t until the largest public-spending program of all—World War II—that the Great Depression came to an end. After the war, most mainstream economists were more or less “Keynesians.” Time magazine wrote in 1965 that Keynes’ ideas had become so widely accepted “that they constitute both the new orthodoxy in the universities and the touchstone of economic management in Washington.”

Why did Keynes fall out of favor?
In the 1970s, global economic distress defied a lot of Keynesian thinking. Keynesian models projected that the ills of inflation and unemployment had an inverse relationship—if one was high, the other would be low. Government could supposedly keep both at modest levels by adjusting both monetary policy (interest rates and the money supply) and fiscal policy (taxation and spending). But in the 1970s, unemployment in the U.S. hit 8 percent and was accompanied by 16 percent inflation. Inflation in the U.K. and Japan rose even higher, and out-of-control government spending was blamed. Keynesian theory lost its mojo, replaced by the conservative policies identified with economist Milton Friedman. While Keynes emphasized demand, Friedman stressed adjustment of interest rates and the money supply as the primary lever of economic policy. Rather than trying to micromanage the economy, Friedman said governments should lower taxes, lower interest rates, and get out of the way, letting the pursuit of wealth drive a return to economic health.

Why is Keynes suddenly back?
Because of the mess we’re now in. In the current economic crisis, monetary policy has been pushed to its limit. The interest rate charged to lenders is near zero, but lending remains stalled and economic activity has plummeted along with employment. With no tools left in the monetarist kit, many economists favor a government boost to aggregate demand—just as Keynes would have advised. That’s the idea behind the $787 billion stimulus package.

How will the stimulus work?
It will spend billions on public-works projects, health care, education, law enforcement, and other programs in an effort to create jobs and put money in people’s pockets. The key goal is to goose consumer spending and counter the effect that Keynes called “the paradox of thrift.” If everyone tries to save money in an economic downturn, the reduction in spending only accelerates the spiral. With a burst of public spending, the White House hopes to break the cycle and restore confidence, the key psychological factor that Keynes called the “animal spirits.”

Will it succeed?
Nobody knows. Economics can be mystifying. Back in the Great Depression, Keynes said, “We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.” Eighty years later, the experts’ collective understanding of economies is greater than it was in Keynes’ hour of despair. But while the White House can point to broad support for the stimulus among economists, not everyone thinks it will work. Critics contend that government spending is inherently wasteful and that the resulting deficits will suppress private investment by driving up interest rates. They prefer balanced budgets, and their lower risk of inflation, saying that such sound policies will lead to a recovery—perhaps not immediately, but in the long run. To such critics, Keynes once famously said, “In the long run, we are all dead.”

Keynes’ bohemian side
Keynes was at home among the rarefied Bloomsbury set, the collection of artists and intellectuals that cohered in pre–WWI London. He appreciated Bloomsbury’s disdain for convention—he had a lengthy and fairly open homosexual affair with painter Duncan Grant before the war. But despite his bohemian tendencies, he found no attraction in radical politics. Squarely labeling himself a “bourgeois economist,” he used his financial acumen to amass a fortune, including one of the world’s great collections of 20th-century art. Keynes married a popular Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, in 1925; the couple had no children. As a don at Cambridge, he influenced a generation of young intellectuals, establishing himself as one of the most formidable minds of the century. “Every time I argued with Keynes,” said philosopher Bertrand Russell, “I felt that I took my life in my hands and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.”

Keynes’ comeback

John Maynard Keynes and Economic Fascism

Some Alex Jones clips are contained…I’m not a fan of AJ. Nothing against him as person…I just don’t agree with everything he states. My thoughts…its not about inducing fear…its about opening doors to information. Seek your freedom…

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

BY CHRIS PETHERICK

To understand private banking in the United States, you must not only probe the country’s periodic financial crises manufactured by the greed of bankers, but the regulations that came about as a result of the ensuing panics. One such regulation involved state laws that were established to prohibit banks from setting up branches across state lines. Designed to spread the risk by limiting the formation of massive financial behemoths, the rule was eventually ignored by bankers, who knew, as Lord Meyer Amschel Rothschild reportedly said in the late 1830s: “Let me have the power to issue and control a nation’s money, and I care not who writes its laws.”*

Throughout this nation’s short history, honest men knew that the power to saddle a country with debt is dangerous business. Wise men knew that money should be used solely as a means of exchange by many and should not be controlled for profit by the few.

That explains, in part, why, historically, states had reserved the right to regulate banks and prohibited them from opening or owning branches across borders.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that created the national banking system. That law passed by Congress created the beast we now know as our privately owned and operated central bank. In fact, it was the National Banking Act, signed into law by President Lincoln in 1863 in an effort to fund the Civil War, that encouraged a national currency and chartered banks nationally.

Despite Lincoln’s early federalization of banks, states still managed to retain control over what is commonly referred to today as “interstate branching”—a banker’s ability to branch out across borders—and most of them prohibited it. The idea was that Main Street would be better served if banks were locally owned and operated. The risk could be better managed as banks would be kept small and would be spread thinly across the entire country, rather than having them consolidate under massive, global financial behemoths like they are today.

That held until the 1970s, when so-called bank holding companies (BHCs), the corporations that own commercial banks, began popping up. These came under the bailiwick of the Federal Reserve and provided a way for bankers to reach out across state lines and gobble up small, independently owned banks. In a nutshell, BHCs worked with states to liberalize banking laws in order to allow these corporations to acquire banks across the country.

Finally, in 1994, Congress put the final nail in the coffin of community banks by passing the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, which made a federal case out of branch banking. With Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and a cadre of private bankers in attendance, President Bill Clinton, who many blame for selling out the Democratic Party and the country to Wall Street, signed the bill into law on Sept. 29, 1994, ominously saying: “Under this law, as you’ve already heard, banks will be able to operate in more states with less trouble. We wipe away obsolete government-created restrictions, something I’m determined to do in many other areas.”

The Independent Bankers Association of America vehemently opposed interstate branching provisions, arguing that it was “bad public policy; it provides no benefits for community bankers; and it is little more than special-interest legislation to allow our nation’s biggest banks to consolidate their empires.”

But it was all for naught. Under the new federal law, states were given the option of spurning interstate banking, but most rolled over and accepted the change, heralding a new era of mergers and consolidation that was unprecedented in history.

Since that time, under a flurry of mergers, banks were increasingly gobbled up by financial behemoths like Citibank and Bank of America. In 1999, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the quasi-private organization created by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and tasked with insuring Americans’ bank deposits, reported a worrying trend: “At year-end 1990, the 25 largest banking organizations held approximately 22 percent of industry assets; by year-end 1998, this figure had increased by more than two-thirds to approximately 54 percent . . . the consolidation that took place between 1990 and 1997 increased the risk of [Bank Insurance Fund] insolvency by approximately 50 percent, and [the] megamergers that took place or were announced during the 18 months between year-end 1997 and midyear 1999 increased the risk of insolvency further. . . .”

Since that report, bank mergers have only increased in the United States.

As most Americans now know, the current financial crisis and the multi-trillion dollar bank bailouts have only furthered this process, with five global powerhouses now ruling the roost: Bank of America, David Rockefeller’s JPMorgan Chase Bank, Wells Fargo Bank, Citigroup and Warren Buffet’s SunTrust.

http://www.heartlandnews.us/02_19_09_laissezfairebank.html

By Michael Collins Piper

The New York Times published a flat-out untruth on Feb. 7 about the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. And the untruth came from the pen of a distinguished American academic who is author of many much-touted works of history.

In a commentary in the Times, entitled “The Value of Other People’s Money,” Dr. Melvin I. Urofsky, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, reflected on the origins of the congressional measure that created the Federal Reserve System. He said that the measure “allowed Congress to take away banks’ control over currency.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Dr. Urofsky was dead wrong. The New York Times was guilty of perpetrating a falsehood, something which should come as no surprise, considering the fact that The New York Times—which fancies itself America’s newspaper of record—has long been the daily media voice in the United States of the international banking dynasties that control the American money system through their domination of the Fed.

The truth about the nature of the Fed is no secret to Americans who have access to independent newspapers such as AMERICAN FREE PRESS, historical journals such as THE BARNES REVIEW and radio outlets such as Republic Broadcasting (which can be found on the Internet at republicbroadcasting.org).

In fact, as far back as the 1920s, the great American industrialist Henry Ford was warning Americans of the venal nature of the Fed and the plutocratic money masters who created the Fed and who controlled it then as they do today. Ford wrote:

What the people of the United States do not understand and never have understood is that while the Federal Reserve Act was governmental, the whole Federal Reserve System is private. It is an officially created private banking system.

Examine the first 1,000 people you meet on the street, and 999 of them will tell you that the Federal Reserve System is a device whereby the United States government went into the banking business for the benefit of the people. They have an idea that like the Post Office and the Custom House the Federal Reserve is part of the government’s official machinery. . . .

Take up the standard encyclopedias and while you will find no misstatements of fact in them, you will find no statement that the Federal Reserve System is a private banking system; the impression carried away by the lay reader is that it is a part of the government.

The Federal Reserve System is a system of private banks, the creation of a banking aristocracy within an already existing system of aristocracy, whereby a great proportion of banking independence was lost, and whereby it was made possible for speculative financiers to centralize great sums of money for their own purposes, beneficial [to the people of the United States] or not.

In addition, while there has been much written on the Federal Reserve and the reality of what it constitutes— a privately owned and privately controlled money monopoly in the hands of banking institutions—the fact that the Rothschild family of Europe was, ultimately, the primary force behind the establishment of the system on American soil, is not something that is fully understood.

For example, because there were no people named “Rothschild” at the famous meeting off the coast of Georgia at Jekyll Island where the framework for the Federal Reserve was put forth and where the planning for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 established the Fed, there are those who would divorce the Rothschild family altogether from the circumstances. However, the fine hand of Rothschild was indeed on the scene, represented by Paul Warburg of the New York-based Kuhn, Loeb Company, which was under the control of longtime Rothschild associate Jacob Schiff.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/new_york_times_falsifies_169.html

By Michael Collins Piper

OUR GREATEST FOUNDING FATHER and first president, George Washington, probably wouldn’t be ready to celebrate his birthday on Feb. 22 if he were alive today. Having led the 13 colonies to independence from the British Empire in 1783, following the course of a difficult eight-year struggle by those freedom-loving American colonists who followed him, Washington (who lived from 1732 to 1799) would most assuredly be appalled to see that the liberties achieved from the American Revolution are now being flagrantly defied by a number of figures who populate the upper ranks of the administration of Barack Obama.

Six former Rhodes Scholars (educated at Oxford University in Britain) and four others associated with the London School of Economics are serving in key posts in the Obama administration. That’s not good.

Here are 10 of the key “British”—that is, Rothschild —operatives now ensconced in the Obama administration (more can be expected):

Susan Rice—ambassador to the UN; Michael McFaul—head of the Russian desk at the National Security Council; Elena Kagan—solicitor general of the United States; Anne-Marie Slaughter—State Department policy planning staff; Neal S.Wolin—deputy counsel to the president for economic policy; Ezekial Emanuel—senior counselor at the White House Office of Management and Budget on health care policy; Lawrence Summers—head of the National Economic Council; Peter Orszag—director of the Office of Management and Budget; Peter Rouse—senior advisor to the president; Mona Sutphen—deputy chief of the White House staff.

The truth about the Rhodes Scholarships is not known to the average American who is constantly told by the mass media that Rhodes Scholars (such as former President Bill Clinton) are among “the best and the brightest.”

The Rhodes Scholarships—awarded to Americans and students from other former British colonies—are funded by a trust set up by 19th Century British imperial figure Cecil Rhodes, whose intent was to indoctrinate these scholars with the theme that the American colonies should be reunited with the British Empire and that they should work through “public service” to achieve that goal.

But Rhodes wasn’t just some rich madcap dreamer. His ventures were underwritten by the international Rothschild dynasty operating from the financial district in London known as “The City”—the banking center of the Rothschild controlled British empire that also includes the London School of Economics.

So now a clique of internationalists trained in the idea of extinguishing American independence are ensconced in the Obama administration.

And another Rhodes Scholar, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, is widely touted as the great Grand Old Party candidate to “take back the White House” in 2012. Jindal doesn’t offer “change.” He—like the other globalists in the Obama administration—is part of the problem.

All of this is not a “conspiracy theory.” Rather, these facts are well known to those familiar with what the Rhodes scholarships are really about.

A journalist specializing in media critique, Michael Collins Piper is the author of The High Priests of War, The New Jerusalem, Dirty Secrets, The Judas Goats, The Golem, Target Traficant and My First Days in the White House All are available from AFP.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/rothschild_agents_168.html