7.1 THE FUNCTION OF POVERTY The standard of living of the average American has to decline...
- Paul Volcker, Chairman of The Federal Reserve, New York Times, 18 October 1979, p.1, Volcker Asserts U.S Must Trim Living Standard.
'Money is power'. Well, to be precise, it's the gap between the rich and poor that counts. The objective of the elite is to maintain the capitalist structure as it is with one vital difference. There will be no middle class in the New World Order. Under public-private partnership, the middle class, free markets, and consumer choice will be replaced with a neo-feudal society in which the Money Trust dictates to an impoverished populace through a supranational technocracy. This is international socialism, run for the benefit of the financial elite who own the economy and control the emerging continental Politburos. The polite name for it is 'The Third Way', but less deferential commentators call it 'corporate fascism'. The corporations need government to restrict consumer choice in the market place, allowing the cartel to determine what we can buy, sell, or even do in our own homes. The 'Third Way' is the path to utopia for our self-appointed philosopher kings, advocated by the likes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schroder - their senior political puppets. There is no difference between ostensibly right and left wing political parties about the eventual destination, even if they appear to be travelling at different speeds towards it.
Real power, then, is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them as if they were privileges, as George Orwell reflected:From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations But it was also clear that an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction... of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. Such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance... It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another... The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty.
The difference between riches and poverty is often the difference between pleasure and pain. Orwell concluded this idea in the torture episode at the end of 1984.How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?' By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation... Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.(1) In The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin discusses the relationship between 1984 and The Report From Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace by Leonard Lewin. It has never been established whether or not this report published in 1966 was written by a U.S. government think tank or if it was an elaborate political satire. On 26 November,1967, the report was reviewed in the book section of the Washington Post by Herschel McLandress, which was the pen name for Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith, who also had been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that he knew firsthand of the report's authenticity because he had been invited to participate in it. Although he was unable to be part of the official group, he was consulted from time to time and had been asked to keep the project a secret. Furthermore, while he doubted the wisdom of letting the public know about the report, he agreed totally with its conclusions. For the purposes of Griffin's comparison, it makes no difference whether it is a satire. The report credits Orwell for many of its ideas and it is a blueprint for what has occurred since. Importantly, it agreed with Orwell's view that poverty is a prerequisite for a hierarchical society: The continuance of the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of power.
The economic destruction of the world's middle class is well advanced. Personal debt, bankruptcies, and unemployment are soaring while investments are destroyed in the stock-market and incomes decline. Like Manchurian Candidates, the Western middle class have played their essential part in creating the techno-bureaucracy of the new feudalism which will enslave them. This chapter describes seven significant methods being used to reduce living standards around the world. These are: 1. money supply and taxation; 2. free trade; 3.free movement of labour; 4. environmentalism; 5. wars; 6. the criminal justice system; and 7. disease.
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