REALITY BEGINNING TO BITE

by Jeremy Lee
The gurus on Wall Street are perplexed. The current recession is not responding to the time-honoured Keynesian prescriptions – another dose of debt-stimulant that gets everybody working and investing again. The senior US institutional equity strategist at Salomon Smith Barney, Mr. Tobias Levkovich, says, "This most recent recession is wildly different". With interest rates at historic lows, record subsidies for farmers and a "jolly good war" all of which are supposed to inject steam into ailing economies, nothing is working for the financial witchdoctors.

A mystified Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, expressed the confusion:
"Something is wrong with – what shall we call it? Wall Street, Big Business. We'll call it Big Money. Something has been wrong with it a long time, at least a decade, maybe more. I don't fully understand it. I can't imagine it's this simple: A new generation of moral and ethical zeroes rose to run Big Money over the past decade, and nobody quite noticed but they were genuinely bad people who were running the system into the ground. I am not sure it's this simple, either: A friend tells me it all stems from the easy money of the nineties, piles and piles of funny money (read 'debt-money', J.L) Wall Street learned to play with.
"Those who invested in and placed faith in Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco or WorldCom have been cheated and fooled by individuals whose selfishness seems so outsized, so huge, that it seems less human and flawed than weird and puzzling. Did they think they would get away with accounting scams forever? Did they think they'd never get caught?
"We should study who these men are .... and try to learn how they rationalized their actions, how they excused their decisions, how they thought about the people they were cheating. I mention this because I've been wondering if we are witnessing the emergence of a new pathology: White Collar Big Money Psychopath." (syndicated in The Australian, 1/7/02)
Peggy Noonan could do no better than read Tragedy and Hope, by America's top historian Carrol Quigley, which sets out the international banking agenda for power and control.

Last December the world saw the biggest corporate collapse in history – Enron, with assets of $A112 billion, which turned to dust. Luke Collins (The Australian Financial Review, 1/7/02) wrote:
" .... Yet Enron was only the start. Accounting scandals have now engulfed Global Crossing, Tyco International, K-mart, Dynegy, Qwest Communications and Xerox, with several more likely ...." The Wall Street debacle has finally punctured faith in the US dollar itself, and round the world people are pulling their American investments out and looking uncertainly for somewhere else to put them. The rush to gold – the final 'panic station' – has already begun.
The effect on the American people is drastic. Peter Hartcher, (AFR, 5/7/02) described it thus:
".... Markets are governed by greed and fear; and it was pure greed in the 1990s and now it's pure fear .... There are three dimensions to this problem. First, 87 per cent of Americans already believe that big business has too much power in Washington, according to a Harris Poll. "Second, a majority, but only a slender one at 53 per cent, believes that Bush is interested in protecting the public interest. Another 41 per cent think he is more interested in protecting the interests of large corporations, according to a Gallup Poll.
"And third, the President's personal record is under fresh scrutiny. "For the past two days, the President and his spokesmen have been fending off reporters who persist in asking questions about George Bush jr's role in some dubious transactions conducted by a company called Harken energy in 1989 ...." The implications are that Bush, a director of the Texan firm and a member of its audit committee, sold almost $US1 million in shares shortly before it crashed. He flouted the law by not disclosing the transaction for eight months – explained as an 'oversight'. The Securities and Exchange Commission later ruled that Bush had broken the law. But no action was taken.
As the facts are revealed, all Bush's demands for 'integrity' in the administration of corporate law are in tatters. To make matters worse, the company Halliburton, once headed by Vice-President Dick Chaney, is under investigation. All of which seems merely the tip of the iceberg.

Hartcher continued:
"... The second critical question is ...whether there will be any more Enrons, any more Global Crossings, any more Arthur Andersons, any more WorldComs? The Conference Board, a non-profit New York research group, surveyed nearly 100 corporate ethics executives in May, and asked them how many more major ethics scandals they expected to be revealed over the next 12 months. The average answer: six .... It's conceivable we'll see six big new cases on a WorldCom scale out of this - the evaporation of $US150 billion ($270 billion) in shareholder wealth - but it's also conceivable we'll see many dozens of mid-sized ones ...."

Who will be hurt most? The banks? Not on your life! A BusinessWeek article, carried in The AFR (5/7/02) said:
" ... The banks have become masters at offloading the financial risks of their lending by repackaging and selling it to pension and mutual funds, insurance companies and even ordinary investors .... The outstanding debt of non-financial companies more than doubled, to $US4.9 trillion in the first quarter of 2002 ...."

So it's pensioners and household consumers who will, as usual, bear the brunt of the unfolding collapse. It will be interesting to learn how much of Australia's superannuation funds are invested in these scandalous multinational corporations. The second half of 2002 looks ominous indeed. The crisis is not quarantined to America. Over the past year the Finnish sharemarket has fallen 32 per cent; The German sharemarket has fallen 28 per cent; Britain 17.5 per cent. In America the Nasdaq has lost 32 per cent after a 46 per cent drop the year before. The Dow Jones has fallen 12 per cent in the last 12 months and is sliding every day, with the occasional jump - just as in 1929. Each corporate crash rocks the foundations of another.

DISPENSATIONAL DELUSIONS

Perhaps it's just the drama of the moment. But all of a sudden there is a massive upsurge of interest and speculation in "end-times-prophecy". The 'Darby-Schofield' form of 'count-down' religion has been around a long time, gripping the sign-seekers. But the new surge is something else. Even Hal Lindsay's "The Late Great Planet Earth", written in the sixties, is having record sales.
TIME magazine (1/7/02) devoted its front cover and its major feature article to the phenomenon, under the heading
THE BIBLE AND THE APOCALYPSE – WHY MORE AMERICANS ARE READING AND TALKING ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD.
The focal point of this resurgence is a series of twelve fiction novels, based on the Book of Revelation, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins under the theme title Left Behind. Book sales have been quite astonishing, the first ten in the series of twelve selling over 36 million copies. Recent events, revolving round last September 11th, have been woven into a neat fit with predictions in the final book of the Bible, attributed to the disciple John, brother of James. Conveniently, the timing starts with the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the predictions that the descendents of ancient Israel will be gathered in the Holy Land before the end comes. The fact that the tribe of Judah was only a twelfth part of Israel, and that the vast bulk of Jews in Israel have no genetic connection with the Israel of scripture is neither here nor there, and can't be allowed to spoil a good story.

For the time being the main beneficiary of all this is the Israel of Sharon, which finds itself overwhelmed by a fervour of misinformed evangelical fundamentalist Christianity, whose grasp of history stopped 2,000 years ago. Obviously, there is no place in this scenario for the aspirations of the Palestinians to a little elemental justice and a state of their own alongside Israel. Even Christian Palestinians are cold-shouldered by many of the churches of the West.
"... Our primary motivation comes from the biblical verses that say he who blesses Israel will be blessed," says Doren Schneider of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. "We see ourselves as part of the fulfillment of the prophecy ...."
How very convenient for the strongly anti-Christian Zionists currently shaping Middle East policy!

Missing from this apocalyptic scenario is any emphasis or thought about the 'Gospel of the Kingdom', which Our Lord exhorted his followers to preach to all nations. Has it, like the mustard seed in the parable, already begun, unfolding through strife and conflict until it subdues the kingdoms of this world – including the money system – reconciling this earth with the will of God, as suggested in the Lord's Prayer? Or is it some future event which only occurs when the remnants of humanity, whatever their professed faith, are destroyed by the carnage around them? The church of more enlightened times was clear on this question. But the 'serial-soapie' of the dispensationalists now has millions transfixed, as the New World Order is shaped into a prophetic event, with all the fatalistic inevitability that implies. The July issue of The New Times Survey will deal with this development in a little more detail.

ISRAELIS HARDLY 'HUMANITARIAN'

DOWNER'S SENIOR ADVISER AND 'GOOD AND EVIL'

by Betty Luks
"Since September 11th, there is now a moral division of 'good against evil', a battle of biblical proportions" according to Joshua Frydenberg, senior adviser to Alexander Downer, Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs (Danya Levy, Australian Jewish News, 5/7/02).
Claiming to be "the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel struggles to uphold the same values that Australia does."

Correction Mr. Frydenberg. That is just not so! Just because Israelis vote at an election every so often does not make Israel – or Australia for that matter – a 'democracy', and Downer and Howard certainly do not speak for all Australians. Israel may be struggling "to uphold the same values" as the Downers and Howards of this world, but that is not the same thing as upholding the values of traditional Australians. In fact, it is not even the same thing as upholding traditional Liberal Party values! The centralist policies of these men is easily discerned in John Howard's response to Edward Rock's letter published in last week's On Target: "In defence of your policy of Globalisation," wrote Edward Rock, "you stated you would not return to 'parochial policies'. I responded by pointing out that your rejection of 'parochialism' and the parish was a rejection of the heart and soul of a Christian society and could only please the centralists who remain true to their prophet Karl Marx..." "I refer now to your 'victory' ," continues Edward to John Howard, "in persuading the Liberal and National Parties to hand over another huge slice of Australian 'parochial' sovereignty to the International Crimes Commission, a product of centralized world power..." Hardly the policies of 'democrats' Mr. Frydenberg

CONSERVATISM, 'CAPITALISM' AND FREE ENTERPRISE

by Betty Luks
What so many genuine conservatives willfully refuse to grasp, to take the time to understand, is that the economic system they vaguely think of as 'capitalism', is governed, controlled by a private financial system based on usury. The essential characteristic of the 'old economics' was the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange; be they land, buildings, machinery or personal credit and ability. The personal ownership of these things had been since the beginning of mankind and were part and parcel of Natural Law. Even the earliest men who owned a stone axe and a bow and arrows, or the most primitive plough and other tools, or domestic animals were not 'capitalists' in the modern sense of the word. They were, and still are in similar circumstances, 'owners of property'. That system would be better distinguished by calling it 'Free Enterprise'.

The distinguishing characteristic of modern 'capitalism' is that it is concerned with the means of exchange; it is a system in which usury – the lending of money at interest – plays a major role. The real dividing line between the old economy and the new, is the privately owned money system based on usury – known as 'capitalism' – which governs and controls it.

Essence of this 'capitalism' is not private ownership
The essence of this 'capitalism' is not the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, it is not the assets; it is the liabilities, the debts, further burdened by interest payments. This 'Capitalism' is the fraudulent system created by the money-lenders, the parasites known in Christ's time on earth as 'Mammon'. As we know, the ultimate goal of this materialistic messianism is world government, world control. For such control, this financial system needed political systems to suit their ends – in this age they are known as fascism, socialism, communism. That is why the following article from South Africa is of such interest. These conservatives are doing their best to survive under a socialist system but see nothing wrong with the usurious financial system governing even socialism. A typical example of 'none so blind as those who will not see'.

WHAT WHITES IN AFRICA DID AFTER THEY LOST

by Jan Lamprecht – Taken from Neil Baird's e-mail
"Prior to the year 2000 the world's Liberals were ever so smug about Zimbabwe and South Africa. They pointed their fingers at us whites in Africa and smugly told us that our worst fears had never been realised. Neither Zimbabwe nor South Africa had collapsed as we had said it would. We looked like fools, and those haughty liberals mocked us. We whites, having lost military and political power were trying to exist under regimes hostile to us, and so we just said nothing. What I am about to tell you has never, to my knowledge, been written about anywhere. The blacks here have long suspected it, but no whites have ever come forth to openly talk about how we work against them. Let me tell you the real reason why Zimbabwe lasted as long as it did, and why South Africa and Namibia have not yet collapsed. The loss of our political and military power did not really change our outlook.

We whites regard ourselves as Westerners and we are believers in capitalism. We generally regard socialism as madness. The new black rulers, being Marxists, were keen to begin socialising the countries as much as they could. They were determined to use their political powers to slowly drive us from the economic front and to get the blacks to replace us. Mugabe wanted to get rid of white farmers since day one. He started out by buying up 20 white farms and turning them into Soviet-style collective farms. This experiment soon failed – so he could not get rid of white farmers as easily as he hoped. He thus had to slow his land reform program and he had to try other tricks. He made slow progress for 20 years until he became desperate and had to speed things up... Farmers were forced to take all their labour problems to a Political Commissar (a nice old communist term). The Political Commissars made the final decision. Mugabe increased income tax until it reached horrific levels... The level to which whites have gone to counter the rules devised to destroy and hobble them financially is the great-untold story of postcolonial Africa. ... They were able to be successful in the face of a hostile government out to get them. It is because whites survived and kept their businesses running, that the economies never collapsed. When Mugabe increased income tax, whites began paying their employees under the table. Half the salary would be taxed. The other half of the salary would be paid under the table. This system kept both the employer and the employee happy... Mugabe is not a complete liar when he says whites are dishonest cheats. We definitely are. But we do so as a matter of necessity and a matter of survival. If it were not for us always engaging in a battle of wits to survive against laws enacted by hostile governments out to get us, we would long ago have ended up on the rubbish heap – and so too would the countries we lived in. Were it not for our cheating then Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia would have collapsed a long time ago.

The African National Congress
It is no different here in South Africa. Ever since 1994, the African National Congress has been out to get us. They have enacted harsher and harsher tax laws... South Africa's labour laws are the most horrific in the world. Indeed, it is one of the main reasons cited by Western businesses for not investing in South Africa. As in Zimbabwe, once you employ someone, you struggle to get rid of him or her for valid reasons... It should be said that the new labour laws have indirectly caused hundreds of thousands of black people to lose jobs, which they had under Apartheid... Whenever the government comes out with a new set of laws intended to interfere with the way businesses are run, the white management then hold conferences and brain-storming sessions to try to figure out ways of lessening the effects of socialism on their businesses... In this manner, whites have managed to survive, and sometimes even prosper, in conditions, which previously nobody would have thought possible. Were it not for this white creativity, and the ability of whites to keep companies afloat even on the most uneven playing field (where everything favours the blacks), a great number of businesses would have collapsed by now. Even so, at the beginning of 2001, it was announced that South Africa experienced an all-time record bankruptcies.

Let it be said that the whites in Zimbabwe managed to survive
The greatest achievement of the whites in Zimbabwe has been their ability to survive for so long in the face of a clandestine attack and battle of wits, which lasted 20 years. Even as Mugabe is about to destroy them, they are not totally without hope. Some of them have deliberately run their farms deep into debt, and taken the borrowed money and then bought high-priced assets in the cities or taken the money out of the country. So when Mugabe comes to take their farms he will find himself sitting with farms, which actually belong to the banks. Let it be said that the whites in Zimbabwe managed to survive against unbelievable odds right to the end... Similarly, here in South Africa, their best hope is to continue murdering the farmers, and to hope that most whites will leave due to the unbelievably high crime. As with all things, we are constantly fighting back. The high crime rate only spawned lots of security companies and inventions... It should be said that while many whites feel we are fighting a losing battle, we are remarkably successful at holding out against black dominated Marxist/Socialist governments who use all their legal and political power to try to destroy us.
Here in South Africa, 1,300 white farmers have been murdered since the early 1990's... Farm attack statistics show that even though the number of farm attacks have doubled in recent years, the number of actual deaths per annum have not doubled... Here in South Africa, where white people make up 14% of the population (as compared with Zimbabwe where whites are down from 5% of the population to less than 1%), we still have a lot of clout. We control most of the economic activity in this country. Were it not for our cunning, and our counter-measures, this country's economy would have collapsed a long time ago. The same is true of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe should have collapsed more than 15 years ago.

The whites could have sabotaged the country
It is we racist whites who could have sabotaged these countries, but are in fact the only factor preventing total collapse. It is white people who never go on strike. It is white people right now in Zimbabwe who are defying the government and who refuse to stop farming. It is our work ethic, and our commitment to our task and our discipline that is keeping things from falling apart completely. So the next time some smug arrogant liberal tells you that their liberal solutions were a success in Zimbabwe and South Africa, just smile and remember what I told you.
Jan Lamprecht can be reached at: pbs@iafrica.com

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