source: Wikimedia Commons
What you're about to read is a fantasy. It's a thought up story with two imaginary characters. Just remember that while you're reading... And if you manage to reach the end of the story, be sure to also read the unreasonably long disclaimer after that ;-)
George is a multi-gazillionaire, just like Gregory. They're not friends, because multi-gazillionaires have no real friends; they realize all too well that those acting friendly towards them are merely hoping that some of their fortunes will rub off on them. Although not friends, they occasionally talk to each other, far away from any walls with ears or eyes, a luxury they could both easily afford of course. Absolute secrecy and privacy during their sporadic meetings was a must, for they both knew that any public knowledge about their modus operandi would certainly cause their downfall...
Gregory: "What's your point George? We're doing great. Our assets in the Military Industrial Complex are making record profits year after year after year! We warmed the sheeple up with the Space Race, in which we beat the Ruski's but established them as a viable military threat to the safety of the entire Western hemisphere. This communist threat to western freedoms will fill our coffers for decades to come."
George: "I know, I know, but still... Our kabaal has made and guarded their fortunes by always looking ahead. The Ruski's never were a real threat: the Space Race bankrupted them, and yes, we've managed to keep the general public unaware of this, but that won't last forever. Besides, we're lucky that communist China isn't willing to make a pact with communist Sovjet Union; if those two were ever to team up, we would have a real enemy to worry about. I say we start working on one or two alternative plans to keep the sheeple afraid."
Gregory: "Well, I still don't see why you're so worried, but I guess it never hurts to have a plan B. Do you have suggestions?"
George: "I've got some possibilities in mind, but nothing definite yet. Let's raise our glasses once more and call it a night; I'll have something more concrete next time we meet."
George: "Indeed, our assets are performing just fine; that idea of yours to expand our holdings in mainstream media companies was brilliant. This will help us in realizing some of my alternatives for our current lucrative arms-race with the Sovjets. It'll also aid us in spreading the propaganda needed to increase consumption, or at least maintain current consumption levels. You see, in order to maximize our profits we'll freeze the income levels of the middle class. Production is skyrocketing, now that we have computers and have managed to let women join the workforce. The working people will be able see our profit numbers, as they are public... remind me to start doing something about that... so they'll demand their cut of the pie when they feel they can't spend more than they used to. What we'll do is... are you ready for it... popularize debts! We'll advertise the American Dream as having a place of your own, so everybody buys a house, and having a credit card. We'll make both easy to get; they'll never complain about their wages not keeping trend with production as long as they can keep spending. We have them by the family jewels Gregory; people with debts won't go on strike either, they'll be too afraid to lose their lousy jobs when monthly debt-payments are due."
Gregory: "That's so evil, I love it! And you know what, that's a great point you make about the repressing effect these debts will have on the will to go on strike, or to bite the hand that feeds them in any other way. I'll talk to my connections in education; it would serve our cause if every student begins their professional career with a debt, so our multinationals can hire them without fear of them ever turning against our interests. We'll just let everybody pay for their own education and give them the opportunity to borrow that money from our banks; better let them get used to being in debt at a young age... By the way, George, did you come up with any alternative boogie-man to scare the sheeple, as to not lose the income from our military industries?"
George: "I'm glad you asked. But first; we'll need political leaders in the hub of the Anglo-American hemisphere to build public support for the needed policy changes. I've seen some promising candidates in England and the U.S. Especially the British one, she's a woman too, I believe I heard someone call her The Iron Lady... But that comes later. The best alternative threat to our safety, the ones to replace the Red Threat, are terrorists. Our Israeli comrades have had some experience with the phenomenon, as have our British allies, with the I.R.A. and the trouble between Ireland and The Kingdom. The beauty of terrorism is that disaster can strike anywhere and at any time. Our C.I.A. operatives have already made preparations to hire some of the Middle Eastern freedom fighters to aid them with fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan; in the future we'll have a pool of assets to choose from. The Soviet Union is eating itself, they're desperate as their national economy is falling to pieces. When mother Russia falls, we'll direct attention to terrorism; we'll just give the sheeple a new Pearl Harbor, and they'll be begging their leaders to take away their liberties in exchange for some false sense of security. And we'll have our new war as a bonus. Works every time."
Gregory: "Well, it's to be expected that the Iron Curtain will dissolve any time now. It wouldn't even surprise me if bricks from the Berlin Wall will be exhibited in museums in the next decade. It's a good thing I already informed our connections in the media and Hollywood; they've started a subtle campaign to start painting bearded men with head-towels as the embodiment of evil. But we'll need to step up the pace. Even with our successful credit card scheme, income differences are growing rapidly; we'll need to think of new reasons for the working class to not revolt against their insanely rich employers. In my estimation, we need a distraction fairly soon, say at the start of the next decade."
George: "Don't worry, dear Gregory. The pieces are already being maneuvered to their desired position on the chessboard. I'm so pleased with the efforts of our Hollywood friends; that wonderful film about that boy who travels back in time... Back To The Future. So brilliant to start the drama with an attack by Arabian terrorists on American soil! And all the other movies with scary bearded men... just brilliant. But yeah, my namesake, George H.W. Bush, will be the next U.S. President at the end of this decade; he'll provide us with the first war in the Middle East. As you well know, our monopoly on creating the world currency, the dollar, rests for a large part on the deal that everyone in the world is obliged to pay for their oil with dollars. Some of the governments of oil producing countries are threatening to weasel out of that deal, so I agree we should move fast, and we will."
Gregory: "This internet thing is proving to be an annoyance; we have no control over it and I can already see our hold on public opinion slipping away. We need a plan to control information flow in that virtual space, or all we invested in obtaining the biggest media concerns will be for naught. We'll have to expand into Silicon Valley soon if we're not to miss that train. But I'm sure we'll manage. In the meantime I'm very content with the way Clinton erased the barrier between private banking and investment banking by repealing Glass-Steagall; it'll take a few decades, but they won't know what hit them when that bubble blows!"
George: "I agree; Clinton was our best candidate to succeed Bush senior. And I think we'll need his son, George W. Bush, to succeed Clinton at the start of the new millennium."
Gregory: "You're just keen to see your own name in the public spotlight again... What's wrong my friend, is the smokey conspiracy room too dark for you all of a sudden?"
George: "Your sense of humor was always.... off. Anyhow, The first Gulf War wasn't enough to justify in the public's mind the need for a permanent military occupation of Iraq. We need a permanent military presence there. The oil and Iran are our real targets here, as well as preventing our friend and ally against Iran, Saddam Hussein, nationalizing his oil. I'm afraid we'll have to perform an old fashioned stab in the back on him. That young boy, Bush junior, he's not the brightest, but he'll serve our purpose well; he has some limited experience in the oil industry and has all the right connections through his father. Did you know his grandfather, Prescott Bush, is rumored to have helped fund the Nazis back in the day? These men are just what we need. We'll somehow give Bush junior his terrorist attack, a new Pearl Harbor, so he can go back to Iraq and finish what his father started."
Gregory: "Don't forget about the Russians and the Chinese. What's left of the Soviets is now Europe's main supplier of natural gas; we'll need to also control ground on Syria, Libya and Afghanistan for pipelines, so we can transport natural gas to Europe and end the Russian stronghold on the European natural gas market. And the Chinese are producing like crazy; their growth numbers are off the charts, it's almost scary. The sheeple at home are becoming restless when they realize their manufacturing jobs are being exported to the developing east. And how long before the services industries move there, now that we have the internet? On the other hand, we did predict this would happen, so I'm curious to hear your plans, if you have any."
George: "How long have we known each other? Of course there's a plan! I trust you haven't missed the recent public uproar about the climate and the environment... After demonizing Islam and igniting the perpetual clash of cultures, we'll have created one other omnipresent public enemy to distract and scare the sheeple with: we'll make CO2 public enemy number two, just behind terrorism. Terrorism just has this nice sense of immediacy about it; the climate scare will be a constant menace hovering in the background, it will open up a new market by making carbon emission permits tradable. And since the oil industry will be the first and biggest to pioneer in alternative and renewable energy, they will be the recipients of the huge subsidies the governments will give freely; their electorate will demand it!"
Gregory: "She's about to blow! We've been showering the world, mainly ourselves, with debt-based 'riches'; now's the time to reap the rewards for all our hard work by simply letting the house of credit-cards fall... Little do the sheeple know that when they bought that mansion, they actually bought a debt. Little did they know that by giving in to the hatred and anger, successfully fueled by the words of George W. after 9/11, and going into war in Afghanistan and Iraq, has caused them to exponentially grow that collective debt even further. Speaking of 9/11, I'm not fully informed about that; the Executives won't leak any information about that and I'm not comfortable with it. Can you tell me, George, if it was us all the way, or did we just push the right buttons to entice the terrorists into performing this attack just when we needed it?"
George: "I know how you feel, I'm left in the dark there too. One thing I know for sure: it wasn't just luck. And what to think of that brilliant performance by Colin Powell in 2003; his testimony in front of the United Nations where he told lie after lie to sell the new war in Iraq. Although it was even better than George H.W. Bush's story about incubator babies, the lie that got us into the first Gulf War, I bet that it'll come back and bite him in the ass in the future. It's a good thing we have others to tell our lies for us..."
Gregory: "Yeah, true, but I warned about the threat of free roaming information on the internet before, and now the web is teeming with conspiracy theories about the whole damn thing; the sheeple are over the initial shock. The 2004 Madrid and the 2005 London bombings were far less effective, and immediately after them the theories began spreading; it's a good thing we've strengthened our position in Silicon Valley. But let's just leave that alone for now; it's not like anything bad happened with regards to our goal of maintaining and increasing control. Hollywood and television are bombarding the public's psyche with stories in which the security cam plays a central role. We've seen employers checking their personnel's online activity, and search engines ensure that people will get trapped in their own bubble of confirmation-bias. Slowly the sheeple will accept a world in which we know everything about them, while they know next to nothing about us. I just hope it's not too slow..."
George: "You underestimate the human mind's ability to bend reality just enough to conform to some preconceived ideal, my friend. All we have to do is keep selling them the right ideals; you stop when the traffic light is red, you work hard, and you exercise your voting power every now and then. I'm interested in what you said earlier; we'll have to ensure we have enough support from the public if we're going to succeed in transferring trillions of dollars from the people to our coffers. We'll have to engrave into the public mind that the world economy will melt down, that the apocalypse is nigh, if they don't rescue our financial institutions with their tax money, with their labor. They already work for the state three to four months per year, so the story will have to be a good one, and it'll have to threaten nothing less than world-order."
Gregory: "That's been taken care of; the world's largest governments will pass this message to their citizens. It doesn't matter if it's Lehman Brothers or Citibank that takes the fall; the sector as a whole will be saved. In the meantime all real-estate that's been bought with debt, will be up for sale for pennies on the dollar, after the fools that thought they could afford a home of their own are evicted. They still don't understand: money is nothing, it's the real bricks and ground that are worth something, and all that real wealth will now belong to us. Just as their labor has always belonged to us. It's clear that the next phase will take place in the far east; our main supporters are already moving to Thailand, China, The Philippines and India, with the smartest among them already encouraging or even demanding their kids learn to speak Chinese. There the cycle of slowly building and then slowly killing the middle class can start all over again. Though we'll have to anticipate a much shorter cycle this time. The EU experiment is dodgy at best and unification of the Americas is going nowhere fast; a new and all-encompassing scare will be needed in the not too distant future keep the people docile. We're already stepping up on the climate scare, but I doubt that'll be enough... And damn that Citi bank to leak those "plutonomy papers"; the fools actually wrote an open letter to our allies, their largest customers, in which they admit the plutocracy is real. I've sent you a copy, didn't I?"
The world is dividing into two blocs - the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. What are the common drivers of Plutonomy? Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist-friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time. We project that the plutonomies (the U.S., UK, and Canada) will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.
source: Plutonomy Report - Citi Group - October 16, 2005
George: "True. And yes you did send me a copy of that Citi farce. The sheeple can rationally understand the need for their industries to move to low wage countries, as it is to keep the economy running in a way that it keeps growing; I still believe that's the best story we've sold so far. After the Bible, the economy has proven to be a much better myth to keep the masses in check. They used to believe they had to be obedient and accept a life of poverty and hardship in order to be rewarded with a heavenly afterlife. Now they believe they have to accept corporate rule and lead a life of hard work in order to be rewarded with a position of true financial freedom, to effectively become one of us... Can you believe that? They actually think themselves equal to us. It's preposterous! But even if they rationally understand the need to keep the myth alive, we can rely on their emotions taking over; as expected, they escape in irrational nationalism, patriotism and fear of the outside world. It could turn out we'll have to take advantage of that, maybe it'll even provide us with that new shock we need to numb them into submissive obedience once again."
George: "The military industrial complex, especially after branching out into the surveillance and espionage business, courtesy of 9/11, is running at maximum output. Oil- and climate-industries are are simultaneously breaking record after record; it was pure genius to make their greatest addiction their greatest enemy, and we couldn't have wished for a better outcome. The western hemisphere will keep burning oil to maintain current levels of comfort, and they'll allow the east to step up pollution in order to keep the cheap products coming into their consumer markets. I'll say it again: this perpetual growth economy is the greatest story ever told, beating even the Bible for it's scope of influence. This new religion is truly global. In the west the taxpayers subsidize their Green Revolution, while their manufacturers sell their pollution rights to the east; another brilliant double-whammy. I say we can celebrate yet another victory over the lesser minds of the masses..."
Gregory: "Not so fast, dear George. Have you totally missed that new thing? What's it called... Bitcoin, that's it."
George: "Bah. Did you HAVE to bring that up? I was doing such a great job totally ignoring this Satoshi Nakamoto nonsense."
Gregory: "It's not nonsense and you know it. Just when we were on the verge of taking full control of the internet's flow of information, this decentralized blockchain comes up to threaten it all. You know as well as I do that the technology itself could be a blessing only if it is in our hands, and it's not. I don't see them falling for something like a centralized government blockchain just yet, my friend. And the timing couldn't be much worse, as Bitcoin was born right after we detonated the credit-bomb and plunged the world into a decades long recession."
George: "I know, I know, don't remind me. Still, I'm not worried yet. Remember that the ones interested crypto-currencies are still a small minority, and that the group consists of the proverbial tech-heads mainly. All we need to do is to criminalize these decentralized experiments and convince the main population of the need to regulate that virtual economy, just as we've always managed to do. We will come up with a way to scare the public away from anarchist decentralized currencies, and into the save arms of REAL money, OUR money. And when they do, this new technology will prove to be a blessing in disguise; there's no better way to keep tabs on public opinion than to know everything about them, and what better way to achieve that than an immutable blockchain in our hands? Remember the words of JFK: an error doesn't become a mistake until we refuse to correct it. We still have time to correct, just like we corrected the JFK error in time..."
If you've reached this far, you have my respect, congratulations and gratitude; anyone could be forgiven for leaving this post in anger, disgust, disbelief or any other negative emotion you can think of. I just thought it would be interesting to paint this conspiratorial picture of my life's history. Now, George and Gregory obviously don't exist and they are not the masterminds behind world affairs nor the architects of the perpetual war. But the world affairs and the perpetual war ARE real. And although I can be certain of absolutely nothing, world affairs have played out in a manner in which figures like George and Gregory COULD exist. Conspiracies are all about secrecy, where democracies should be all about open and freely consumable information. It's interesting to me that we blindly accept the need for secrecy when it comes to strategic economic or strategic governmental decision-making, while simultaneously freely giving up our personal right to secrecy, better known as privacy, so willingly. We have collectively done nothing while we saw democracy being perverted into what we have now; the best democracy money can buy. If information is power, if knowledge is power, then there's a gross imbalance between the citizens one one side, and the corporations and governments on the other side; democracy simply cannot work this way.
How do we know what we know? Seriously ask yourself that question once in a while. I think you'll soon realize that we know most things because we were told they were so, from some form of authority. I don't believe everything I wrote in the story, but I do suspect that the all overarching authority we've created for ourself is a purely economical one. Even though our two conspirators don't exist, the actions and decisions made by the world's largest financial powers have played out in a way in which they effectively BECOME George and Gregory. Even if it's not a devious plan made by old white men in smokey rooms, the plan still exists. Nothing that George and Gregory talked about happened by accident. It's not an unfortunate coincidence that there's so much poverty right next to such abundant riches; that's in the plan too. There are no surprises in the story when viewed from a purely ideological and mechanical standpoint of the free market economy we have known for centuries. When the main drive of an ideology is maximizing personal wealth, it's not surprising when the ones best at doing that rise to the top. The reality of the current plutocracy should surprise no one.
Since the Second World War the world's largest economy has been depending on the weapons and ammunition industry. To legitimize the continued existence of such a profitable source of income, there's a real economic need for continuous warfare. Also there's nothing better for economic growth than to produce the need for renewal. Bombs explode and need to be replaced. Destroyed factories need to be rebuilt, just like demolished homes; whoever scores those contracts is sure to make a killing. But more importantly: the perpetual economic growth needed to maintain the status quo is served by this constant cycle of destruction. You see this tactic deployed everywhere: we're perfectly able to manufacture razor blades that last a lifetime by providing them with a diamond coating. Yes, we can make diamond; you can look that up. But we keep manufacturing the disposable ones. Why? We can make inkjet printers that last longer than their ink cartridges, yet we keep making ones that break down after a certain amount of prints. Ever heard of "planned obsolescence"? You've guessed it: it's real and serves a purely economic purpose.
How do we know what we know? What truths are unshakable? What do we accept without second-guessing, without questioning? How much of it is really our own? I know nothing for sure, or at least that's what I want to believe, even when I know my own truth is a necessary one without which I would likely go insane. What I would like to leave you with, however you feel about all this, is to keep asking questions. Don't believe the story about George and Gregory; I don't because I made it up. But don't exclude the possibility of the existence of persons like these two, or a group of entities whose concerted actions result in a conspiracy like the one between these two. The flow of information is too one-sided and mainstream disinformation is too rampant to be sure about anything; that's why we have to keep questioning their rhetoric, always.
Well, that's about it. Once again, you have my deep gratitude for sticking with me, and I hope I have made some of you doubt some things. If nothing else at least my sanity ;-) Crypto-currencies, the internet of money, could be a deciding step in the direction of a renewed freedom. I hope when mainstream adoption is realized, the mainstream informed public will have shrunk enough to safeguard against the corporate and government efforts to incorporate the technology for their own world-economical purposes. Keep an open mind, stay curious and beware dogmatic mindsets. In the end it is us who will have to make the difference that our shared reality needs.
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep safe, keep healthy!
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