HOW THE WORLD NOW WORKS

A good summary of the type of people we are all dealing with: “This is pretty much how it works. What appear to be so-called Third World countries that can't get themselves together are for the most part people who've been robbed and brutalized just short of death. Ask not for whom the bell tolls... These same crooks will cut your throat too the second it appears profitable to them.” 

THE BRITISH PEOPLE FINALLY AWAKENING?

We read in the Guardian: “Protesters have targeted more than 35 branches of Barclays bank, with pickets, poetry readings and even colouring competitions, in another of a series of days of direct action organised by the UK Uncut group. They were highlighting Barclays' admission that it paid just £113m in UK corporation tax in 2009 – a year when it rang up a record £11.6bn in profits.
Several branches were closed to the public as protesters staged peaceful sit-ins, impromptu reading groups and creches in dozens of cities and towns across Britain, including Edinburgh, Birmingham, Liverpool and Lewes. Supporters of UK Uncut said the plan was not to shut the banks down but to "open them up", occupy them and transform them into "something people need but will be cut"… Ruth Griffiths, 36, a UK Uncut supporter, said: "Today we are transforming the banks into schools, leisure centres, and libraries and forests, because it's society that's too big to fail, not a broken banking system."

UK UNCUT: Welcome to the Age of Austerity
The banks have run the global economy into the ground. Bankers, encouraged by the government, gambled recklessly with our money, and they lost. Spectacularly. Remember 2008? In the UK, the government decided it had to step in with a bail-out because these banks were ‘too big to fail’. According to the Bank of England, the cost of this bail-out now exceeds £1trillion. The result is that all high street banks- from Barclays to RBS- owe their existence to public financing. What did we get for our billions? A banking system that serves ordinary people rather than the super-rich? No. Regretful bankers who refuse to reward themselves with massive bonuses? No. How about increased financial regulation to ensure this crisis couldn’t happen again? No.

The government has done nothing to stop it being business as usual for banks. What’s worse, the money that was given to the bankers is the money now being taken from the poorest in society, guaranteeing a rise in poverty, debt and inequality. Nearly £7 billion will be paid out in bank bonuses this year. This sum is more than the first wave of public spending cuts. We are not all in this together because it’s us who will pay if education, health, housing, libraries, woodland and much, much more, disappears from our lives. Who’s telling us we must make these cuts? A government led by a cabinet of millionaires, in bed with the bankers, which is now pulling off an audacious con-trick in front of our eyes. This is how their story goes. The crisis was caused by a bloated public sector. We binged away all our money on luxuries like healthcare and free education and council services, care for the elderly, for people with disabilities, school sports and free school meals for children living in poverty. Now the country is bankrupt and we must repent, detox, cut back. We have to relinquish our welfare state to appease the circling money men. Welcome to the Age of Austerity but don’t worry because we are all in this together. We say – don’t believe their lies. This is their crisis, but there is no austerity for the bankers.

POSITIVE MONEY: "One Good Cut" Alistair McConnachie of http://ProsperityUK.com writes:
The foremost campaigning group for Money Reform in the UK - has launched a new sub-campaign called "One Good Cut"
It has produced a 3-and-a-half-minute video on the subject of the ability of banks to create money. "Whilst vital public services are slashed around the country, ordinary people are being asked to pay for a crisis caused by the banks. Yet at the same time, banks are one of the most heavily subsidised businesses in the world, receiving up to £130 billion of (U.K.) taxpayer support every year.
By taking away these privileges, we can raise enough to make the spending cuts unnecessary, and stop the banks from blowing up the economy again. The changes we need to make are surprisingly simple, but if we don't fight for it, the banks will continue to run off with more and more of our tax money every single year while our public services and our economy crumble around us."  

PEOPLE EVERYWHERE ARE AWAKENING

by Betty Luks
In last week’s On Target we sought to get a clearer picture of what is behind the unrest in the Middle East – what is the truth of the situation and what is the propaganda put out by the corrupt ruling elite. The headlines of Sarakenos’ article “Democracy Without Economic Independence is Worthless” (On Target Vol47, No7 2011) summed up the situation now before us all. Since then the unrest has spread to other Arab states.

The people, that is ordinary citizens like you, me, us, have braved the guns of the ruling elite’s brutal thugs and still said ‘no more’. But what comes next? Revolutions are dangerous affairs and can go terribly wrong for the people; two examples come to mind, the French and Russian Revolutions. For the people to gain economic independence there is the most urgent need to change the policies of all political parties. To waffle on about ‘democracy’ – which in the context of freedom means the self-rule, self-government, of the people themselves - without a change in policy of the purpose of the nation’s financial system is simply empty rhetoric.

Read carefully the following articles on the betrayal of the peoples by their political representatives – in secret deals with the corrupt and fraudulent money power (Mamon) - and weigh up the truth of that New Testament [paraphrased] observation: “The love of money, that is, the preference for money in terms of personal advancement, above all other considerations, is the root of all kinds of evil”. True or not?  

KEISER REPORT: FIAT FOOD

The headlines read: “Rising regional tension in wake of Egypt revolt is hitting ‘global markets’”.
Better stock up on pantry food-stuffs, etc. gentle reader. What is your home vegetable garden like? Is it thriving?
Don’t say you weren’t encouraged to become more self-sufficient and learn to co-operate, in more ways than one, with your neighbours. At its most basic level, that is what the Social Credit is all about.  

LET’S 'LAY TO REST' THE BIG LIE OF THE 20th CENTURY

We need to finally lay to rest the lies of the sham 20th century ‘Capitalism-Communism enmity and confrontation’. In 1981, Ivor Benson exposed the nexus operating during the Cold War which miraculously ‘converged’ when it suited the super-rich Capitalists-Communists. That great Russian patriot and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn verified Ivor Benson’s earlier revelations. According to the New York Times “In October 1994, Mr. Solzhenitsyn addressed Russia’s Parliament. “This is not a democracy, but an oligarchy,” he declared. “Rule by the few.” He spoke for an hour, and when he finished, there was only a smattering of applause.”
In Solzhenitysyn’s last book - not published in English as yet but some translated chapters now online – he threw further light on the cosy arrangements between the Oligarchs of Capitalism and the Oligarchs of Communism.

Chapter 19 of “200 Years Together” reads:
“The 1930s were years of an intense industrialized spurt, which crushed the peasantry and altered the life of the entire country. Mere existence demanded adaptation and development of new skills. But through crippling sacrifices, and despite the many absurdities of the Soviet organizational system, the horrible epic somehow led to the creation of an industrialized power.

Assistance flowed plentifully from the capitalist West: Yet the first and second five-year plans came into existence and were carried out not through the miracle of spontaneous generation, nor as a result of the simple violent round-up of large masses of labourers. It demanded many technical provisions, advanced equipment, and the collaboration of specialists experienced in this technology. All this flowed plentifully from the capitalist West, and most of all from the United States; not in the form of a gift, of course, and not in the form of generous help. The Soviet communists paid for all of this abundantly with Russia’s mineral wealth and timber, with concessions for raw materials markets, with trade areas promised to the West, and with plundered goods from the Empire of the tsars. Such deals flowed with the help and approval of international financial magnates, most of all those on Wall Street, in a persistent continuation of the first commercial ties that the Soviet communists developed on the American stock exchanges as early as during the Civil War. The new partnership was strengthened by shiploads of tsarist gold and treasures from the Hermitage.

But wait a second, were we not thoroughly taught by Marx that capitalists are the fierce enemies of proletarian socialism and that we should not expect help from them, but rather a destructive, bloody war? Well, it’s not that simple: despite the official diplomatic non-recognition, trade links were completely out in the open, and even written about in Izvestiya:
“American merchants are interested in broadening of economic ties with the Soviet Union.” American unions came out against such an expansion (defending their markets from the products of cheap and even slave Soviet labour). The “Russian-American Chamber of Commerce,” created at that time, simply did not want to hear about any political opposition to communism, or “to mix politics with business relations.”

Anthony Sutton, a modern American scholar, researched the recently-opened diplomatic and financial archives and followed the connections of Wall Street with the Bolsheviks; he pointed to the amoral logic of this long and consistent relationship. From as early as the “Marburg” plan at the beginning of the 20th century, which was based on the vast capital of Carnegie, the idea was to strengthen the authority of international finance, through global “socialization,” “for control … and for the forced appeasement.”

Sutton concluded that:
“International financiers prefer to do business with central governments. The banking community least of all wants a free economy and de-centralized authority. Revolution and international finance do not quite contradict each other, if the result of revolution should be to establish a more centralized authority,” and, therefore, to make the markets of these countries manageable.
And there was a second line of agreement: “Bolsheviks and bankers shared an essential common platform — internationalism.”

In that light, the subsequent support of “collective enterprises and the mass destruction of individual rights by Morgan-Rockefeller” was not surprising. In justification of this support, they claimed in Senate hearings: “Why should a great industrial country, like America, desire the creation and subsequent competition of another great industrial rival?” Well, they rightly believed that with such an obviously uncompetitive, centralized and totalitarian regime, Soviet Russia could not rival America. Another thing is that Wall Street could not predict further development of the Bolshevik system, nor its extraordinary ability to control people, working them to the very bone, which eventually led to the creation of a powerful, if misshapen, industry.

But how does this tie in with our basic theme? Because as we have seen, American financiers completely refused loans to pre-revolutionary Russia due to the infringement of the rights of Jews there, even though Russia was always a profitable financial prospect. And clearly, if they were prepared to sacrifice profits at that time, then now, despite all their counting on the Soviet markets, the “Morgan-Rockefeller Empire” would not assist the Bolsheviks if the persecution of the Jews was looming on horizon in the USSR at the start of the 1930s…”

MOAMMAR GADFAFI’S TURN TO BE THROWN TO THE WOLVES?

Obviously worried as to how far this revolt could spread, CNN has turned to Mikhail Gorbachev’s warnings to the present Russian ruling elite should the Russian people say “enough is enough for us too"! CNN’s Moscow office reported: “Former Soviet leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev is warning that Libyan leader could be chased out of his own country if he does not begin to bend to the will of the people. Gadhafi reacted so ruthlessly that he might end up being forced out (of his country). I don't want to make predictions or anything, but he's shooting at people; he is using the military and weapons against defenceless people," Gorbachev said.

American-Zionists love him: Readers should do a search of On Target’s online archives for some background on Gorbachev.
In 1987, On Target had this to say: “Gorbachev had nothing to lose and everything to gain by his attempt to halt the Gulf conflict… Gorbachev has from the beginning of his coming to office had the backing of the internationalists everywhere. Zionist leader Edgar Bronfman has said that Gorbachev is the greatest Russian since Peter the Great. Gorbachev has made an agreement with Zionist leaders to move at least one million Russian Jews to Israel.
There are a number of respectable anti-Communists who hold the view that the whole of the Gorbachev strategy, including the loosening of Communist control in Eastern Europe, has been a grand dialectical ploy to dissolve N.A.T.O., to generate a new atmosphere of peaceful coexistence, and to gain massive financial and economic aid from the West…”  

NOW TO SHINE THE SPOTLIGHT ON THE CORRUPT ELITE OF THE WEST

In IT 'S PLANNED THAT WAY! - On Target 24 October, 2008 - Jeremy Lee wrote: “My recent article claiming that the $US dollar crisis was designed has produced further, ample evidence. Secretary to the Treasury Henry (‘Hank ') Paulson, who demanded carte blanche, immunity from legal challenge or surveillance, to manage a tax-funded bailout package of $700 billion for his Wall Street mate, finally had his package bulldozed through. The minority who held the first vote back were subject to arm-twisting and head-kicking, and the second attempt was successful. But the meltdown didn't go away. In fact it spread through Europe and Asia. Prime Minister Rudd and Treasurer Swan departed Australia 's shores for Wall Street after assuring us that we had to have a 'global solution '...

AND NOW FOR AN UPDATE:   Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone journalist asks: “Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?”
It is of course because governments are now in the hands of Money – and do its bidding. Taibbi continues: “Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them (16/2/2011). “Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. "Everything's ***** up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that." I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signalling to the waitress for the cheque. "Everything's **** up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there." Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industry wide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.

Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this b****t would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once." But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is **** up. Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.

Remember this one? 5th April, 2010: Wall Street's Naked Swindle
A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits

UNBELIEVABLE HUBRIS

Bishop Williamson of Eleison: Comments CLXXXVIII (19/2/2011)

Prophets of doom do not make themselves popular, but if they are ministers of God, they must tell the truth. Now some people say that such ministers should not concern themselves with politics or economics. But supposing politics have become a substitute religion, necessarily a false religion, as they put man in the place of God? And supposing economics (or finance) are about to make many people go hungry? Are ministers of God not allowed to ask, with Aristotle, how people are going to lead a virtuous life if they will be lacking in the basic necessities of life? Is the virtuous life not the business of such ministers?
Therefore I make no apology for quoting a remarkable paragraph from a reporter of the prestigious Wall Street Journal who relates how in the summer of 2006 he was rebuked by a senior adviser of then President Bush for having written an article critical of a former communications director in the White House. He says that at the time he did not fully comprehend what the adviser was saying to him, but afterwards he saw it as getting to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
Here are the adviser's own words, as quoted by the reporter :--
People like the reporter, the adviser said to him, are "in what we call the reality-based community, meaning people who believe like you that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." The reporter should forget about yesterday's principles of respecting reality. "That's not the way the world works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality - judiciously, as you will - then we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
(See www.321 gold, Feb 2, "We are Victims of a Financial Coup d'Etat", by Catherine Fitts.)

This is not me moralizing about how the modern world runs on fantasy. This is a Washington insider of insiders, positively boasting of how the modern world is run on fantasy. Do not his words correspond exactly to the fabrications, for instance, of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein's “weapons of mass destruction", "created" to justify policies otherwise impossible to justify? The arrogance of such a scorn for reality, and for people respecting reality, is breath-taking.
The classical Greeks were pagans with no knowledge of the revealed God, but they had a clear grasp of that reality which is the moral framework of his universe, governed, as they saw it, by the gods. Any man, even hero, who defied that framework, like the Bush adviser, was guilty of "hubris", or of rearing up above his proper human station, and he would be crushed accordingly by the gods.
Catholics, if you think that grace does away with nature, you had best re-learn from the pagans of olden times those lessons of nature which are more than ever needed today. Study Xerxes in Aeschylus' Persae, Creon in Sophocles' Antigone, Pentheus in Euripides' Bacchae. Pray the Holy Rosary for sure, but also read the famous classics, plant potatoes and pay down debt, say I!

--- Kyrie eleison.  

THE FALL OF MANHOOD

by John Steele
Betty Luks’ “My Disappointment with the Attitudes of Some Males” [On Target, Vol47 No5, 11/2/2011] remarks that in some remote village communities once men are trained with particular skills, they leave the family unit to go to the cities to seek work. She reflects upon the lack of life-skills of most men and laments about the perilous state we would be in, in a collapse or social breakdown situation.

Of course, her remarks are applicable to both young men and women in the West. It is a product of affluence, consumerism and urbanisation: people have become skilled at being part of a machine, but have lost what it means to be human. An intimate connection to life has been lost. Watch Bear Grylls on SBS Mondays as he deals with primitive survival situations. Few of the people which we see on the streets could catch their own food, light a fire without matches or modern technology, or construct primitive weapons.

Beyond all this, the elites have destroyed manhood, the rugged individualist “John Wayne man” and in its place put a feminised society, one which is easier to control and manipulate. In such a society there is social conformity but no resistance. God help people when the collapse comes.

Further reading: “The Tree of Life” by J. Massingham deals in detail with this situation and it was written in the 1940s! $35.00 plus postage from Heritage Books and VeritasBooks online.  

THE FAILURE OF RACE POLICY

by Brian Simpson
Britain’s “conservative” Prime Minister David Cameron has criticised Britain’s multiculturalism policy, claiming that in part it has created the problem of Islamic extremism. The remarks were made to a Munich Security Conference. Before we get too excited, Cameron also said that young British Muslims were radicalised because they were not able to identify with the collective identity of the UK. Multiculturalism was a failure.
In its place Cameron wants more liberalism, rule of law, equal rights, democracy, freedom of speech and all of that familiar box of tricks; what Cameron called “more active, muscular liberalism”.

I take this to be in reality, simply more of the market, more migration and more globalisation. It has been these forces of “muscular liberalism” of the new right which has destroyed British identity. Further, to assume that all groups can be simply assimilated into the mainstream is equally fallacious. Racial realities aside, there is a limit to how many people can be boiled down in the melting pot before the pot itself melts. British conservatism is alienated from its historical roots and is as much a plaything of the market and global finance as the Australian Labor Party and Liberal Party. The lessons of the reality of race will be hard learning indeed for our decadent civilisation.  

SUPERBUGS AND THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE

by Brian Simpson
An overuse of antibiotics has led to the evolutionary development of “superbugs” – multiple resistance bacteria. Now there is no new generation of wonder drugs waiting to kill these bugs, putting us back to the 1930s as one headline put it. (The Australian, February 8, 2011, p.3) I am no health professional – but my opinion, and I am nobody – is that common sense indicates that people need to get as healthy as possible by good diet and exercise.

Natural remedies may be of use: I have heard that a certain honey has some success against superbugs, but I can’t confirm this. In any case, the emergence of superbugs well shows the limits of science, technology and human ingenuity. Surely part of the mystique of science has come from the controlling of disease and the future failure to do this, will tarnish science’s once shiny armour.  

A TASTE OF THINGS TO COME - SEE YOU IN MOSCOW?

from Lou Cook
The information from ‘Freedom Advocates’ (re ‘Transitions’) was interesting, actually very good, and almost nightmare stuff when coupled to the Murray Darling Basin development plans. I read it last night and still trying to digest it but I am sure it gives informed readers a tummy ache!!
I had the NVIRP (Northern Victorian Irrigation Renewal Project) field officer here last Wednesday; he was a nice enough young fellow; it is a well-paid job for him but a real socialist/bureaucratic conglomeration of everything else for the farmers. If we don't go along with The Plans "we will be left behind" and have to buy in water at our own expense in the future.

There was a time when a prospective farmer moved to an irrigation area because of the water security, but now there is no financial security due to low farm incomes - so stupid to give it any thought. Moving to a high rainfall area is not a good prospect either because old fashioned water conservation projects like Keyline farming are deemed bad practice. Why? Because it prevents water getting into the dams where it can be sold by government!

TRANSITION TOWNS – TRANSITION INTO WHAT?
A warning from our American friends: Transition Initiatives work to prepare local communities to conform to "Energy Descent Action Plans." They also work to conform policies in line with world governance principles including the abolition of private property. Read more:

BOOK REVIEW

“Why I Fight!” by J.T. Lang: Originally published during the Great Depression years, this book details the behaviour of the Private Banks, which at the time, provided all the finance for Australia. We will look at one of these, the Bank of Australasia.
This bank was established in 1835 with an initial capital issue of 200,000 pounds. This grew to 4,500,000 pounds in 1934, representing 8,500 shareholders. Its disclosed reserves, amounting to 4,475,000 pounds almost equalled its capital. The bank had eleven directors, two of whom were also directors of the Bank of England. Others were directors of other banks, of insurance companies, big pastoral companies and railway companies.

The establishment of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is detailed and the struggles by Mr. Lang to get a better financial outcome for all Australians during the Great Depression, culminated in him being sacked by the State Governor of NSW on the 13th May, 1932. Price $28.00 plus postage. Being a reprint of the original, this book is of great historical interest for all Australians.