Bring4th

Full Version: Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...world.html

Interesting....as it all comes to the fore. I wonder if this will be squashed.

Richard
not surprising. it was inevitable.

3DMonkey

mmmm, Power

this was evident.
1318? That's around the "illuminati" membership count ha ha ha. Tongue
Thanks for posting the article.

It's not very surprising at all, this type of data has been out there for a long time. I think the protests are a natural reaction to this, because the manifestations of the power relations are too evident to ignore. Everyone feels it.

-SomaticDreams
(10-19-2011, 05:24 PM)Richard Wrote: [ -> ]http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...world.html

Interesting....as it all comes to the fore. I wonder if this will be squashed.

Richard
Thanks for the link, Richard.

As most posts imply, no scientific evidence was necessary to get to this knowledge. I remember I was a teenager when I first heard that the EEC (European Economic Community, seed for the current EU) produced milk surplus. My first thought was that it would be given away to the countries in which people died of famine. The "surprise" was discovering that sending that surplus over those countries was deemed "too expensive" by "the authorities" and, so, it wasn't to be sent. Years later, being in close contact with the environment of NGOs, I also found out that most of the "humanitarian aid" never reached its real target groups, but militias or dictators in good relationships with transnational companies or national (european or US) interests.

I've never had deep doubts about the fact that the few hundreds of people with most de facto control over the resources in our world are sadly, mentally unbalanced. This scientific approach is really good news, though.
That was a study worth doing, although it doesn't necessarily point to an immense conspiracy to control the masses. People of a certain class of wealth try to maximize and protect it and make investment decisions accordingly.

A free market of goods lets people buy what they want to, including nutritious food and junk food, classical works and porn, and construction goods and dynamite.

A free market of capitalism lets people buy what they want, including risky penny stocks and pop-investments, e.g. Google or Facebook and seriously thought-out ones like those of Warren Buffett, a hero of mine.

Society created investment organizations like pension managers and mutual fund groups that have certain goals that include stability. For the most part, they achieved that stability.

The early history of the U.S. includes many "financial panics" where families and companies lost everything because of poor decisions by others and a lot of absolutely fraudulent thievery. By now, it is a lot calmer because of regulation and transparency with oversight. We saw two recent failures of the U.S. economy caused by unregulated investment bubbles that burst.

If the above study adds to the transparency, and it certainly won't hurt, then society is better off. OTOH, if power continues to concentrate, some bad people will figure out a way to grab it for selfish gain. Ironically, the study might help them do that. Confused

To enjoy Warren Buffet, read his Chairman's Letter to shareholders in the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report. Here is one of my favorite Buffett quotes: "Charlie and I believe that those entrusted with handling the funds of others should establish performance goals at the onset of their stewardship. Lacking such standards, managements are tempted to shoot the arrow of performance and then paint the bull’s-eye around wherever it lands."
(10-20-2011, 03:20 PM)kycahi Wrote: [ -> ]People of a certain class of wealth try to maximize and protect it and make investment decisions accordingly.

=

Quote: point to an immense conspiracy to control the masses.

Quote:A free market of capitalism lets people buy what they want,

is that why on average 4 corporations control every major product in your life as of this moment, and they implement precisely same pricing and policies ?

Quote:OTOH, if power continues to concentrate,

there is no such thing as 'if' :

http://pineight.com/mw/index.php?title=MPAA_news

5 companies control 80% of news in america. they decide what is talked what is not. they came here through the 'free market', which acted as a chaotic wild west frontier until the predominant players established themselves.

and even more :

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/who-own...-industry/

(10-20-2011, 03:28 PM)unity100 Wrote: [ -> ]is that why on average 4 corporations control every major product in your life as of this moment, and they implement precisely same pricing and policies ?

---------

there is no such thing as 'if' :

http://pineight.com/mw/index.php?title=MPAA_news

5 companies control 80% of news in america. they decide what is talked what is not. they came here through the 'free market', which acted as a chaotic wild west frontier until the predominant players established themselves.

and even more :

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/who-own...-industry/
Thanks for those links, unity. Here's another about the media control (I mean the real control, not the imagined/feared one):




@ThriveMovement Thrive "Check out this link to see how the global pyramid of control is designed to consolidate wealth and domination".
https://twitter.com/#!/ThriveMovement/st...9177350144

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...world.html

[Image: mg21228354.500-3_600.jpg]
Quote:The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

Updated 13:15 24 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie

Quote:AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…" was misattributed.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

(Data: PLoS One)
I just started doing a bit of Googling starting at #1 on that list (Barclay's). It appears it is owned and/or controlled by the Rothschild family.
Wikipedia.org - Barclays Wrote:As of 2010 it was the world's 10th-largest banking and financial services group and 21st-largest company according to a composite measure by Forbes magazine. It has operations in over 50 countries and territories across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America and around 48 million customers.


Think about that for a second. 48million out of 7 billionish, yet it is the 21st largest company in the world. Thats a very high concentration of wealth IMO.
I also think it is interesting how many of those companies I know nothing about and/or have really generic names. Like Legal & General Group plc. Who are those guys? Huh

Quote:We make financial security easier to achieve for millions of people.

Our products help to protect individuals and businesses against a wide range of risks - everything from poor health and natural disasters to the risk of outliving savings in old age.

Oh right. They sell "security". I learned all about this first-hand years ago when a friend asked me to come to this "meeting". Everybody is raking it in hand over fist, she says. I show up and it turns out to be AIG.

They've got about ten of us in the room, each paired up with our "sponsor advisor". Some dipshit in a fancy suit gets to the front of the room and tells me what a great "opportunity" I have before me.

Then they play this ridiculous video. It starts with a slow-motion closeup pan of the AIG World Headquarters. You know the kind... with the majestic fanfare and booming "authoritative" voiceover. So the video is basically one big AIG jerkoff session. Doesn't say a single word about what they actually do as a business.

The lights come back up and the sponsor advisors have this expectant look on their faces. This is the point where everybody should be jumping at the "opportunity" I guess?? So, I ask, how does this all work anyway.

In a nutshell, my job would be to prey on the fears of dimwitted elderly couples or expecting newlyweds and sell them annuities. Of course, you don't just come out and say that. And now that I think about it, AIG didn't quite come out and say that to us, either.

What you do is set up an appointment to talk about their "financial security" and conduct this elaborate "evaluation" in order to determine what kind of financial products are supposedly best for their situation. The first part of the interview is basically to probe their fears and worries. Get them to admit they are scared about an uncertain future.

Then, you flip it around and start asking them about their "dreams and goals". Paint rosy pictures of retirement homes and yachts and all manner of material bullshit. Health and relationships, for example, are not discussed. It is all about having a bunch of things which are supposedly keeping one "secure" (read distracted) from outer reality.

Next up is the real kicker. So you fill out this sheet that, indeed, has all manner of financial products listed on it. CDs, stocks, bonds, T-bills, and annuities. But the trick is... nothing ever comes up besides annuities. No matter how you do the "calculations" annuities are the answer!

It was brilliant, I must admit. I only noticed it because at first I was actually a bit interested in the idea, so I took one of these evaluation packets home and filled it out myself. When annuities came up as the answer, I had to go look up what they were, because I had never really heard of them.

Then, I got the idea to try filling it out with different hypothetical scenarios. Annuities came up every time. So I thought to myself- this is really sketchball. Then I got on the Internet and looked up who AIG really was and what kinds of business they were involved in.

Turns out that AIG was heavily invested in several areas of the world that were considered highly volatile at the time. I thought- that was strange, why would an insurance company have so much money tied up in these places which are anything but secure?? Dodgy

So then I had to look another level deeper into what kinds of investments AIG was making. That's when I learned about derivatives and credit default swaps. When I finally found out what was really going on, it all made perfect sense.

It is something called delta-neutral trading. Basically, it was developed as a way to protect oneself from volatility- or fluctuations- in the market. This is of particular interest to "security" companies because part of their whole schtick is to make people feel as if they are being kept safe, or watched over.

If the markets are all over the place, people aren't going to feel secure no matter what kind of insurance policy they've got. So it was a small step from trying to hedge oneself against uncertainty in the market- to controlling the market itself.

Delta-neutral trading makes this possible. It involves some slick mathematics, but with computers and the right software, it is a cinch. Basically what you do is place bets on a particular stock or mutual fund price called "puts" and "calls". A put is a bet that a stock value is going to go down, while a call is a bet that a stock value is going to go up. These bets are called "options" or "derivatives".

With delta-neutral trading what you do is play both sides against each other. You actually make both puts and calls on a given stock value such that, according to a certain equation, the sum total of the spreads (delta) of your bets is zero (neutral). Hence delta-neutral trading.

So after I learned what delta-neutral trading was I thought to myself- who in their right mind would want to do that? Why would you want to place bets that all cancel each other out?

The answer is in order to protect or "hedge" yourself from volatility in the market. The more volatile a stock price is, the more bets you place on both sides, such that your chances of losing money is practically nil.

Now... where does a company like AIG get the funds to place these bets in the market, you ask? Why from those dimwitted elderly couples and expecting newlyweds which bought their annuities!

Well, what is wrong with that, you may ask? Isn't AIG doing what they are supposed to be doing making sure that their clients' money gets invested in the "safest" manner possible? Well, yes.

But what AIG wasn't telling anybody was that they were actually making a killing in the derivatives market and sharing only a very small sliver of those profits with their clients. Oh to be sure, they would make an example out of a top salesperson every now and again. Lavish them with trips and cars and whatnot. This kept the worker bees excited. Just a few extra crumbs from the feast of plenty with the corporate fatcats were enjoying at the top.

Here's the dirty little secret about delta-neutral trading... the more volatile the market becomes, the more money you make. But not just a little more money. Not just a lot more money. A whole shitton more money. And the more volatile the markets get, the larger shittons get poured into your coffers. (Mind you, none of this money never really existed. It wasn't even printed or anything. Just numbers on computer screens.)

But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words:

[Image: Total_world_wealth_vs_total_world_deriva...8-2007.gif]
Now mind you this all went down back in 2003, so if you look back at the graph, you will see this was right about the time that the value of derivative contracts floating around cyberspace actually eclipsed the total value of all the real assets in the world. As you can see, the situation wasn't nearly as dire as it is right now.

But back to the story. Needless to say I wasn't interested in taking the job. But I thought- what the heck- I am going to go back in and talk to this jerkoff in the fancy suit and see what he has to say for himself. So I walked in, briefcase in hand, and sat down in his office. He wanted to know how excited I was about this "opportunity" I had been offered. I said I've got a few questions if you don't mind...

So I started laying everything out on the desk. Charts and graphs. Listings of AIG holdings in developing nations. The whole nine yards. He stared at me with this sort of half-blank half-s***-eating-grin look on his face. Clueless. I asked him- why would a company like AIG, whose charge it is to be safeguarding the assets of their clients, be turning around and investing their money in political hotspots and areas of civil unrest. He just sat there like a blithering idiot. But he sure looked great in that suit! Wink

Well anyway, at that point I suppose any normal person would have just happily continued on with their life. But not me. I'm not one of those normal types. The information I had come across kept nagging me in the back of my mind. Why? What were they up to, anyway?

I mean- think about it. These jerkoffs have more money than God. It can't really be about the money, can it? And besides... what good is an account with ten zeroes in it if there is nothing real you can actually buy with it? Assuming that only a small portion of the world's assets are for sale at any given time, what would be the point of having all this idle money sitting around?

And then it hit me. All I had to do was open my eyes and look around. See, at the time I did a lot of driving around the city. To and fro from home to work. Visiting friends, and whatnot. I started to notice a couple of odd things.

The first was that Clear Channel seemed to be buying up all the billboards. Whereas before there were about four or five companies, in a very short time nearly all the billboards had this Clear Channel sticker on them. Well as it turned out, they weren't just buying up billboards, but also radio stations and concert venues all across the country.

So who the heck is Clear Channel, I wondered? (And who or what, exactly, are they wanting to channel so clearly?)

Quote:Corporate governance

Current members of the board of directors of Clear Channel Communications are: Alan Feld, Perry Lewis, Lowry Mays, B.J.(Red) McCombs, Phyllis Riggins, Theodore Strauss, J.C. Watts, and John H. Williams.

Tom Hicks and Vernon Jordan were formerly members of Clear Channel's board of directors. Jordan was a close friend and advisor to President Bill Clinton and was accused of lying to investigators during the investigations into perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Clinton. Hicks, Clear Channel's former vice-chairman, is a past donor to George W. Bush's political campaigns and a close associate of the Bush family. Hicks is the founder of Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, the private-equity firm which funded many of Clear Channel's antecedent companies, including most significantly CapStar, Chancellor Media and AM-FM, Inc..

Well at that point, I suppose a normal person would have just concluded is was just Bush cronyism as usual. Nothing to be surprised about. But see there was this second thing that I started to notice as well. It started right about the same time. There were all these office buildings starting to put up "For Lease" and "For Sale" signs. Even brand spanking gorgeous new buildings. Totally empty. Month after month.

So I thought to myself- well that sure is idiotic. Why would all these construction companies build these brand new office buildings if there wasn't anybody willing to rent the space? Surely they would do their research before starting new projects?

Well the answer I found was... yes... they were doing their research. Only instead of good old fashioned supply and demand economics, these guys were buying into the "new math" being churned out by Wall Street. That "new math" was called subprime loans. And it was all made possible by... yup you guessed it! G.W. Bush.

With subprime construction loans, a company could essentially borrow the money to start building a new office building, and by the time they finished, it would be worth more than total of what they borrowed PLUS the interest. Then what they could do is take out a NEW loan based on the inflated value of the finished building, pay off the original loan and interest, and then pocket the difference.

But wait, you say, something like this clearly couldn't go on forever! Eventually there would be such a glut of commercial buildings on the market that the values would start to implode. Well if you said that, you would be right. But these dingbats really didn't care about that. They knew they were playing a game of hot potato, but of course every dingbat thinks he is the smartest kid on the block, and so nobody thought they would be the one who got caught holding the potato when the music stopped.

But wait, you say, what about the banks? Why in the heck would they loan out good money after bad when all these development projects failed? Well, the answer is because they didn't really care either. They had a virtually limitless (and growing) supply of funds available to them from tapping into the derivatives market. Writing bad loans is of no concern when one can hedge against default with a quick flick of a pen, and an instrument known as a "credit default swap".

This is when things really started to go down the rabbit hole. See, what I did was I started to look up all these banks and insurance companies and look their Board of Directors and major shareholders, as this is all public information available from SEC filings. Turned out the same names kept popping up all over again. Some of them I recognized, others I didn't. But the point is that it seemed to be the same dudes pulling the strings on both sides of the equation through their derivatives instruments.

Well at any rate I guess I was kind of naive because I thought to myself that certainly the gig would be up soon. The game had gone on as long as it could. Boy was I ever wrong. What happened next was that the construction boom simply shifted from the commercial sector to the residential sector.

Next thing I knew, vast swaths of track homes were sprouting up everywhere. I am not kidding- whole neighborhoods appeared where there was previously nothing but undeveloped land. Crappy houses too. I got a chance to look at a few of them. All the infrastructure was cheap as all hell. The plumbing work was cheap. The electrical was cheap, and so on. But nobody seemed to care. They were happy that they were getting "more house" for their money... i.e. a bigger floorplan with vaulted ceilings and crap like that. That corners were cut on other, more important, aspects of the buildings seemed unconcerning to most. Freaking money pits waiting to happen. But those expecting newlyweds didn't care. They felt safe and secure, reassured by their good friends at AIG that all was well in the world, and that the money would just keep freely flowing forever. And with that new mall down the street, courtesy of Simon Property Group, there was no shortage of places to spend all those greenbacks!

And of course the banks were there to lend a helping hand. In many cases they were willing to lend out 120% of the home's value at the time of purchase. Whoever heard of a bank doing that?! Well they did, and again people just pocketed the change and went on with their merry take-the-check-and-stick-my-head-in-the-sand lives. Such is life.

Well as you can imagine, there were those who weren't satisfied with only a few extra Gs in their pocket. They had to push the issue. So people started networking. Putting their heads together. Homeowners, agents, brokers, appraisers, loan officers, all "working together" for the common good, you know. Wink

This is when the concept of "flipping" homes was born. How does one "flip" a home, you ask? Well it is really quite simple. Basically you buy it at one price, and then resell it a short time later at a sizeable profit. In a normal economy, things like this aren't really possible, but in an economy undergoing a massive inflation of the money supply along with a hefty dose of collusion and looking the other way, things that were once the stuff of fairy tales start become possible. Oh, it was a magical time indeed.

Take the example of my little condo. Nothing special really. I bought it in 2001, just before the Twin Towers incident. I had actually felt like a sucker for a while because I thought I had locked in a pretty good rate at 7.5% but when the economy started to implode after 9/11, the insurance companies and banks settled everything down by injecting massive sums of money into the economy. This drove interest rates practically down to zero. Really, this is how the derivatives thing started to get out of hand.

I actually remember when this shift started. You know how after 9/11 for a while all you got on the news was updates on death tolls? Then suddenly that stopped? That's when the message shifted. I remember it was toward the end of November because all of a sudden all of the major news outlets changed their tune in lock-step fashion. It was so abrupt that for the first time I really started to consider that all the media companies were actually answering to the same people.

Well anyway. One day it was death tolls. The next it was how everything was "getting back to normal". And how, pray tell, did we know that everything was "getting back to normal"? SHOPPING! Yes, that's right it was getting well nigh into the holiday season, and Americans were back in the malls shopping their cares away. And OH was it ever a great season for retailers! There was so much holiday cheer spewing from everybody's lips that it was all I could do not to puke on myself.

But wait. Where did all this money suddenly come from? Did everybody get a raise at work? Nope. Tax breaks? Nope. No my friends, in Christmas 2001 it was your friendly "neighborhood" bank that threw on the Santa Suit and started spraying everybody with cash. 120% loans? No problem! Here's a little something extra "for the kids"! I remember I was getting at least one new offer for 0% on my credit card purchases per week. Zero percent?! O! What a joyous season it was! And everybody was more than happy to put that nasty 9/11 stuff behind ourselves. After all, we knew who dunnit and we knew that Iraq was where we were gonna find 'em. We're gonna smoke 'em out of their caves! But we won't let those Muslim terrorists rob us of our Christmas spending frenzy. Oh no, we're gonna fight back. With an army of plastic cards with little magnetic strips. SPEND SPEND SPEND! It's the "American" thing to do! Let G.W. and his cronies take care of that little "terrorist problem" and we will do our part by SPENDING MORE MONEY!

And spend we did. Nobody really stopped to think too much where all of this money was coming from? Did it just appear out of the ethers? Did Santa just pull it out of his magic bag? Hey, who cares? Have another cup of Christmas cheer and leave all that "fear-mongering conspiracy crap" behind.

But something in me just couldn't let it go. I just had to get to the bottom of it...
"Pyramid of Capitalist System" circa 1911, (A 1911 Industrial Worker (IWW newspaper) publication advocating industrial unionism that shows the critique of capitalism. It is based on a flyer of the "Union of Russian Socialists" spread in 1900 and 1901.)

[Image: Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System.png]
Although, this one has been updated a little since 1911 Wink

[Image: the_illuminati_elite_organization_n_plan.jpg]