If we smell precisely the stench of the totality of
steps taken in NATO countries in recent months, especially in the United States
and the European Union, we can smell the stench of totalitarian rule or some
would call it, fascism, being quietly imposed on our basic human freedoms. Some
recent examples give pause for reflection as to where we are allowing our world
to drift.
Let’s begin with a most ominous, bizarre, Jesuitical
interview that the Roman Catholic Pope Francis gave to a Belgian paper December
7, comparing what he calls defamatory news to what he called the “sickness of
coprophagia.” He stated:
QUESTION – A final question, Holy Father, regarding
the media: a consideration regarding the means of communication…
POPE – The communications media have a very great
responsibility…It is obvious that, given that we are all sinners, also the
media can…become harmful… They can be tempted by calumny, and therefore used to
slander, to sully people, especially in the world of politics. They can be used
as a means of defamation: every person has the right to a good reputation, but
perhaps in their previous life, or ten years ago, they had a problem with
justice, or a problem in their family life, and bringing this to light is
serious and harmful… This is a sin and it is harmful. A thing that can do great
damage to the information media is disinformation: that is, faced with any
situation, saying only a part of the truth, and not the rest. This is
disinformation…Disinformation is probably the greatest damage that the media
can do, as opinion is guided in one direction, neglecting the other part of the
truth. I believe that the media should…not fall prey – without offence, please
– to the sickness of coprophilia, which is always wanting to communicate
scandal…And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia,
it can do great harm.
Coprophilia is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary
as “marked interest in excrement, especially the use of feces or filth for
sexual excitement.” And coprophagia is eating feces by humans, literally,
eating shit.
What people precisely, Holy Father, have a “tendency
to towards the sickness of coprophagia”? Is this the dominant sickness of the
human race? And if not, why do you make such a disgusting likeness between
eating shit and citizens who read about politicians and their misdeeds or media
that report on same? And who is to judge if factually true dissemination of
facts about political figures from their past is relevant or not to help voters
judge their character? I would say the comments are a perfect example of what
he pretends to condemn.
Were it only a single, off-the-cuff remark by a
religious figure, we could dismiss it along with claims such as the papal
infallibility declaration proclaimed by the Vatican I on 18 July 1870. However,
precisely because of such dogma and of the influence of the Roman Catholic
Church and its Pope, notably in the countries of Western Europe, the United
States and Latin America, such vague and dangerous remarks ought to be taken
seriously as a signal of what lies ahead for the public freedom of speech.
“Fake News”
The papal comments on coprophagia and journalism come
amid an explosion of charges in the USA and EU that Russia is planting “fake
news” as it is now being called, about Hillary Clinton in the US media by way
of certain alternative media. Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign
manager, said “fake news” was “huge problem” the campaign faced in the recent
US election: “I still think we have to investigate what happened with Russia
here. We cannot have foreign, and I would say foreign aggressors here,
intervening in our elections. The Russian were propagating fake news through
Facebook and other outlets, but look, we also had…Breitbart News, which was
notorious for peddling stories like this.”
Online stories that claimed a Washington D.C. pizza
restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, was used by candidate Hillary Clinton and her
campaign manager John Podesta for child sex, the so-called “Pizzagate” Scandal,
is now being used to drum up popular opinion for censorship of the Internet as
well as Facebook and other social media. Senior New York Times reporter David Sanger wrote a
vague, anonymous “according to senior Administration sources,” article on
December 9 under the headline, “Russia Hacked Republican Committee but Kept
Data, US Concludes.” What we are seeing is precisely the kind of fake news that
Hillary Clinton and the Pope talk about. But it is mainstream establishment
media doing the fakery.
The fakery is being orchestrated by the highest levels
of the mainstream media in collusion with NATO circles and intelligence
agencies such as the CIA, which has saturated the ranks of mainstream media
with their disinformation agents according to former CIA head William Colby,
who once allegedly said, ““The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the
major media.” The campaign will continue, likely with some
horrendous stories about some psychopath taking a gun and bursting into Comet
Ping Pong pizza place shooting innocent customers, because it was said he read
in alternative media fake news about the pedophile ring. That already took
place, but the man fired no shots. The population is being manipulated to
accept extreme censorship of internet and other alternative media, something
unimaginable just months ago.
Like clockwork, the “fake news” campaign has spread to
the European Union. After announcing she will run again in 2017 for Chancellor,
Angela Merkel spoke ominous words suggesting government censorship of
independent “populist” (sic) media might be necessary: “Today we have fake
sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions
with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them.” She declared,
“we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it…Populism and
political extremes are growing in Western democracies..” Her remarks came after Google and Facebook cut off ad
revenue to what they declared to be “fake” news sites.
In the EU, especially Germany, populist has an
implicit negative or even fascist connotation as in “right-wing populist”
parties who oppose Merkel’s open door to war refugees policies, or who these
days oppose almost anything her heavy-handed government puts forward.
War on Cash
Now if we begin to see stealth propaganda preparing us
to accept severe clampdown on the one remaining free media, the Internet and
related social media, we can also see an equally ominous, indeed, totalitarian
move to create acceptance for the idea we give up the right to hold paper
money, giving private, often corrupt, banks total control over our money, and
in turn giving government agencies total control over where we spend for what.
This is the so-called cashless society. Arguments put
forward are that elimination of cash will be more convenient to consumers or
that it will eliminate or greatly reduce organized crime and shadow economy
that evades taxation. In the EU, Sweden has already virtually eliminated cash.
Sweden cash purchases today are down to just three per cent of the national
economy compared to nine per cent in the Eurozone and seven per cent in the US.
Public buses don’t accept cash. Three of Sweden’s four largest banks are
phasing out the manual handling of cash in bank branches. Norway is following the same path.
In France today, it’s now illegal to do cash
transactions over €1,000 without documenting it properly. France’s finance
minister Michel Sapin, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, blamed the
attacks on the ability of the attackers to “buy dangerous things with cash.”
Shortly after the Hebdo attacks he announced capital controls that included the
€1,000 cap on cash payments, down from €3,000, to “fight against the use of
cash and anonymity in the French
economy.” In
high-inflation Eurozone €1,000 is not a huge sum.
Even in conservative Germany, a leading member of the
Merkel coalition proposed to eliminate the €500 note and capping all cash
transactions at €5,000. Some weeks later the European Central Bank, where
negative interest rates are the order of the day, announced it would end issue
of €500 notes by December 2018 arguing it made it too easy for criminals and
terrorists to act.
And in the United States, as the campaign to sell
skeptical citizens on cashless digital bank payments increases, JP Morgan
Chase, the largest and one of the most criminal banks in the US, has a policy
restricting the use of cash in selected markets. The bank bans cash payments
for credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans; and it prohibits storage of “any
cash or coins” in safe deposit boxes. So if you have a rare cold coin
collection, you better stuff it in the mattress…
Negative Rates and Cashless Citizens
As long as cash–bills and coins of a national
currency–are the basis of the economy, the central banks of the USA and EU as
well as Japan, are unable to impose a severe negative interest rate policy much
beyond the flirtation today by the ECB and Bank of Japan. If central bank rates
were to go very negative, banks would be charging customers the absurd charge
to make them pay to keep their cash on deposit or in savings at those banks.
Naturally, people would revolt and withdraw in cash to invest in gold or other
hard, tangible valuables.
Harvard economist and member of the Economic Advisory
Panel of the Federal Reserve, Kenneth Rogoff, an advocate of the “war on cash,”
noted that the existence of cash “creates the artifact of the zero bound on the
nominal interest rate.” In his 2016 book, The Curse of Cash, Rogoff urged the
Federal Reserve to phase out the 100-dollar bill, then the 50-dollar bill, then
the 20-dollar bill, leaving only smaller denominations in circulation, much
like what the mad Modi has just done in India.
Any serious observer of the world economy, especially
of NATO nations in Europe and North America since the financial crisis of
September 2008, would have to realize the current status quo of zero or
negative central bank interest rates to prop up banks and financial markets is
not sustainable. Unless cash is eliminated that is.
On April 5, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signed Executive Order 6102, “forbidding the Hoarding of gold coin, gold
bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.” That was
rightly denounced by many as outright theft, confiscation of privately held
gold, by the Government.
Radical solutions such as done by President Roosevelt
in 1933, yet in a monetary order where gold no longer dominates, is clearly
becoming more attractive to the major bankers of Wall Street and the City of
London. Rather than confiscate citizens’ gold, today the Gods of Money would
have to find a way to steal the cash of citizens. Moving to their “cashless”
banking, limiting how much cash can be withdrawn and then eliminating cash
entirely as Swedish banks are doing would enable tax authorities to have
perfect totalitarian control on every citizen’s use of money. Moreover,
governments could decree, as did FDR, that cash above certain levels must be
taxed under some or another national declaration of emergency.
As such bold, radical moves advance, they would of
course be vociferously attacked not on CNN or The New York Times or Financial
Times or other mainstream media tied to those criminal financial institutions,
but in alternative media. Keep in mind it was the uncritical New York Times and
Washington Post that uncritically retailed the fake news that led to
declaration of war on Iraq in 2003, namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction aimed at Washington. That war has spread death and destruction
of a scale unimaginable. No one complained at the time about that fake news.
The protest over moves to confiscate citizens’ bank
holdings would come through alternate, independent media such as Zero Hedge or
countless others. Recently, US media uncritically republished a purported list
of “fake news” blogs and websites prepared by Assistant Professor of
Communications at Merrimack College, Melissa Zimdars. Zero Hedge was on it.
This is not about endorsing or not endorsing any
alternative blog or website. It is about the essential freedom of us all to be
able to read and decide any and all opinions or analyses and not to have
government decide what I am or am not allowed to read. It’s about the freedom
to keep privacy about what I choose to buy and not leave a digital trail that
my bank could release to the tax authorities or to Homeland Security or the
FBI, or sell to profiling consumer operations. Controlling public communication
and controlling private money would go a long way to creation of the perfect
totalitarian state. Not a good idea, I would say.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer,
he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling
author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern
Outlook”
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