At the turn of the last century workers and students around the world were willing to take to the streets, launch revolutions, and battle the agents of the wealthy elite to death, if need be, in order to advance basic human rights of justice and equality for all, fair and living wages, and tolerable living conditions.
In the United States, the monopolies of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt were broken up and in Europe lethargic and impassionate monarchies were overthrown by popular worker-led revolutions.
Fast forward the calendar to the present and the world is witnessing the same ingredients that forced change in the early 1900s. The people of Greece, the cradle of democracy, have witnessed their entire nation picked clean by the Euro-banker vultures, with the House of Rothschild rubbing their hands behind the central bankers, in a foreign-dictated series of austerity programs.
However, unlike the progressive popular movements of the early 20th century, workers and students in Greece and other nations afflicted by the global banking-imposed austerity programs, lose their steam after holding a few general strikes, marches on parliament, and the occasional overturning of a police car. Events that should be concluding in a series of overthrows of banker-controlled governments in Athens, Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon by united worker-student-pensioner popular fronts instead end up with establishment oligarchical political parties forming coalitions that answer only to the dictates of supranational contrivances of the global elite. Today, it is the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund that dictates who governs nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, not the people of those countries . . .
Why can’t true popular revolutions succeed? The reason is that the elites are able to more effectively use information technology to their own benefits, leaving mass movements in the dust. So-called social networking technologies like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are not only monitored by intelligence services with global reach, like the National Security Agency, but much of the seed money for companies involved in social networking came from the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital firm, IN-Q-TEL. And international hedge fund tycoon George Soros, who fancies himself as a leader for popular change, has invested heavily in Facebook and LinkedIn. In addition, Soros, who is nothing more than a front man for the House of Rothschild, has ensured that Twitter is the social networking platform of choice for “themed revolutions” financed by his Open Society Institute and Foundation. In other words, the technology heralded by the corporate media as the catalyst for change is owned, operated, and surveilled by the very forces that are subjecting workers, students, and pensioners to a new form of feudalism and indentured servitude.
The “themed revolutions” have never resulted in a true worker-led government coming to power. In Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, and Serbia the results of themed revolutions financed by Soros and orchestrated with social networking technology were reactionary regimes that favored the immediate sell-off of state-owned property to greedy globalist consortiums, crack-downs on internal opposition, and dalliances with tools of capitalist control like the EU, World Bank, and IMF.
The devastation waged on Greece by the global elite is even more egregious with news that a list of wealthy Greeks with secret Swiss bank accounts extended to the mother of Andreas Papandreou, the former Socialist Prime Minister, George Papandreou, who began instituting Greece’s “austerity” compliance with the European Union and IMF. Austerity has meant slashes in pensions, medical care, salaries, and the most basic of social services for Greeks. The austerity comes at the same time that a list prepared by Christine Lagarde, the current director of the IMF, shows 2000 of the wealthiest of Greeks caching their money in Swiss accounts. The normal working people of Greece are told they have to pay more taxes and see a reduction in wages to bail out the very same elites who have hidden their wealth away in foreign accounts. This should be the recipe for a popular revolt that would normally see parliament, the presidential palace, the defense ministry, the central bank, and the central police station in Athens occupied by cadres of a new revolutionary government. But such is not the case. Perhaps lulled into self-importance bestowed by social networking technology, along with a dose of Soros-inspired infiltration of their leadership, revolutionaries of today are simply lazy and not willing to take their cause to the ultimate goal—a total replacement of their system of control with no coalitions, no compromises, no cooling off periods, no deals.
It was later revealed that Jérôme Cahuzac, the French Socialist Budget Minister in charge of drawing up France’s latest austerity program, held a secret account at UBS bank in Switzerland for a number of years before closing it in 2010 and transferring the money to an Asian account. Rather than resign, Cahuzac has threatened to sue for libel Mediapart, the French investigative journalism site that carried the story. Just like Margaret Papandreou, who denied she had a Swiss account, Cahuzac feels he is above the law. These are the ways of the elite; they consider themselves entitled and immune to prosecution. The elite of today exhibit the same mind sets of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette right up until the time their heads were severed by the guillotine.
Global banker-led austerity, which has decimated Mediterranean Europe, is now heading toward Great Britain and the United States. Britain’s National Health System is on the target list, with Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne drafting budgets extending to 2018 that will cut funds for pensioners, teachers, and those at the very bottom rungs of the economic ladder. White Britons are being told to tighten their belts, three U.S.-based companies, Starbucks, Google, and Amazon, were discovered to have paid little or no taxes in the United Kingdom. But workers, students, and pensioners are told this is the new world order and they should just get used to it. As part of its austerity deal with the bankers, Ireland is seeing across-the-board tax increases and benefits cuts, even though the country is reeling with an unemployment rate of 14.6 percent.
In the United States, after defeating Republican multi-millionaire and corporate job destroyer and outsourcer Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama appears willing to put two hallmark programs of past Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security and Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare, on the chopping block as part of America’s own sacrificial offerings to the global bankers. Like their counterparts in Europe, American workers, students, and pensioners seem all too willing to accept Obama’s promises that he will protect their social safety nets. Blinded by the “neo-negritude” personality cult aura that has been established by the corporate media around the 44th President of the United States, those who will be impacted the most by a post-“financial cliff” deal between Democrats and Republicans—minority groups, the poor, workers, and students—will continue to march like lemmings toward their own financial cliff.
One of the worst scourges America has visited upon the world is that of popular “culture.” Even though social networking technology is controlled and thoroughly monitored by governments, it is used primarily to swap information about the most meaningless issues conceivable—pop singers and bands, sports, and consumerist tripe. If the bankers finally push people far enough to the point where they want to react aggressively, someone will probably invent a Molotov cocktail i-Phone app that can virtually strike its target.
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
I think the problem is one of legitimacy. The people are taught to believe in the fundamental legitimacy of the state and its institutions. They are also taught not to think for themselves but to let the government do it for them. This, I think, is one of the major obstacles that any social movement will have to overcome if it is to have any hope of success.