Runnymede Institute

Crowds of about to be famished people across the Arab world are gathering in huge numbers to protest rising prices, lack of opportunity and get a handout if one’s being given. The greatest noise of all is the demand for democracy but as with all things, they should be careful what they wish for.

They may get Beltway brand majority rule, chock full of clauses and caveats to make sure the common man is not represented except in acquiescence to guarantee a punishing national debt to a local Temple of Mammon.

How else will the World Bank find 100 trillion credits?

The invisible hand guiding the world to a new improved war of destruction seems to harbour a satanic quality in it’s awe-inspiring tenacity. Ministers from Egypt and the nearly toppled North African states desperately grasp for new loans to service old debt, commiting populations to strangling limitations on people’s customary liberties.

Gaddafi’s been selected to provide the Lybian sideshow and comic relief for when the serious carnage begins since he opted to resist the irresistable masters. Ranting that his popularity fell due to a resurrected Osama Bin Laden is crazy but blaming drug using enemies is too bonkers. How could they ever afford to feed their munchies?

It’s a small group, elites with too much money and only some six thousand front line minions but that’s more than enough to handle confused populations. When distracting people to pick their pockets clean, PHDs make pretty good props and they did manage to convince humanity their brand of Democracy’s the way forward, an immense coup.

Perusing the world’s available first-hand archaeological material in search of hidden secrets to use against their fellow men has developed into a field of it’s own and where whole segments, paragraphs and continuity are missing, the blocks get filled in through agenda fuelling guesswork. Roman manuals in slave-craft on the other hand, whose bibliographies encompass the knowledge of two previous milennia don’t normally get an outing or wide translation. A playbook in the wrong hands won’t do.

The rich in every society have behaved in the same way. Discoveries of baked cuneiform tablets from more than 4,000 years ago indicate sophistication in Babylon was as great if not equal to our own and it was around the Tigris and Euphrates that business theories and loan interest were first expostulated.  Banking, term insurance, markets, they had it all but pensions are more of a western thing, ‘war bounty’. Nobody who armed themselves entrusted valuables to others, they had alternatives.

Translators have never quite got that one right and it’s possible they intentionally launched legions of fledgling undergrads into a chasm of ignorance through their own misapprehensions. Perhaps it’s more polite to state that ancient texts are the property of those who paid to have them dug up and if the interpretation leaves something to be desired, it is the right of the lawful owner to save the best bits for himself. The end result in the US has been to soften up and cower the Second Amendment crowd.

Profitably arming men in conflict was never exclusively a western tradition but all provisions cost more when scarce and the Greeks took things to the natural conclusion when their turn came. That we’ve adapted many of the resulting structures in modern society is less a testament to the brilliance of ideas than singular profit motive.

In the span of a single century, visionaries built up and then oligarchs destroyed Greece with their own hands fomenting the Peloponnesian Wars. Guilds, technical networks and worshipful societies vanished overnight when socialised war funds morphed into unserviceable debts thanks to canny majority votes. Is this the source of the Fed’s 99 year plan?

Hasn’t it taken just about the same amount of time to bring America to it’s knees, hopelessly bankrupt and still barking threats at it’s invented foes? Attributing the fall to a series of unhappy coincidences does no favours for a discredited media. Capitalism doesn’t work because America doesn’t practice it and the illusion of the ‘solid pension’ was designed to put everyone at ease just long enough till full participation meant the whole thing could be imploded, leaving the public too poor to do anything about loss.

Blame the modern guild, the corporation! Read more…