Imperialism wages wars and plunders to pay debts

By E. Michael Jones

Most Americans know that on July 4, 1776 the founding fathers of their country gathered in Philadelphia and issued their Declaration of Independence. What most don’t know that it was sovereign debt of the sort that is now crippling the entire West, from California to Greece, that led Americans to declare their independence from England. 

 Whenever Capitalism breaks down, as it does on a regular basis whenever its debts become unrepayable, the leaders of Capitalist countries must go out on a looting expedition to make up the short-fall.Capitalism began with the looting of the monasteries in England. Henry VIII looted the monasteries because he was hopelessly in debt. It continued with England’s promotion of piracy on the Spanish Main. One of the most famous looting expeditions in English history was Sir Francis Drake’s voyage around the world on the Golden Hind. Queen Elizabeth, who was one of the shareholders in that venture, received an amount equal to 40 percent of the sovereign debt as a return on her investment. 

Looting achieved a new level of sophistication with the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. As soon as the Seven Years War, ended in 1763, the wrangling over who was going to pay for it began, and, using this war as its excuse, the finance ministry in London began looking for ways to make the colonies pay off the national debt which had accumulated since the founding of the Bank of England, some 70 years earlier. The financial stakes were not insignificant. During the course of the war, the national debt nearly doubled, rising from 72 million pounds in 1755 to almost 130 million by 1764.

The first measure which attempted to pass the costs of war off on to the colonies was the Stamp Act of 1765. The act required that all official documents be printed on stamped paper produced in London which carried an embossed revenue stamp. The printed materials covered under the act included “legal documents, magazines, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies.” As if that infringement on local liberties weren’t bad enough, the colonists had to pay for the stamped paper with hard currency, thus causing economic hardship in a land where gold and silver were scarce and paper money had become a viable alternative. The Virginia House of Burgesses in December 1764 sent a protest of the taxes to London, arguing that they did not have the specie required to pay the tax.

Great Britain’s sovereign debt, as Adam Smith made clear in Wealth of Nations, went back not to 1763, the year in which the Seven Years War ended, but to 1688, which is when the Whig regime began. In Wealth of Nations, Smith admits that: “It was the war which began in 1688, and was concluded by the treaty of Ryswick in 1697 that the foundation of the present enormous debt of Great Britain was first laid,” and, Smith continues, “from the time that we had first recourse to the ruinous expedient of perpetual funding, the reduction of the debt in time of peace has never borne any proportion to its accumulation in time of war.”

 
Seventy years later, when the debt of the Bank of England had became unrepayable, the English tried to loot their North American colonies to pay it off. By the time Wealth of Nations was finally published on 9 March 1776, armed hostilities had already broken out in the colonies, which would formally proclaim their independence four months later, on July 4. Debt led to the America revolution, which Americans celebrate every year on July 4, without knowing why.

Unfortunately, the Americans never learned the real lesson of that revolution, which is that debt, as Adam Smith, the father of modern Capitalism, pointed out, is the destroyer of nations, “gradually enfeebl[ing] every state which has adopted it” beginning with the Italian republics. Genoa and Venice, Smith wrote in 1776, were the only two remaining [Italian republics] which can pretend to an independent existence, have both been enfeebled by it. Spain . . . has . . . been sill more enfeebled. The debts of Spain are of very old standing. It was deeply in debt before the end of the 16th century, about a hundred years before England owed a shilling. France, notwithstanding all its natural resources, languishes under an oppressive load of the same kind. The republic of the United Provinces is as much enfeebled by it as either Genoa or Venice. Is it likely that in Great Britain alone a practice which has brought either weakness or desolation into every other country, should prove altogether innocent?

The answer, of course, is, no, Great Britain was no exception to the rule that debt is the destroyer of nations. Nor is America, the exceptional nation, any exception to that rule. That rule is still in force and its effects can be seen today. When Capitalism gets burdened by too much debt it goes on a looting expedition. NATO’s attack on Libya was a recent example of this rule. When NATO attacked Libya, the United States was $14.29 trillion dollars in debt and four weeks from default. If we consider the ratio of debt to GNP, the situation in Italy and France was even worse.

And why did NATO choose to attack Libya, when the world is full of dictators who oppress their own people? Was it because they needed to be liberated from a regime which provided them with free health care and free education? Libyans, unlike Americans, were:

entitled to free treatment, and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 US dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans, and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe, and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement made abundantly clear, freedom in American means the right to incur crushing debt from 1) student loans and/or 2) from catastrophic health emergencies.

One of the first things the Libyan “rebels” did, even as the tide of battle swayed back and forth toward an outcome that was still shrouded in the mists of the future, was to create a new bank. Ellen Brown noticed the surprise of experienced observers. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal: “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.”

And why did they do this? Was it because Libyans had been denied banking services? The answer to that question is no. It was because the people backing the rebels wanted to destroy Libya’s Islamic based banking system:

One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.

 In fact, the Libyan bank, which was state-owned, was the engine of Libya’s prosperity, because it was state-owned and not part of the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements or BIS, which is the enforcement arm of the international usury debt-monetary system. This prompted Ellen Brown to say: “Libya not only has oil. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its central bank has nearly 144 tonnes of gold in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS, the IMF and their rules?”

The answer to that question is the nations of the west who are now loaded down with unrepyable debt. Egged on by Nicholas Sarkozy, who felt that Libya was a threat to the financial security of mankind, NATO acted as the enforcement arm of international finance and attacked Libya to steal Libya’s natural resources from the Libyans (“What’s our oil doing under their sand?”) and, more importantly, crush any alternative to Capitalism, which is state-sponsored usury.

An even more recent example of looting (this time of Americans by their own government) is the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Obama’s health care act. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts let the cat out of the bag when he referred to the health care bill as “a tax.” Yes, health care in America is a tax, just like the Stamp Act which tried to fob off England’s debts on the United States and led to revolution instead.

It’s time to dispense with the charade of America’s “humanitarian” foreign policy and hold those responsible for the failure of our economic system accountable for their dereliction. It’s time to stop blaming the victim, whether we find him in Wisconsin or in Egypt. Americans need to pack up and go home instead of invading more countries in the Middle East. Like Pogo, the Americans who have traveled to the Middle East to engage in a looting operation to save a bankrupt system need to get honest with themselves and admit we have met the enemy and he is us.