Why the New World Order Crowd Will Fail in Their Plans
Remnant Review (July 17, 2010)
One of the most important books that I have read over the last 10 years is titled Superclass. It is written by David Rothkopf. The author is a certified Insider. He has access to the decision-makers who are in positions of leadership and enormous wealth around the world. He attends their meetings on a regular basis. They trust him.
The book is not so much a controversial account of the rich and infamous as it is an announcement in full public view of the confidence of a group of about 6,000 people who are in a position to exercise leadership. These individuals are the spiritual and institutional heirs of similar people with similar goals who have been exercising political influence in the West since before World War I.
These people are self-conscious globalists. They see the ideal world as an integrated, well-oiled machine that can be run, or at least influenced, by an elite. These people possess enormous power, because they control capital in the range of $100 trillion. This, at least, is the estimate of the author.
These individuals cooperate with each other, communicate with each other, get together on a regular basis, and exercise influence over all major political parties in every Western nation.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, these individuals and the organizations that they represent achieved a major victory in a struggle that had been going on since 1917. It was a struggle between socialist tyranny and Western state capitalism. The Communists were willing to stop at nothing short of nuclear war in order to expand their influence as an empire. This was true in the Soviet Union, and it was true in Communist China. But with the decision of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 to allow agriculture to be operated in terms of free-market principles, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the confrontation between East and West moved from military to social and political.
The people described in the book believe that the Western industrial system will continue to become ever-more integrated and ever wealthier over the next century. The problem that they face is that Asia has clearly become the wave of the future economically. The Asians are lending money to Western governments, which holds down interest rates in the West. They do so in order to encourage Western populations to import goods from Asia. This strategy has worked ever since the beginning of the Japanese economic miracle in 1950. It has led to rapid economic growth in Asia, and it has led to an enormous expansion of government debt in the West.
The confrontation between East and West today is over
economics, not politics. Asian leaders are not enamored with
democracy. Neither are the Insiders who run Western governments
from behind the scene. These Insiders enjoy the cover that the
ideology and institutional arrangements of democracy provide for
them. But, in the final analysis, their view of democratic
institutions is not fundamentally different from the view held by
Asian oligarchs. They see democracy as a means to an end, not a
non-negotiable demand.
I have lived through the Cold War. I am very grateful for the fact that there is little likelihood of a nuclear war breaking out today. While there is danger from terrorist groups with biological weaponry, there seems to be little danger that Western governments will start a major war. There could be war between India and Pakistan. Russia is not a threat.
I'm not nearly so concerned about the attempts of globalists to increase the control of governmental agencies over the affairs of the marketplace. The reason I am not so concerned is because I understand the power of the free market. No matter what kinds of regulations are imposed by this or that government, or by the United Nations, or by any other international agency or governmental organization, the power of entrepreneurs to stay ahead of the regulation is extremely great. Entrepreneurs will find ways around the regulations. While the Insiders believe that increased government regulation over the affairs of the market can be positive, they are also committed to economic growth. They do not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. They own the goose. They get a high percentage of her eggs.
The author reveals the enormous wealth that these individuals control. By control, I mean ownership over the tools of production. In order to make a profit, they have to meet customer demand. So, in this sense, they are stewards of the assets. They cannot do anything they want with these assets and still maximize their profits. In this sense, they are under the control of customers. This is the advantage of the free market economy. If these people want to stay rich, and way beyond rich, they have to supply the goods and services that consumers are willing and able to purchase.
The author estimates that approximately 3,000 people who are members in this unofficial group of influential people possess the same capital as the bottom 3 billion members of the human race. I would say that this is a somewhat skewed distribution of wealth. The author may be incorrect about this estimate. But, no matter what we like or don't like about politics, economics, and the way the world works, Pareto's law is still in effect. There is going to be at least a 20-80 distribution of wealth. Again, I'm not too concerned over the fact that a handful of people have legal title to the tools of production. I believe that private property does favor economically efficient people, but I also believe that private property enables little people to get wealthier, So, I'm not nearly so bothered about these people as I was about the oligarchs who ran the Communist tyrannies.
This book is a kind of political tract. Its task is to show
the literate person part of the way the world works. The author is
concerned about the unequal distribution of wealth, fearing that
this will lead to some sort of revolutionary violence in the
future. It is not clear to me how or why the great masses of the
world will rise up in opposition to the existing system. He
thinks there is risk, and he wants to find a way to de-fuse the
threat of revolution against the prevailing social order. The
trouble is, he has no idea of how to keep Pareto's law from
working, any more than the Communist tyrants did. In fact, the
Communist tyrants would not have objected to Pareto's law as long
as they were at the top of the pyramid. What upset Communist
tyrants is that the average guy in the West lived better than
they did. It undermined their respect for the Communist system,
and it led in 1991 to the suicide by the Communist state of the
Communist Party.
The author does not seem to be aware of the extent of the decentralization that is implemented by the free-market social order. He does not understand the extent to which the Internet and other electronic technologies are transferring power to common people. These little people may not be in a position to move wealth downward. But they are in a position to break up the existing state governments that are involved in the process of globalization.
He also does not seem to understand the extent to which the modern nation-state is threatened by the technologies associated with the digital revolution. It is possible that the system of state governments which the people described in this book have commandeered for their own benefit will break apart over the next two generations. This will not be because of some form of revolutionary violence. It will be because the nation-states of the world are going bankrupt. They are not going to be able to deliver on their promises to the general population. They will not be able to deliver on the promises of Social Security, Medicare, and other forms of guaranteed retirement benefits.
Furthermore, they are losing their ability to prevent organized crime and unorganized criminals from disrupting the lives of common citizens. The justification of civil government is its ability to provide safety for the broad masses of the population. The rise in crime indicates the state is unable to deliver the goods with respect to crime prevention and public safety. This will undermine people's confidence in civil governments at all levels. It is most likely to undermine confidence in national governments.
The existing social order has benefited from globalization as international trade has expanded. The author is correct in pointing out that national governments find it difficult to control the activities of capitalist countries. As capital becomes diversified across borders, it becomes less and less possible for any one group of politicians in one state to control the allocation of capital across borders.
The author points to many attempts that are going on at the present time to transfer sovereignty away from national governments to international governments. The difficulty is, the speed at which the process of decentralization is taking place is much more rapid than the process of globalization in the realm of politics. In other words, the globalists are benefiting economically from a process that reduces the power of civil governments. They are getting rich by means of capital diversification, yet they are beginning to lose control over the direction of this capitalist order because the nation-state is unable to enforce its claims across jurisdictions.
This seeming contradiction has been going on for decades. I am familiar the writings of the globalists in the 1930s. Some of the policy recommendations that are being put forth today for strengthening of international regulation were conceived of in the middle of the 1930s.
The Rockefeller Foundation hired free-market economists who believed in free trade to write books defending free trade in the 1930s and 1940s. Rockefeller money funded some of the books of Wilhelm Röpke, and funded Ludwig von Mises's book, Omnipotent Government. This did not mean that the Rockefeller interests favored the same kind of free-market social order that Röpke and Mises defended. The globalists did understand that international free trade tends to produce interconnected economies. These interconnected economies favor those economic organizations that are large enough and rich enough to be deeply involved in international trade. The globalists were associated with these corporations. They favored the expansion of trade because they favored the expansion of these organizations.
Similarly, on the other side of the free trade debate, people who said they believed in the free market, but who also believed in high tariffs and restrictions on imports, opposed the expansion of international trade. But, in opposing the expansion of international trade, they had to favor domestic sales taxes on imported goods (tariffs), and they had to favor other kinds of controls over the decisions of consumers in the marketplace.
So, on the one hand, the globalists who favored free trade were also pursuing the creation of international organizations that would regulate international trade. They favored the creation of stronger international governments. On the other hand, people who believed in domestic free-market activities wound up defending policies that were unfavorable to the free flow of capital.
We have seen all this before. We saw it in the 1780s in the new nation. There were restrictions on trade, state to state. There were local fiat currencies. In order to overcome these restrictions on trade, James Madison organized the Annapolis Convention in 1786. That was a group of state representatives who got together to find ways of increasing trade across state borders. The convention failed, but Madison got a commitment from the attendees that they would gather in the summer 1787 in Philadelphia to hammer out some sort of trade agreement that would enable companies in each state to profit from trade across borders. The result was the Constitutional Convention of 1787. That Convention dramatically centralized power in the national government, and reduced the power of states to regulate commerce. With the ratification of the Constitution, there was a major centralization of political power in the United States. The same sort of motivation that is driving the globalists to create international government and other regulatory agencies is operational today.
Half a century ago, I read a booklet produced by conservatives who opposed the strengthening the United Nations. The booklet quoted liberal textbooks that argued that the United Nations was simply an extension of the principle of centralization that led to the Constitutional Convention. The booklet dismissed the argument for a number of reasons. As I remember it, the main reason was that there was no agreement in terms of government in the 1950s that would enable the United Nations to create anything like a Republican order comparable to that which was created by the United States Constitution. I thoroughly agreed at the time with that argument. I still agree with it. But, in terms of the old liberal argument that the booklet was opposed to, namely, that the United States Constitution was an example of centralization of power at the expense of state sovereignty, was accurate. The anti-Federalists were correct.
The fundamental belief of the globalists, whether in 1950 or today, is that religious differences and even political differences are minimal. They believe that the free market, meaning the deregulated market, provides a model for political compromise. They believe that market interconnections across borders are more important in the daily lives of individuals than whatever political or religious differences separate them.
Conservatives dismiss this argument. Conservatives in Islamic countries certainly dismiss this argument. Conservatives in the State of Israel dismiss it. People who are committed to a particular way of life are not convinced that the benefits of free trade, mainly in the form of lower prices, offset the loss of the benefits that are associated with national sovereignty. I am also of this opinion. But the globalists are not of this opinion. They believe that a regulated system of international trade will bind people together in a new world order.
These people are not socialists. They do not believe the state should own the means of production. You can be sure they don't believe that. They own the means of production. They prefer to own the state rather than have the state own the means of production. So far, this philosophy has worked out very well for them.
With respect to economics, the market provides a system of positive feedback and negative feedback that enables people to make decisions that will further their own interests. The system the profit and loss which governs the free-market social order offers benefits to those who meet customer demand, and it offers losses to those who do not. It does not take a government official or a committee to make this system function for the benefit of consumers.
The free-market social order is therefore nothing like a civil government. A free-market social order enables individuals to trade with each other, each benefiting from the trade, neither suffering a loss because of the trade. If either of them expects to suffer a loss, there will be no trade. Politics is different. In politics, it is winner take all: 50% plus one vote establishes the winner and loser. This has nothing to do with the principle of profit and loss as it applies in a free-market social order. This is why any attempt to extrapolate from the free-market to civil government is doomed to failure.
The globalists believe that the model that is provided by the free-market is applicable to international affairs. They believe that, in the same sense that a buyer and seller can get together to make a deal, so can diplomats or Insiders behind the scenes get together to work out contradictions in political affairs. But the give and take of politics, in which each side surrenders something of value, is done through force as a back- up. This is not true in a free market. In a free-market, either individual can walk away from the deal, and no one is threatened with violence. In international affairs, if one nation walks away from a proposed treaty, it may risk war. This is not the same kind of compromise, of working out the details, that prevails in the free-market.
The globalists believe that, at some price, a deal can be worked out. This is not a universal rule in economic affairs. There are lots of deals that are never consummated because one of the parties believes that he is not getting a good enough deal. Most offers most of the time are rejected. Every advertisement is such an offer. We pay little attention to most advertisements most of the day. This is not the same as an offer that one nation makes to another nation. That kind of offer is usually taken seriously. That is because there are major consequences, mostly negative, for not paying attention to the offer. There is the old phrase out of the Godfather: "We will make them an offer they cannot refuse." This had nothing to do with free-market principles. It had more to do with a system of government that was a miniaturization of civil government. It involved the use of violence.
So, the internationalists are going to find that they hit a series of brick walls. If they want to know what the wall looks like, all they have to do is go to the State of Israel and take a look at the wall that divides the Israeli settlements from the Arab settlements. That is not a symbolic wall.
Religious groups, racial groups, linguistic groups, traditional groups, and many other kinds of groups that are in a position to gain political power on one side of a border are not about to surrender sovereignty to a government on the other side of the border. Anyone who thinks such a surrender is going to happen is extraordinarily naive. Yet the incredibly rich people who are surveyed in this book are of the opinion that such differences can be worked out across the bargaining table. They think of negotiations between civil government's in much the way that they view the negotiations between senior executives of two large corporations. If the two corporations they are speaking of are rival factions of the Mafiya (their spelling), then they may have a point. But this is not the kind of corporation that the globalists have in mind.
We are being pulled in the direction of the creation of centralized governments that will demand the surrender of sovereignty by national governments. This is something like the Constitutional Convention of 1787, but without any of the shared confession or shared way of life that made possible the newly constituted United States government of 1788.
There is going to be political resistance in every nation -- resistance by organized political groups that are against this move at the top, which is being orchestrated by members of the same groups that have been orchestrating this development since before World War I.
The public does not see what is going on. Individuals within the general public are beginning to see what is going on, but they do not have political influence today. So, the globalists think that they can get away with these plans without organizing openly. This is being done behind the scenes. This is not exactly a conspiracy, because the books and materials published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and other Insider organizations have been open for many decades about the long-term plan, or plans, that these groups have.
There is no doubt that what Norman Dodd revealed in the mid-1950s regarding America's largest nonprofit foundations was true then, and it is true today. The faces change; the agenda remains. What Dodd discussed in 1954 was going on in 1934. They were pushing for the fusion of the Soviet and Western systems.
We see the push for international political centralization paralleling the increase in international economic cooperation. The globalists believe that they can harness the desire of individuals to benefit from international trade. They think that this preference for free trade will aid them in their attempt to influence national political leaders to accelerate the movement toward international government.
By the way, the insiders have adopted a new word: governance. They think that by changing "government" to "governance," they are going to pull the wool over our eyes. So far, they seem to have been successful. There is no great outrage politically in the United States or elsewhere against the efforts of the globalists to extend the agenda they have been working on, and their predecessors have been working on, for a century. The story still gets very little publicity in the mainstream press.
I am bringing it up today, but not because I think we are seeing some rapid escalation toward the creation of some sort of international governmental body. On the contrary, I see a slow and steady process that extends an agenda that has been operational in these groups for 100 years. This is not a new process. This has been going on for so long that several generations of conservatives have come and gone and have never understood the motivation behind the agenda. They do not look back decades. They do not perceive that this is part of a world and life view which favors the creation of something like the tower that went to heaven that we read about in Genesis 11. This is an attempt to rebuild the Tower of Babel. This inclination is in the hearts of power seekers in every generation. What is unique in our generation is that the possibility of working out some sort of arrangement like this seems within the realm of possibility.
Is not within the realm of possibility. We are viewing the breakdown of the euro currency system, which is a prelude to the breakdown of the European Union. The more the Insiders scheme to centralize power, the more they find that their schemes are blowing up in their faces. The banking establishments that are behind much of this process of internationalization are at the center of the crisis. They came close to going bust. These people do not know what they are doing.
In every society, in every period, there are groups that favor centralization, and there are groups that favor decentralization. Today, because of the success of international trade, and because of the enormous reduction of communications costs as a result of computerization, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and similar technologies, the globalists believe that they are in a position to speed up the process of international centralization. What they do not understand, or least what they will not admit in public, is that computerization, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and similar technologies are moving in the opposite direction. They are empowering individuals at the local level. They are doing so by that most fundamental attribute of the free-market system: price competition. As the price of technology decreases, more people take advantage of technology. The ability of individuals to mobilize politically on a particular issue has never been greater. The globalists may pressure politicians to increase a particular nation's cooperation with other nations across borders, but at the next election, the politicians who did this will find themselves out of office.
Think of Glenn Beck. He has an erasable marker, a whiteboard, and 3 million viewers. He can create more havoc for the Obama administration than the Republican National Committee can, or would. The people who watch Beck then go on Facebook or Twitter and send messages to people who think the way they do.
There is this enormous leverage effect of the social media. None of this existed as recently as five years ago. From political standpoint, this development has come out of nowhere and is now threatening the ability of the globalists to pursue their agenda quietly, without much political resistance domestically. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.
Technology is taking away more power from the globalists than the growth of free trade has produced for them individually or corporately. Yes, they control a great deal of wealth. But in order to benefit from that wealth, they have to serve consumers. It is getting more difficult for them to pursue their political agenda and at the same time extend the technology of free trade in order to get wealthier. As they get wealthier, they are making common people better informed. This is as it should be. This is what free-market theory says will happen. The benefits of innovation become widespead.
From the point of view of the globalists, this increasing wealth and awareness on the part of organized voters is a threat to their political agenda.
So, on the one hand, they are getting richer on the basis of the
extension of these new technologies to the common man, and on the
other hand, they are becoming more vulnerable to organized
political opposition from the common man.
I am strongly of the opinion that what Jacques Barzun and Martin van Creveld have written about the coming bankruptcy of the nation-state is correct. They have argued that the nation-state will decline over the next half-century. It will not be able to hold together. It will go bankrupt. When this happens, there will be a move around the world to a breakup of the large nation-states. There will be political decentralization.
As this takes place, it decreases the influence of multinational corporations. It ends the state subsidies. They will have to compete on their own. This, they are not in a position to do. They're going to have to compete in a true new world order. This new world order will not be governed in terms of large centralized political units. It will be governed in terms of local politics, local loyalties, and local political sovereignty. The number of nation-states will increase. This seems inconceivable at the present time, but it is very conceivable whatever you think of the possibility that the checks from Washington will either not arrive or will bounce.
So, the globalists have bet the corporate farm on the continuing legitimacy and solvency of the nation-state. That assumption is unlikely to be proven accurate. When the breakup of the nation-states takes place, or when existing nation-states suffer extreme decentralization as a result of national insolvency, we are going to see resistance to the creation of powerful international global governance. Global governance rests upon the ability of these global governing units to gain cooperation from national political leaders and national bureaucracies. Take away that assumption, and the globalist agenda hits the ultimate brick wall.
I don't think people are going to give up the Internet and the World Wide Web. They are not going to give up social media. That means they're not going to give up being able to buy low-cost goods from outside the state, in order to avoid paying state sales tax. I think there will continue to be price competition on the Web. I think it is going to accelerate. So, I do not think there's going to be a move to shut down trade across borders. The political constituency associated with the World Wide Web is so strong that local political leaders who attempt to interfere with international trade will find the same kind of resistance among Web users that the globalists will find when they attempt to increase the power of international governing. In other words, I think the technological developments associated with computerization in the Web are operating to fight increased civil government at both ends of the tax spectrum. The internationalists are going to find enormous resistance locally, which will affect their ability to influence national politicians. Local politicians are going to find it difficult to create a system of trade barriers, or state tariffs, or even state currencies that interfere with the commercial expansion that is being made possible by the Internet.
I think this is all to the good. Whenever you have an institutional development that interferes with the expansion of political power at any level, but especially the international level, this is beneficial. It leads to greater individual freedom. It also leads to lower prices.
We see the rise of low-cost surveillance technology, and we shudder. But the economic fact is this: governments have to have money in order to implement systems of control that take advantage of low-cost surveillance technologies. Governments are going to find that the ability of individuals to resist the expansion of Federal power, even if it only means that they can start lawsuits at a discount price because of the paperwork made available on some website.
Technology works both ways. It centralizes power on the one hand, by making surveillance less expensive, but it also enables well-informed individuals at the local level to fight back effectively in the court system. I believe that the power of ever-more effective price competition is so great that it will overwhelm the ability of the central planners to take advantage of their surveillance techniques. The Internet is transferring information to so many people so rapidly at such a low cost that the traditional means of political control are being undermined.
In the good old days, local politicians gained influence power over the way people thought because they had allies in the mainstream media. They would be in close working relationships with an editor or owner of the local newspaper, and as time went on, there were fewer of these newspapers. Today, most cities have only one newspaper. Yet if you look at this newspaper, it is like a shrunken mummy of the newspaper that existed 10 years ago. The politicians may influence the local newspaper, but this does them no good politically. Nobody under 30 reads the newspaper anymore.
The same thing is true of local television. In any case, local television news was always a minor factor in local politics. The main thing local TV news did was to cover stories of human interest other than politics. Today, a politician can be devastated within a matter of hours by a report that goes on the Web, in which is then sent around the digital neighborhood on Facebook. There's not a thing that the local politicians can do about this. They are no longer in control of the negative sanctions.
I am becoming more concerned about the technology itself than I am about politicians, whether local, national, or international. What I'm concerned about is the fact that the cost of chips is declining by about 50% per annum. This means that a desktop computer that sells for $1,000 in 25 years is going to have the computing ability of several million people. The social order is not prepared for digital technology that delivers to an individual the same kind of computer power a couple of million brains possess.
We do not know what the results will be of a society in which the computers by the year 2050 will have the ability to program software to run even more sophisticated computers. We are now getting into the realm of the dark side of the science fiction genre. The main promoter of this dark side today is computer genius Bill Joy. The main promoter of the bright side today is equally smart Ray Kurzweil. Joy says that the world we are going to get into shortly will be a lot more dangerous than we think. Kurzweil admits that this is a possibility, but he displays a happy optimism that things will somehow all work out for the best.
So far, computer technology has been a great benefit for most of us. I have certainly enjoyed my 1991 WordPerfect for DOS program. I have gotten a lot of use out of it. I expect to continue to get a lot of use out of it.
For this report, once a month, I use NaturallySpeaking, a voice-recognition program. I can write very fast, but it makes lots of mistakes, called "wordos," that I would never make when I'm typing. Now, if I could just find a cheap digital proofreader, who works for nothing, I would be in fat city. Unfortunately, when my wife is out of town, and I have to post Remnant Review, as is the case today, I risk a whole lot more errors. But, under the circumstances, I am still a great fan of NaturallySpeaking. I don't use it all that often, because of the problem of errors, and because I usually don't write long reports, but when I write Remnant Review, I hook up NaturallySpeaking, and start to talk. I figure readers would rather get my ideas, accompanied by a few typographical errors, than not get my ideas at all. If you have read this far, I suppose you agree with me.
My point is, by the time that we get voice-activation
software that does not make wordo errors, or grammatical
errors, we may get a lot of other software products in the hands
of hostile groups that will create scenarios we would prefer to
avoid.
I think Superclass provides great insight into the workings of the Insiders. It does not enter the inner sanctum (sancti?), but we see the outer court. That's all we really need to see to get a sense of what is going on.
The author says that the nation-state will fail. He is correct. He argues that this strengthens the case for international government. He is blind to the decentralizing effects of technology. He sees the new world order as the replacement of the nation-state. He and his peers do not see the other possibility: decentralization politically.
The Insiders have seen the nation-state as a stepping stone to glozalization. I see it as a stepping stone to decentralization and political localism. They are ready to relegate the nation-state to second-rate status. So am I.
The Insiders see themselves as the wave of the future. They think their agenda will continue: great personal wealth, great influence over politics, and a new era of international governance.
I think they are wrong. I offer two pieces of evidence: high technology and Asia, which benefits from high technology and price competition. The Asians are selling to us. We are building up massive debt to their central banks. The next decade belongs to China. After that, India. The West will be overtaken. Asia has no Social Security or Medicare. Asia is outside the control of these Western Insiders.
I think the Insiders' plans will go the way of the euro, then the T-bond and the FDIC. They are on top today, but they are on top of a mountain that will be eclipsed. The move towards centralization in politics will be undermined by the forces of decentralization.
This is why taking steps to gain local influence is crucial today.