by Sean Jobst, 16 January 2011
Under finance capitalism, usury has allowed the financiers and economists to transform the very nature of money. Through interest it becomes artificially productive, whereas through fiat money it becomes artificially valuable. Interest and fiat money are closely linked as part of its cultic dimension of capital.
Through interest money becomes an end in itself, compromising the organic view of honest unexploited labor and free exchange of services as the only legitimate sources of income. It elevates money to a self-perpetuating power in itself rather than a mediating agent of power as has been traditionally understood. “The love of money is the root of all evil.”(1)
Capitalism is not the free market, but rather its antithesis. For state intervention on behalf of the financial powers have given life to this false god of Mammon. Joseph Proudhon traced all current injustices to this root cause. “Credit is the canonization of money, the declaration of its royalty over all products whatsoever.”(2) He then referred to “the sect of economists.”(3)
The economists are the apologists of this religion, whose high priests are the financiers. The words of the financiers are made the gospel truth, whereas those of the economic apologists are odes to the glories of these high priests. The various factions of politicians are religious orders, each serving the dogma in their own way without accepting any other orthodoxy. The financiers reward the most subservient among them, with notable mention in their decrees which is favorable publicity through their mass media.
Economic priests maintain their artificial privileges through obscuring their religion’s true nature. Just as each clerical class derives power from keeping people ignorant of the faith and thus dependent upon them, so too have the economists buried its reality through a matrix of false principles and meaningless distinctions.
Tyranny starts with the abuse of language, as George Orwell informed us in his classic work on totalitarianism. Usury has been made synonymous with trade, so that a nation is not considered “prosperous” until it has a debt it can call its own. Hence, the materialistic myth of “progress” is measured in how much is borrowed from the financiers.
Usury and taxes are then held up as being necessary for such “prosperity,” such that without them is only “backwardness.” In practice, this has buttressed economic imperialism along with its accompanied cultural subversion, which “purifies”, in an almost spiritual sense, all distinct cultural traditions and mores that may prevent spread of the creed. The West is held up as the supreme model for the world, but what this really proves is to what extent the West itself has been subverted to the rule of the financiers.
On its false altar of materialism, these high-priests of economics sacrifice the livelihood and real labor of the people, and have them serve their false god of Mammon through them – the rabbinical/priestly class of economists – as intermediaries. This new religion redefines Grace, so that through material “grace”, it seeks to deliver spiritual hopelessness.
Capitalism seeks to address the same worries and anxieties as spirituality. It is “a pure religious cult” in which “utilitarianism gains its religious coloring.”(4) It is no coincidence that a group of philosophers called the utilitarians provided much of the basis behind the acceptance of usury in the West, redefining it from an absolute evil to one that looked only to immediate “pragmatism”, to be measured in material terms.
This is perhaps the first instance of a religion based solely on guilt rather than repentance. In other words, it seeks not to repent for this guilt but “to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt, in order to finally interest him in repentance.”(5)
The growth of capitalism has only been possible because other religions transformed into capitalism. That is, they were reduced to mere private questions of “morals” without social obligations. “The economic issues have been carefully kept out of the religious discourse, so that the person who wants justice for the world finds no tools among what is left of religious morals. He needs to look elsewhere.”(6)
The spiritual dimension of economics was a new esotericism, whereby religion was reduced to common grounds that could be acceptable to the majority; erasing religious identities so as to create a new identity based on “citizens” as taxpayers and clientele of the state. This predominant identity was then elevated to the realm of the unquestionable and became the orthodoxies of usury and taxation.(7) Under the name of “tolerance,” the state does not tolerate anyone who refuses to pay taxes to the state or debt to the banks!
Capitalism is founded on a new trinity, an inversion of the previous sacral and its replacing by a new myth. The three primary forms of deriving income from other than honest labor, are interest, rent and profit. “These three constitute the trinity of usury, and are simply different methods of levying tribute for the use of capital.”(8)
In fact, the state which is based on taxation, central banks and paper money, replaces it with its own morality, which includes those highlighted by Joseph Proudhon in “General Idea of the Revolution of the Nineteenth Century”:
“Thou shalt respect thy representatives and thy officials, which the hazard of the ballot or the good pleasure of the State shall have given you.
“Thou shalt obey the laws which they in their wisdom shall have made.
“Thou shalt pay thy taxes faithfully.
“And thou shalt love the Government, thy Lord and thy God, with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, because the Government knows better than thou what thou art, what thou art worth, what is good for thee, and because it has the power to chastise those who disobey its commandments, as well as to reward unto the fourth generation those who make themselves agreeable to it.”
There is no actual “separation of church and state”: this was merely a rhetorical tool by which a new religion called economics replaced the power of the other religions and penetrated into every aspect of society. Politics is a charade, a spectacle that is subverted by corporate wealth and operating under the watchful eyes of the financiers; indeed, all “elections” are merely exercises in who will lead the bankers’ service industry called the state!
Under “privatization,” it has subverted science and information, so that through the patents monopoly – upheld by the statist legal fiction of “intellectual property” laws – such basic needs as medicines have become corporate property, with its beneficiaries expected to pay tribute to financiers who allow it to them out of the kindness of their hearts, expecting only to be paid in debt! Likewise, under such “privatization” more land and resources can be gobbled up by financiers and the state, leading to the land monopoly that denies the basic understanding of stewardship of the earth and possessions as based solely on use and occupancy.
The real purpose of economics is to promulgate the new myth of the “invisible hand,” accompanied by a dogmatic acceptance of usury, so that “if one seeks first the kingdom of Mammon, everything else (social compassion, individual freedom, universal wellbeing) will be given to you, as well as the by-products of the free market (the expression free-market itself being as unfaithful to reality as calling prostitution true love).”(9)
The old feudalist order justified itself as serving “the will of God” through the clerical class, whereas the succeeding mercantilist order replaced it with “the will of the people.” This alleged “will” is merely an instrument of coercion: the state creates monopolies that would otherwise be punished (i.e. theft is redefined as “taxation,” kidnapping as “conscription,” etc.), but are considered legitimate as long as its done by the state. This provides the capitalist elites with endless legal justifications. In the succinct words of Benjamin Tucker: “interest is theft, rent robbery, and profit only another name for plunder.”(10)
The cult of capitalism has permanence; it not merely rationalizes the sacred, but makes everyday a “feast day,” or a celebration of this religion. It has become so connected with technology that if normal transactions do not occur for a day (or even the mere possibility they won’t), the system collapses. This is what occurred with the stock market crash in 1929 and with the Y2K craze leading up to the year 2000.
Similarly, philanthropists can be more accurately understood as those who derive their wealth from crippling the people with debt, and then who “give back” to them on special feast days – with the same media they control holding them up as idols of adoration by the people! The banker George Soros cripples the economies of entire nations, and then gives a fraction of this stolen capital as “charity.” In a most “esoteric” manner, crucial decisions facing entire nations are made behind closed doors by privileged elites through globalist bodies like Bilderberg, Club of Rome, and the Council on Foreign Relations, with no accountability or even publicity – and we’re supposed to accept them as mere philanthropists!
Capitalism being the expansion of despair, and in such despair can also be found its salvation, manifests in notions such as “creative destruction” and bringing “order out of chaos.” In true fashion of clerical hierarchies, this is filled with self-fulfilling prophecies meant to elevate the priestly class as the upholders of knowledge. The same individuals who back in the 1990s created the same policies that led to the collapse of the economy, such as Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, were then brought forward to propose the “solutions” to what was merely the bankers robbing the people!
The banks are temples in which people pay homage to Mammon. The analogy given earlier of a clerical hierarchy has a basis, as the ancient Mosaic religion was gradually perverted by the Pharisees, who upheld the Talmud over the Old Testament and also changed the temple into a place for usury. “Jesus entered the temple precincts and drove out all those engaged there in buying and selling. He overturned the money changers’ tables and the stalls of the dove-sellers, saying to them: ‘Scripture has it, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are turning it into a den of thieves.'”(11)
Modern finance derived much of its formative elements from aspects peculiar to the Ashkenazic expression of Judaism founded upon the Talmud, as will be examined in another article. The new banking families such as the Rothschilds, were the successors to the very usurious Pharisees who Jesus (peace be upon him) chased out of the temple.
“Judaism….Pharisaism became Talmudism, Talmudism because Medieval Rabbinism, and Medieval Rabbinism became Modern Rabbinism. But throughout these changes in name….the spirit of the ancient Pharisees survives, unaltered….From Palestine to Babylonia; from Babylonia to North Africa, Italy, Spain, France and Germany; from these to Poland, Russia, and eastern Europe generally, ancient Pharisaism has wandered….demonstrates the enduring importance which attaches to Pharisaism as a religious movement.”(12)
At the same time, modern finance capitalism wouldn’t have been able to expand to the level it has historically if not for the rebellion of several Christian theologians against the traditional prohibition against usury. The new religion of capitalism made money a myth, “until it could draw from Christianity enough mythical elements in order to constitute its own myth.”(13) In a very religious sense, capitalism was born from “the spirit that speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.”(14)
The change occurred in direct violation against the Old Testament and the New Testament, with the same process now being followed by the “Islamic” bankers who likewise seek to overturn the explicit prohibition of usury in the Qur’an, with a meaningless lexicon of their own creation. This has happened with the turning not to Allah through the Din, but turning to Islam as a system of “principles” and symbols – the distinction is key to understanding the game of the bankers. The creation of these “principles” mean that neither the bankers nor their theologians will be principled except in a false utilitarian sense, as one “Islamic” banker revealed:
“We create the same type of products that we do for the conventional markets. We then phone up a Sharia scholar for a Fatwa. If he doesn’t give it to us, we phone up another scholar, offer him a sum of money for his services and ask him for a Fatwa. We do this until we get Sharia compliance. Then we are free to distribute the product as Islamic.”(15)
The problem has been identified as an outgrowth of the new philosophy of modernity, but the solution cannot be found in the very theism and philosophy that gave birth to the new religion. Rather, the only viable solution is to transcend such theisms and eliminating all metaphysical foundations of thinking. Once this is achieved, then the way forward will appear to those with enough fortitude to seize the initiative.
“The whole problem of economics in general is the underlying presumption of collectivism. The individual’s life and stored labor are viewed as the ‘medium of exchange’, the collective supply of ‘society’s’ labor is to be found in the ‘money supply’ which must be manipulated by those in power on behalf of the collective in order to protect the all important bee hive that the economists call the ‘economy’. These false assumptions have led to grave errors on an enormous scale. The question is not one of which school of economics is the most accurate, but rather, is the endeavor of economics valid? Is economics the new alchemy? This is a question of great importance.”(16)
NOTES:
(1) The New Testament, Timothy 6:10.
(2) Joseph Proudhon, Proudhon’s Solution of the Social Problem, New York: Vanguard Press, 1927, p. 53.
(3) ibid., p. 54.
(4) Walter Benjamin, “Fragment 74: Capitalism as Religion,” in Eduardo Mendieta, ed., Religion as Critique: The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Religion, New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 259.
(5) ibid.
(6) Umar Vadillo, The Esoteric Deviation in Islam, Cape Town: Madinah Press, 2003, p. 182.
(7) ibid., pp. 20-21.
(8) Benjamin Tucker, “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree & Wherein They Differ,” Liberty, March 10, 1888.
(9) Vadillo, op. cit., p. 7.
(10) Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty, eds. Michael Coughlin, Charles Hamilton and Mark Sullivan, 1975, p. 29.
(11) The New Testament, Matthew 21:12-13.
(12) Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, The Pharisees, The Sociological Background of Their Faith, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938, vol. 1, p. xxi.
(13) Benjamin, op. cit., p. 261.
(14) ibid.
(15) John Foster, “How Sharia-compliant is Islamic banking?,” BBC, December 11, 2009, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8401421.stm>.
(16) Hugh A. Thomas, Stored Labor: A New Theory of Money, 1991, pp. 80-81.
wow
bizzare