"Usurpation of resources is happening within the business organization because neo-liberals have written off the common good as nonsense in their process of retreat from Adam Smith."

Water is essential to life. You can hear words like these in any language:

Droplets of water unite -
A river is formed.

That version comes from a Sinhala song.

Modern economics carries the hallmark "privatization". Yet the exercise brings far more than that. As markets demonstrate, it is a drying up of the river by the opportunist.

Synergy essential to the business company evaporates:

Droplets disperse -
The river runs dry.

See more on how this applies to business organization.

When England's central bank was nationalized in 1946, great financial houses in the City of London retained a hold on the economy. This hold was exercised mainly through:
(a) The dependence of the British government's budget on interest-bearing loans from financial houses (the sale of Treasury bills and other gilt paper) and
(b) The counterpart, neck-locking dependence on holding companies (of the same financial houses) for budgetary purchases of everyday commodities that range from the British army's breakfast tea to its energy supplies.

However, finance capital pursues onward its interest-seeking, rentier profile. As much as the sheepdog is trained to protect the flock, the bloodhound is trained to pursue smell.

The former controllers of the pound sterling of the Bank of England dropped it as world money by default and went right across the Atlantic Ocean for the dollar of the US Federal Reserve System (USFed). Why? Though across the Atlantic, the USFed was retained within the ownership perimeter of the same first-cousin married clans.

The USFed idea was conceived by Paul Warburg. Arriving in 1907 in New York, his brother Felix married the daughter of financier Jacob Schiff. The two clans were connected after their joint stay in the same Frankfurt mansion in the 18th century.

Besides that, it must be frankly declared that the conjecture on USFed ownership today is based on no more than axiomatic probability verifiable at the USFed site on the Internet. The USFed - a cartel like the Bank of England in 1694 - enjoys a monopoly on the emission of the dollar, but makes no declaration either about its ownership structure or its financial accounts.

In this shadowy situation of monopoly, academe and media must promote the merits of free trade and free competition to rank and file citizenry.

As to first-cousin marriage, it is a mechanism for consolidating clan property and the congealing of single-mindedness in the clan. Because such a marriage is conventionally outlawed to Westerners, the above features help the clan elevate and nest itself above the sharing and dilution that occurs in ordinary betrothal in the West (a sophisticated chart of relationships is traditionally drawn up in the East to avoid birth defects in children in what is also known to sociologists as uncle-niece marriage).

To follow this reasoning about the shift across the Atlantic, for more than half a century now finance capital clans have had at their hands the US dollar as a lever. During the period they have dissolved the mediating benevolence of statesmanship that Adam Smith was compelled to suggest at the critical time of rebellion of American colonies against the British Crown in the 1770s.

Adam Smith took over the idea of individual interests then so highly publicized by Bernard Mandeville and others. He wrote in his master work The Wealth of Nations: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard of their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but their advantages."

Smith says that in the pursuit of self-interest an individual is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

The Edinburgh professor reinforced a message that statesmen must work toward a higher, common good. Professor of moral philosophy Adam Smith was applying in essence to words repeated for centuries in the British Isles to relate to the higher good, "Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven."

However, when neo-liberal economists talk to us from Adam Smith - a known quantity - they spin us around 180 degrees to the individual interest.

The theme was carried into academe. For its part, Western celluloid welcomed the job of re-programming because of the structure of its ownership (Ted Turner came out with million-dollar handshakes to use tele-journalists to capture world audiences, after which the trailblazing "independent" tycoon handed over CNN's worldwide audiences to media conglomerate Time-Warner).

Motive? If society were atomized to its smallest possible unit, to the individual, neo-liberals estimate that social cohesion would be lost. Organized community and even the family would be atomized to rabble swayed by the fortnight's opportunities, programmed by magnate media. As a result the penetration of the US economy by the single-minded finance capital clans would accelerate by leaps and bounds.

We can recognize a still larger international conjunction by now applying the term Finanz Kapital. That may be exemplified by the gold collected as payment for mustering men in Germany's Hesse-Kassel and sailing them ("Hessian troops") out to fight the American rebellion. The war was lost by the red-coated troops on the king's side, but the money shop that figured in the international gold transfer won.

Here is another key feature for rising above competition to do business with the state: the common banker's risk of not having a live debtor to return capital and interest is minimized.

From Frankfurt am Main, the red shield of the money shop's principals - recently migrated from the Khazar east - set off on the trail of George III's money to nest with clans already in the social heights of England.

It is difficult to propose that Adam Smith was ignorant as to the social hierarchy that controlled the Bank of England in 1694 or the British East India Company in 1600 (they were blaring and dominant money and foreign-trade monopolies).

Smith had observed: "Neither the most acknowledged probity, nor the highest rank, nor the greatest public services, protect [the legislator] from the most infamous abuse and detraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger arising from the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists."

Heavy taxes were raised for 10 years from 1763. Smith's master work appeared in 1776 and it is more reasonable to believe that he had been an observer of the possible onward path of revolution. The spirit of those years is captured by the Grolier Encyclopedia: "Britain's was a mentality unable to appreciate the aims and aspirations of its colonial people. Superpowers, all too often, are not much given to introspection, to questioning their values and assumptions."

It is more realistic for us to propose that the professor - observing the ferment of revolution - chose to participate in mitigating and converting toward benevolence the harshness of the money houses' influence on government.

After the lesson of the US declaration of independence of 1776, the professor's idea (onetime prime minister Lord Shelburne was a close friend) came to be hammered on to the mast of the British ship of state.

For the other part, Thomas Jefferson had assured John Adams, "the flames kindled on the fourth of July" have spread over too much of the globe ever to be extinguished by the forces of despotism and reaction.

At first glance the two ideas seem different. The tradition itself, however, dates to the Magna Carta of the British Isles. We shall see whether it is lost in the 21st century.

In contrast, not from British civilization came the core doctrine spread in the United States by the neo-liberals. Their doctrine used the anti-Bolshevik missile launched by Alisa Rosenbaum, born in 1906 in St Petersburg.

Alisa Rosenbaum retained her initials and assumed the name Ayn Rand after her arrival in the United States in 1926. She served as the priestess or "guiding hand" for neo-liberal Milton Friedman. She achieved that status through her incantations plagiarizing in her new location the philosophy of nihilist intellectuals such as Russian writer Nikolay Dobrolyubov. The term itself was first circulated by Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons.

Nihilism ("nothing matters") in the Russia of Orthodox Christianity and the House of Romanov was a survivalist ethic of intellectuals. Theirs was a country whose money and credit system was desired by Finanz Kapital, which had begun to rock the Romanovs from 1812, the time of Napoleon's Grand Army that lost 75 percent of its officers and men in Russia.

Money was required to conscript, train, equip and feed army men and the endeavor would have been impossible without the inducement of war loans contracted in the name of the nation from the triumphalist money houses after the guillotining of France's Catholic Bourbon monarchy was done and finished with.

Napoleon's multi-fold belligerence shows us how the money houses had honed skills in turning a quick penny using both aggressor and defender through subsidiaries extending from Vienna to London until Napoleon degraded to a self-willed liability (the same liability situation evolved after power fell into the hands of Vladimir Ulyanov and Leon Bronstein in 1917 and of Corporal Adolphus Schikelgruber in 1939).

Both the Romanovs and Bourbons held a dim view of usury because of the scriptural teaching on the moneychangers. In England, King Edward I, notable for his regular parliaments, had banished usury-practicing clans in 1290 and France had followed suit in 1394.

To return to Alisa Rosenbaum - her associate Milton Friedman had for his part cast his eyes in the early 1960s on the position of J K Galbraith. In Galbraith, president John F Kennedy had selected as economics advisor a relative outsider (British Commonwealth-born in 1908 in the Canadian province of Ontario).

Britain had successfully operated a nationalized central bank from 1946 and there is little need for surmise on the roots of Kennedy's presidential order. The order, still in force, authorized a Treasury dollar to compete with the USFed dollar (such axial competition was kept off by his Democratic successors until the euro arose outside the US domain).

In contrast to what anyone can read in Galbraith's books in the world's libraries, Friedman's writings epitomize street-savvy salesmanship and only a frugal background in the philosophy of economics or even corporate business (we can best refrain from speaking of the classical philosophy and epistemology from which Adam Smith wrote).

Without such intellectual baggage, Friedman was easily readied and positioned as salesman for Finanz Kapital by Ayn Rand's nihilist genie uncorked from its bottle in the New World. Her seances were given on Saturday evenings at gatherings in her New York apartments (Alan Greenspan would also walk in and found himself elevated from part-time jazz player to head the USFed).

For all of us today, it was a tragic case of "fools rush in where wise men fear to tread".

Ayn Rand's Virtue of Selfishness (1930s book title) could not immediately break down to individuals the Soviets ("councils" in Russian) as the Petrograd University alumnus projected for her work. She was lost to that audience for 60-plus years, the audience being out of reach of Western newsmagazine, movie, TV and FM programming.

Her anti-Bolshevik missile had to wait out World War II until the mid-1970s when mass markets were flooded with Japanese transistor radios sporting 16m and 19m short-wave bands. In addition, jamming of broadcasts on the longer wavebands was made intermittent as the Leonid Brezhnev circle set aside the many new beginnings of the Nikita Khruschchev era to wine and dine under the self-satisfied, plush, crimson banner of "Developed Socialism".

Better reception of Munich-based stations such as Radio Liberty incorporated at last Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev's generation in programming on the merits of free trade, free competition and related goodies churned out for the interlocked holding companies of Finanz Kapital.

Despite the lack of a Bolshevik audience during those six decades, neo-liberals were busy messaging in their trans-Atlantic nest. As a result, in the United States the process of reduction to the individual began to destroy the synergy that the business corporation requires. What destroys the Soviet ("council") was placed on track to destroy the Board of Directors (the council of business). It must also hurt the councils of social and religious organizations.

The only refreshment that the United States experienced in this regard was the arrival of Japanese managers in US factories to help create the cohesiveness that they had seen and absorbed at home in Japan's huge rise in shop-floor innovation and productivity incepted by the work of Kaoru Ishikawa and of US-consigned specialists Joseph Juran and Edwards Deming.

The Japanese experience with participatory management sparked off "The Search for Excellence" in US management literature. However, by then the hold of Finanz Kapital and of Ayn Rand and her associates had malodorously soiled the nest for business and industry. They had space left only for gas-masked manager-by-directive. Mr Gas Mask has proved ill-equipped to halt falling rates of US productivity.

Looking at the scandals that rock Wall Street today, financier George Soros stated in no uncertain terms that neo-liberalism "is a false and dangerous ideology" (The New Republic, September 2002). In this we see a dean of secular business moving in the direction of Pope John Paul II, who dealt with the dangers of neo-liberalism in an open-air sermon in Cuba on January 25, 1998. By then the pope had been exposed to first-hand evidence of what neo-liberals had done for his flock in Eastern Europe.

Wall Street's George Soros makes this move because he sees the ferment in everyday life. Usurpation of resources is happening within the business organization because neo-liberals have written off the common good as nonsense in their process of retreat from Adam Smith.

Soros is Hungarian-born but he has imbibed the anglophone idea of "common-wealth". However, Europe in general is still in the process of realizing that the euro symbolizes enlarging joint resources. The 400 million population has gotten as far as "European Communities". Many Germanic and Romance languages have no equivalent for "commonwealth". Several nations have only known submission and subjugation in history, as reflected on March 28, 1999, by Thomas Friedman, an editorialist nested in the New York Times: "For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is ... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

Such lobbying was explained by Adam Smith in several ways. For instance: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."

Though brow-beaten and historically blindsided by lobbyists of Thomas Friedman's status, General Collin Powell retains a residual idea of commonwealth thanks to his background in the West Indies. That residual ethic of British "commonwealth" extends to people in Belize, Canada, Guyana and then eastward across Africa and Asia to Hong Kong.

We will need more civic thinking if only to care for the environmental resources we share on the planet. We have to reconstitute civics after the great toll on body politic taken by neo-liberalism.

On the World Wide Web, analyst Sartre stands up to reflect on "a single world currency, administered through a solitary clearing house and autarchic central bank". To take that path in spirit, we must re-benchmark (a) to Adam Smith and (b) to a civics of commonwealth, as Soros proposed in his own way in his September 2002 study.

After the breakdown of Russia's Soviets in the mid-1990s, if Ayn Rand's missile keeps pointlessly hovering around, the "priestess of liberty" can plug into the ongoing opening-up of China, there destabilize social cohesiveness to send millions of its people to settle in the Chinatowns of the world.

Speaking with China's nationals today, you find that if they have an alternative picture, it is gained from the American movie. Consequently, if China's destabilization follows Russia's, the media-promised oasis will be continental North America, where water, energy, housing and other infrastructural utilities and elements will also need to be reproduced.

That is part and parcel of an awaiting future for the existing programming by nihilism that clouds the higher echelons of the United States. There nihilism - as usual without acknowledgment - has adopted J K Galbraith and the Keynesian model in fly-by-night mode to stimulate someone's business and save the USFed dollar by state intervention in destructive warfare.

Britain's Lord Keynes, talked down in media showtime of free marketers, claimed that government should play a key, beneficial role in stabilizing an economy.

It is worth repeating that George Soros is today among people who comprehend that we need to re-establish frames of reference and an ethical bulwark to fend against Ayn Rand's "each man for himself", her anti-Bolshevik missile that has misfired on US business and industry.

Also refer to the W Clark study (several URLs) "The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War With Iraq". For more on Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand see http://www.geocities.com/WorldCityEssays/ .

(©2003 Wendell W Solomons.)

Original source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ED19Dj01.html

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