For over 200 years our ancestors worked and struggled to make Canada one of the bright spots on the world map - peaceful, democratic, progressive, prosperous, providing an ever-improving life for all of its people, a country consistently rated among the best in the world with the brightest of futures. And then something happened during the 1970s - although some things certainly continued progressing - technology, for instance, never stopped looking for and finding new and better ways of doing things - other things stopped progressing and started regressing. Instead of general living conditions for everyone getting better as the years went by, things started going backwards. Poorer jobs with poorer wages and less security for the average family instead of better jobs with more money and security. Regressing social safety nets, our national health care program getting attacked instead of strengthened. Less safety and honesty and civility throughout our land, less democracy, less openness and accountability from our politicians, less honesty and intelligence and more propaganda and superficiality from our media, a people more and more becoming petty and mean and angry and bitter and grasping rather than happy and content and generous and enjoying the fruits of a life well-lived. From wherever ancestors go, ours must be wondering what happened ...


PART I: What happened? They took it all away...
1: What's Happening ...
Compared to a couple of generations ago in Canada, we seem to be taking apart our country, or at least standing by whilst others dismantle it, rather than finishing the job our ancestors started of working hard to create a great society, much of which work involved beating back robber barons or other would-be undemocratic rulers who wished to appropriate the wealth created by the many for their own personal fortune, and building a great, free, prosperous democracy capable of and devoted to providing a good life for all its citizens. Instead, for instance, of adding improvements like drugs or dental coverage to the national health care system over the last couple of decades, or modern improvements like fully computerized national records and integrated health centers in every community with ever better access for citizens, we've been (or 'they've' been - 'we' don't seem to get asked much, just told what they're going to do, whether we much like it or not) 'delisting' all over the place and adding user fees and reducing medical staffs and seats at universities so in 'modern Canada' it's hard to even find a doctor for a non-emergency visit. Instead of better courses at more affordable tuitions in our universities, we've (they've..) been dropping liberal arts courses - the foundation of a good education which is the essence of a good, well-rounded citizen - and replacing them with MBAs designed for nothing more than promoting a shallow 'me-first money-first screw-you she-with-the-most-toys-wins-haha!' attitude in its graduates, cutting funding for pure research and demanding a commercial connection which when found is then passed on to some business, and hiking the fees of everything to the point where many cannot afford to even think of accruing the debt they'd need to get a degree. Highways are crumbling or being turned into toll roads for private businesses after we pay to build them, we're selling off national assets often at fire sale prices, and public schools are charging for books and after-hours use of their facilities that used to be happily provided free. Public transportation outside of and between major cities is barely functional. Our parliament has degenerated into an adolescent name-calling chaotic partisan sham from the national assembly of intelligent debate it once at least aspired to be and even was at times, something most intelligent, caring Canadians hang their heads in shame and despair at rather than point to with pride. The political process seems determined to drive wedges between more and more groups of Canadians rather than bringing everyone together.

The average Canadian now has more work for less money, more stress in daily life, smaller savings and more debt, less security on the pension front, we have a government far deeper in debt than ever before, and using that debt to justify cutting progressive social programs our ancestors worked generations to establish, claiming 'money problems' (whilst ever bragging about greater corporate tax cuts), rising crime rates of every sort, homelessness and food banks formerly not to be thought of in such an advanced, civilized country, higher unemployment and fewer decent jobs, road rage and gang violence and a population taking more prescription pharmaceuticals than ever before to deal with stress and depression, a financial roller coaster of booms and busts and recessions and bank bailouts destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens, more bankruptcies every year, and on and on and on, every day there are new horror stories about our failing country in the paper. ¹

These are not trivial, transitory things, they are the kinds of fundamental things that go to the heart of our belief of ourselves as a progressive, prosperous, caring country and people, that indicate a change in the underlying direction of our country. Thirty years of continually decreasing quality of life and a country falling more and more into disrepair and debt and chaos and incivility is not a 'blip' of some sort, it is obviously a sign of some serious structural problems that are not being dealt with. If Canada was your friend or brother, you'd be (I hope) becoming very worried about all of this. 'Progress' has to mean more than simply a growing GDP, producing more consumer items and bigger ROIs for the wealthy investor crowd, it has to involve things that raise the quality of life for all, like sound national finances, better jobs and working conditions, improvements to health care and education systems rather than cutbacks, less stress, more security, etc and etc, and if we had been progressing in any serious fashion over the last 30 years, then surely these things would be improving every year rather than growing worse every year, as they had been improving generally over the first couple of hundred years of the country's existence.

So it would well behoove us, I would think, if we are interested in getting our country back on a path to a better future rather than a continually degrading one, to start asking - What happened here?

2: Actually, Capitalism happened ..
Well, the answer isn't that difficult to figure, once you start thinking about everything. Capitalism happened. Yes, capitalism has been with us for a couple of hundred years, as the latest incarnation or appellation of the 'those who would be kings' faction we have had throughout history in one form or another in every society, but sometime during the 70s, in Canada, a 'tipping point' happened, and Capitalism, or more correctly the small group of wealthy people who would be identified as the leading capitalists in Canada were such an exercise ever performed, became not just one of various factions competing for influence in our government, but became the dominant force in our country. (..but capitalism is Good, isn't it? ) When this happened, things started being done in the interests of these wealthy and powerful capitalists, and against the interests of 'we the people'. Despite massive propaganda extolling the wonders of capitalism (in, where else, the capitalist media..), the two interests ('wants a decent, peaceful life' common citizen vs 'wants great wealth and power' capitalist) are quite obviously very much not the same, and now, some thirty years later, the results of putting the interests of capitalists ahead of the interests of 'we the people' in a systemic and systematic way are what we see around us, and are about what you would expect - more of what capitalists value, less of what 'ordinary people' find important in their daily lives. Capitalists, for instance, value maximum profit for themselves - and quite obviously, if there is a great deal more of the national wealth going into the bank accounts of the wealthy there is a great deal less for the rest of us, in every way, of the finite pie that is our 'national production'. Since the economic-political system known as capitalism became a nameable entity in Dickensian England, those at its helm have been known for their preference of things like an uneducated, desperate workforce with minimal rights or options or power - fewer unions, fewer safeguards for unemployed people, with less of the national income wasted on looking after them, makes for a more compliant work force which can be forced to work harder for less money if they want to have any life at all that does not involve food banks and sleeping under bridges in Canadian winters for they and their families. Exactly as we have been seeing, exactly as a government run by capitalist interests would do their best to facilitate. (although there is precious little about options to capitalism in the Canadian capitalist media, for quite understandable reasons, there are other ways of arranging national economies in which the balance of interests is much less skewed in one direction - for examples of countries where capitalism is not, at least yet, dominant, consider the European Nordic countries, which are both the most prosperous countries and the strongest social democracies in the world, and where the people's interests are much better looked after than in 21st century Canada (and which you do not read much about in the Canadian capitalist media, which is doing their collective best to make Canada more like the United States, Capitalism Central). The neo-conservative adage begun in Thatcher days - TINA - is very much nothing more than capitalist propaganda - there are, indeed, alternatives, and much better ones for 'we the people') (Social Democracy? What's that?)

Capitalists had been in bad graces in the public eye for the previous couple of generations before their surreptitious silent coup in the 70s due to the excesses during the 1920s leading to the Great Depression and WWII and the resulting anger of the people who were forced to endure those times, but like any bad smell they had never gone away during the post-war years when our grandmothers and grandfathers were standing tall against the would-be elite rulers and making Canada a leading socially and democratically progressive country, they had just retreated to the background to let the dust settle and regroup. During the 50s and 60s they worked on regaining their influence through modern PR-based means of population manipulation, and by the late 60s, with a public lulled to inattention through a few years of prosperity and progressive advances and a lot of 'what's good for GM is good for America!!' feel-good corporate advertising, the capitalists, perhaps sensing it was 'now or never' as a truly socially progressive Democracy threatened to actually become established in Canada through popular politicians such as Tommy Douglas and a people who increasingly believed in themselves and their country and a becoming-dangerously-truthful and not-corporate-controlled national media in the CBC, made their play. Rolled the dice, as various less circumspect of the new breed of capitalist-puppet politicians would later phrase it concerning other capitalist gambits. And came up sevens.

Such successful realpolitik maneuverings as happened behind the scenes during that time when the capitalists took over our government are never recorded in the official annals whilst they are occurring, as official annals are controlled by the people doing the maneuvering they wish kept out of the public eye, in the same way that serious illnesses such as cancer can become established in a person without their knowledge, but symptoms can identify many diseases quite accurately after the fact, and the evidence is compelling that a capitalist takeover, by whatever behind-the-scenes means, occurred during the 70s (not only in Canada, of course, but in other western English-speaking would-be social democracies as well, but this essay is primarily about Canada).[more on the capitalist takeover here ] A reading of history through an appropriate lens alert for such things makes clear from the policies and direction of our country since then that capitalism became the guiding force of Canadian politics during this time, as hindsight clearly shows that both major parties began at that time to morph into two branches of the 'Bay St' capitalist party, a Canadian version of the elite-dominated royalist-disguised-as-ultra-conservative US Big Business Party with its two tweedledee-tweedledum branches. The transition was not, of course, overt or publicized, as the appearance of a functioning democratic system had to be maintained for democracy-demanding and expecting Canadians if a rapid counter-revolution was to be avoided as the great reversal began to become evident a few years later, and any number of superficial 'differences' (including the re-alignment of various political factions into new parties as the old PC party was decimated by angry voters in 93) could be and continue to be presented by the media as 'major policy options' to maintain the fiction of 'voter choice' and 'distinct parties' during or between elections. But in the key policies there are no true options, as the dominant parties have acted as one since this time - the key policies which shape our country such as embracing 'free trade' and 'TINA globalisation', or the focus of the overall macro-economic policies of our country. Policies which are obviously good for capitalists and bad for Canadians, and which, it seems quite safe to say, a majority of Canadians would never accept were the pros and cons of the distinct options honestly offered for open debate and meaningful democratic choice.


3: The Cornerstone of the Capitalist Coup: Controlling our money
The central key economic policy option set in place during the 70s as the capitalists, with the iron fist of economics in the velvet glove of media massage, took over the economic policy-making reins of our country, the cornerstone for the changes to come, the results of which we are living with today as noted in the opening paragraphs, the policy which signalled that de facto control of our country had been turned over to the capitalists and capitalist interests, was that the government withdrew as the controller of the Canadian money supply and turned this central power over to commercial banking interests. This policy had major implications for the future of the country, even more important than the so-called 'free trade' that would follow a few years later - and yet this all-important policy shift was never debated by the public or discussed in the media, or declared as such by the government or offered as an option during an election campaign. The appearance of our financial sovereignty was left undisturbed, but in reality the control of our country had been surrendered to hostile forces. (there will be much protest, of course, claiming that of course the government oversees the Canadian Money Supply through the much publicized Governor of the Bank of Canada and his wise and fearless fractions-of-a-percent adjustments of the 'overnight lending rate' every few weeks - but an impartial analysis of what has happened in the country over the last 30 years in regard to the money supply indicates that, much like the Great Wizard of Oz, such claims are a great deal more smoke and mirrors than reflections of reality, made as with the wizard's Great Green Smoke to fool the Canadian public into believing fantasies and keeping them away from things others wish them not to know .. Read on ...)

Note this clearly, it is the cornerstone of everything that has happened to our country since the 70s. Although it is the very lifeblood of our country and every modern country, even the basics of this most important of all economic and financial policies, the origins and control of our money supply, are never taught to most Canadians, nor talked about in the mainstream media, nor is this most important subject ever talked about during elections or on the evening news or radio talk shows beyond the most meaningless generalities, and thus most Canadians are not aware of anything about our money supply and who creates and controls it. But the changing of this key central policy during the 70s enabled the bringing of true social progress in our country to a halt, and marked the beginning of the great reversal of everything Canadians held and hold dear and fought for for generations.

The banks have always been powerful in Canada and every country, and have always created some of our money as 'reserve-based loans' as they do everywhere - but following the Crash of 29 which caused such hardships to so many people for so many years during the Great Depression, the Canadian Government formed the Bank of Canada and enacted some laws designed to control the power of commercial banks, and from then until the 70s the Canadian government, executing its role of looking out for the best interests of the Canadian people as a whole, used our Bank of Canada to supply some of its financial needs rather than using commercial banks, and to carefully oversee the Canadian money supply, and monetary policy, to prevent the bank excesses which had led to the Great Depression from happening in Canada. But then, during the 70s, as noted above, the government, behind closed doors and carefully avoiding any public discussion of this major policy change, stopped following these policies which had kept our economy stable, and effectively backed away from money creation and oversight of the money supply altogether, and turned control of our money over to commercial banks. Commercial capitalist banks. The rest, as they say, is history.

It is an unarguable fact of life in our modern world that they who control the money, control everything else, and during the 70s 'our' government turned control of our money over to commercial, capitalist banks. The interests of capitalists are not the interests of the average people, the workers, and the society we are experiencing today is the society wished for by the capitalists, not the progressive society most Canadian people want for their country and that our forebears fought for. It is a society shaped at its very roots by the way money is created and controlled, and our money today, or more accurately the electronic money which actually comprises over 95% of 'our' money supply, is created and controlled in the interests of those who create and control it - not the people of Canada, but commercial, capitalist banks and their investor-owner capitalists.

And it is the cornerstone in another way - it is the cornerstone to truth. Understanding what they have done with our money supply leads to the undeniable inference that a coup has indeed occurred in our country, that our government no longer works for 'we the people' but for a small special interest group, the elite who are used to wealth and power, and who have returned to where they have always aspired to be - in control of our government and country, where everything we do, we do for them, not us.

4: The Economics Rosetta Stone: what a privately controlled (with government complicity) money supply has meant for our country
Take a few minutes and think about this - don't go reading quickly on looking for the interesting stuff - this is it. This is the heart of everything. This is what you have never been taught in school, or read on the 'economic insights' pages of your media. This is the Rosetta Stone that will pull back the curtain on the many falsehoods and misdirections of 'Official Economics' and enable translation of what you have been taught about our economy and its drivers into the Truth of what has been really happening here, the truth that for very obvious reasons the capitalist bankers and people currently running our world do not want people understanding. (If you are not aware of the money creation process, as most people are not, here are a few places to start looking - and as you read through some of these things, you might also be wondering why something as fundamental and centrally important to everything in our society as where our money comes from is never talked about in school, or in the media, or during election campaigns. I think that the answer to the question is obvious, once the process is understood, and what it means.]

Once it is understood that commercial banks control 'our' money for their own purposes, with the blessing of 'our' government and the silence of 'our' media, all the little pieces about what has been happening the last 30 years fall into place, and the pattern of everything becomes clear. Understand this, and you understand all you need to. The people running our world, and those who have taken over our own country, understand it all well. They would prefer you didn't, as it is hard to imagine a sovereign, democratic people allowing this great cancer to long exist unopposed in their body politic once they understood it.

Note some of the highlights resulting from this policy change of allowing private banks to control our money supply, and think of what has happened to our country.

Debilitating National Debt: Most notably, within a decade of this policy shift, by the mid-80s, our government had amassed close to a half trillion dollar debt through borrowing from commercial banks, borrowing to meet money needs which would have formerly been handled primarily through the Bank of Canada either through nominal interest loans (for which the nominal interest payments would, of course, simply go into another government bank account and thus not result in any out-of-control debts) or 'seigniorage', which basically means the 'profit' gained through printing your own money, as the government must do from time to time, expanding the 'hard cash' money supply to keep up with the expanding needs of the economy (many cry in mock horror at the idea of governments printing money, crying 'out of control inflation when governments print money!!' - but this is a completely false idea spread by those who benefit from allowing banks to control the money - government creating money is no more inflationary than letting banks create the same amount of money and borrowing it from them - less, really - it's not who is creating the money that matters, it's how much is created, and when the money supply was supervised with strict government oversight from the 30s to the 60s, inflation was minimal even though the government used the Bank of Canada for most of its needs, with minimal borrowing from commercial banks - all of our problems have arisen since the 70s, since we started letting commercial banks create most of our money with no effective supervision. And most of the money which went into that infamous huge half-trillion dollar debt was simply borrowing for nothing more than to pay interest on previously borrowed money, which again of course never would have happened using the Bank of Canada.).

Rather mysteriously when you think about it (or suggestively, if you have a detective hat on yet) this half-trillion dollar debt has not changed substantially over the last 25 years, and continues to draw tens of billions of Canadian tax dollars every year to 'service', interest paid not only federally but from every provincial government as well through provincial debts. In the name of this debt, the cuts to many programs that helped to define our progressive country were imposed, and these programs continue to be whittled away at as governments cry poverty and look for more 'wastage' or 'non-essential' programs to savage. Not so poor they can't meet their primary obligations to the banks, of course, the one writ-in-stone expenditure the federal and provincial governments refuse to question or even talk about (or the media) - we have paid, on federal and provincial debts, something close to two trillion dollars in interest on these debts over the last 30 years - debts primarily to commercial banks, debts which should never have been accrued in the first place, if the government had not turned control of our money supply over to private interests. The cutbacks to health care, increasing education costs, crumbling infrastructure, selling national assets, and much, much more, all due to this national debt, which should never have happened. Imagine what two trillion dollars spent on things Canadians wanted and want for Canada, rather than being collected as service fees for the banks, might have meant over the last 30 years in terms of not simply maintaining but improving our health care system, or making education truly attainable for all, or doing something about child poverty besides lip service, and so on.

But the government debt and attendant money problems are just the beginning of the evils that are loosed when we let commercial capitalist banks create and control our money supply.

Roller coaster economy: When banks create almost all of our money through electronic debt-money, as they have been doing, it is very hard to keep track of how much there is, or even try to regulate, as it is created so easily, and there are all kinds of 'privacy' regulations available for any business, including banks, to resist opening their records to anyone, including the government, if it ever asked. And it does not require any advanced degrees in economics to understand the truth of the idea that too much money in an economy is destabilizing and inflationary, neither of which are good. So to leave essentially unregulated, maximum-ROI-seeking banks free to create unknown amounts of electronic debt-money in the pursuit of profit is really like turning an alcoholic loose to run the liquor store - disaster is not 'if', but 'when', and in all probability 'sooner' rather than 'later'.

And so it has proved to be. There are two related features at work here.

First, when profit-seeking banks, creating electronic debt-money more or less at will, are left with no serious oversight, it's like letting a metastasizing cancer loose in your body, as we have been seeing over the last year with the world financial meltdown, with untold trillions of dollars lost and more impossible-to-follow untold trillions of dollars being expected to bail them out (the problem devastating the world economy is, at root, the same as the one I am describing about Canada, although details vary of course from country to country, and the big global picture is another level of complexity (bigger banks to start with, bigger and more clever con artists with a much bigger money pool and much more potential power to incent them, better trained lawyers and accountants to facilitate and protect them, bigger more powerful more corrupt politicians and media to give them cover, and so on). Thirty years of uncontrolled bank excesses, during which we have suffered a number of boom-bust cycles, all building to this great final Armageddon in which world debt is now measured in numbers too big to grasp, which most serious economists acknowledge is too big to ever be repaid, although nobody wants to talk about this whilst the great ride continues.

And the Canadian government did not only get out of the money-supply business in the 70s, it then soon followed with deregulation of the banks through the 80s and 90s, freeing them from the constraints that had kept them under some control at least since the days of the Great Depression, and this deregulation plus the exponential growth in the demand for money made possible through the advent of computers and electronic banking and banks encouraging credit card use etc led to what we have been seeing for the last 25 years - a financial rollercoaster, with major asset inflation booms as the banks created massive amounts of new 'investment' credit for various stock or real estate or whatever booms, adding no value to anything just bidding prices up, followed by the inevitable busts as investors finally come to their senses and realise what they are buying is simply not worth that much and stampeding to get out before everyone realises the same, the following recessions and bank bailouts, with attendant losses to normal working people who had nothing to do with the asset inflation or ensuing crash, and so on - all which pose no lasting problems for the 'dog-eat-dog' capitalists and big investors who see our economy as nothing more than a big casino to gamble in, who chat about their losses with good spirits at their clubs in the evening, who own the game and set the rules and protect themselves so they benefit no matter what happens, whilst highly destructive for average citizens, who lose great amounts of money and property through these bubbles and busts and recessions and government bailouts and etc.

And again do not forget, never forget - prior to our government handing this money creation power over to private banks in the 70s, and then otherwise deregulating and letting them run free, the Canadian economy was a great deal more stable, enabling the steady progress we had been making, growing our country and the money needed to enable the growth growing together. Turning the money creation power over to commercial banks who had the interests of private investors in mind rather than stability for all of us, and the Canadian economy into a giant casino for these wealthy investors, and for the banks who financed such 'investors' (speculators is a more appropriate word) and also got a good cut through their ability to legally create more or less as much money-as-debt as they wanted to, was a deliberate choice, a deliberate change of policy, by our government. A choice maybe a great idea for a few, but a very bad idea for most Canadians, as we are seeing after 30 years of bank-controlled money.

Systemic inflation eating at our spending power: And the second thing not to forget when delving into the reasons for our current state of going backwards rather than forwards as a potentially great country, beyond the government debt and the casino economy, but again related very directly to allowing commercial banks to create the bulk of our money - the interest the banks expect for the privilege of creating the Canadian money supply, which by itself largely explains the reversal in the fortunes of the average Canadian family we have seen since the final days of the dream of true Democracy existing as anything more than an empty promise in Canada.

Although money is not the central purpose of life, a stable monetary system is a necessary component of life in a modern society with tens of thousands of jobs and services to be negotiated amongst daily or weekly in a trillion-dollar economy, and with private interests controlling and manipulating the money supply for private gain rather than with the overall goal of a stable national money supply for the security of us all, the troubles we are seeing, all related to money, are completely explainable by this unpublicized and not widely understood but very real policy of allowing banks to create and control our money. The most obvious, direct and key result of banks creating virtually all of our money as debt that applies to our current problems is systemic inflation, as the interest that is charged on almost the entire money supply must be paid for by someone every year, and businesses don't survive long if they do not raise prices to keep up with rising expenses - and as everyone knows from personal experience, when inflation is systemic and ongoing, the salaries or wages of average people never keep up with the overall cost of living, and over the last 30 years, the prices we must pay for everything have gone up much more for most of us than the income we have to pay for them with - thus the reduced savings and increased debt, two people being required to work to provide a decent lifestyle where one could do so before this began, and the many other financial and social problems that have become endemic amongst Canadians such as money-related stress and depression and anger and thievery and violence and the frustration of seeing our future crumble around our ears without knowing what is happening or what can be done about it.

All due to this one secretive policy change in the 70s, of turning the control of our money over to private interests. A choice. A choice made in secret with no democratic discussion or even notice, with no media questions or outcry. Not a necessity in any way, nothing whatsoever to do with 'TINA', quite the reverse, really, there were and are many alternatives, just a choice our government made quite intentionally to favor a small group in society over the rest of us, a reversal of an existing policy that had worked well for 40 years for all of us. A change made quite secretly, with results completely predictable. A change a bit like starting a small snowball rolling at the top of a big hill. Look out below. (a good cartoon opportunity here for someone - at the top of the hill, labelled 1970, a small boardroom with locked doors, and a few politicians and bankers talking and planning and laughing - at the bottom of the hill labelled 2010 or something, an avalanche of problems descending on our society ...)


5: THE NECESSARY ACCOMPLICE ...
And let us, in passing, never lose sight of another key fact, something once again made clear with hindsight and something, this time for quite understandable reasons, we have never read about in the Canadian mainstream media - none of this could have happened if we had or had of had a decent media in this country, a media truly responsible to 'we the people' rather than their capitalist masters, a media which would have, if it were truly working for 'we the people', had some very serious questions about the possible ramifications of this policy change of letting private banks create our money, a media which would have at the very least demanded some openness and discussion about these key policy changes, some democratic validation before making the change by a public aware of what was being done.

This change was in the past, of course, and there may be some protest made about the media not really being aware of what was happening, or the ramifications, any more than average Canadians were at the time, but even if that is true, what about today? What about the intervening years when problems started becoming evident? As various of the references in the money reference section show, the very strong arguments about turning control of a nation's money over to private banks have been known and elucidated for a very long time, so it is not really believable for at least our senior journalists in Canada, who are expected to be aware of such things, to claim ignorance.

Where even today are the raised media voices asking why 'we the people' are taking such a beating whilst the capitalists make out like thieves, rather than pretending whatever hardships we are experiencing are caused by forces beyond our control and/or our own foolishness, and etc? Where is the discussion anywhere in today's mainstream Canadian media of the wisdom of letting banks control our money, when the abuses and dangers are now so evident and the source of all the problems we are dealing with equally evident to one who understands where our money comes from? Where are the demands from our leading media pundits for a truly sovereign Canada, based on controlling our own money supply and not renting it every year from private banks, who can and do manipulate this money supply in their own interests and to the great disadvantage of the people of Canada? When Finance Minister Flaherty says at the end of 2009, as Canada faces huge financial problems along with most of the world, he plans even more program cuts in response to his recent tens of billions of dollars of borrowing for bank bailouts ( Flaherty's deficit plan: Take an axe and cut deep ) - why does noone in the media even suggest he might consider using the Bank of Canada for some money creation, rather than yet more ruinous borrowing from commercial banks? Again, many lower level reporters can be somewhat forgiven, as they were brought up to ask no questions about this, and still do as they are told in an increasingly pressure-filled environment - but there is, there can be, no excuse for 'journalists' at management levels to claim ignorance of this all-important facet of our economy.

Certainly one of the central mythologies of this country is that we have a great and free media in Canada, watching over government and keeping them honest etc - but when you understand the importance of what I write here about the money supply and banks creating it all, and government allowing banks to create money which they then borrow from those banks at interest rather than using the Bank of Canada and then turning tens of billions of taxpayer dollars over to those private banks every year as 'service charges' on a completely unnecessary debt, it becomes glaringly obvious the media are either mind-numbingly incompetent for missing the importance of this major policy shift and the impacts of that policy even today - or they are knowingly complicit in keeping the light turned off on this central facet of the problems of our country, very much to our detriment, and must then be considered as not the friend of Canadian democracy, but the enemy, not the 'necessary enabler', as a good media would be, but a suppressor, the role a co-opted media would play, would have to play, if someone was trying to take over our country. (It has been instructive, if very anger-inducing, the last year, to observe the media, especially the CBC (notable example, The Current's Work in Progress series, in which they acknowledge that workers have been devastated the last few years, but rather than asking why, they helpfully feature stories about how workers are coping with the 'new reality'), giving us pointers on how to cope with the problems the country is facing due to the global financial meltdown - rather than trying, as a truly citizen-focused media would, to delve into the actual reasons we are having the problems, such as outlined herein, and doing some talking about the way to the real reform that is needed - seeing this, their focus, the masters they really serve, cannot really be questioned. The 'great political exposes' are meaningless once the tweedledee-tweedledum aspect of the two major parties is concerned - it matters not to anyone who understands what is really happening in Canada which of the mainstream parties is in power, so scandals that lead to the defeat of one and the election of the other mean nothing beyond sound and fury to entertain the masses, who have been trained not to think much, but to see politics as a competition of some sort, in which you just pick a team and root for it through thick and thin. (- a few more readings on the media and capitalism here ) (ASIDE 2: ... wait a second - thousands of journalists working together in a great conspiracy against the people of Canada? That's a bit much, really ....)

PART I SUMMARY: So what happened? Well, a lot of details - but the essence is pretty straightforward - in the 1970s the Canadian government was taken over by people who wished to stifle democracy and install capitalism once and for all as the ruling system in Canada. They knew an honest frontal assault would never work, so they undertook a 'silent coup'. The main weapon they used was financial, as first they turned control of our money over to commercial banks, and the ending was begun. Within ten years the government had intentionally incurred a completely unnecessary massive national debt, a debt which they then used to justify gutting the social programs our ancestors had fought for generations to institute. And then with the banks creating the great bulk of the modern electronic Canadian money supply as debt, upon which interest had to be paid every year, we began the era of systematic, systemic inflation, and the assault that continues upon the earnings and savings of all Canadians. And the essentially unregulated banks also at that time began once again the games they played last in the 1920s, creating great amounts of money to fuel asset inflation bubbles of various sorts, which attracted investment from small people, who then lost much when the bubbles imploded, as all bubbles do. And everything contributed synergistically to not only growing financial problems for everyone, but also a growing sense of insecurity and frustration in Canadians, leading in turn to a generalized suspicion and anger and selfishness and meanness throughout our society. And as the media and government continue their dumbing-down movement throughout society, so the average citizen is less likely to have either the curiosity or intellectual ability to be able to understand any of this, there are no signs anything is about to improve as we continue to spiral downwards.


Intro: What Happened? / 1. What's Happening? / 2. Capitalism Happened / 3. The Cornerstone - Who controls our money? / 4. The Economics Rosetta Stone / 5. The Necessary Accomplice .. / / 6. What can be done? / 7. Knowledge is Power .. / 8. The Fourfold Path .. / 9. The Capitalist Weapons / 10. If we want it - we take it ... / 11. Outreach ideas ... / References, Notes

PART II: What can we do? We take it all back...
6: CAN ANYTHING BE DONE?
So we've gone a long way backwards, baby, from the proud and confident and optimistic and progressive and generous society we once confidently were and expected more of, and there is no sign that anything is going to get better on its own anytime soon. Can we do anything about this powerful cancer that has invaded our body politic? Are we doomed, as is the usual case when some deadly cancer metastasizes throughout a system, or is the metaphor in this case potentially less deadly than the reality? Is there a 'miracle cure' for capitalism?

Well, there's no miracle cure, but I do believe that with capitalism, we still have time to stop the takeover of our society, if we decide that's what we want to do. But the window of time we have grows shorter every year, every month, every day that passes in which we refuse to acknowledge what is becoming increasingly apparent - we lost democratic control of our government many years ago, and it is no longer working for us, which is the proximate cause of every problem we have. The capitalist-controlled media are doing everything they can to prevent people from realising they no longer control their government and encourage people to accept the new world order they are imposing quietly like good acquiescent citizens, but the description of what has been happening to our country I offer earlier leaves little doubt for the impartial analyst that our country has been run for the benefit of the capitalist elite rather than the people for quite some time now, producing as a necessary spinoff the much less pleasant place for everyone else - and that the media we have been told is our great guardian of democracy does not put this reality in blunt, unmistakable words is not surprising if, as seems relatively clear also, they are actually complicit in the takeover - a would-be usurper has no better ally than the king's closest and most trusted advisor telling him 'all is well!!' until the very last revelation of the great treachery as the knife slips between the ribs.

I think there is some hope, however, as grim as our situation may seem at the moment. Because of the great struggle waged by our ancestors as they fought for generations to create a just society against the earlier capitalists whose ideal was (and remains) a Dickensian dystopia of mansions and servants and unquestioned, endless privilege for the few and workhouses and misery for the many, and because of the strength of the country and institutions our stronger, more determined, more-understanding-of-the-dangers-and-enemy forbears built and the belief in Democracy they bequeathed their descendents before the capitalists began their surreptitious secret coup of our government in the 70s, Canada is still a constitutional democracy populated with intelligent, courageous, caring, well-meaning people, people who are willing to work hard and sacrifice as necessary to achieve goals they believe in. Our current problem is largely that after 30 years of capitalist media propaganda promulgated on an unwary citizenry, promoting capitalist ideals and justifying the transformation of our country, most of our citizens, most especially the younger generations, are sadly uninformed about what is really happening here, most importantly understanding nothing about the money supply situation and how it controls everything, and thus, whilst understanding the country is in trouble and increasingly anxious to do what must be done to cure the present ills, have no clear idea in the midst of massive media obfuscation of what it is that needs to be done, or the real enemy that needs to be engaged.

The capitalists have been proceeding slowly and carefully over the last 30 years, knowing that Canadians, still awash in the great promise that our forbears bequeathed of prosperity and democracy and the belief that their Canada is destined to be and will be a great country, will only be pushed so far before 'this far and no farther, something is going wrong here!' is reached, thus the necessity for establishing plausible excuses for their dismantling of our country such as the national debt and TINA globalisation until some tipping point is reached and recapturing the 'good Canada' is no longer possible, becomes only a sad dream of what might have been. But still, although much destruction has been wrought both through overt changes such as 'free trade' laws, and further through attrition of important parts of our tradition such as health care and education and the selling off of much of our national heritage and the assault on the goodness and generosity and optimism of the average Canadian through financial hardships, it is still mainly the head of our system which has been captured by the capitalists, with the majority of the people simply lulled into frustrated inactivity through the constant reassuring by politicians and pundits that all is proceeding as it should be, nothing to see here citizens, go home and watch the tv and all will be well. But they have not yet dismantled the machinery of our democracy, we still value the idea of democracy and do have freedom of speech and assembly, and a relatively new information outlet called the internet that is not yet under their control, and honest elections (even if the candidates we are offered are increasingly a selection based on 'lesser of evils' as truly good candidates would not agree to be capitalist puppets), and we do still have an electoral system staffed mainly by honest Canadians who truly want the best for our country, thus it still remains very much within our power to regain control of our country through normal democratic means. And if the Canadian spirit remains whole, the illness can be shaken off quickly once the bright light of Truth shines on the diseased, darkness-loving scum which have formed a slimy, foul veneer on all we hold dear. For those who like allegory, the image of Theoden shaking free of Wormwood's spell comes to mind - it is an apt image in our situation.


7: GETTING OUR COUNTRY BACK ... FIRST UNDERSTANDING IT HAS BEEN STOLEN
The first necessary tool to take back our country is simply the realisation that it has been taken from us in the first place. There has been no popular uprising in the country during the last 30 years because most people still believed that whatever was happening, whatever negative things were happening in our country and making our lives worse instead of better, were the result of natural forces of some sort abroad in the world, things we had no control over, and our democratically elected government was under our control and doing the best they could for us all in difficult times - a message, a false belief, constantly spread by the mainstream media, thus we had little cause to do much besides fret and worry, rather than, as the Bard might have said, take up arms against this sea of troubles and thus end them. Realising that the negative changes that have been happening have been the result not of irresistible forces abroad in the world, but of human decisions very deliberately made in favor of certain interests which have caused the negative changes for most of us, is the key to understanding that we can reverse those changes, if we want to.

This is a very large step for most people, to acknowledge the democracy they have always believed in has been usurped by hostile forces and is in reality a sham, their democratically elected leaders in reality puppets controlled by a small special interest sector of our society - but if you understand what has happened with our money supply, as I try to explain above, then the truth becomes undeniable, the lies we have been living under start to become clear, no matter how much media time is spent trying to tell us that everything is happening as it should, in the best interests of everyone. Understanding the money supply fraud is the cornerstone to understanding the usurpation of our democracy, for understanding this fraud makes the complicity of 'our' government and 'our' media equally undeniable. And once that is understood, we can also see how to resume the path to a true democracy, to continue the struggle our forebears began. The struggle will not, of course, be easy, wresting power from those who believe they have a right to power, who fiercely desire that power, and who have very powerful weapons with which to attempt to impose their will on the rest of us, is never easy. But if we want Democracy here, if we want a better life for not only ourselves but our children and grandchildren, if we want to stop the descent we are currently on to a world little different than feudal Europe with omnipotent masters and a powerless, impoverished, lives-brutal-and-short peasantry - then taking up the torch our ancestors passed us, that, like the frog in the boiling water we have slowly allowed to weaken during the last generation until the flickering flame is barely still alive, is not an option, it is a necessity.

What needs to be done is recognize and engage the four-pronged power structure that rules us if we are to throw off the chains of would-be god-kings and resume the path to true freedom and democracy that our species has been on for millennia. It is by no means a given that we will reach this future, as the opposing forces are great and strong, and have held power for long, and are in no way anxious to give up their power. But I think we are at a crossroads in history - Democracy and Freedom become ascendant today, and we firmly vanquish the would-be kings who are making their greatest claim ever for total world dominance, or we who value freedom for all fade into the background for the foreseeable future, centuries at least, perhaps to rise again some distant day, perhaps not, if the current rulers destroy all life on earth in their hubris and warlike ways, as they appear able and willing to do. Taking this final step, this last giant step, to Truth and Democracy will not be easy, deposing dictators who control great power and believe strongly in their right to rule, and who control the information flow in the country to immerse the citizenry in propaganda justifying their rule and denouncing any who challenge them, and who control the 'legitimate' levers of violence in the country, never is. Democracy is never easy to accomplish - but if we want a better future, this is the path. We are truly at a turning point in human history - either democracy dies forever, or it flowers into glorious blossom, after centuries of struggle against an implacable foe.


8: THE FOURFOLD PATH ...
Here are the things I believe need to be done if we are to depose the capitalist usurpers from our government, and take back our country.

THE FIRST STEP: TAKE BACK OUR STORY: The story of 'civilized' human history (something beyond hunting and gathering, the history of cities and civilizations) is in many ways the struggle between two groups of people - a large group of 'we the common people' struggling for nothing more than the freedom to live our simple lives in peaceful communities amongst our neighbors, and a smaller group of people who have always been among us who felt they had the right to be rulers, to dominate the average people, to claim the lives of those people and the wealth produced by those people as their own. For thousands of years 'we the common people' have been slowly advancing along the long, long road from complex societies ruled by omnipotent god-kings in which the people were little better than slaves to complex societies ruled by We the People ourselves in which we lived as freemen, from societies in which all wealth was/is claimed by a handful of elite rulers to a society in which the wealth produced by We the People through our work was/is shared by We the People, and passed on as a legacy to our children and used to build and build on prosperous communities in which all share and benefit from.

By the mid-20th century, in parts of the world 'we the people' were on the very edge of finally triumphing over 'they who would be kings', of establishing some true democratic societies around the world. One such place was Canada. The 'would-be omnipotent kings', in their modern incarnation as 'capitalists', the most recent and powerful and clever of the 'would-be kings' human predators, understanding the story from their loftier perspective as few 'average people' ever have, initiated their most successful gambit ever - they usurped that story of the struggle for democracy as they have usurped everything else of value in our society, and, as the PR advances of the 20th century have made them so clever at, imposed their own spin on our narrative. They made 'our' narrative 'their' narrative - they began a campaign to make us believe that their triumph was our triumph also - a narrative that we are at the end of history, that Capitalism is the end of the road, the apex of human society, finally triumphant. Nirvana has been reached, thus the struggle is over, we can all go home and relax in front of the tvs, life can get no better.

The past 30 years, since the beginning of the serious spreading of this narrative, that we now see has caused such destruction within and around us, should make it clear that this capitalist narrative is all fable, that while it may well be a form of nirvana for the capitalist rulers, it is nothing but a dystopian nightmare for the rest of us - that the real goal of these capitalists is, as we are seeing, a return to the open and exalted and unchallengeable power of a small elite, the acceptance of permanent bondage by we who once dreamed of freedom. If we allow this false narrative to prevail, to subjugate until it is totally forgotten our true narrative of the struggle against these people for 'our' democracy, then they will have achieved their goal, they will be right - it will be the end of history for the dreams of mankind to a future of prosperity and peace for all, as we falter at the gates of Mordor and fall prey to this final crushing gambit by the greatest tricksters of them all, and become servants of the master rather than continuing to the one final battle that is needed to remove this cancer from our midst once and for all. The enemy is fiercely clever in their plans and tactics and strategies today, and few people see the reality of what is happening, that the bright light they claim for capitalism is a false light, a light that blinds our eyes as it draws us as moths to the flame not for fulfillment of our ancient dreams, but for consumption and the death of all dreams.

If we allow the capitalist usurpers to assume full ownership of our story, our narrative that chronicles the long struggle to depose would-be omnipotent kings and create our own government, if we allow this, then the story of Canada, the country our ancestors worked so hard for so long to make great, will go out, as TS Eliot put it so bleakly, not with a bang but a whimper - a society which saw a great dream, a society which was to be prosperous, and free, and democratic, a country which was to provide a good home for all of its citizens through widespread, inclusive social safety nets and programs to ensure every child had a right to a good education and upbringing, safe from want and fear and hunger, every citizen to a good job, every retired person to a dignified retirement - the people who most recently inherited this great democratic dream will have been tried, as another saying goes, and found wanting, most tragically so.

If 'the people' as a whole do not understand this story, this narrative, and the diversion of it from one favoring We the People to one enslaving us in the interests of the would-be kings, then nothing can change, there will be no incentive for people to become angry at the theft of their country, their futures, their children's futures.

So, the very first thing we need to do, if we are to get back on the path to a better future, is to regain our own narrative, to understand that the capitalist narrative, as pushed on us every day through their media, including most popular culture such as books, movies, music and television, is the narrative of the would-be rulers, and not the narrative of the People as we struggle to achieve true democracy in our societies. The narrative of Capitalism must be understood, as other earlier narratives such as a particularly evil one called Mein Kampf eventually came to be understood, as something that attempted to once again turn the People away from the path to Freedom and enslave them. Let us hope that the next generation will be able to say that this evil narrative, this usurped narrative, was recognized in time as a false narrative and overcome, as we continue on to a future where all humans will be free. (some thoughts on the same idea by David Korten )

2 TAKE BACK OUR GOVERNMENT: Resume the fight for Democracy that our forebears brought so near to completion in the middle years of the last century, but was then derailed in the 70s: Once we understand the vision of the capitalists to take over our lives, and the way they impose the rules and laws which enable this takeover, then the next obvious step, before anything else can be done, is to take control of the legitimate means of power in our country - our democratically elected government. We live in a large and complex world and country, and the need for a government to oversee administration of such a complex entity as a modern society cannot be argued - the question is, do We the People control the government for our own purposes, or do we allow a small group of people to control 'our' government for 'their' purposes - purposes considerably different than 'ours'? If the people running the major political parties which dominate the parliament have sold their loyalty to the capitalist forces who wish to control our country, then the first step is to take the legitimacy away from them by no longer voting for them, but by electing a parliament of independent MPs, MPs who understand their first and only loyalty is to the electors in their own ridings, not to backroom manipulators offering junkets to 'meetings' in nice locales around the world and a nice post-political sinecure in some top-level law firm or other well-paid, minimal-duty max-perks appointment for a few years of 'service' betraying the people of Canada. The government which has, all the evidence indicates, been run from behind the scenes for decades by people making decisions in the interests of elite capitalist priorities, rather than in the interests of the people of Canada, must no longer be sanctioned by the people of Canada. There is an old saying that people get the government they deserve - surely we can do better, much, much better, than we have been.

3: TAKE BACK OUR MONEY Understanding the money supply chains that rule us: As the first great modern banker, Mayer Rothschild, famously noted - Give me control of a nation's money, and I care not who makes her laws. Even if we regain control of our government, we will still never control our country as long as we allow private banks to control our money - the power of this money-creation monopoly is truly the most potent power in the land, if we allow them to control our actions by refusing us money, or creating economic chaos by the many powers inherent in the power to control the money supply. All the destruction to our country has been undertaken and/or justified in the name of money and through manipulation of our money by people with their own rather than our best interests in mind, and the most important step to putting our country back on the road our ancestors built for us that we have been cleverly tricked into turning away from is to take control of our money, and dethrone Mammon and its High Priests as the kings of all the land. If we turn off the tap that has been stuck into the blood of our nation which is at the same time sucking us powerless and feeding the beast that has invaded us just as a cancer invades a human body and turns the cells to perverted ends producing only more cancer cells, we at once stop feeding the capitalist disease that has turned the great power of our people and country to foul ends, and allow the healing process to begin.

4: TAKE BACK OUR MEDIA Understanding 'our' media have been a traitor in our midst, the central force helping the usurpers keep us ignorant and docile as the coup was initiated and progressed: I have spoken of this before, often, but it is central and must never be forgotten. Harsh words, ignorance and docility, but ask yourself if they are true or not? Very few Canadians have any idea about what is going on with our money supply, about the great fraud that has been perpetrated with the theft of two trillion dollars, about how our 'democracy' is really controlled from behind the scenes by a handful of wealthy capitalists, and we do not know because we have been trained to trust our media, and our media have kept this knowledge from us while reassuring us constantly that all is proceeding as meant to be, nothing to see here citizens, go home and watch your tv we keep you informed of all you need to know! The establishment of at least a couple of reliable and truthful media outlets is of central importance in our struggle to regain our country - the old saying that 'knowlege is power' is as true today as it ever was, perhaps even more so, and without an honest assessment of, and constant surveillance of, those who would steal everything from us, our struggle cannot succeed - the very things we have not been getting in the capitalist media.


9: The weapons of the capitalists
So we may overcome the great lethargy we have fallen into through the tricks of our capitalist usurpers and realise our danger and fight - if we do, we must never forget that the enemy has great weapons at their disposal also and will present a vigorous defence of 'their' spoils, our country. As great military commanders have always known, being prepared ahead of time for the worst the enemy can throw at you is a necessary prerequisite to any battle you hope to have any chance of being victorious in once you engage it. Herewith a brief noting of what I would consider to be the main weapons of the capitalists, those they have used with such devastating effectiveness in their silent coup of our country, and which remain their most potent force.

CAPITALIST WEAPON 1: The False Narrative and the Media engender a sense of uncertainty and hopelessness, a lack of intensity in most Canadians - an army burdened with such things is defeated almost before the battle begins ...: First, as described briefly above, through long tradition reinforced by both media and government, Canadians believe they live in a truly democratic country, and by and large their leaders are well-intentioned people who do their best for all of us - and of course if we actually live in a great, honestly functioning democracy, then any talk of a fight for democracy becomes nonsensical, and this false belief will hold many, perhaps most, of our citizens back from engaging in the struggle, and guarantee our defeat before we even begin, for if we are to have democratic change, then a majority must be with us. Yes, their arguments will go, our leaders may make mistakes at times, but their essential well-meaning and integrity are not to be questioned, and thus policies which may seem a bit misguided, or that many seem to dislike, are to be accepted in the name of maintaining a stable system, and because they actually are democratic - whatever problems may result, if any, will be fixed soon, as the mistakes are realised, and policies made to counteract them, or when a different group of politicians are elected reflecting a different popular will, and we will bumble along, slowly getting better, as we always have. And our media, well, they may not be perfect, but who is? Like our political leaders, they are all doing their best in difficult times... This trust in the integrity of our government and media is deeply seated in Canadians, from days when we actually did exert some democratic control prior to the coup, when many politicians and leading media figures actually did have some integrity and many if not most deserved the respect they were given. But once we understand the undeniable inference following from an understanding of the great money supply fraud that was initiated by 'our' government secretly in the 70s and which has impoverished us over the last 30 years, this honesty, or integrity, is obviously something completely absent in the current upper levels of both government and media. But as long as a majority of people continue to have this false belief in their hearts about the current treacherous leadership of the country, they will not understand the depths to which we have fallen, the passivity and apathy trap we are all caught in, and nothing will change, nothing can change, and the destruction, the path to an ever less 'great' Canada, will continue. This belief in the integrity of our leaders is, in normal times in a democratic setting, a good thing - but when the government has been usurped by a small elite who very obviously mean to destroy the country most of us want, the democracy we believe in that our ancestors struggled for for generations, and turn it into a capitalist plutocracy that most of us very much oppose, it is not a good thing at all to keep silent through some residual respect for better times and more honest governments in the past, but a very dangerous thing.

THE SECOND POTENT CAPITALIST WEAPON: CREATION OF A DUMBED-DOWN, DEPENDENT CITIZENRY :
One of the greater strategies that has been in play by the elite for the last 30 years is what many have come to understand as the 'dumbing down' movement (just google if you want refs - lots out there - one of the earliest of the modern writers to talk about this was a man named John Taylor Gatto, and his website is one place to start..). In a similar way to the fact that we are told we live in a financially insecure world where terrorists lurk around every corner because fearful, insecure people are easier to control than secure ones, our rulers have very intentionally been creating a society in which people are held back from adulthood, a society in which the years of childhood are lengthened until many believe that childhood is forever, as less intelligent, dependent children are also much easier to control than mature, intelligent adults. Signs are all around us for those able to think independently who have some knowledge of history and time to reflect on such things (two qualities which are not easily found in a dumbed-down world..) - the adolescent namecalling that passes for 'debate' in our government houses, a far cry from at least some intelligent debates of 50 or 100 years ago, the glorification of sexual themes in popular culture (adolescents see sex as the center of their lives, and that is fine, but it is something that adults get under control as a part of their lives, not the center, but our popular culture promotes SEXSEXSEX!!!! as if it is the center of the average 'adult' life, the epitome of all things adult, without which you are some kind of 'loser' - people thinking about sex all the time are not thinking about other important things in the broader society such as I write about in this essay), the promotion of sports scores and stories of sports celebrities as something so important that they require a separate section of the newspaper and we need to hear about for a few minutes every hour on the CBC rather than so many more important things going on in our world, the whole 'entertainment industry', in which people are encouraged to see the lives of celebrities as important things in their lives and world, rather than promoting knowledge of, for instance, world leaders who see different visions of a peaceful world (really, there are many such people, although you would never know it to watch Canadian television or read Canadian mainstream newspapers - but you surely have a considerable store of completely useless information on the details of the sex lives of every movie or sports star ...), the expansion of compulsory education at both sides - there are places talking about compulsory kindergarten, and expanding compulsory 'education' until the age of 18 in many places - and the major thing young people 'learn' in school is 'do as you are told!', and that there are very definite limits to 'think for yourself', limits you do not debate or decide yourself but which are imposed by your 'authority figures'; modern 'education' itself is a shadow of what it was previously, I would challenge anyone to find a grade 6-8 school text book from the first part of the last century and compare it with a modern one - children were learning things a hundred years ago in grade school that they only get in high school these days, and then only in a superficial way.

Twitter, texting, cell phones constantly in use, 99% of which is simply mindless chatter to fill minds with nothing and keep them from going to deeper places where useful things might be found. Watching television 6 hours per day, turning off the mind, getting it in the habit of being told things rather than thinking for oneself. Once out of school into the 'work world', a busy, busy world, from the time they get up until the time they go to sleep, rushing everywhere, no time for calm reflection. Everywhere one goes background Muzak, white noise to take enough attention to stop calm reflection about what is going on - all in the service of creating a docile, self-centered, uncurious population of workers and consumers who never think to question the larger realities of true engagement in their society. Exactly as a government who ruled as they wished, but desired the citizens to accept as democratic, would wish for. And create if they could.

An interesting short presentation on The making of modern schooling (about the US, but we all know Canada does not stray much from the US lead..)

Certainly there are exceptions to the docile citizens most are encouraged to become - the children of the wealthy, of course, get good educations - as future rulers, they need to be better educated as to the way our country really works - and there are always a few of us around who resist the dumbing down pressures and educate ourselves, and a few older people who see what is happening who learned to think for themselves before the usurpers took over in the 70s - but it is not required that everyone be dumbed down, as long as most people are kept in enough of a passive, childlike, dependent state to pay no attention to those who try to talk about such things, who willingly accept the lead of the talking heads allowed on the tv every day reassuring them that all is unfolding as it should, the goal is accomplished.

Well, I could go on at length, but I wish merely to open doors here, not describe the entire world behind such doors - that is for your own explorations. Many others have written of such things at length - google Neil Postman, for a good start.

THE THIRD AND PERHAPS MOST POTENT CAPITALIST WEAPON: BRINGING A GUN TO A KNIFE FIGHT: The final great weapon of the capitalists, a weapon common to all human predators throughout history, something most modern progressives do not seem to understand, but is probably their most potent, notwithstanding the great power of our trust in our leaders and the passivity encouraged by a complicit media and the creation of an easily manipulable childlike citizenry, is that the capitalists, like all bullies anywhere whose only interest is in winning whatever battle they are engaged in, have no interest in 'fighting fairly' or openly to establish their 'right' to rule (although they go to considerable lengths to promote such values of honesty and 'fair contests' in their intended prey, well aware of the advantage, very often decisive, this gives them).

It is the capitalist in modern Canada (in the modern world) who goes behind the scenes with bribery and corruption, buying politicians who lie to the people about everything important. It is the capitalist who has the money to buy newspapers and television stations, and ensure that certain things never get talked about, and other things are not dialogued but monologued from the desired point-of-view, in the certain knowledge that, as another old saying has it, it is not necessary to fool all of the people all of the time - only enough of the people enough of the time. It is capitalist-following trolls who insinuate themselves on 'progressive' discussion lists for no other purpose than to derail any attempts at understanding or organising against this foul usurper, sowing dissent within the progressive ranks, engendering passive ineffectiveness, running in circles, debating meaningless tangents, getting caught up in name-calling contests, and so on. And when the mainstream media control - the mainstream media which, as noted above, most Canadians innocently trust to give them honest news - can be used to minimise the voices of dissent no matter how popular the dissent may be or how strong and cogent the dissenting arguments, the average citizen, usually more interested in their own shallow desires and wellbeing as taught by several hours of tv each day than things political and passively accepting that their masters know what needs to be done and are looking after things, is easily fooled into a very false view of what is happening. The kneejerk distrust of 'socialism' that is ingrained in the average modern citizen is a very good example of the capitalist media controlling the worldview of the average citizen in a detrimental way, through the widespread dissemination of self-serving propaganda - it is a situation of some wonderment to the awake observer, for instance, that although the vast majority of Canadian citizens strongly support the Canadian health care system and other 'socialist' programs such as old age pensions, unemployment insurance, government-subsidized education, and a tax structure which reduces rather than encourages gross income inequality, they give only a small percentage of their votes to the 'socialist' party that is most closely associated with such socialist programs that support the people, after decades of the media conditioning everyone to think that 'socialism' is something evil, that it means a form of dictatorial top-down Communism such as was seen in the USSR for many years, and so on. That it is obviously capitalist forces through the two mainstream capitalist-controlled parties attacking the things most Canadians hold dear is a connection most citizens are apparently incapable of making or acting upon, after decades of propaganda shifting the blame for all things evil to a bogeyman labeled 'socialism'.

And until we on the honest and progressive side of the contest start understanding that our opponent, our oppressor, our false rulers, will never fight fairly, will always use these weapons of corruption and deceit and divide-and-conquer to control public opinion and the leaders people look to and the media they read or watch or listen to, we will never win, no matter how greatly we and those like us, most Canadians, outnumber this grievously dangerous foe. I do not suggest we take up the weapons of capitalism ourselves, the weapons of lies and corruption, as the means can never justify the ends, and it seems to be true that the weapons used to gain power in any society will almost certainly define what that society becomes - I simply say that we must not allow our notions of fairness and honesty to lead us to be hesitant to speak openly about such tactics when others use them against us. We must not make the mistake of assuming our most deadly foe will fight honorably, as we do ourselves, but we must make every effort to expose them, to drag them out from under the rocks and expose them to the withering light of Truth, as I attempt to do herein with the discussion of what is really happening with our money supply. You cannot fight an invading cancer with reasoned arguments, you can only take the knife and excise it while there is still time. A living, breathing capitalist is by definition a dangerous capitalist, a foe with no honor, a foe with only one goal, to win their 'right' to steal our wealth by any means expedient. As a decent people in pursuit of a decent society, we cannot just murder all the capitalists among us, but we do need to recognize that they are not like us, they are incomplete humans, deficient in some of the qualities decent people most value, they are predators, they are like an illness amongst us, and we must ensure that their proclivity to lies and corruption is never forgotten, is always kept in the light no matter how fancy their lies and their attempts to conceal their true nature.

(an interesting article from a few years ago, not directly related to the above, but still speaking to the same issues of how we must engage this struggle, and what we need to watch for - Time for Progressives to Grow Up, by Frances Moore Lappe)


10: Democracy, our country: Nobody's giving it to us - we take it or forget about it ..
The primary requirement for retaking our country is simply the recognition that we no longer control it through the faux-democratic channels offered us, and that we cannot trust our media to tell us things we need to know about what is really happening here. Understanding these fundamental truths, we must then take things into our own hands and do what must be done at local levels all across the country to reestablish some real democratic control over what happens in our country. We need to understand our history clearly, not the very false capitalist version of it, spun to the point of fantasy. We must recapture our democratic narrative, and clearly understand that the infant Democracy bequeathed us by our ancestors just starting to come to maturity in the 60s was a great gift, earned with much struggle and grief and sacrifice against a fierce enemy. We must understand that Democracy is not some rainbow in the sky we get for free with no work beyond thinking good thoughts, but it is more like a great garden hewn from a wilderness, and without care it will become overgrown with unwanted things and lose its beauty and utility, as we have allowed our Garden of Democracy to become infiltrated and taken over by a highly dangerous disease, Capitalism, which was never destroyed after its last great period of destruction leading to the Great Depression, only beaten back, and has now returned with a vengeance and new wiles with which to trick us.

What we have lost sight of in the last years of the 20th century and first of the 21st century (with much help, of course, from forces who stood to gain much as our sight dimmed) is that Democracy is not a present from Santa or even your parents that appears magically under a Christmas tree that you never have to work for or look after, it is a prize that is won only after long and hard stuggle, and a prize which then is kept only to the extent we are willing to fight for it, fight to the very death against those who will always be in our midst who wish to have our wealthy country and hardworking people for their own fiefdom. Too many young people today (some older too, who should know better) feel they have 'rights' and 'entitlements' that they 'deserve' just for being alive, and have no conception that work and dedication are required to achieve anything worthwhile. Generations of our ancestors did us great service, bequeathed us one of the greatest gifts possible, in bringing us to the edge of Democracy, but as they approached ever closer to that great achievement, a mountain that has never been scaled before but they came so close, those who would be Kings began their reactionary movement, and a very strong movement it has turned out to be, as those who received the great gift of the almost-accomplished dream were tricked into turning from the summit that beckoned so closely, and allowed a great miasma to be placed over their brains which persists to this day, as the great almost-Democracy constructed by their forebears is deconstructed and stolen in front of their very faces.

The capitalists did not take over Canada because they woke up and found it some day on their doorstep like a lovely unexpected gift - they took over Canada because they knew what they wanted, and they got out and worked like hell to get what they wanted. That's the way the world works, generally - and if we want Canada back, we're going to have to work like hell to make it happen. The masters are not going to generously give us democracy. That is childish thinking in the extreme at work, as is the idea you can actually have democracy without working at it, without understanding it and cherishing it and participating in it and fighting for it and protecting it against the many foul diseases in our world which would destroy it.

The capitalists knew that Canadians, after a couple of hundred years of struggle to create a decent society, would not meekly turn over their country to a gang of modern robber barons if they stated their intentions honestly, so they worked by stealth, buying the major political parties and corrupting politicians at the highest levels to behave in ways favorable to them, buying up the major media to spread lies and propaganda justifying what they were doing, telling Canadians lies about the way things were in the world, and telling them there was no alternative to implementing policies the capitalists wanted enacted.

If we want Canada back, we need to clearly understand what these hostile forces have done, and how. We need to clearly understand that these hostiles, the capitalists, are not going to wake up some sunny day, see the error of their ways and give it back with a little shamefaced chuckle. If we want Canada back, and democracy to happen in this country, we will have to take it back and make it happen.

Predators do not listen to reason - predators listen to somebody with a bigger stick.

The capitalists won our country because they wanted it badly enough to do what was necessary to win it - the first question we as aware progressives need to answer is, do we want Canada back badly enough to fight for it?

The capitalist's biggest weapon right now is that they control the show, and most people believe that control to be legitimate, as discussed earlier. So while most Canadians have some understanding that we have problems, maybe some very serious problems, they have no idea about what is actually happening, or how to go about doing something about it. They are immobilised from various factors - because of the great confusion spread by the capitalist press, because of the way they have been trained to trust our leaders and give them the benefit of the doubt, because of the way they have been encouraged to live in a state of passive childlike dependence without taking action, preferring to pursue 'feel-good' recreation and entertainment activities like children rather than get engaged in serious issues about our country like adults, because they have been told the world is a dangerous place and they hope their leaders can protect them - this is no time to rock the boat. ( an interesting recent article here, again about Americans, but the same ideas apply here - Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet, December 11, 2009 )

Given the control of our media and much of our citizenry by the enemy, if we are to retake our country, it means that every one of us who understands what has happened, who is aware of this hostile takeover, must be doing something to actively spread the word - victory is not going to be given to us, if we want it, we will take it. We do still have the machinery of an honest electoral system in this country, and it is possible to send honest people to our government, and retake our country through democratic means.

It is possible, but it will not be easy.

It means we do things *our* way - we use the political process, but not *their* political process - they control the major parties (including the NDP, which is allowed to exist to gather in most of the 'sanctioned protest vote' - the complete silence from the NDP concerning the money supply situation is proof enough they are allowed to play with the big boys because they do not raise any questions that might actually seriously threaten the power structure..), and they control the media through which Canadians are all told what we should be thinking about politically, what the sanctioned limits of political discourse are. If we play in their box with their rules, our chances of victory are essentially zero. We have seen the futility for over 30 years of expecting the existing political parties or politicians to truly work for 'we the people' - if we are to take our country back, it will not be through party politics, but some form of direct democracy - democracy from the only place democracy can really happen, from the bottom up. The representative system is in theory workable and democratically controllable, if we take it and make it work for us rather than letting it be controlled from the top down by 'them' - what it requires, to work for us rather than against us, is that we must organise our own representatives in our own areas, and send Independents to the parliaments, Independents who work for, not against, their constituents, who get their directions from us rather than some 'party central'. (somewhat ironically, we actually have a small bit of 'good news' here - one of the capitalist weapons to 'legitimately' control our democracy has been to continue with the highly undemocratic 'first past the post' electoral system which more or less ensures they can control the country through their control of the major parties with only a minority of 'popular' support, so we do not need to win a majority of votes in any given current political district, simply a plurality for our independent candidates, which should be easier to achieve as we get underway).

PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT: What is necessary is for every one of us who understands what is happening to be out there in our communities spreading the word, talking to people, helping them to understand that we have a cancer in our system, and if we are to survive, that cancer needs to be excised. It needs to be a 'viral' effort, to use a modern term - to even begin to counter the full-spectrum capitalist propaganda, we need to engage everyone we can, particularly people with some artistic and creative ability who can create great amounts of media material which we spread through the internet and personal contact to chip away at the capitalist mythology - there are dribs and drabs of this now, but what we have is nothing more than a drop in a great capitalist ocean of full-spectrum propaganda dominance. We need to create a movement, a movement not to follow any leader, but a movement to create Democracy, a movement that first wakes people up to the great danger we are in from this capitalist cancer, and then tells people their lives are in their own hands, in their own communities, it is all waiting for them, all they have to do is reach out and take it. It will mean getting together in small meetings in your communities, facilitating the learning that is necessary to spread understanding of what has happened and how, and how we can retake our democracy through Independent candidates, answerable only to their constituents, going to Ottawa to depose the capitalist vichy rulers and establish a true 'of, by and for we the people' democracy, finally, in this country. (Richard Moore of Escaping the Matrix fame (for those of us who move in such circles) has some ideas for talking about grassroots-controlled Democracy - An Experimental Framework for Community Democracy - there's all kinds of stuff out there on the net, stuff never available through the mainstream media)

Rethinking the Path: The methods progressives have been using for many years need to be examined for their effectiveness - we all know the old saying about insanity being trying the same stuff over and over again hoping for a different result. For instance, as we have seen from Seattle to Copenhagen, demonstrations are next to useless - although they create a lot of Shakespearean sound and fury, in terms of effecting any actual power changes they accomplish nothing, they just add to the bread and circuses material for the evening news. Actually, I suspect, the rulers love demonstrations - as long as people are spending time and money on street demonstrations, they are NOT doing anything dangerous such as organising political movements that could challenge the seat count in the House of Commons, the only place it really counts, or seriously spreading information around through non-mainstream-controlled channels that could educate people with things more useful than clever slogans about things the rulers do not want the people knowing about, such as the money supply scam I write about herein. Demonstrations have the added bonuses (for the rulers) of allowing a lot of people to believe something useful is being done, when in reality nothing is being accomplished, and also to identify potentially dangerous leaders for future attention, if required. (there are, of course, exceptions - small local demonstrations that do not take a lot of time or energy to organize, but reach a relatively large number of people, can raise awareness of things, or perhaps rarely massive demonstrations to unseat governments may be useful - but they also run the great danger of simply replacing one set of undesirable leaders with another, and as a rule, energy can be much more usefully spent in less colorful but more effective-in-the-long-run activities such as local political organising).

There is a central lesson here that might be learned - if the current rulers allow something, if it gets attention on the evening news - then the rulers probably approve, for their reasons of course, which will be somewhat deeper in a Machiavellian sense than the superficial demands of the people creating the media event, and is probably not very useful for 'we the progressives who actually want change'. You can gauge the feelings of the rulers according to what they allow on their news - for instance, the cornerstone I discuss above concerning the central importance of who creates our money and what the power can and is used for has never been and will never be aired on the sanctioned news - this is simply too dangerous to them to allow any widespread common knowledge of.

The internet has been and is a great tool for those of us who see the dangers and fight for change. That is all it is, however, one tool among many, and its great danger, like the demonstrations I talked about earlier, is that we can spend much time on the internet and feel we are accomplishing something, when we are not really accomplishing much more than the demonstrations do. Having information is great, and necessary, and I well understand how so many of us have gone somewhat overboard with enthusiasm at access to this magnificent, huge, free library and open communications channel the last few years - but we have had our first gothrough now, and it is time we understood that all of this information is ultimately useless if it is not used effectively, and on the internet we are, by and large, unfortunately, talking to ourselves, preaching to the choir as the old saying goes, whilst most citizens are still listening to the talking heads they have been taught to trust on their tvs every day. The capitalists do not talk to themselves, they understand that they need at least the semblance of popular support if they are to prevail, and they take great pains to talk to everyone through their control of the mainstream media, thus by sheer weight of numbers the capitalist message dominates. We are never going to have access to the capitalist media in this struggle, so if we are to have any chance at all, then we need to stop speaking exclusively, or even mostly, to the choir of ourselves on the internet, and pick up our toolkit and get out on the streets, in the schools, in the malls, in the meeting halls all across the country and talk personally to people who never come to our internet sites and have no idea what we are doing or thinking, but are well-conditioned by their tv talking heads to view anything critical of their Great Democracy with suspicion and even hostility. It is good that we have many internet sites which carry much useful information - but we need to be out in the communities letting people know about these sites, and talking with them ourselves about what is going on in our country so they have some incentive to start looking around these internet sites by themselves, and some reason to accept that we are not tinhat crackpots, but may actually have something of importance to contribute to their world views.

FINAL WORD: FULL CIRCLE Again I repeat the old truth, but it bears repeating at the end of this short somewhat-longer-than-planned essay as a reminder because we seem to collectively have lost sight of this truth - whoever controls the money controls everything, and if we leave our money supply in the hands of capitalist bankers, they will of course use that power to take over all power and control everything else in their own interests, as they have been doing for the last 30 years. Politicians work for who pays them best, and if the capitalist bankers are paying them best by campaign donations or junkets or promises of post-political-career rewards for service well given, that is who they will work for. When we take control of our democracy, and all decisions are openly and democratically made, the bankers also will be much more closely controlled and unable to corrupt our democracy as easily as they do now from dark places.

Speaking of money, there are those who will remember the huge national debt our government has accrued in our name in connivance with the capitalist bankers, and worry how we are to deal honorably with this massive obligation. It can be dealt with - there are valid legal precedents concerning 'odious debts', which our national debt surely is considering the way in which it was constructed completely unnecessarily and with no public discussion of alternatives, and other laws concerning fraud and fiduciary responsibility and treason, which will give us a way to honestly, legally and ethically retire that elemental problem and begin working for ourselves, once again, and restoring our country to the path of prosperity and care for all we were once on before the capitalists turned on the trickle-up tap, like a bloodsucking leech inserting a never-satisfied money vacuum into our body politic and economy. With control of our money, we can begin acting as a truly sovereign people - nobody can be sovereign if they allow a private interest to control their money, any more than a teenager can be independent as long as she is dependent on her dad for her weekly allowance.

We must also have it clearly in our immediate objectives to recognize and take steps to counter the danger of privately controlled media, and make an aware effort to support a professional but truly independent media, through the internet or in print form as soon as we can gather our resources together to afford to begin a new one or take over an old one. The destruction, the usurpation, of our democracy was only possible because the media conspired with their capitalist masters and puppet politicians to keep from the Canadian people what was happening behind closed doors concerning the money supply, and the corruption of our political system, and whether through complicity at the upper levels or ignorance at the lower, they have obviously revealed themselves as unfit guardians of our Democracy. In a free country all will be allowed to speak, nobody would suggest banning these deceptive purveyors of our news who speak so falsely about so many important things - but if the current media wish to be spokespersons for the Capitalists, and thus attempt to lure the people of Canada into undesirable places through their withholding and gatekeeping or spinning of essential information, then we have no choice but to somehow create and maintain a media of our own, one that is truly independent of class bias, and that we can trust to tell us things we need to know, rather than confining their reportage to things the rulers wish us to believe.

And once these things have happened, if they ever do, once we see clearly that what happened in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 00s was not some preordained, inevitable future, as they have tried to make us believe, but was indeed a path of false promises we were lured and tricked on to by those who did not have our best interests at heart, a path whose rosy promises carried a deadly addiction and harsh penalties, perhaps then we can accept the hardships we have suffered the last 40 years as a lesson learned at great expense that will not be forgotten soon, that Democracy is a precious gift that must be eternally watched, and get back on that road to a good future for all of us that our ancestors began for us when they began this dream called Canada.

We wasted the first decade of the third millenium in confusion and passivity and apathy - let us waste no more time. If the future is to belong to us - it will be because we take it. Let the future begin now.


SOME REACHOUT IDEAS
Countering the lies of democracy and exposing the scam of the money supply that is used to control us all are, in my opinion, the two things that need most to be done. Other problems are certainly of concern in our world - but nothing whatsoever is going to be done about them until we have control of our government, and that is only going to come through true democracy, thus exposing the capitalist faux-democracy is the first step that needs to be taken. (nothing that progressive sorts want done, that is to say - obviously lots is being done that we, or most Canadians, do NOT want done ...)

We need to understand clearly that petitioning the rulers, the usurpers, for things they have no intention of giving us is a complete waste of time, and even worse. The ONLY way we are going to improve our country or world is by taking control of our government - and doing so through legitimate political means, in the process creating a strong democracy that people will understand is vulnerable to usurpation and will thus understand they must continually work to protect and strengthen.

To this end, since we have no access to the mainstream media which is controlled by the usurpers, we must, each and every one of us who see and understand the actual situation we are in, be advocates, be out regularly sharing our knowledge of what is happening with others who may understand the country is in serious straits, but are not aware of the root causes, people who believe they already live in a democracy so turn their attentions to other pursuits which have no chance of success in a non-democratic setting, leading to the frustration and hopelessness and anger and disconnection we see around us.

And to this end, it is my belief that the money supply scam is the smoking gun with which the usurpers can be confronted, the undeniable proof of their theft of not only our government but trillions of our dollars which represent years of 'our' national production which they cannot deny or rationalize away, as they can any other issue about which progressives are currently petitioning them - they can bring up arguments against climate change to excuse their lack of action, they can bring up arguments that 'free trade' is good for everyone, they can rationalize wars on terror or drugs and justify almost anything else by claiming some kind of 'financial imperative, we have no choice!' - but once it is widely understood that private banks create our money, and control everything we do through that money-creation power, and have stolen trillions of dollars from us and destroyed the beating caring heart of our democracy through cutbacks and other measures made in the name of this money which they control - then the lies that underlie everything they say will be exposed, the betrayal of our politicians cannot be denied, the necessary media complicity cannot be denied, and I believe this could be the catalyst that could wake people up from their passive slumber, the media-induced apathy, that can energize them to finally understand we have, indeed, been taken over by hostile forces, and the first fight we must engage and win is the fight to take back control of our country. This keystone that undeniably exposes their work, the money supply situation, is *never* talked about in the mainstream media - the argument cannot be made that it is of no importance, leaving only the conclusion that it is not discussed because this is a door they cannot afford to allow to be opened or a situation they cannot allow any light to be shone on - although they have buried their crime under a massive amount of obfuscation over many years, it is still at heart a very simple fraud, an easy to understand scam, and once average citizens start to understand the great hardships they have faced because of this scam, and the lies they have been sold to justify it, I think the revolution will be unstoppable.

And once our country is under truly democratic rule again, then can we begin to debate and take serious measures against our other problems, the pervasive poverty that grows every year in Canada, the environmental destruction that is allowed because those who profit from such destruction control our government, the fear of terrorism we have because our usurped government has become an American imperialist lackey which invites retaliation from those who are simply defending their own countries, and the incivility and anger which the financial problems have caused. For starters.

The key to it all is Democracy - and the keys to Democracy are understanding it is missing and wanting it back, and control of your own money. Democracy has ever been the dream of the many to create a strong government in which we stand together to hold back the predatory few who would enslave us all - and it has ever been the desire of the predators to prevent or control such attempts. They understand well what they are doing - we must ensure that 'we the people' also clearly understand the field and the enemy if we are to have any hope in this latest great battle of an eternal war.

If you are one of the small but growing number of people who understand the great struggle we are engaged in, and want our Democracy back - show it. Work for it. This is not a battle you can let others fight for you - there are not enough of us as it is, and if we are to have any chance at all, all of us must stand as tall and proud and determined as our forebears before us. You can start educating others about the money supply scam by downloading a few of the films listed below and putting them on DVDs or CDs and giving them to your friends or others you talk to, and arranging showings in living rooms or town halls or anywhere you can get a few people together. If this short essay has inspired you in any way, it is available in PDF form for (free) download and copying to pass around to others, and there are many, many other materials available on the internet that can be used freely as well. And then once you have their attention, you can start talking about organising independent political movements so you can send people to our government who are truly representative of the people, and who will act as the people wish. I would not presume to suggest what is the best course for our country in this dangerous and troubled time we live in beyond starting to make decisions truly democratically amongst all of 'we the people' - but I have every confidence that what 'we the people' wish can be worked out in our local meetings and what 'we the people' wish, and make for ourselves, will lead to a far better country for all of us than what 'they the corporate/banking elite' have been imposing on us for the last 30 years, and plan for the next 1,000.

Democracy - the last great dream. Yours - if you want it. Not for children.

Intro: What Happened? / 1. What's Happening? / 2. Capitalism Happened / 3. The Cornerstone - Who controls our money? / 4. The Economics Rosetta Stone / 5. The Necessary Accomplice .. / / 6. What can be done? / 7. Knowledge is Power .. / 8. The Fourfold Path .. / 9. The Capitalist Weapons / 10. If we want it - we take it ... / 11. Outreach ideas ... / References, Notes

---

Notes and Reading

FOOTNOTE 1: A Failing Country: Every day more examples of a failing country - I think everyone is just numb from the endless disaster stories, somewhat like the old story of the frog in the boiling water, who jumps out if you throw it in hot water, but if you start the water cold and gradually turn up the heat it adjusts and boils. That particular little story may be myth, but as allegory it fits our situation well, and we're close to cooked here, if a lot of people don't wake up soon and stand up and stop it all. Good things are a lot easier to lose than to win in the first place, or get back once they're gone. And there's always a few conmen around willing to help people lose things when they forget that important lesson.

For a larger overview of exactly what we're losing here, try any of the recent books of Mel Hurtig - there's an interview with him about his most recent here - Mel Hurtig interviewed about The Truth about Canada

Food bank need grows across Canada

One in five Canadians cannot find a doctor

Canada's tragic failing grade on child poverty

Broadbent: How to end child poverty

Canadian households $1.3 trillion in debt and still digging deeper hole: CGAs

Travers: Let's get serious about the deficit

Recession swells food bank use

'Pushing paper' trumps safety under new aviation rules, MPs told

The Most Urgent Threat to World Peace Is ... Canada

Canada's Olympic crackdown (this whole story has received little coverage, but it's absolutely outrageous)

One dead, three injured in Toronto shooting

Edmonton bus driver brutally beaten

If GDP's So High, Why Am I So Low?

Blips 92, Gilles d'Aymery

Travers: This holiday, pity the poor watchdog

Flaherty's deficit plan: Take an axe and cut deep

The whimper of our discontent - Outrage missing as Canadian values and standards trashed

Laxer: Income and wealth inequality: An underlying cause of the crash

Welfare numbers soar in Ontario (CNEWS Jan 6/10)

How did the 'just society' become 'just don't care'?

Canadian Council on Learning funding cut

Greyhound to cut more routes in Ontario

back to where you were


FOOTNOTE 2: CAPITALIST TAKEOVER - this is, as noted, not recorded in the official media or government press releases (what great criminal conspiracy announces their intentions to all and sundry ever?!?), but it is obvious enough to the many who are paying attention, and much is available to be read about the transition to the so-called New World Order, which was implemented during this period. It is instructive to note that such capitalist-promoting organisations as the Business Council on National Issues (later renamed the Canadian Council of Chief Executives) and the Fraser Institute, a neo-conservative-promoting 'think tank', were formed in Canada in the 70s, specifically to promote 'neo-conservative' or capitalist policies - whilst one may disagree with their objectives, one must acknowledge they have done, and continue to do, their work well. There is a lot of good stuff out there if you are new to this, although you won't, again, for understandable enough reasons (no criminal promotes exposure of their criminal activities duhhh...), find much about this in the Canadian corporate-controlled media (including the CBC - not a 'lefty-pinko' media at all, simply 'capitalism light') - a few places to start:

Tony Clarke: Silent Coup, Confronting the Big Business Takeover of Canada

- a bit of historical perspective here - The Corporate Reactionary Revolution

Bit of academic-style history you won't get on the CBC: Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve

Good movie from a Great Britain socialist group: Capitalism and other kids stuff

Linda McQuaig has many good books on the capitalist takeover of Canada

late note - I just found this somewhat serendipitously whist scrolling around that massive library we call the internet - but note the year it was formed - Basel Committee on Banking Supervision

back to where you were


Footnote 3: The Money Supply - this is a big topic, mainly because it is covered with a huge amount of obfuscation in order to prevent people from understanding the essential scam of allowing private interests to create a national money supply, which is in essence not complicated at all, which is why they won't even try to admit it and spin it in the media - .

For a recent and well-done film on the Canadian money supply, check out Oh Canada, the Movie

- a shorter one, also Canada-based, at Perpetual Debt: Bank of Canada & why we should use it instead of wall st.

For more on the creation of money by commercial banks, you could start here - Dollar Deception: How banks secretly create money (Ellen Brown, Web of Debt - deals mainly with the US situation, which is a bit different, but the basics are more or less the same)

And here is a short film on Canada you aren't likely to have seen on the CBC - Bill Abram: The Crime of the Canadian Banking System. What is going on here is obvious, what is less obvious is why so few people understand it.

The Money Masters (google if this link doesn't work, things have a way of changing) - an excellent history of the struggle between the bankers and those who preferred democratic control of the world's money supply. We know who is winning, so far ....

Money as Debt - a film by a guy called Paul Grignon, explains it all clearly. Also available on youtube if you don't want to buy it. Google.

- a very interesting historical document - The Conquest of Poverty, by a guy called Gerald McGeer - from 1933. This was just before the Canadian government put some serious regulations in place to control the bank excesses that had caused the Great Depression - regulations that kept the economy pretty stable until they were removed during the 70s and 80s, leading to the current mess. Kind of interesting that Canadian history never teaches about stuff like this. Related: The Regina Manifesto - the founding document of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation, the 'socialists' who brought us things like medicare, old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and etc - all the stuff capitalists hate. Again, odd we never get taught stuff like this, or it never gets mentioned in our media as things we all ought to know about our country. Although, of course, if we are controlled by capitalists who think stuff like this ought to be buried forever, it's not all that odd .. (a recent article on the Regina Manifesto from the Canadian Center for Policy Options, a leading Canadian 'left-wing think tank', as the media like to refer to it.. much other good reading to be had here, if you're new to non-mainstream reading material ..)

- actually, a whole lot of other interesting reading here - the site does not have a title or any identifying stuff, but a lot of good links


A few books with more info (there are many more, but these are a starting place):

Web of Debt by Ellen Hodgson Brown

Grip of Death by Michael Rowbothom - not online, but worth getting your library to order for a very good history of banking and all this money-creation stuff - he has a very good short article introducing it all at Prosperity UK, where you will also find a lot of other good info

The Lost Science of Money, by Stephen Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute - - I haven't read this, but it sounds very good

James Robertson and the New Economics Foundation - - many books and articles

The Two Faces of Money - again, I haven't read this, but the web page has quite a lot of good info (quotes, etc), and the book seems to cover the territory well, without the libertarian 'let the market rule!!' snake in the grass you have to watch for with stuff like this ...

- and an excellent recent article from a good site called Information Clearing House - A New Monetary System by a guy I haven't heard of but who obviously knows his stuff, Nikki Alexander

-- Just google Monetary Reform, and you'll get lots of interesting reading - and if you have not been aware of this massive scam before, probably some of the most useful reading you'll ever do if you want to save our country. Not to mention world.

back to where you were


FOOTNOTE 4: The media are NOT your friend ...

Barrie Zwicker, a Canadian journalist (a real one) has quite a lot to say about the Canadian media

YayaCanada - one of the best current Canadian 'blogs' watching for Canadian media lies and spin

A Canadian journalist not afraid to speak the truth, Nick Fillmore: Why we must limit the influence of corporate media )

Canwest latest 'media giant' to exploit news operations (from Rabble: "...Canwest and other media corporations claim to care about quality journalism, but they've deceived Canadians for decades -- censoring news to protect their profits, pandering to the interests of the corporate world...")

Media Lens covers the media primarily in Great Britain, with special emphasis on the BBC, but their writings have relevance to the CBC and other Canadian media, who behave the same way - a recent good review from them - A comparative review of Flat Earth News and Newspeak

The classic work, of course, on the media in capitalist faux-democracies: Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent (you won't hear this mentioned on the CBC for some reason ...)

- an essay I wrote on the Canadian media and its involvement in the Canadian election last year: Canadian Media: Reporting or Managing the News of the 2008 Election?

Stephen Lendman - Paid Lying: What Passes for Major Media Journalism

---

FOOTNOTES - tangents needing a bit more explanation that did not really fit in the text that was getting too long already ...

FOOTNOTE 1: - but capitalism is good, isn't it??!
You may believe this, as it's all you've been told all of your life - but is it really so? Consider some things that haven't been explained to you very well, for reasons that should be obvious enough if you think about it (what con man ever told you the truth about the con he was desperately trying to get you to 'invest' in? - and given that the capitalists thoroughly control our media and have for decades, why would they give negative reports about themselves or paint the competition in a positive light?). Capitalism, essentially by definition, is a system whereby a few powerful people (the 'real' Capitalists) control all of the major wealth of a country. They control the industries where most people work, they control the money, they control the government. (If you think Canada is a 'democracy', you need to deepen your understanding of how things work in the real world, outside of civics high school courses theory - start here, perhaps - The Democracy Scam. The people running our society - the capitalists - well understand that Canadians wish to live in a 'democracy', so they spend considerable time and effort arranging things so Canadians can believe that they do indeed live in a democracy - but any impartial examination of what goes on in the country readily exposes this for a pretty obvious fantasy. Democracy does not simply mean no obvious dictator running your country with an iron fist, democracy means that the people actually make decisions about what happens in 'their' country, and this is very obviously not the case in Canada. That we have relative prosperity, regular elections and freedom of speech are nice things to be sure and better than the alternatives, but they do not a democracy make ... )

In the larger sense, 'capital' is in essence simply the excess wealth produced by workers, that which is produced over and beyond what the worker actually requires to support her or himself. It means a 'big' excess from many people - the few dollars you manage to stash away in your savings account each month does not qualify - the million dollars your corporate employer stashes away each month after paying his employees' wages and the other expenses is. The new factory he builds with that saved excess wealth is capital. As a large 'excess' produced over time, this capital can be used for various things - to save for a rainy day, to build things that we might not otherwise have time to build, to buy luxuries, etc. In a modern society, with modern tools and means of production, there is a great deal of this excess, and a large number of options as to what we might do with it. In a social democracy sort of system, this excess wealth would be used to build things for the common good (health care, education, pension, UI systems, etc, whatever was decided on democratically), and probably some portion stored in some way as 'savings' for the benefit of all of us, as a kind of insurance against future problems - in a capitalist system, that excess wealth, anything beyond your daily wages, is claimed by the capitalist owners of production as their 'profit', as 'we the people' continue to work for our daily bread and little else. You might also believe, as you have been told it often enough, that 'capitalism produces great wealth for everyone in society' - but again, you ought to think a bit more widely than the 'feel good spin' you get from the capitalist press, who rather obviously have a serious interest in promoting this system and therefore are not the most reliable witnesses of its benefits or otherwise. Otherwise especially.

Consider another perspective - that 'the good times' we have experienced to some extent in the west over the last few decades, which the capitalists have claimed proves how wonderful capitalism is, have largely been the result of unsustainable exploitation of everything exploitable from workers to the entire world environment, a very foolish plan if the long run is considered as most intelligent adults understand, but the capitalist mindset is to maximize profits in the 'now' and let the future take care of itself (a lot of this overexploitation could just as easily be called 'looting' from weaker, poorer countries.. such looting throughout history has been the basis of a very substantial portion of the capitalist fortunes, as it was of the precursers to the modern capitalists, the godkings or emperors or kings etc of ancient and medieval fame ...). Well, if you look around the world, at the environmental destruction, the poverty, the strife, the failing systems even in Canada where people are starting to realise the accumulated debt of the last couple of decades is getting pretty mountainous, and the 'civil society' we once aspired to is becoming highly uncivil, you can start to consider that the future is here, and we are about to start paying for decades of devil-may-care capitalist excesses and lies - the 'good times' of capitalism have about run the cupboard bare, and reality is about to come knocking, or crashing down on our heads. If you are a die-hard capitalist supporter, a few words such as this are not going to change your mind, but if you have read this far in this short essay because you are concerned about the direction everything seems to be taking, then you might start reading around a bit, with a view to reconsidering your acceptance of capitalism as the best thing that ever happened, which it surely is not, it is actually one of the worst things that has ever happened to us. There are many good books out there explaining everything from a perspective you were never given in the capitalist press - you could start with David Korten, for instance, or many of the references herein, and carry on. When you think of the capitalist propaganda about how great everything is - just look around. The Capitalists have been the dominant force in the world and running everything for decades - this is the capitalist world we live in today - and its centerpoints are unimaginable wealth and virtually omnipotent power for the few, growing poverty for the many, rampant environmental and social destruction all around us, and growing danger everywhere as people start to fight back, often in sheer desperation, against the capitalist excesses. Is this really what you want?

(back to Capitalism Happened ... - or read on a bit, about what a Social Democracy, the sane path to the future, might offer:)


FOOTNOTE 2: Some things that a real 'social' democracy would offer that capitalist pretend-democracy does not
During the last couple of decades, as noted above, the capitalists have been depending on the full bank accounts, the good compliant citizens who trust their leaders, the goodwill around the world, that our ancestors accumulated as they strove to create a strong and progressive social democracy prior to the capitalist takeover in the 70s and 80s - but they have been robbing the cupboard like children set loose in the candy store without planning for the future since then, and, as they say, the cows are starting to come home. Whilst they were spending like Midas to conceal their theft of the real wealth of our country to make us believe their PR about how great they were, they were destroying our futures, and as we look around now, we see the future that capitalism created - a destroyed economy in our country, a destroyed environment on the planet, an impoverished, demoralized citizenry, a planet torn by strife and war in every corner, and etc

Are most Canadians capitalists or social democrats? Start with one question that should be revealing - do most Canadians support a national health care system or not? Of course they do - and that is a social-democracy program, and very much NOT anything to do with capitalists or capitalism - since they became dominant, capitalists have been trying to destroy this program, as a waste of 'their' money. Don't let them fool you anymore. We are, at heart, social democrats, not 'capitalists' - that has all been a great lie.

The very false choice the capitalists pretend we have to choose between is between Capitalism / Democracy and some form of 'communist totalitarianism' - this is a very false dichotomy, another capitalist spin-to-the-point-of-lying. We can do better, much better, than either extreme - the 'middle road' is a form of social democracy, wherein we have the benefits of a willing, hard-working, honest, civic-minded people together with a strong market economy and true Democracy all working together. The result would be a modern version of the Canada we had in the 1960s - hard-working people, using the wealth they created not to enrich a small, obscenely wealthy capitalist overclass, but to provide a safe, progressive, prosperous and peaceful place to live for every citizen. Don't fear that rejecting capitalism and recognizing your true social democracy nature would somehow turn your world upside down into something strange and fearful, a state bureaucracy running your life and country into the ground, that is all propaganda from the capitalist press trying to keep you under their thrall - the change would be all positive, like the relief you feel when you have an infected wound and the doc lances it to drain the pus and gives you some antibiotics and pretty much immediately you start to feel better. Getting the capitalism out of our government would be very much like getting a cancer out of your body - you're going to feel a lot better quickly without the constant debilitation sucking your system dry.

For example, some of the things we would expect to see with a social democracy that we are starting to understand are not on the table at all with a capitalist-dominated faux-democracy:

1. Democracy (surprise surprise) - imagine living in a country where major decisions were talked about by 'we the people' with, in most cases, a consensus involving 80-90% of us resulting, rather than the current situation where we are not asked at all what we think about something, but decisions are taken behind closed doors with the input only of major financial players, and those decisions then 'told and sold' to us, even though, with most of these major things, most of us disagree. Hard to imagine, a bit like a fairy tale - but, as one of the Kennedys said - dare to dream of things that might be. If you do not dream, it will never happen ...

2. Almost no taxes!!: Imagine, in a truly social democracy, we could more or less get rid of taxation altogether. The background for this comes a bit later in the main part of the essay if you're browsing here from the first footnote, but as a truly sovereign people, creating our own money for our own use rather than allowing some private business to control our money and society for their benefit, why would we tax ourselves? It's like paying yourself rent on your own home, or giving yourself a bill for taking food out of your fridge. Current 'taxation' is simply a continuation of the feudal titheing, in which the peasants gave a portion of their work output to the feudal lord every year. In modern faux-democracies, giving the appearance of 'democracy' whilst allowing the same old Lords to actually control the important stuff, they don't want to have to pay for the pretend government, so demand tithes, or taxes, so we pay for our own supervisors. In a social democracy, where 'we the people' owned our own means of production, and our own government, these tithes would be un-necessary. We would not be paying 'rent' on our money each year to a banking cartel, which would remove a great deal of the government's current need for money. Government income required above its 'seigniorage' benefits could come from some low level of interest or service charges on loans to individuals made through government banks, or perhaps small service charges for government services (waived for people below a certain income level who required such services, of course), and etc.

3. A COMPLETE NEW UNDERSTANDING OF 'WORK': In a social democracy, driven by the collective will and wellbeing rather than the capitalist profit motive, there would be much less work that actually 'needed' to be done, and this work would, in some way, be divided up amongst all of the people in some more or less equitable way. 'Not having a job', or unemployment, would be as unthinkable as slavery. There would be a job for everyone who wanted one, but the amount of work required to maintain a decent lifestyle would be much less than in capitalist societies, where so much of the work of every worker - that is to say, the wealth produced - is simply appropriated by the 'owners of production', who insist on maximizing the wealth and thus the work all must do, thus there is no saving for the future nationally, and only in a very restricted sense individually, for those lucky enough to have one of the few good jobs - jobs which are in demand by an intentionally maintained large unemployed workforce, who must then compete for scarce jobs through lower wages, good for the capitalist owners, bad of course for the workers. If 'we the people' are not working to provide million dollar mansions, thousand dollar lunches, Lear jets, and all of the other things great wealth buys, our collective workload would be greatly reduced. There would still be lots of room for entrepreneurial innovation and private businesses for those who desired a richer lifestyle - but without a large group of unemployed laborers desperate for work, such businesses would have to pay their workers fairly, and provide something actually useful to the society in order to draw either investment or approval from 'the people' who would be the target consumers. No more production of meaningless crap by workers who had no options. Many, many other benefits of course - just imagine all of us enjoying our work each day, being secure in every way, and having lots of free time for our own lives as well.

4. PEACE, CIVILITY, SECURITY: When capitalist values dominate a society, primarily placing the accumulation of money as the primary goal, with lots of 'wink wink' about how that money is obtained if you get enough of it, but the perks are very real for those who dare, then selfishness and desperation for money also dominate, and competition for a small pie results in all of the evils we see around us result. In a social democracy, where values of sharing and looking after one another dominate, and organised theft of the wealth produced by 'we the people' becomes recognized as the major crime it is against 'we the people'. The mental problems and anger and other socially destructive things many people feel today will largely disappear, as the financial pressures which are the major cause of such problems largely disappear, and security and a more relaxed lifestyle for all become the norm, not the exclusive preserve of the wealthy. Not all will be perfect - we will still have genetically challenged human predators in our midst, those who think they are better than the rest of us and feel it is their 'right' to steal and lie and use violence to dominate others - but as long as we are aware of them, they can be easily controlled. We are living in a society currently dominated by these few people, and the evil they create is palpable. We just need to never forget what happens when we allow them to dominate.

5. A MEDIA THAT PROMOTED 'OUR' GOALS INSTEAD OF 'CAPITALIST' GOALS: Just imagine a media which worked together with us to try to make our society as good as it could be for all of us, rather than urging us all to be nothing more than good consumers and workers so the capitalist masters could become as wealthy as we could possibly make them! Imagine a media that brought us stories of other societies around the world trying to create good things to enhance our lives, that told of ways to pursue peace and sanity rather than urging us all to more and more wars.

Well - again, I am not writing a text book here, just trying to turn on some lights for people who have lived far too long in the capitalst-media induced dark. Many, many other benefits would be seen in a true social democracy - turn this light on, and imagine what could be ... .

(back to Capitalism Happened ...)

FOOTNOTE 3: ...wait a second - thousands of journalists working together in a great conspiracy against the people of Canada? That's a bit much, really ....
It would be a bit much, if anyone was really claiming that. But it is not necessary at all for most journalists to be part of any great 'conspiracy', any more than it is necessary for most Canadians to be part of it all. Most journalists are honest people, and more or less average citizens, with the same backgrounds as any average group of Canadians - meaning, of course, that they have been educated the same as all Canadians to know as little about the financial system here as every other Canadian - which is, essentially nothing important such as I talk about above. So when they start work as young journalists knowing very little about what is happening, and are taught nothing about the money system as they get into their work, then so they continue, and as they climb the corporate ladder they are too busy to be looking for things they are not told to look for, and get involved with the stories the other journalist are covering, so that they do not write about something they know nothing about and nobody tells them to write about is not that surprising. On the other hand, the senior levels of management cannot _not_ know about what is happening with the money system - and it is their job to make sure that nothing gets into the papers that might get people thinking. This is not as hard as it might sound - the first thing a senior editor is going to do is to make sure his or her media outlet is staffed by people with more or less the same philosophy as they have themselves, or others who are afraid enough for their job that they quickly learn what is acceptable story material and what is not. The libertarian / right-wing National Post (or any of the other Canadian mainstream media, for that matter) is not going to hire people like me, for instance, who would be writing about the world from a very anti-capitalist perspective, as in this essay. No surprise. They are, however, going to go after people who are rabid capitalist supporters (if you have any awareness of what goes on in the Canadian media, I don't have to give any names here), people who will support all things capitalist in nature, and do all they can to get people to turn away from anything that attempts to expose or oppose capitalism. Even in the so-called 'lefty' media places, primarily the CBC and Toronto Star, any observation of these places with a clear understanding of things shows quite clearly they are both nothing more than 'capitalism light' - and as such support capitalist dominance of the economy, and the initiatives of capitalists throughout the world (the Yugoslavian bombing of 97 and the current Afghanistan mission being two recent exemplars) and thus are going to allow nothing asking the fundamental questions that need to be posed that might lead to the truth about such things as the money supply situation.( a somewhat longer analysis of the media situation here - Why we must limit the influence of corporate media ) back to Necessary Accomplice...

---

Click on the poster to download a printable and copyable PDF
of this essay to pass around and share with others...

---

If you thought this short essay useful, you'd probably enjoy a read of Green Island, a story of a modern social democracy where We the People have finally displaced the bankers from our government, and things work much better. We follow a couple of old Utopians around Green Island as they see how things are done in a truly democratic society - and then follow the excitement as, predictably, the bankers are not about to sit idly by and allow the work of centuries to be undone by a band of hippies, and attempt a regime change with their military arm, the US hegemon. This regime change attempt gets a bit of a shock, however. Green Island too has something a little harder under the green glove.

---