The Washington Times Sunday, March 9, 1997 PLUTOCRATS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER By Bob Djurdjevic
A crude hand-painted sign on a run-down building in East Berlin, not far from the former "Checkpoint Charlie" crossing which once divided the West and the East, read as follows in July 1995:
"The border runs not between the peoples, but between top and bottom." The implication? The Wall may be down, but the class differences remain.
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the U.S. This is where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the Great American Divide between the relative "haves" and "have nots" has been growing wider and deeper in the last 30 years.
The share of the national wealth owned by the top 1 percent of Americans increased from 22 percent to 42 percent between 1979 and 1996, according to Rep. David Obey, Wisconsin Democrat. The top half percent of the U.S. population saw their wealth surge by 24 percent during the 1980s deregulation period - the so-called "Reaganomics" era.
The top 1 percent gained 12 percent; the top 5 percent increased 9 percent, while the bottom 60 percent of Americans experienced an overall decline in their net worth.
The total compensation of about 30 CEOs of major U.S. corporations surged from 44 times an average worker's wage in 1965, to 212 times in 1995, closely tracking the stock market's spectacular rise, according to a Wall Street Journal survey in April 1996.
So while Wall Street is partying, Main Street is staggering under the weight of corporate downsizing. No wonder the U.S. now leads all developed countries in terms of the top 20 percent of households' income to the bottom 20 percent ratio (11), according to K.K. Ashusito. Japan, on the other hand, has the lowest ratio (4) among the industrialized countries, implying a more equitable sharing of national wealth.
What does such an increased concentration of the U.S. wealth mean? In a word - trouble!
First, it suggests that our society is more a plutocracy than a democracy. Second, it means that history is repeating itself. And those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it - at their peril.
History repeating itself?
Yes. Several times. Arnold Toynbee, a British historian, was perhaps the first person to clearly define the Industrial Revolution in a series of lectures delivered at Oxford University in 1880-1881. His thoughts were posthumously published in 1884, in a book entitled "Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England."
Much of what had taken place in Britain in the 18th and 19th century is now happening in the U.S. under the New World Order banner. A century ago, the rich got richer; the poor got poorer, and the resulting social injustices gave birth to such ideologies as Marxism and Communism, among others. They also led to several revolutions and two World Wars. We are facing the same prospects today.
The reason? Take the concentration of wealth, for example. In 1881, 2,512 Englishmen owned half the land in the United Kingdom, says Toynbee. During the 1980s, the top 2.5 million Americans earned as much as the bottom 100 million.
In 1696, about a quarter of England's population lived in the cities, while three quarters were the rural dwellers. As agriculture was the dominant economic activity prior to the Industrial Revolution, this also meant that three-quarters of Englishmen were able to support themselves off the land on which they lived.
By 1760, however, only half of the population lived in the countryside. And in 1881, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing, only one-third lived in rural areas, with two-thirds of England's 9 million people residing in the cities.
Nor was this necessarily a natural or a voluntary shift of population. In his lectures, Toynbee described the dark side of the revolution. Using their economic wealth to buy political clout in Britain's parliamentary system, a tiny minority of powerful landowners and the newly-minted industrialists, drove the farmers off the land, forcing them into virtual slave labor in their factories. They did it by, either buying up the impoverished farmers' land at fire sale prices, and/or by passing the laws in Parliament which led to a break up of the common ("freeholders") land.
Toynbee contrasts this process with the situation in France and Prussia, neither of which had a parliamentary democracy. The landowners and/or industrialists of the time, therefore, had little political power.
Now, let's pause for a moment with the history lesson, and consider what happened in Britain under Margaret Thatcher's celebrated privatization process in the 1980s. And what is currently under way in France, Germany and several other industrial countries.
The public is being told how privatization is all goodness, because private enterprises can supposedly manage these companies more efficiently than the governments. Maybe. But at what price? And more importantly - to whose benefit?
Obviously to the benefit of these private enterprises' NEW shareholders. But what about the interests of the former owners - the public? One doesn't hear much of a debate on that topic, does one?
Considering that prior to the Industrial Revolution, land was the equivalent of today's industrial assets, isn't then the current privatization wave in industrial societies similar to what had happened in England during the Industrial Revolution? Industrial workers in developed countries are getting impoverished as the English farmers had been, as industrial production shifts to lower labor rate markets.
So it seems that the New World Order, and the worst of England's 19th century Industrial Revolution, are a "déjà vu all over again," in the words of Yogi Berra.
Oh, but the public now gets a chance to buy shares in the companies being privatized, some will argue.
True. But even then, mostly at inflated prices. For, the stockmarket trading, where the NWO architects "coincidentally" chose to place our privatized public assets, is being done by institutions the very NWO elites own.
But an even better bargain is the fact that they get the first crack to buy OUR PUBLIC ASSETS at low prices. By the time we, the PUBLIC, the FORMER owners - now disowned by our bought politicians - get to bid on such privatized assets, it is usually at inflated prices. Plus the commissions, of course, which we have to pay to the NWO-owned institutions which got in on the ground floor of these deals.
Sound familiar, in view of what you now know about what happened in England in the last century?
"The more things change, the more they are the same," Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849.
Not quite. Sometimes they get worse... In Russia, for example, the American elites'-imposed privatization resulted in a massive plundering of the Russian peoples' property by the Boris Yeltsin mafia, Russia's new quislings. Some $350 billion dollars were transferred into the Western banks by the Yeltsin NWO plutocrats, according to Moscow media sources.
Meanwhile, how much did the West invest into its much-heralded "democratization of Russia?"
A grand total of $2.7 billion since the end of the Cold War, according to the United Nations and the World Bank reports. Even the tiny Hungary, 1/14th of the Russian population and 1/184th of its land, got $10 billion during the same period.
In other words, if the public in the West is being ripped off by its ruling elites, just as the poor English farmers were in the last century - and unquestionably we are - then what the NWO plutocrats, the "Princes of the 20th Century," have done to Russia, is the most egregious case of colonial exploitation since the British rule ended in India.
Unlike the poor English farmers, or the colonized British Empire subjects, today's Homo Sapiens has some means of its own salvation without necessarily starting world wars. It's called the PC and the Internet.
In its quests for global profits, the industrialist world has also invented the tools of its own destruction.
"The Internet is very bad for you. Anyone with a PC and an 800-number can become a worldwide distributor," Mike Zisman, a former IBM executive, warned a valued large corporate customer in 1996.
That's the good news. The bad news, however, is that even the PC and the Internet cannot save America from falling apart. In fact, they may speed up its disintegration.
"What’s happening in Bosnia is going to happen in the United States," a highly decorated American veteran told this writer in November 1995. Why would the U.S. break up?
Two reasons: First, demographic forces similar to those which have torn Bosnia asunder are present in the United States. Second, a technological revolution is under way which will accelerate the process, changing forever change the way we think and work. Only one kind of a country is secession-proof - a homogeneous single-ethnic state. The U.S. isn't it. Deliberately not, as it turns out.
The American plutocrats have injected potentially incendiary elements into the nation's ethnic mix. The destructive effects of this 30-year process was described in an excellent book on the subject of U.S. immigration, "Alien Nation," by the British-born editor of the Forbes magazine, Peter Brimelow.
The author explains very clearly why the immigration explosion since 1965 has led to, what he calls, the "browning of America," a "demographic event of seismic proportions." And why the roots of the immigration lie in the liberal elite’s economic interests.
Namely, the lower-paid immigrants not just displace the indigenous workers; they help lower the overall wages of the local people by merely competing for jobs.
The winners, of course, are the business and government elites who own and run large corporations. The "Princes of the 20th Century" are the New World Order's new aristocracy.
The losers, of course, are the "ordinary Americans." They are the "plebes" of the New World Order. They are the ones whom the elites have saddled with the largest national debt in the history of the world in an effort to create an illusion of prosperity and well-being.
Once this "pyramid scheme" collapses, as it inevitably must, the recent citizen protests in Albania will look like child's play compared to the might with which the "ordinary Americans" will strike the NWO aristocracy's version of "taxation without the representation."
BOB DJURDJEVIC Phoenix, Arizona
Bob Djurdjevic TRUTH IN MEDIA Phoenix, Arizona e-mail: bobdj@djurdjevic.com
I think that Bob is right on and you can see it all unfolding more and more every day. The taxpayer today has already put up with more taxation without being represented by our elected government officials on all levels by both parties than did our forefathers who held the Boston Tea Party.
It goes back to those who can afford to buy all the pottery barn chairs at one time without interest and having free delivery and a $100.00 gift card... the rest of us slugs buy one or 2 chairs at a time paying delivery charges and full price each time......either that or to take advantage of the 'special' often put it on credit......
who owns ya baby....who owns ya?????
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
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