Visitation: Sins Of The Fathers
As a whole the modern world has constructed a nightmare that we may not be able from which to awake. Oh I know the usual charges of war and famine, and disease abound with out end, such are the non appointed Cassandras endlessly remind us every hour of every day. But those are the merely venal sins of our existence. No the great mortal sins are of a different nature. The first group always comes to an end, sometimes sooner than later, but never lasting long enough to destroy us as a global population. It’s the mortal sins that pose the greatest danger for then threaten to consume everything in their path. Now for those of you who have little or no religious belief and hence reject the concept of sin out of hand, hear me out for I am not a religious man either. True, I do have my belief in a spiritual being but have no need of a god around which to organize a religion. And yes, I do believe that individuals have within themselves a spirit which can reach out and touch other spirits either with love, indifference, or evil. And for me, sin is what my spirit bows to what is evil.
The great Enlightenment of Western Civilization, that foment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we we as intelligent men of reason broke from the bonds of authority, both monarchy and religious so as to declare our independence from such tyranny and claim our individual rights, at first God given and now whatever given, no one today seems to know the answer. Of course all this came with the rise of scientific inquiry which our religious leaders and our royal rulers discouraged lest we show the slightest disobedience to either. We turned from the study of metaphysics to that of physics, such as it was, and now today so many of us worship science as the true religion, the one true god controlled by man. How low we have fallen without true faith.
With scientific inquiry came greater progress in the affairs of men. Here in the west it took us awhile to gain mastery of the seas, to venture out into the unknown where our maps gave fair warning: ‘Here Be Dragons’. Over on the other side of the world the seas were more cooperative and trading in goods was more common between the peoples of the various islands and the mainlands. Exotic goods came overland through the great lands of middlemen, each exacting his toll until what was left became very scarce and very expensive. If we could have gotten pepper by the ton for a few pennies we would have remained ignorant of the seas and never left the security of the land. Now a man can build himself a canoe for the waters of small streams and rivers but cannot use it to navigate the open waters of seas and oceans. For that he needs something bigger and better, the marketing cry of commerce. He must build beyond his individual capacity just as he built great cities. That means capital must be acquired, if not from the monarch then from a collection of other like minded men, a joint stock company. And how shall we induce these other men to invest in out venture? Reduce the risk to only the loss of each man’s investment. Think on that for a moment, need to fight a war? Create a joint stock company so each man can participate in the war….oh wait, war is usually up close and personal, no way to reduce risk here. It seems that risk avoidance does not work for every occasion. So the corporation was born, blessed by kings and praised by bankers. Later the ‘Trust would be born as the way to keep kings from taking too much of an estate. The cause as good, religious men who took a vow of poverty needed a way to keep their possessions. So the monastery and lands are placed in a trust with an administrator to oversee it in the interests of the monks and friars who would inhabit but never personally own the property. But like all good ideals, trusts soon became a way of corruption. Men of financial wealth would create unincorporated joint stock companies that would own these new holding companies, often shielding the identities of its owners. Then cascades of trusts would be created as ways of creating combines and monopolies and control not only the wealth of a few individuals but the economies of nations.
In the 1890s progressive thinking individuals (no not today’s CRT morons), mostly of the republican party decided that enough was enough and helped to pass legislation in both the individual states and in the nation, America, against trusts, busting them up, so to speak. Except the trusts went underground and became respectable corporations, properly chartered and duly registered, assigned legal status and legal duties and legal protections. John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and many more of the old era of trusts owners were the equivalent of our billionaire class today. They set the stage for the ‘rehabilitation’ of the owners of great accumulations of wealth, the creators of not for profit public trusts that existed for the ‘good’ of society. These foundations were endowed with great sums of money and financial instruments (when your foundation owns a big piece of your corporate stock with voting rights and you ‘own’ the board of directors of your foundation, you still control that block of voting stock) and so operate in your personal interests. Just ask Bill Gates how its done.
The final piece of the old puzzle is the revival of the syndicate idea, the ‘improvement’ of the great financial institutions that act as if they own this country. We have hedge funds, pools of investor money run by ‘professional’ managers who may or may not own the controlling interest but who ‘act’ in the interests of their investors. We have mutual find companies that sell shares in its operations and often grow into behemoths of the financial world. Your IRA or 401k may invest your retirement savings with them. We have ‘Venture Capitalists’ corporations where the wealthy wage their bets on emerging corporations and technologies at roughly 20 to 1 odds of winning, but the payoffs are often 20 or more on the dollar. Wealth creates wealth, as they say, but now it is no longer the old fashioned way. With the help of FDR and the federal government and a colluding Congress we found the joys of credit. The former Secretary of the Treasury under President Hoover, Samuel Chase testified before Congress on his opinion of the New Deal. He said it was the first time he heard so many individuals claim that one could borrow one’s way to fiscal solvency. He was correct, it would take a world war to lift us out of the depression with full employment beyond our dreams. We borrowed our way to win a great war and we, as a nation, have been borrowing our way into the future.
The 1960s saw the GoGo years where individuals used borrowed capital to buy failing corporations and weld them into conglomerations whether the would prove viable or not. How man of you know about Ling Temco Vaught? Then the 1990s came and we saw the era of the corporate raiders and buyout artists. Again, using credit one could buy stolid old corporations, rip them apart into profitable entities and sell them on the public block for a pretty profit. In the meantime millions lost their employment as they were deemed obsolete. But what an era of ‘Golden Parachutes’ for the top management, they only lost the race to the top of the heap and retired to their country houses in great comfort, egos bruised but intact. Then came 2009 and the race to the bottom of interest rates. If you want to control economic expansion or contraction, you use monetary policy and that often involves raising or lowering interest rates. But the one thing you don’t do, something the Biden administration and handlers have never learned, is expand the supply of money beyond your ability to control credit. How many economist have told me that credit is not money? I will clue you in, it is money and it spends just like money, but unlike money, when it’s gone you are left with debt to be repaid. Credit inflates the value of wealth. It’s like listening to labor unions and their demand for higher wages. You give them higher wages but in return you raise the prices, you raise the cost of living. My paycheck is bigger but my bills have grown proportionally, I don’t understand.
But the sins of wealth is that it inflates the egos of those who posses it. We as a nation and we are peoples of the world are now governed more closely than by our respective governments. We helped to create this mess, in fact a great many of us demanded it. We wanted the security of lifetime employment our grandfathers enjoyed, but we forgot that most of them never enjoyed such employment. We bought into a lie told to us by politicians, corporate businessmen, and labor unions. The politicians and the unions always believed in other people’s money was there for the asking. The corporate businessmen knew where the other people’s money was, they owned it. The great question is what do we do, how do we reform this system and make it real again? When a cancer grows into a specific lump, you can cut it out, but when it grows and intertwines with healthy cells you need other means of dealing with it without killing the patient. This corruption of the world of finance, both national and international, for there is no longer much difference between the two, this is what will cause the downfall of so many societies.
Say Goodbye To Our Town 