Today we’re going to continue our discussion of western civilization and how it met its demise. Today’s discussion will deal primarily with another one of the chief weapons that those who seek to destroy our civilization have used to accomplish their ends: financialization.

What is financialization?

Financialization can be defined as the dictionary defines it, and that is, “an increase in the size and importance of a country’s financial sector relative to its overall economy.” I prefer a layman-like explanation, and that is, turning everything involving the human experience into a financial transaction that profits an enterprise and the State.

The State needs profitable enterprises that generate payroll tax. Thus the State becomes a partner in financializing all human experience. For example, the decisions that we make in our daily lives. Simple decisions become financial decisions.

When we decide what to do with our children, the decisions are often financial ones, or at least dominated by financial considerations. Do we put our children in this day care, or in that one? In this school, or in that one? Often coming down to which we can afford, rather than what is best for our child.

The nurture and care of our children becomes not so much caretaking of the next generation, as a revenue source for the enterprise and the State. Usually in these discussions, we journey back in history to begin with a background story. Today will be no exception.

When and how did financialization begin?

A Weimar-era householder wheels a barrow full of worthless Reichsbanknotes to the corner baker to buy a loaf of bread.

We start with World War I. World War I was fought in Europe between the years 1913 and 1918, and it ended a social order that had held sway for centuries. In Russia, feudalism under the Czars gave way to centralization of the economy under the Soviet Union. In the rest of Europe the changes were more subtle, but still no less revolutionary.

Germany was financially destroyed by the war. The Weimar Republic emerged from the war, burdened by unpayable debt obligations from the Versailles Treaty that ended the war. The Weimar Republic printed Deutsche Marks to deal with these debts. Hyperinflation was the result, and at least a springboard for the dissatisfaction that allowed an Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler to become chancellor of Germany in only 14 years.

In England the social caste system was broken by the war. The war killed an entire generation of young European men. English, French, and German youths – these men were in their child-fathering years when they were wiped out by the war. It had a tremendous effect on all of Europe for many decades.

Everyone, in all social classes, suffered terribly from the war. Upper classmen were expected to continue their leadership responsibilities as military officers, while the lower classes filled the enlisted ranks. By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, the French had hurled their young men at the German trenches at such a rate that more than the United States lost in all of its wars, combined, had already been killed.

This all changed Europe, as I said, and set the stage for World War II. European upper classes were broken apart by the war’s destruction. The social order broke down when the lords of the castle were buried in the trenches of France and Germany. The lower classes, and especially women, agitated for emancipation. They wanted entrance into the House of Commons and the general workforce, and they got what they wanted.

Most women had lost their husbands, their sons, their fathers; they were not willing to go back to pre-war status. World War I, as terrible as it was, did not completely satisfy the bloodlust of those who sought a new financialized world and a new global government. Germany was on its knees from the war, but it was not dead.

It took World War II to make Germany a completely vassalaged puppet of the new financial world. When World War II ended, the United Nations was formed to make sure such war never happened again, and to make sure the United States could never chart its own course in the world again. Coincidentally, we have been almost constantly at war since.

The Bretton Woods Conference gave financial leadership of the world’s economy to the United States, and made the dollar the world’s reserve currency with its value pegged at $35.00 per ounce.

That worked fine for a while; but then the inflation caused by the war in Vietnam hurt the dollar internationally. President Nixon could no longer tolerate a $35.00 per ounce price, so in 1971 he severed the last links to the gold standard. His action took the world from something at least partially sound, partially stable, to a financial system set adrift with nothing to control it. Nothing behind it except the empty policies of politicians.

IE: The dollar has value because they, your politicians, say it has value. The U.S. standard of living has been in an off-again, on-again decline since that day. The world quickly converted from a gold-based system, to a credit-based system. By credit-based, I mean that credit actually is perceived as money in today’s credit system. Money loaned into existence by banks licensed to do so by the Federal Reserve.

How empty credit replaces hard assets

When you borrow money, to buy a home for example, the bank creates the mortgage price on its computer, because the Federal Reserve, a private banking cartel, says that it can do so. Nothing tangible is exchanged for the mortgage on your home, just blips on a computer screen, but if you fail to pay the bank, it takes your home.

Not to be outdone, the government gets in on the act as well, by taking your home if you fail to pay property taxes. The government can, and will, take your home if you fail to pay its taxes, even if you own it free and clear! I see this quite often in my law practice. Property tax is really a disguised tax on wealth.

The toll of financialization

Let me pause for a moment folks, and remind you that this discussion is about the destruction of western civilization. The credit-based monetary system we are discussing has ruined the world, and is on the verge of ruining our way of life completely, and the way of life of a lot of people around the world. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so, folks.

Just let me give you a few examples of what I mean. The system, the credit-based monetary system, has destroyed the middle class in America. It did that through deliberate tactics that those in charge, all those Ivy League lawyers in charge, could easily see and anticipate in advance. Pensions and health care costs were shifted from employer, and from State, to employees.

Then interest rates were dropped to zero, which made it impossible to save for retirement. Along with that, low interest rates induced companies to overborrow. The debt load destroyed the profitability of the companies and caused the world’s economy to slowly grind down; thus wages have been shrinking relative to inflation while expenses have been rising for the last 30 years, at least.

The traditional entry door for the middle class life, IE: higher education, is now so expensive, and yet so commonplace, it no longer has any value, and yet it takes a lifetime of debt to acquire it. The three “H”s, higher education, houses, health care, and their related cost, along with the offshoring of American jobs, also related, mean goodbye middle class.

The world’s governments, in response to this boom-and-bust crisis (which is an offshoot of the credit-based system), have borrowed so much money to bail out failing banks – the banks which caused the problem in the first place – that now the entire world economy is on the edge of collapse.

Running out of options

The annual meeting of the “world’s most powerful,” just finished their discussions in Davos, Switzerland. It seems they are out of options. Reports coming out of Davos advise they’re concerned, they’re depressed. With interest rates at zero and money pumped in by the trillions, they still haven’t been able to stop the deflation of asset values they fear, so what else can they do?

Well, I’ll get to that question in a moment. First, here is a bit of their hypocrisy to indicate these people have completely lost touch with reality: Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor, flew to Davos in a private jet to stay in his five-star hotel, to tell the members there, the élite of the world, that corporate greed keeps governments from solving climate change.

Just what we need right now, the world’s economy at a standstill, the middle class collapsing, with virtually every government teetering on the edge of insolvency because of debt made by the elite to whom DiCaprio was talking. We should borrow money from banks, or extort it from the people who still have jobs! Trillions of dollars to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.

Here’s another one folks, 62 members of the meeting at Davos, 62 people, have as much money as the poorest 3.6 billion people on planet Earth. Those figures come to us courtesy of the charity, Oxfam.

If those people made that money honestly, by their own wits, then good for them, but I contend that it’s the manipulation of the credit-based monetary system that causes such disparity. Corruption is everywhere for everyone to see. Everyone is becoming aware of it. Corruption in government, corruption in private business. The rule of law is no more. This all leads to a cynical, immoral, approach to life and to living.

No one is trusted, no one in government certainly. Lying is so rampant it’s expected. Many no longer understand, or won’t, what 800 years of civilization has brought to our world. This problem is too complex for simple answers in one article, folks, and I must bring this one to a close.

Let me leave you with this thought: What should we be asking the presidential candidates of today? How about this question: Will you, as president, continue to borrow money from a privately owned bank to which we must pay interest? Or will you help produce a debt-free, national currency, which is based on something substantial for the American people?

Now folks, what else can the élite do? I’ll endeavor to answer that question next. Thanks for reading!

Part 4 in the Destruction of Western Civilization series. Originally broadcast 29 January 2016.

Darrell Castle is an attorney in Memphis, Tennessee, a former USMC Combat Officer and 2008 Vice Presidential nominee. Darrell gives his unique analysis of current national and international events from a historical and constitutional perspective. You can subscribe to Darrell’s weekly podcast at http://www.castlereport.us.