Steven Yates - The Four Cardinal Errors

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

THE FOUR CARDINAL ERRORS THAT ALMOST DESTROYED AMERICA By Professor Steven Yates, PhD Summary of a six-part Series dated September 13, 2009 thru January 9, 2010 NewsWithViews.com [Author’s note: this article is dedicated to the memory of William C. Yates Jr.—World War II Submarine Veteran, patriot, and devoted husband to my mother and father to my sister and myself — who passed away on December 23, 2009 at age 86.] [Author’s background note: a week or so after publishing “The Real Matrix” (http://tinyurl.com/845dl) on this site four and a half years ago I received an email from a Terry Hayfield, an independent researcher based in Ohio, who offered to share his findings. While his core claim was different from what I’d proposed, there was a key point of congruence: both of us realized, in different ways, that there is indeed a “real matrix” in which most Americans are imprisoned, as it were: not by some AI device, of course, but by their so-called educations, mass media diversions, and the controlled political and economic systems—designed, respectively, to indoctrinate, distract, and create an illusion of choice within systems that are controlled from the top by a well entrenched superelite (as I called it)—working through such entities as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, and finally, the British Fabian Society. What had prompted Hayfield to write? I already realized that I had committed an error: because of the length of my discussion I had deleted a section on the Fabians. According to Hayfield, my error was worse: my conception of the “real matrix” was false, as it rested on a false premise: it neglected the Permanent Revolution. Here, no doubt summarized too quickly, are Hayfield’s main claims based on four decades of research and study including direct experience working with organized labor. Outside the “real matrix” is the Permanent Revolution, a term referring not to any specific power elite but to a process, economic in nature, directing the actions of the elites, who do what they do not simply because they want to but because they have to. At the core of this process is a specific British-American capitalism, managed by the British Fabian Society for the Crown. British-American capitalism has a design flaw: overproduction and underconsumption. Hayfield calls this the flaw of capitalism. Because of the flaw of capitalism, BritishAmerican capitalism is in constant turmoil; it must always change, expand, revolutionize itself from within—finding new markets for what it produces and finding ways of getting currency into consumers’ hands so they can buy what capitalists produce. Otherwise the system falls into crisis and must resort to some form of fascism. Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase ‘creative destruction’ to describe this continuous process of disruption and change (see his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942). The superelite’s cure for the flaw of British-American capitalism is the Permanent Revolution — building up a global capitalism that at its height will evolve into global socialism and then into global communism (in the sense Marx originally intended for that term).

Page 1 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

This process, according to Hayfield, is what is sweeping away — destroying — our Republic from within. It is crucial to grasp that in this view capitalism, socialism and communism are not alternative systems but components of a single process. British-American capitalism must exist in order for the socialism originally desired by the Fabians to exist. Conversely, socialism cannot exist without capitalism. British-American capitalism thus stands at the foundation of the process. Hence (1) British-American capitalism—not socialism—is the enemy and must be the target of those who would save our Republic. Moreover (2): communism as usually defined is a myth. The Soviet Union was a poorly planned form of state capitalism. The Leninists attempted socialism without a capitalist base. Real communism thus hasn’t happened yet! British-American capitalism is creating the conditions for its creation! Such a view is bound to raise eyebrows. More than one respondent has called Hayfield a closet Marxist. This is simplistic. He believes that nearly all Patriot organizations and publications are parts of the Hegelian ploy to create a “controlled opposition” and herd as many opponents into it as possible so that they may be safely neutered. He believes this happened with the John Birch Society, which had subterranean connections to Rockefeller dollars from the very start. Hayfield has adapted the term Perestroika for all these efforts, which he also believes includes Ron Paul’s rise to visibility. I have commented critically on Hayfield’s research here: http://tinyurl.com/ygvze4g and here: http://tinyurl.com/yh8hc3a, Hayfield responded here: http://tinyurl.com/y8v36a9. I have reservations about a number of his conclusions, which include the idea of a new political fusion of “left” and “right” forming a new political party devoted to exposing the Fabians and thwarting the Permanent Revolution. He has more confidence than I do that independent voters will respond to an exposure of the Fabians. As of yet they have not responded to exposures of the much better known CFR and the Trilateral Commission, probably because they are more interested in sports and American Idol. I am unsure, more generally, that our Republic can be saved. In my pieces linked to above I expressed doubts about the existence of an economic process that stands above the aggregate actions of individuals, including the superelite. Using the principle known as Ockham’s Razor, we might consider that the superelite with its tremendous resources and pull, an educational system designed to turn us all into collectivists and subordinates, and the myriad distractions including the explosion in sexual innuendo in the marketplace since the Kinseyite revolution, just might suffice. But I do not dismiss out of hand the possibility of supervening historical laws governing these things. I know of cases of Republics becoming Empires (e.g., Rome); I know of no cases of Empires returning to being Republics. Doubtless there are reasons why this is the case. Also, I am unclear what kind of society Hayfield would have us work toward, although he clearly sees the system instituted by the Articles of Confederation as superior to what came about later with the Constitution and when the Crown reasserted control (Jay Treaty). That doesn’t help us much today, of course, if for no other reason than the vastly greater complexity of society now. As bad as the present structures of domination are, the power vacuum created by their sudden end in a population accustomed to them seems to me equally if not more dangerous, which is why I continue to support specific piecemeal efforts such as Ron Paul’s, first to audit and then to eliminate the Federal Reserve—one thing at a time. Be all this as it may, I would like to see Hayfield’s research studied and discussed. After all, with the current manufactured crisis deepening, we need everybody’s ideas on Page 2 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

the table, and not let our egos get in the way of frank and open dialogue. I am told that Mr. Hayfield has had hostile exchanges with other NewsWithViews.com contributors. This is unfortunate, because while my views are not congruent with his, his documentation is quite extensive and his specific claims about, e.g., the Fabians, check out. If it pushes the limits of our comfort zones, then so be it. Our purpose here is to learn and communicate the truth—or as much of it as we can uncover—not maintain feelings of intellectual security. For only on this basis can we expect our actions to succeed. And let’s observe that with last year’s very public bailouts of institutions deemed “too big to fail” and articles now appearing about Halliburton-subsidized detention camps not on “conspiracy sites on the Internet” but in the very mainstream San Francisco Chronicle (http://tinyurl.com/2h7fu4), we are rapidly running out of time!] Four Cardinal Errors, as I will call them, have all but destroyed our original Republic, dating from July 4, 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Error One: the Republic failed to gain full freedom and economic sovereignty from the British Crown, and this state of affairs went unrecognized. Error Two: the country adopted an educational system whose premises were alien to those of a free Republic. Error Three: Americans slowly but steadily lost the “moral religiosity” of its founding traditions, replacing it with a naturalistic materialism also imported from Europe. Error Four: Americans did not recognize the British Fabian Society for what it was, and stayed blind as agents of Fabian permeation gradually assumed control over dominant institutions and occupations in this country. This paved the way for the piece-by-piece erosion of our sovereignty and its replacement by world government (“global governance”). The first of these will doubtless come as something of a surprise. Please allow me to elaborate.

Cardinal Error One. Our Republic, founded in 1776, failed to retain its full freedom and economic sovereignty from the British Crown—which had long been the wealthiest and most powerful secular entity in the Western world. (See E.C. Knuth, “The Empire of the City: The Secret History of British Financial Power,” orig. 1944). I. Concentrations of power have always been dangerous. This can be as true of private wealth as it is state power; when used to buy and retain the loyalty of heads of state, private wealth is power. Such a system was built up gradually by the Rothschild dynasty in the final third of the 18th century. Mayer Amschel Bauer had been a child prodigy of sorts, growing up in Frankfort-on-the-Main and learning the art of money lending from his father, Amschel Moses Bauer. The elder Bauer had started a counting house and hung a red shield over the entrance. The Bauers were Ashkenazi Jews, and the red shield was a revolutionary symbol. Young Amschel Mayer’s parents having died from the plague, he was sent to Hanover to work in a major bank. His talent obvious, he became a partner when still in his teens. He returned to Frankfort and bought the family business back. The red shield was still there. He changed his last name to Rothschild (Rott schild = red shield), offered his services as a dealer in rare coins to local heads of state, and as a moneylender. He was soon on his way to becoming fabulously wealthy. He would move with his family into a house shared with the Schiffs, another fabulously wealthy banking dynasty whose most famous progeny would be Jacob Schiff.

Page 3 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

Mayer Amschel Rothschild had five sons and five daughters. He trained each son in the science of money lending, and eventually placed each in a central bank in a major city in Europe: Amschel Mayer stayed in Frankfurt, Salomon Mayer went to Vienna, Nathan Mayer went to London, Kalmann (Karl) Mayer went to Naples, and Jacob (James) Mayer went to Paris. Remaining in close communication, the five Rothschild sons became the first internationalists whose only loyalties were to money, power, and the Rothschild name. Central bankers had adopted fractional reserve banking, the art and science of lending more money than the bank had in reserve—in effect, creating money out of thin air—and then charging interest on it. This had proven to be a road to riches previously undreamt of! Mayer Amschel Rothschild has been quoted: “Allow me to issue and control a nation’s money, and I care not who makes the laws.” Each Rothschild daughter, meanwhile, married into another wealthy banking house, extending Rothschild influence but without using that name. Within a couple of generations, there were people advancing Rothschild causes who very likely had no idea who they were working for. The British Crown was, as we already noted, one of the largest repositories of wealth and power in the West. The Crown’s Dutch East Company spanned the globe. It was inevitable that the most talented of the Mayer Amschel’s sons—Nathan Mayer—would establish his bank (N.M. Rothschild & Sons) in the hoary City of London, the heart of Crown territory. Soon, Rothschild influence also spanned the globe. II. The colonies established in North America were intended to be commercial entities serving the Crown. The colonists eventually began to chafe at the fact that they were not treated the same as other British citizens. Contrary to what many history books teach, they did not initially want independence from the British Empire. ‘Taxation without representation,’ for example, was obviously not a demand for independence but for equal treatment under British law. Their demands met with no response from King George III, who in 1775 proclaimed the colonies to be in rebellion. (Note that word proclaimed. We will see it again.) By the end of the year, independence stirrings had begun. In early 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense. Paine’s tract brazenly attacked the very institution of monarchy and made an eloquent case for independence over reconciliation: “The authority of Great Britain over this continent, is a form of government, which sooner or later must have an end …” And later: “A government of our own is our natural right.” Common Sense was widely read throughout the colonies. A Declaration of Independence was inevitable, as was the war for independence which followed. Thirteen colonies became a Perpetual Union of sovereign states under the Articles of Confederation—a document creating a highly decentralized society rooted in the assumption that concentrations of power are dangerous. By the mid-1780s, however, the elites within the states were grousing that the federal government established under the Articles was too weak—and to be sure, a number of volatile issues both within and between the states had erupted which it was unclear could be resolved peacefully under the authority of the Articles. It wasn’t clear that the Perpetual Union established under the Articles was sustainable. In 1787 the states sent representatives to the first Constitutional Convention, which met behind

Page 4 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

closed doors. Its stated purpose was to revise the Articles of Confederation. But why the secrecy? This raised red flags even then. The representatives emerged after three months with an entirely new document, the Constitution of the United States of America. When asked by a woman what kind of government this Constitution created, monarchy or republic, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” One thing was for sure: the Constitution had created a stronger central government than its predecessor. It is unfortunate that Thomas Jefferson had been in Europe while this was going on. Had he participated in the Constitutional Convention, it is at least possible that the resulting Constitution and all subsequent history might look very different. To be adopted, the new Constitution needed ratification by nine of the thirteen states. James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton penned The Federalist Papers making a public case for ratification. Others—whom history labels the “Anti-Federalists”—smelled a rat and argued against the Constitution’s ratification. Authors such as Richard Henry Lee and Robert Yates (no known ancestral relation to the present author) among others circulated numerous statements contending, among other things, that the Constitution contained too many loopholes which those who wanted a still larger central government would eventually climb through. Among their worries was the lack of an explicit statement of people’s natural rights which the federal government was obligated to respect. Statesmen like George Mason paid attention. A compromise was reached: a Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the Constitution) was inserted. In light of history, this wasn’t enough. History has validated the fears of the “AntiFederalists.” But alas, we get ahead of ourselves. The Constitution created a new system of government, one stronger and more centralized than that of the Articles but still limited. The federal government was to have three branches, each with specific delegated powers—or, better, responsibilities, since the overriding aim of having a Constitution was to contain power by creating a balance of powers within the federal government itself; and with dual sovereignty—the central concept of true federalism in which the powers of the federal government were few and carefully defined while the rest was left to the states (Ninth and Tenth Amendments). Among the responsibilities assigned to Congress was to “coin money and regulate the value thereof.” Article I Section 8 did not authorize Congress to delegate this responsibility to any private entity or public-private partnership. This clause in the Constitution was abrogated almost at once by Thomas Jefferson’s arch foe Alexander Hamilton, allowed to create the first Bank of the United States over Jefferson’s explicit objections. Jefferson’s warnings about central bankers, doubtless based on first hand observations from his time in Europe, are well known. It is likely that the European banking elite—centered in dynasties such as that of Rothschild and Schiff—wanted to destroy the fledgling Republic across the ocean right from the start. They would bring it under their control, or else! The Treaty of Paris of 1783 had officially ended the war, but His Brittanick Majesty’s overbearing presence remained, including on U.S. soil. President George Washington, seeking to avoid renewed hostilities with the stillpowerful British war machine, sent John Jay to London to work out a new treaty that would Page 5 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

diffuse the danger of renewed conflict. This treaty—virtually forgotten by historians today— became known as the Jay Treaty and was very controversial in its time. It was signed in London on November 19, 1794. Back in the states, it was submitted to our Senate on June 8 the following year and provoked an angry and rancorous debate. It was finally passed on June 24 (the vote was 20 – 10). The House passed it on August 14, 1795. Then it was sent back to the British. Great Britain ratified it on October 28, 1795; His Brittanick Majesty proclaimed it on February 29, 1796. Time out! Remember that word proclaimed? What, precisely, do we mean, proclaimed? There was no basis for a recognition of proclaimed in the Constitution! Proclaiming was something done by British royalty, not Constitutional Republics! What this means is bound to be startling, even to Patriots who believe they’ve seen everything! In the last analysis, given that it was proclaimed, the Jay Treaty is more a British document than an American one. His Brittanick Majesty ended the American War for Independence on February 29, 1796—with a treaty that does not explicitly assent to U.S. sovereignty and independence. Rather, it establishes “a firm inviolable and universal Peace, and a true and sincere Friendship between His Brittanick Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, and the United States of America …” Had Americans just fought a war for independence only to have established an ambiguous “Friendship” with the Crown, one that is “inviolable”? The disturbing question that should pull us all out of our comfort zones: in this last analysis, did the United States of America remain, however covertly, under the thumb of the British Crown? Were Americans merely allowed to believe they had attained full sovereignty? A final note about the Jay Treaty. Its Articles V, VI and VII of the Jay Treaty establish the first international mixed commissions, to resolve disputes not yet resolved through negotiation. This set an important precedent for later “commissions of inquiry” with autonomous decision-making power. III. Remember that Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States was in operation by this time. Hamilton had defended what amounts to mercantilism in Federalist #12. Unlike Jefferson and the “Anti-Federalists” he wanted a centralized and activist government. Was Hamilton secretly working for the Crown, and therefore also for the Rothschilds? His goals aligned with theirs, and the future was open to the very meddling by European bankers about which Jefferson was warning everyone who would listen. A few historians believe Nathan Meyer Rothschild ordered the War of 1812 as punishment for our refusal to recharter Hamilton’s bank (so much for the “inviolability” of the Friendship Treaty from the Crown’s point of view). Wars, of course, create debt; central banking, to create the money to pay the debt, becomes an irresistible temptation. The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816. Rothschild agents John Jacob Astor, Stephen Girard, and David Parish were placed in charge. With Nathan at the helm, the Rothschilds ascended to full power during the first two decades of the 1800s — especially with the insider-trading stunt he pulled with the Battle of Waterloo which made him Great Britain’s richest man.

Page 6 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

President Andrew Jackson — a hero of that war following his victory in the Battle of New Orleans — would shut down the Second Bank of the United States having denounced the institution as “a den of vipers and thieves.” This was the culmination of his protracted battle with Rothschild agent Nicholas Biddle, who had assumed the Bank’s presidency in the 1820s. The bankers retaliated by causing a near-depression that severely damaged the remainder of Jackson’s presidency. He would survive an assassination attempt on January 30, 1835. His would-have-been assassin admitted working for “foreign interests.” While we had no central bank during the decades which ensued, we also had no means to prevent Rothschild meddling in American affairs. For example, Rothschild agent August Schoenberg came to our shores and changed his last name to Belmont. He began purchasing government bonds, rose in wealth and stature through his firm August Belmont & Co., and eventually became an advisor to the White House. John Slidell, another Rothschild agent, had been a merchant in New York before relocating to New Orleans to build up a law practice. He would serve in the Louisiana House of Representatives. Finally, Judah Benjamin was a Rothschild agent who would rise to become Jefferson Davis’s chief advisor. Yes, we now have pretty good evidence that the attempt to divide the U.S. in two was a Rothschild scheme from the get-go. The emerging battle over slavery served as a convenient issue on which to focus public attention. Those with real power couldn’t care less about such things as the treatment of minority groups unless it creates a wedge issue they can use. Fractional money flowed into the coffers of corporations that built the industrial revolution that transformed the Northern states during the second third of the 1800s. This process took people off the land they had farmed and sent them into burgeoning cities. It created a fundamentally different culture. Invariably, people began to lose touch with the land and would eventually lose the ability their ancestors possessed to live off the land. The North’s commitment to industry versus the South’s preference for an agrarian economy also helped set the stage for dividing America into two separate nations that could be more easily brought under Rothschild/Crown control. Was the most violent war ever fought on U.S. soil really orchestrated from overseas, or is this just a “conspiracy theory”? Consider what Otto Bismarck (a protégé of Frankfort’s Amschel Mayer Rothschild) would say in 1876: “The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds prevailed… Therefore they sent their emissaries into the field to exploit the question of slavery and to open an abyss between the two sections of the Union.” Abraham Lincoln thwarted the division of the U.S. into two separate nations—and kept the nation out of debt to foreign bankers by printing Greenbacks. He’d had to sign a National Banking Act (1863) as a wartime measure, however, and this was a step back toward a central bank. Some recent treatments of Lincoln portray him as a ruthless and unscrupulous tyrant (see, e.g., Thomas DiLorenzo’s “The Real Lincoln,” 2002). In a sense, he was between a rock and a hard place. By using brute force to bring the Confederacy back into the Union he thwarted the Rothschild scheme but there was a steep price: the end of dual sovereignty and hence of true federalism. The federal government ascended to its present status as dominant over the states. The consolidation of federal power (which should have become known as Page 7 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

central power) proved to be permanent. The South, ravaged by war, descended into poverty. For all this, there are Southerners who have never forgiven Lincoln. On the other hand, had he allowed Southern secession to stand, this would have given the Rothschilds what they wanted—and heralded an uncertain future for both societies in which neither would have enjoyed what sovereignty they had for very long. Lincoln seems to have known what was really going on. In an 1865 statement he told Congress, “I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in my rear is my greatest foe.” Lincoln made other remarks suggesting that he believed his life would end violently, with an assassination. He knew he had made enemies who had no scruples about murdering those who interfered with their plans. Not long before his assassination he wrote: “The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” Suffice it to say: a major treaty ending our initial conflict with Great Britain in the late 1700s was proclaimed (not simply signed or ratified). The money that grew U.S. industry in the 1800s came from Great Britain—a great deal of it came specifically from that powerful family ensconced in the City of London: the Rothschilds. The effort to divide the nation also appears to have emanated from the Rothschild/Crown axis. Even though the Rothschild/Crown axis lost that battle, the question remains: was our Republic ever truly sovereign and free of Rothschild/Crown interests? It appears not! To be sure, we believed we were free. We generally acted as if we were free! But were we merely allowed to believe we were free while in truth remaining the Crown’s biggest covert colony?

Cardinal Error Two. In the 1840s, an educational system whose premises were alien to those of a free republic was brought into this country. I. Horace Mann of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts traveled to Prussia and returned to his home state with word of what he considered an amazing school system. The Prussian system, steeped in the philosophy of Georg W.F. Hegel, not John Locke or Thomas Jefferson, operated under the assumption that the individual belongs to the state instead of to himself and to his God. It “educated” Prussian children accordingly. Mann received a matching grant from Massachusetts to set up this school system. It seemed likely to encourage loyalty and obedience to those in charge. Eventually other states began adopting it. Thus began what became known as “public education”—government schools—in America. Although Americans would run it, obviously, this system was not American. It was Prussian. Our word kindergarten is, in fact, a Prussian word. It means, roughly, child garden—a reference to the growing of children as if they were vegetables in a garden, to be tended, nurtured and directed down the path the owners of the garden want them to follow.

Page 8 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

A few pastors/authors, e.g., R.L. Dabney and Archibald Cox, warned of danger. They were ignored. And at first, government-sponsored school systems seemed harmless enough. They seemed benign and even useful, state-sponsorship having spread to higher education with the Morrill Act of 1863, rejected by President James Buchanan as unconstitutional but signed into law by Abraham Lincoln as a wartime measure. The Morrill Act created the land grant system of what were then called Agricultural & Mechanical (A&M) Colleges. These institutions began to train the masses in the rote technical skills and business skills wanted by those developing the incipient but rapidly growing corporate world. This meant setting aside, in public institutions anyway, the classical model of formal learning that makes for an independent minded, thinking citizen. Neither government nor corporations wanted that. America’s shift from a nation of independent craftsmen and entrepreneurs (farmers, doctors, lawyers, carpenters, teachers, etc.) to a nation of employees and professionals thus began. Employees and professionals could be more easily controlled. Professionalization meant instituting specific educational or other credentials, licenses, etc., to limit entry into occupations. Ostensibly this was to ensure quality control. The practice became known as occupational licensure. It began to transform professions, one after another, into organized guilds, with the establishing of an Establishment including gatekeepers for each profession. In the late 1800s we had entered the era of the “robber barons” who owed their economic supremacy to infusions of Rothschild fractional money on which they built—and since politicians even then were spineless worms easily bought and paid for in exchange for favors, the “robber barons” were able to destroy competition and dominate the marketplace in their industry. Rockefeller dominance in oil arose within this economic ambience. Other prominent names came to dominate other industries (Carnegie in steel, Vanderbilt in railroads, and so on). There is, it turns out, a misunderstanding about corporations found among libertarians and other free marketers: the belief that those running dominant corporations really desire free markets. The beneficiaries of Rothschild money were as interested in power as any politician; and again, wealth was power. They did not want free markets, they wanted markets they could control, and they had more than enough resources for this. Social engineering was the key. II. Having made his fortune in oil, John D. Rockefeller—and soon his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr.—recognized the tremendous possibilities of control offered by state-sponsored schools. Shortly before the turn of the century they discovered young John Dewey, a then-obscure psychology professor at Rockefeller-bankrolled University of Chicago. Dewey had studied under G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University. Hall, in turn, had been the first American student of pioneer “experimental psychologist” Wilhelm Wundt of the infamous Leipzig School. The Wundt school held that human beings were not different in kind from other biological organisms. Its members were radical empiricists. What they could observe, is what counted. They believed they observed specific kinds of stimuli yielding specific responses in behavioral patterns. Change the stimuli, they reasoned, and you change the behavior. By repeatedly supplying the right stimuli, they reasoned further, desired behaviors could be artificially induced and then established as habits. Conditioning was therefore possible. Human beings were malleable, like the potter’s clay. Page 9 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

Wundt’s pupils and their pupils applied this idea to children. It was clear that if they could control a child’s environment they could raise up a cohort of readily controllable children. Controllable children would grow up to be controllable adults. Dewey, having been trained by Hall and also having absorbed Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, was perfect for what the RothschildRockefeller axis wanted. The Rockefellers founded the General Education Board in 1902. Its Occasional Letter No. 1 stated: “In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops, on the farm.” The tax-exempt Rockefeller Foundation would later bankroll Dewey at Columbia State Teachers College. Thus would arise so-called Progressive Education. Dewey’s philosophy advanced as the goals of education not the transmission of knowledge, or the integrated study of those disciplines (history, philosophy, theology, etc.) necessary for an understanding of our Republic’s founding, but “adjustment” to a “changing world.” With support from other wellbankrolled professional guilds such as the National Education Association, Progressive Education became the Establishment among teachers and school administrators. None of this is to say the elites ignored the teaching of history. The Carnegie money empire was working with other tax-exempt foundations (Rockefeller and Guggenheim, for example) to hijack history at the university level. They sought out graduate students sympathetic to a collectivist view of society, bankrolled their studies, and found them employment at prestigious Ivy League universities. These court historians for the elites became the core of the American Historical Association, soon to become the largest organization of academic historians in the country. Other academic guilds had formed—the American Philosophical Association in my discipline became the largest organization of philosophy professors in the country—or were in the process of forming. Such organizations would serve as gatekeepers of the various academic disciplines and sponsor major journals, ensuring the establishment of orthodoxies that would not challenge the rapidly growing power system in the Western world (they would permit token “challenges” such as the childish Marxism of so-called “tenured radicals” whose articles and books were/are so specialized as to be unintelligible outside the narrow circles of their specialties). III. The rest, one might say, is itself history. Never again would government schools at any level be free from collectivism and the goal of the coerced socialization. Eventually Progressive Education gave way to more up-to-date fashions. They went by names such as Mastery Learning and Values Clarification (which saw all values, including moral ones, as exclusively subjective and thus having no epistemic authority). More recently we have seen OutcomePage 10 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

Based Education and School-To-Work. All involve control over process to achieve a controlled population. In the latter, a promise of jobs are the lure for students; promises of docile, cooperative employees and complacent voters are the lure for business and governmental support respectively. Job skills and obedience to authority are what the process is designed to impart. Traditional liberal arts are relegated to the academic equivalent of wall décor. The problem with the latter, again, is that they encourage independence of thought and, when carried out properly, give the student the skills he or she needs to reason clearly and think effectively about first premises, including where wealth and prosperity actually come from, whether the centralization of society helps or hinders one’s own quest for a prosperous and happy life, and whether government should be large and intrusive or small and confined to a few functions. This had been known for some time. The elites as far back as the last turn of the century did not want common people educated beyond their station, as that Rockefeller General Education Board statement should make clear; or as an NEA document stated later along the same lines, the elites did not want the common plebs taken “away from the pursuits for which they are adapted.” And as A.J. Russell, head of Columbia State Teacher’s College, asked as far back as 1905, “How can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be their leaders?” After all, those few who had absorbed the panorama of thought presented by Western philosophy, history, theology, economics, and so on, and extracted their lessons, might turn their attention to what was gradually encircling them. They might have questioned directives coming from the top of their professions. Such persons could quickly become a problem, however small—especially if by some chance they organized around a charismatic leader. Today such folks might become dangerous malcontents who visibly question major elitedriven policies such as “free trade” (as embodied in NAFTA, CAFTA, etc.) in light of the loss of our manufacturing base and its replacement by low-paying “service” jobs. They might look at our recent history in the light of their own research about how trade deals paved the way to the European Union and the euro in order to question the cash value of the difference between the phrases North American Community (promoted openly by Professor Robert Pastor of American University) and North American Union (dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”). The point here: thought does not fall into lockstep and bow before authority, intellectual or political. A few iconoclasts can be tolerated. Hence the occasional Lou Dobbs in broadcasting or Ron Paul in politics. Too many, however, growing too influential, and the entire New International Economic Order might be defeated as elected representatives respond to angry constituents. For the full story of the deliberate destruction of the American intellect I recommend three books which in my view do the most to document how it has worked (and is still working): Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s “The deliberate Dumbing Down of America,” John Taylor Gatto’s “The Underground History of American Education,” and Beverly K. Eakman’s “The Cloning of the American Mind.” One should also not miss Allan Quist’s books, nor Sheldon Richman’s Separating School and State which contains important history of this problem going back to Horace Mann. Iserbyt’s and Gatto’s works are readily available online. All consider, from various angles, not just the fashions themselves that have destroyed our society’s ability to teach critical, logical thinking and transmit accumulated knowledge to its children but how the effort has come from the upper echelons—bankrolled, as always, by elite-controlled foundations (Ford is also a major villain in this regard) and sponsored organizations. Page 11 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

The most sensible immediate antidote for us as individuals is not to allow our children anywhere near a government school. For a Christian perspective calling for a mass exodus from government schools I recommend Rev. E. Ray Moore’s “Let My Children Go!” and Bruce Shortt’s “The Harsh Truth About Public Schools.” Every state in the union now has organizations devoted to accumulating resources for those who would home school their children. Home schooling has become the fastest growing educational movement in the country, with documentation showing that on the average, home schooled children and teenagers are as much as four years ahead of their peers in every academic subject. The problem, of course, is that educrats have constructed a largely self-contained and selfperpetuating system. Educrats permeate federal and state education agencies and hand down directives which administrators and teachers have a choice between following or giving up their careers. Fashions such as OBE control major accrediting agencies. College and university administrations do as they are told, or risk having their accreditation revoked. The buzzword of the day is “accountability.” The professional guilds and educratic hierarchies have the workaday practitioners by the throat. They would drop the axe on home schooling if they believed they could get away with it. Government schools, meanwhile, continue to graduate students who have a few job skills but no real learning or thinking ability. Sometimes, of course, they do not even have the job skills, to the extent these require reading and understanding complex sequences of instructions. They have been exposed to little in the way of deep thought. If they have any grasp of politics at all, they are followers of one or the other wings of the Washington D.C. Party. This is encouraged through student organizations, and the mainstream media. And we wonder how a Barack Obama can be elected President of the United States on the basis of very good oratory skills and a contentless promise of “change”? We wonder how Republicans could nominate an opponent with almost no support from the active rank and file (the Republicans I knew supported either Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, or Ron Paul). We wonder how so many can overlook the obvious continuities between the Bush II Regime and the Obama Regime: foreign wars, top-down legislation, social engineering through education, and dominance of the country’s money system by globalist banking elites. We wonder how, under Obama, our Congress can do the very same things that transformed the Crash of 1929 into the Great Depression, which didn’t really set in until 1932, and why almost no one (except for Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, and a few others) questions the fundamental economic premise of our time: that governments of the world, working with central banks, can spend us into prosperity with money either borrowed from potentially hostile foreign nations like China or simply created out of thin air.

Cardinal Error Three. This error in a nutshell: Americans — intelligentsia first, consciously, but eventually our so - called leaders and much of the public tacitly — abandoned the inherent religiosity of the Founders and embraced a naturalistic materialism also imported from Europe. This has had serious consequences for our basic moral convictions, which became more hedonistic and utilitarian with every decade. Hedonism sees pleasure as the fundamental good. Utilitarianism holds that an amorphous “greater good” is what counts. Ultimately, lives are expendable and may be sacrificed, even involuntarily, in the name of this “greater good,” always defined by those with money and power. I. Page 12 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

Early Americans may not have seen eye to eye on all theological specifics, but almost all had an inherent religiosity, as I call it. That is, they believed in a transcendent realm and a transcendent God who had created the world and from whose perfect character had come eternal standards of moral truth. Such notions were the key to a free and responsible people, as John Adams understood: “We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” (1798). Many others of the time recognized the indispensability of Christian theology in the body politic, whatever their specific doctrinal differences. They realized, as have many wise men and women down through the ages, that life in this world only acquires a stable and nonephemeral meaning through insight into a world beyond this one, and that this alone can provide the basis for a system of morals based on something other than enculturation—and when that fails, intimidation. Religion is invariably a contentious subject, of course, because it deals with ultimates in ways no other area of human life touches. Spiritual convictions have, for some, infused lives immersed in a daily struggle for survival with ultimate meaning, and given their pain significance. (See Victor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning, 1945) Religion has had its dark side, of course. Religious institutions and their leaders are as vulnerable as anyone to the lure of power. They founded the Spanish Inquisition, for instance. They held heads of state in thrall prior to the rise of dynasties such as the Rothschilds. Governments had generally been more than willing to sponsor national churches such as the Church of England. When governments sponsored specific bodies of religious doctrine, as they always had in Europe, it was invariably a recipe for repression. Thus Thomas Jefferson’s call, however often abused, for a “wall of separation between church and state” in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association (1802). So again Americans blazed a different trail, one set out in our First Amendment which promised “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,…” Seas of ink have been spilled over what this establishment clause means — in recent years, ignoring everything after the comma. The point is: the American Republic was of necessity Christianity-friendly but did not aim to establish any denomination as a national church akin to the Church of England. There was to be room for many denominations, many ways of worship. These were left up to the people themselves, without interference from the state and without their interfering with the state. The assumption here is that a society can be infused with a bottom-up commitment to one or more variations on a Christian worldview without allowing that worldview to be transformed into a top-down theocracy. If society is decentralized and potential instruments for the abuse of power are dispersed as widely as possible, we can prevent national theocracy even if local theocracies occasionally develop here and there. So why has the “establishment” clause been so troublesome? Why have numerous Supreme Court cases, one by one, forced Christianity out of education and out of the public square? The Adamses and Jeffersons of the period 1798 – 1802 never in their wildest imaginings thought that in two centuries’ time the federal government would completely overwhelm the states, that federal power would be everywhere, dictating terms to every institution. Since federal dollars going to any institution that openly acknowledged a Creator would be subject to legal challenge, and since by the twentieth

Page 13 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

century that was most institutions, most institutions found themselves unable legally to acknowledge the Creator. II. There were other factors curtailing the influence of Christianity. It is well known that Christianity was losing the allegiance of the European intelligentsia before the American founding. What went wrong? Historians and other scholars are bound to disagree on many of the specifics. Please allow me to offer some of my own thoughts—on how philosophy and philosophical theology overstepped their boundaries and set themselves up for a fall, so to speak. The story is longer than we can tell here. In a nutshell: major voices in medieval philosophical theology and early modern philosophy opened the door to skepticism and thence to humanism. They insisted (as in St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Thomas Aquinas and René Descartes) that rigorous deductive proofs be given for God’s existence. These proofs employed the kinds of logical devices familiar from Aristotelian logic and Euclidean geometry. In the hands of fallible, finite minds, they turned out to have insurmountable weaknesses on their own terms. Soon, those who identified reasonability of belief with rigorous proof or at least decisive evidence found themselves forced to conclude that belief in the Christian God was not rational. We saw this attitude exemplified in (for example) the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s castigations of “natural religion,” and the emergence of Enlightenment humanism. In the face of formulations of, say, the “problem of evil and suffering,” moreover, Christianity’s problems seemed even worse. Given these human-centered criteria, belief in God seemed impossible to the “enlightened” human mind. What was—and is—Enlightenment humanism? While hardly a unified school of thought, in all its forms it represented a man-centered view of existence with roots also going back to the ancient Greeks (especially Plato). It drew heavily on the work of social philosophers the most famous of whom was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of Du Contrat Social (1762). It was optimistic and idealistic. Its primary tenets: (1) human nature is inherently good but has been corrupted; (2) what has corrupted human nature are society’s institutions—especially religious ones but also monarchies; (3) we therefore need to abolish these institutions and work for the transformation of society en toto; and that (4) doing so will bring about indefinite social improvement and, one day, possibly even perfection. Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! It dawned on some observers (Edmund Burke, for example) that something was wrong when the French Revolution turned into a bloodbath. Christians, of course, believe human nature is sinful because of the Fall and so not inherently good (see Rom. 3:23; Job 5:7; Isaiah 64:6, etc.), that this explains the corruption of institutions which were designed after all by human beings, and that therefore every transformational agenda rests on a false premise. Attempts to place a culture on the path of universal progress towards Utopia are therefore bound to turn tyrannical when human nature refuses to cooperate. Sin, for the Christian, explains the lust for power itself—even when manifested in supposedly Christian institutions. All of us recall Lord Acton’s adage that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” According to a Christian worldview this doesn’t get matters quite right. Human nature is already corrupted by sin; concentrations of power just play to this corruption and make it more dangerous.

Page 14 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

All of this explains, of course, why the humanist stance, in the hands of those who knew how to exploit it, eventually gave us tyrannies that made 1790s France look like a walk in the park by comparison: the Soviet Union under first Lenin and then Stalin, Nazi Germany under Hitler, China under Mao, and so on. Utopia looks like paradise to the intellectual with a vision—but actual flesh-and-blood human beings never really fit into his vision. In practice, they become cogwheels in the state machinery, their lives meaningless otherwise. Those who resist or who otherwise do not fit the Plan are crushed like insects by the state machinery’s police force. There are, of course, more “modest” forms of humanism as we’ll see in the next and final installment of this series [Cardinal Error 4]. These forms of humanism are not totalitarian, and in fact their purveyors would prefer to avoid totalitarianism using some of the behavior-modification techniques we saw in Part 2 [Cardinal Error 2]. What humanist systems all have in common, though, is that in practice the individual person is never an end in himself, or an entity with intrinsic value, owned only by himself and his God. He becomes a subject, if not to a bloody tyranny then to the corporate powers that be that have come to own the political class under the direction British-American capitalism took after naturalistic materialism became the dominant theory of reality. Even before Rousseau, physician-philosopher Julien Offray de la Mettrie penned L’Homme Machine (Man, A Machine) (1748). The stage was set for the rise for a materialism which added: (5) the universe is self-existent, and not created; (6) it is comprised exclusively of entities that obey the laws of physics and chemistry, or entities whose behaviors can be explained ultimately in terms of physical causality; and therefore (7) the totality of humanity—human nature, action, society—was ultimately subject to physical causality and biological explanation. The originators of the scientific revolution had all been essentially Christian, even if influenced by various ancient Greek schools (Pythagoras, for example). That is to say, they believed a rational, law-governed natural order had been created by a rational God, and thus was capable of being apprehended by beings who were rational because they had been created in God’s image (that’s us). If the leading intellects of a culture do not believe, a priori, that the universe is intelligible to the human mind, then for them science is pointless. Many ancient cultures never developed any sciences because they believed that nature was controlled by whimsical, irrational entities, not the law-governed providence of the Christian deity. But as a radical empiricism took over European thought (especially in Great Britain), what couldn’t be observed through the senses or their extensions (scientific instruments) was dismissed as unreal. This extended to metaphysics, which Hume dismissed at the end of his famous Inquiry as “sophistry and illusion” (also in 1748). The views of a Wilhelm Wundt, discussed last week, would simply apply radical empiricism to children as would his descendents, the behaviorists, to human beings generally. No one had ever seen a human soul (psyche), or experimented on it in the laboratory. Therefore it did not exist, and probably neither did a transcendent God. As for Jesus Christ dying on the cross to pay the price for our sins and then rising from the dead? Forget it! III. By the early 1800s, other things being equal, an open clash between the two worldviews, the Christian one and the materialist one, seemed inevitable. Around this time a new development would change the rules of the game, making it difficult to talk about worldviews at all. Hume’s dismissal of metaphysics foreshadowed the new development. The pivotal Page 15 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

figure would be the so-called father of sociology, Auguste Comte. Comte’s writings, culminating in the multi-volume Philosophy and Public Polity (1850), would unleash on the world the doctrine known as positivism. Positivism formalized the idea that scientificempirical methods alone held the key to knowledge of factual truth, that all religions were by nature superstitions, and that traditional philosophy could be set aside as a pointless exercise in building intellectual air-castles. Comte argued that a civilization underwent three stages of development. He called this the “law of the three stages.” During the first stage, the religious one, supernatural explanations of the world prevail. Since the gods are whimsical at best, irrational and malevolent at worst, no explanation of the world in the scientific sense is possible. Comte granted that monotheism is the highest form of the first stage. One fickle deity makes for a more orderly universe than a legion of them! During the second stage, the metaphysical one, philosophers spin grand systems out of their imaginations to explain the world—examples range from Aristotle’s cosmology, Aquinas and his doctrine of Natural Law, the dualism of Descartes the “father of modern philosophy,” down through Hegel and “idealism.” They speak of such notions as “natural law” and “natural rights.” Since in the last analysis none of these systems or notions are empirically testable, systemic philosophy can be nothing other than a clash of systems, with each new philosopher crossing out the system developed by his predecessor and substituting his own. Philosophical explanations of the world are more rational than supernatural ones, Comte granted, but they hold out no hope for genuine cognitive progress. During the third stage, the scientific one, investigators of the world put forth hypotheses and test them step by step against observation, empirical testing, and data collection. Those that survive the best empirical tests deserve to be called knowledge. The general idea caught on, and soon dominated scholarly thought. Science, after all, seemed to be advancing by leaps and bounds. Physics was the quintessential science. With Darwin publishing not long after Comte’s ideas circulated, biology began slowly to coalesce around the idea of evolution by natural selection. Darwinism offered a materialistic theory of the origin of life and of all species including humanity. With Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” evolution soon dominated. Evidence that a materialist worldview—not empirical evidence—explained the show of support for evolution can be found, surprisingly, in textbooks themselves. My copy of paleontologist J. Marvin Weller’s The Course of Evolution states openly: “Darwin was particularly fortunate in his timing because the intellectual atmosphere in England was favorable for the consideration of a new materialistic theory of evolution, and he promptly gained the active support of several able and aggressive young biologists” (1969, p. 2). Positivism, like any humanism, was optimistic about human nature, focusing on the possibilities of science and technique. Its advocates soon combined it with powerful analytic tools nineteenth century logicians had developed, and in the early decades of the twentieth century was transformed into logical positivism. Logical positivism relied on an idea going back to Kant (versions of it are found in Hume and Leibniz), that of a cleavage between two kinds of propositions—analytic and synthetic. The former were matters of logical truth, mathematical truth, or definition, and were empty of empirical content (that is, they said nothing about the world). The latter were matters of empirical truth (or falsity) because they could be tested against experience and experiment and would either meet or fail such tests. The propositions of religion (also ethics) seemed to be neither; so, to the logical positivist, Page 16 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

they weren’t ‘real’ propositions at all. Perhaps they had emotive significance. In the legal realm, this translated into “legal positivism,” first given voice by utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham who dismissed all talk of natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” In this view, propositions about worldviews are as meaningless as those of religion since they can’t be tested and validated by empirical science. The practical consequence of this was that a specific worldview such as materialism could win the allegiance of intellectuals without much in the way of criticism or opposition from within the intellectual community. The would-be critic or opponent could not formulate his objections in acceptable language! Schools of thought drawing attention to the metaphysical commitments of modern science failed to gain traction. With Comte the positivist founder of sociology, Wundt and Freud dominant in psychology, and Darwin in biology, by the early twentieth century materialism had won the day in Europe, and would soon be making extensive inroads in the U.S., working through the educational networks being set up and funded by, e.g., the Rockefellers. It would enter the mainstream of American education through John Dewey, also encountered in Part 2 [Cardinal Error 2]. Soon the positivist-materialist mindset would overwhelm American culture itself. IV. By the middle of the twentieth century, America was ready for Alfred C. Kinsey’s divorce of sexual activity from morality. Kinsey had been an entomologist—a biologist specializing in insect behavior; but most importantly, he was a hard core materialist whose early interest in the sexual behavior of insects grew into an interest in sexuality generally. The Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled his Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, and the result was two volumes that caused the greatest stir since Darwin’s Origin of Species: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). One of Kinsey’s key theses was that children were sexual from infancy. At the time no one seemed too curious about how Kinsey and his team had obtained some of their data sets. In fact, Kinsey and his team were most likely conducting torturous experiments with children and even infants that would have been considered criminal offenses. Kinsey also interviewed sex criminals (some of them in prison); several members of his team were almost undoubtedly pedophiles. (See Judith Reisman, Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, 2000). Kinsey became an academic celebrity whose ideas filtered into the cultural mainstream. There can be no doubt that the sex drive is one of our most powerful, and entirely nonrational in the intellectual’s sense of rationality—which is why cultures either keep it on a short leash or perish. The first highly visible Kinseyite was Hugh Hefner, founder of what became the Playboy empire. The sexual revolution followed in the 1960s. Hedonism (whether specifically sexual or not) was becoming America’s reigning personal ethic, as utilitarianism had already become its reigning social ethic. Religion was retreating to Sunday social events having little affect on a culture which less and less looked to it as a source of morality and meaning (see Harvey Cox, The Secular City, 1965). The extended family had already been replaced by the nuclear family as children left the nest in search of employment. Now, the nuclear family was jeopardized as cultural forces set hormone-driven teenagers against their more traditional parents; it was jeopardized further by economic forces of the sort we considered in Part 1

Page 17 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

[Cardinal Error 1]: the devaluation of the dollar, resulting in declining actual incomes that sent mothers into the workplace as a matter of necessity. Some would argue that the “religious right” began to restore “traditional values,” at least in part, during the 1980s. This movement, in retrospect, barely even scratched the surface of what had been a seismic cultural shift; and it never even seemed aware of the economic forces threatening the family. Neither the political nor the popular cultures were much swayed by the pretenses of the “religious right”; not helping matters was the penchant many of its supposed leaders seemed to have for shooting themselves in the foot with their own sexual misdeeds. We should note that by this time Western philosophy (like history, as seen last week) had long been transformed into a professional academic guild and effectively neutered. The “trained” philosopher was invariably warehoused in an academic department as a professor; in a civilization built on bankers’ fractional money and being taken in a specific direction, he or she had few viable alternatives other than law school, cab driving, burger flipping, or—later— computer programming. Logical positivism, even though largely supplanted by even more specialized “analytic” academic fashions, had been the perfect vehicle for a “philosophy” that would never challenge the rapidly growing alliances of governmental bureaucracies, globalist bankers and the industrial capitalists who would grow up around them, or the cultural forces being bankrolled by huge foundations such as Rockefeller and Ford. Its tools of analysis would not allow it to ask the “big questions.” Logical positivism was really more of an antiphilosophy—suited to a societal power network that had just eliminated a potential threat. The discipline whose ancestor had set out the premises on which Western civilization—and ultimately the natural philosophical and moral bases for the founding of the American Republic—was now incapable of producing effective critiques of power. It had quietly and almost ashamedly retreated into the recesses of academic decoration behind the colleges of business and centers for technical training that the land grant system had originally arranged for. So-called “academic radicals” would be permitted to exist. They would apply a kind of baby Marxism to the production of tomes that were just as specialized as the works of logical positivism and analysis, even less intelligible, and just as oblivious to the international banking cartel at the core of the capitalist system they sought to expose. They would eventually go crackers over race, gender, homosexuality, and so on, as if those with real power cared about minority groups, or were interested in gays beyond their capacity to disrupt “traditional morality.” This was academic philosophy by the end of the twentieth century: divided into dozens of micro-specialties, feminized, politically correct, and utterly unable to affect the real power system in Western civilization. Those who as students refused to cooperate were refused admission to the guild (stable academic employment, that is). Such individuals—with way too much education for today’s dumbed down marketplace—pay a steep price. I know of cases of individuals with doctorates now engaged in a daily struggle to keep the wolves at bay, since neither government nor corporations will hire them. The job market for professors collapsed in the early 1970s. A situation where there are more jobseekers than jobs always invites abuses: conformists are hired while dissidents are weeded out. A system unable to affect power thus perpetuates itself in multiple academic guilds through the intellectual equivalent of inbreeding as ideologues hire their own in the name of “diversity.” Page 18 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

There were a few exceptions to the rule that a philosopher must be a professor. Ayn Rand comes to mind. A self-taught Russian immigrant, she would gain a substantial following in the 1960s and 1970s, especially among college students (much to the chagrin of their philosophy professors). Unfortunately, Rand, too, was essentially a materialist who accepted the Enlightenment view of human nature and made autonomous Reason into the equivalent of a deity, capable of solving all human problems. Rand’s “unknown ideal” was (what else?) capitalism, to which she sought to supply the philosophical foundation she maintains capitalism never had. Eventually, though, one had to notice that the perfect capitalist heroes of her novels, such as Howard Roark of The Fountainhead (1943) or John Galt and Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged (1957), simply have no counterparts in real life. Ultimately, “Objectivism” also rests on a false premise, and doubtless this was clear to those in power who allowed thousands of people to be diverted in a direction no more effective than academic Marxism. Likewise Misesians in economics, members of other free market schools, and Libertarians generally, tending (with rare exceptions) to rest their views on the same Enlightenment premises, were allowed to believe that capitalists really wanted competition in markets free of state regulation, as opposed to dominance over markets achieved with the help of the state. To show the short-sightedness of intellectual defenses of capitalism today, all one has to do is look at the rise of the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma), the insurance industry (think AIG), the food industry (think of Monsanto), or any of a dozen other industries where corporate behemoths grew to dominance with the help of government regulation they embraced because it limited competition. V. There were thinkers of various stripes who saw the cracks in this edifice and set out to expose them to the light of day. Return to Comte. Comte—and those in the academic guilds who built on his work—simply assumed the metaphysical neutrality of modern science. That is, they assumed that science makes no substantive metaphysical propositions about the world. Just the facts, ma’am. This, too, is a false premise, as countless writers eventually pointed out. By the middle of the twentieth century several historians of ideas had shown the falsity of this image of science; two examples include Edwin Arthur Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1952) and Alexander Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957). No less a scientist than Einstein himself rejected the empiricist image of science, having repeatedly spoken (sometimes with great awe) of the comprehensibility of nature that must be presupposed a priori by physics. The most visible rebel against the positivist image was Thomas S. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn argued in great detail, with a wealth of historical examples, that a mature science both does and must make substantial non-empirical presuppositions about its subject matter; and that these presuppositions change over time (scientific revolutions) in ways incompatible with the radical empiricism of logical positivism. British philosopher Nicholas Maxwell went further, arguing in his books From Knowledge to Wisdom (1984) and The Comprehensibility of the Universe (1998) and in many articles, that underlying the diversity of the sciences is a single metaphysical proposition which scientists presuppose a priori: the universe is intelligible or comprehensible to the human mind (does this sound familiar by now?).

Page 19 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

Positivism and radical empiricism are, in fact, false—in the embarrassing position of being undermined by their own inner logic. The general idea or thesis of positivism that all valid knowledge rests on, and must be tested against, sense experience or scientific experiment cannot itself be tested against sense experience or scientific experiment. It is therefore invalid by its own standard of validity. Empiricism, in fact, faces a very similar predicament. It maintains that our senses and their extensions (plus inductive reasoning) are the sole sources of knowledge. Is this a knowledge claim, or isn’t it? It is not something we learn through the senses, or through scientific instruments, or through inductive reasoning. Empiricism therefore also fails by its own standards. Christian philosophy offers a metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and so on. One of its pinnacles was expressed in the philosophical theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, despite his error in believing that God’s existence could be “demonstrated,” believed that a perfectly rational and benevolent God had created a rational world order, and that those created in His image had been “imprinted” with a finite version of the Divine Reason (Logos). God’s infinite and non-spatiotemporal perception of the Creation was that of Eternal Law; our finite perception was of Natural Law, made possible by that spark of Eternal Law in us. Divine Law then consisted of God’s direct commands to humanity; Human Law consisted of laws passed by governments, intended as subordinate to the first three. The point: God’s cosmos is “governed” by providential patterns inherent in all created things, and these patterns are intelligible (perhaps up to a point) by rational beings applying correct methods of inquiry. This, I submit, provided the original basis for the rise of Western science, which, again, did not arise elsewhere precisely because the god or gods of other faiths was/were not perceived as rational or as having created rational beings capable of grasping a comprehensible world. This is what was abandoned, when Enlightenment philosophers embraced radical empiricism in the 1700s, science embraced materialism in the 1800s, when philosophy forgot how to talk about worldviews also in the 1800s, and eventually when Western culture itself nudged its Christian roots aside in the 1900s. We are now in the 2000s and already paying a very steep price! Many intellectuals no longer grasp how we can speak of an intelligible world outside our linguistic and cultural constructs. These schools go by such names as post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and so on. Their advocates are fascinated by power. They believe that assertions of truth conceal longstanding structures of domination (usually by white men over everyone else). They utterly fail to see the real institutions of domination, of course: those of the international banking cartel and the semi-secret organizations that have grown up alongside it, often in mutual penetration and permeation. One of Comte’s core interests was in the future of humanity and in the possibility of a “scientifically planned” society. Such visions would capture the imaginations of major writers of the 1900s. Examples include H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. Both, at different times, were members of the British Fabian Society, for whom the doors had been left wide open. This organization’s role in the near-destruction of America will be our next and final topic.

Cardinal Error Four. Americans did not recognize the British Fabian Society for what it was, and remained blind as the Fabians infiltrated and slowly assumed control

Page 20 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

over every dominant institution in this country—paving the way for today’s unbridled globalism. I. Surprisingly few writers exposing this or that element of the world-government movement have mentioned the Fabians. Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World In Our Time (1966) appears to dismiss them out of hand without even naming them by name. He refers to “wild-eyed and bushy-haired theoreticians of Socialist Harvard and the London School of Economics” (p. 949). He left the impression that the Fabians are insignificant. This is wrong and must be corrected. Major economist and economic historian Joseph Schumpeter paid them homage (see his Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy, 1942) ; and it is significant that arch-capitalist Alan Greenspan also incorporates them into his discussion at strategic points (The Age of Turbulence, 2007). Rose L. Martin saw them as instrumental in having moved America leftward from the last turn of the century up to the 1960s (Fabian Freeway: The High Road to Socialism in the U.S.A., 1968). Classical Marxism viewed the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as on a collision course that would end in violent revolution that would end capitalism and instill socialism. Once socialism had eradicated the last vestiges of capitalist domination it would evolve into communism. By the 1880s—at the end of Marx’s life—it was dawning on observers including Marx himself that violence was no more necessary than it was desirable. They could work toward the kind of society they wanted through penetration and permeation. Penetration involved infiltrating existing institutions by members of the Fabian Society. Permeation would involve furthering Fabian goals by non-Fabians once these institutions were hijacked. But who were the Fabians? The mid-1800s was witness to an upsurge of interest in socialism, including in the Englishspeaking world. Robert Owen’s ideas and communal experiments had attracted attention. In the early 1880s, an organization called the Fellowship of the New Life began to meet. In January 1884, a splinter group was officially organized as the Fabian Society. Their credo stated explicitly, “The Fabian Society consists of socialists.” They took their name from Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman general who specialized in delaying tactics. Fabian Tract No. 1, a four-page leaflet, stated, “For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.” The Fabians’ symbol was the tortoise—moving ever forward; inoffensively; quietly, quietly; but always on the move. Arguably the Fabians never “struck hard.” But as it turned out, they didn’t have to. The Fabians’ sources ranged from Owen to Darwinian evolution, and Comtean positivism. Of the latter, Edward Pease wrote in his History of the Fabian Society (1918), “his philosophy accepted science, future as well as past.” The Fabians, although far more interested in behind-the-scenes activism than in philosophy or ideology, fit nicely into the shift from a Christian worldview to materialism and Enlightenment humanism. They also drew on John Stuart Mill and Henry George, in addition to Karl Marx who had just died in 1883.

Page 21 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

The most famous early members were, of course, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw the playwright. Other members included classical scholar Graham Wallas, psychologist and sexual-liberationist Havelock Ellis, theosophist Annie Besant, artist Walter Crane, historian Edward Pease, author Israel Zangwill, and Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor. The Fabians continued meeting and strategizing—and expanding. They were excellent networkers. Their influence grew during the late 1880s and early 1890s, especially after the publication of Fabian Essays in 1890. This collection promoted socialism in language anyone could read—as opposed to Marx’s turgid prose most of which analyzed capitalism and elicited its supposed flaws instead of espousing socialism. In 1895 the Webbs accepted a large grant courtesy of the estate of Henry Hunt Hutchison to found the London School of Economics (LSE). The Fabians now had a visible center of influence! Their turtle moved steadily forward, and never looked back! Close inspection of not-usually-cited but nevertheless crucial documents makes it clear that the Fabians hijacked Rhodes’s oft-cited plan for a secret society that would expand British control around the world, including America. Rhodes was no socialist, after all; but he had ideas the Fabians found useful, such as British-led globalism. According to William H. McIlhany’s The Tax-Exempt Foundations (1980), it was William T. Stead, a Fabian, who, in 1891, introduced Rhodes and future Round Tablers Alfred Milner, Arthur Balfour, and others. In other words, behind the “Anglophile network” of Round Table Groups Carroll Quigley credits in Tragedy & Hope (p. 950) were the Fabians! In 1900, the Fabian Society would be instrumental in helping organize the British Labour Party, with Shaw writing its constitution. By this time the Fabian Society claimed 861 members. II. There can be no doubt that the Fabians had landed on American shores. They knew Americans would not warm to socialism under that name. So they called themselves progressives. (Later, they would expropriate the word liberal.) American Fabians began to form study groups in American universities. Among the institutions they penetrated and permeated was Princeton, whose president Dr. Woodrow Wilson they would surround. In “Colonel” Edward Mandell House (ambitious son of Texas-based landowner and Rothschild agent Thomas House), they found a permanent link to the international banking cartel seated in the City of London and connected to the Crown. House anonymously authored Philip Dru: Administrator (1912) which promoted a central bank, a graduated income tax, control over both political parties, and “socialism as dreamt of by Karl Marx.” He became Wilson’s right-hand man as the elites of the day promoted his presidency on the promise of his signing into law an act of Congress creating a central bank: what became the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The infamous secret Jekyll Island meeting [see Richard Sizemore’s Jackals at Jekyll, and Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island] had already been held following the manufactured Panic of 1907, and the Rothschild-Rockefeller-Schiff-Morgan axis was ready to move. The year 1913, of course, was pivotal in the ruination of our Republic. We saw the end of Constitutional money as control over monetary policy was placed in the hands of a private entity (strictly speaking, the first public-private partnership) controlled by a secretive cartel of private corporations. We also saw the first incarnation of the Internal Revenue Service, and the creation of the Anti-Defamation League. The former created the first direct, Page 22 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

unapportioned tax. Such a tax had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co., 1895). The response was the change [to] the Constitution by adding the Sixteenth Amendment. Today, shadows hang over that Amendment. Was it really ratified in the way the Constitution requires? Independent researcher William J. Benson says it wasn’t (see his The Law That Never Was, 1985). The courts have rejected Benson’s arguments as “frivolous.” Of course. The Anti-Defamation League, meanwhile, would later brand criticism of the Federal Reserve and other manifestations of superelite influence as “anti-Semitic.” Their attacks would all but destroy the reputation of Eustace Mullins, an independent scholar whose The Secrets of the Federal Reserve (1952) was the first effort to expose the superelites behind its creation. “Colonel” House, a master organizer with a huge network, assembled what he called the Inquiry. This is interesting, in light of what we learned about “commissions of inquiry” when investigating the Jay Treaty; the Fabians were still operating from Great Britain, after all. By this time, the Crown was surely looking on with quiet approval. Following a meeting at the Hotel Majestic on May 30, 1919, House’s Inquiry became the parent of both the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Great Britain and the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S. The latter was formally organized in 1921. These organizations immediately began laying the foundations for a global society—which meant working against U.S. interests as a sovereign Republic based on the Constitution. They had suffered a setback in 1919 when the U.S. Senate torpedoed U.S. participation in the League of Nations, dooming one of their first brainchildren to irrelevance even though it survived in Europe for a time. The U.S. would, of course, join its stepchild the United Nations, in 1945. The Fabian Society, meanwhile, continued to penetrate and permeate. Other highly influential Fabians included John Dewey whom we encountered in Part 3 [Cardinal Error 3], author H.G. Wells, historian and author Arnold Toynbee, economist John Maynard Keynes, and major philosopher Bertrand Russell. Dewey, in addition to his Rockefeller-bankrolled Progressive Education movement, had a key voice in the Fabian-directed League for Industrial Democracy. Originally called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society founded in 1905, it changed its name in 1921 and soon permeated organized labor in America. Dewey was also closely tied to the American Humanist Association, becoming the lead author of its infamous Humanist Manifesto which attempted to work out a secular ethic to accompany the Comtean “scientific society.” H.G. Wells would author not just early science fiction novels such as The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898) but also, following his time with the Fabians, The Open Conspiracy (1928) and The New World Order (1940). He had broken with them and was pursing an even more radical vision of a socialist World State incorporating Comte’s notion of a “religion of humanity.” The New World Order spoke chillingly of the opposition: “Countless people ... will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to estimate its promise we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.” In The Shape of Things To Come (1938), Wells presents a future in which his World State has eradicated Christianity. Arnold Toynbee, an original Rhodes Round Tabler who later became official historian for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, would give an address in 1931 to his fellow globalists Page 23 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

at the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Affairs in Copenhagen entitled “The Trend of International Affairs Since the War” He would defend the need for secrecy in the assault on national sovereignty: “I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands…” (All italics mine.) John Maynard Keynes had already realized (along with Lenin) that the way to destroy the free enterprise system was to debase its medium of exchange and make it fruitless for common people to save. In his book The Economic Consequences of Peace (1920) he stated, “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some…. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer method of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” This is the same Keynes who would work out the details of what has become the dominant economic philosophy of today’s elite-controlled British-American capitalism, a system based on inflation, mass consumption, debt, and government’s “priming the pump” when the system fell into crisis as it inevitably would—repeatedly. Keynes’s General Theory (1936) became the economic bible of the Roosevelt / WWII era and for decades after. Keynes is still the most influential economist in the Western world. Everyone who believes that the federal government can spend a society into prosperity, or that printing-press money can generate more than pseudo prosperity (as it did during the 1990s) is under the long-term spell of Keynes. Clearly, and despite his initial defense of the gold standard under Ayn Rand’s temporary and superficial influence, this included Alan Greenspan. It presently includes Ben Bernanke as well as people like Henry Paulson (U.S. Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush) and Timothy Geithner (U.S. Treasury Secretary under Barack Obama). Bertrand Russell, finally, developed openly some of the consequences of the Comtean “scientific society” in his books The Scientific Outlook (1931) and The Impact of Science on Society (1952). The focus is on education, and picks up where Rockefeller’s General Education Board left off. Russell proposed that in the “scientific society” the elite receive one kind of education while the masses receive another: “the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches into psycho-analysis, behaviorism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.” And: “Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished…. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.” Page 24 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

The upshot is that in the Comtean-Russellian “scientific society”—its masses educated according to methods proposed by Dewey in accordance with those desires expressed originally by Rockefeller’s General Education Board—science and technology would become not instruments of liberation but instruments of control. All this further explains why subjects like history and philosophy have been neutered, relegated to the status of academic decoration. The emerging superelite would not be philosopher-kings, as Plato had envisioned in The Republic, but technocrats of behavior. There would be a place for everybody, and everybody would be conditioned to stay in his/her place. Harvard’s B.F. Skinner, yet another recipient of Rockefeller dollars, would openly pursue the idea of a “technology of behavior” based on such notions as operant conditioning. The most visible result was his widely-read Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) which urged the rejection of “autonomous man,” i.e., men and women regarded as free to choose their own destiny in life, as opposed to that chosen for them by a technocratic superelite.

Supplemental article added 1-9-10 I. The twentieth century saw the rise of new institutions for the financial domination of nations. The Bank for International Settlements was founded in 1930. Its two main founders were Hjalmar Schacht, a Rhodes Round Tabler who later became Hitler’s Reich Minister of Economics, and Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England and a Fabian. The Bank for International Settlements would be the central bankers’ central bank, and therefore a major power center. About it Carroll Quigley would write: “[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups” (Tragedy & Hope, p. 324). Member central banks of the Bank for International Settlements soon included all those of Western European nations as well as that of major Eastern powers such as Japan. Obviously, the Federal Reserve was a member. The Fabian Society role is not obvious. For some reason, Quigley was uninterested in them as a group. Fabians always worked in the background. They did not seek publicity. They were more interested in results, and they sought evolution, not revolution. They saw no need for open coercion when infiltration, persuasion through subterfuge, and the subtle conditioning of malleable populations would do the job (penetration and permeation, as we saw in Part 4). Capitalism certainly appeared to be the ‘incredible bread machine,’ producer of wealth and prosperity. The Marxian complaint, echoed by the Fabians, was that capitalism could produce

Page 25 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

but not distribute equitably. Yet in this view, it was a crucial step in the evolution of economies—its establishment a necessary condition for the emergence of genuine socialism. Genuine socialism, in this view, was not what was had developed in the Soviet Union, where the Bolsheviks had tried to build socialism on an agrarian base without having gone through the capitalist stage. The most that could have happened there, again in this view, was a corrupt state-capitalism, a system every sane observer eventually realized was delivering worse injustice and brutality than anything in the British-American world. The Fabians therefore began to change their tactics. They sought not to destroy capitalism but to transform it from within, using devices we have encountered such as the subversion of education (led by the Fabian John Dewey) to produce those malleable, manageable masses instead of informed, independent-minded individuals. The British-American superelite would further Fabian goals. David Rockefeller Sr. is arguably among the most powerful and wellconnected of today’s superelites—and very much a capitalist in the new mode. He’d studied at the Fabian-founded London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1930s and written a senior thesis entitled Destitution Through Fabian Eyes, as recounted in his Memoirs (2002, p. 7576). David Rockefeller’s vision of a globalized world led him to the helm of the Council on Foreign Relations and would lead him to assist in founding the European Bilderberg Group in 1954. He would regularly attend its top-secret annual meetings which, for several days, would transform plush hotels into armed enclaves with carefully selected staff members sworn to secrecy. He would help found the Council of the Americas in 1965. Eventually, in the early 1970s, he would read fellow globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970). This book described history as a process moving away from “nationalism” (i.e., national sovereignty) through Marxism to a globalism that would be essentially a merger of capitalism and what was then called communism. With Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, Rockefeller would organize the Trilateral Commission—all the while continuing in his ongoing role as overlord of the CFR. The Trilateral Commission propelled Jimmy Carter into the White House and would maintain a central presence in all subsequent administrations regardless of party affiliation. All these groups were pursuing Fabian goals whether the rank and file knew it or not—and most surely did not. That is, they had become agents of Fabian permeation. II. In sum, one envisions the Fabians and those they mentored as having taken an implicit fresh look at a key Marxian thesis: in order to create conditions for global socialism, the world needs global capitalism. The superelite began to think in those terms. Their efforts shifted from building global socialism to removing all barriers to an aggressive if micromanaged global capitalism. The Fabians had had control over the Democratic Party at least since 1960; John F. Kennedy Jr. had also studied at (where else?) the LSE. The “liberals” had built on the collectivism of the Rooseveltian welfare state with the “war on poverty” and such programs as “affirmative action” for women and minorities. Soon, the false opposition would appear. By the start of the 1980s we were hearing from “neoconservatives”—neocons—educated in such hotbeds of Fabian permeation as New York’s City College and Columbia University (where Brzezinski had taught). The first wave of neocons penned books with titles like Two Cheers For Capitalism (1978) by the late Irving Kristol, father of one of today’s neocon leading lights William Kristol, and Breaking Ranks by neocon Norman Podhoretz (1980). What would Page 26 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

masquerade as a “conservative” intellectual renaissance began that would ultimately ruin the Republican Party by the time it had run its course (2008, end of the Bush II era). The Reagan years spoke of “morning in America”; the truth was, with the rise of the neocons the Fabians had begun the capture of the Republicans. One of the newest mantras would be free trade. It began with so-called enterprise zones. This idea, to all appearances, was the brainchild of one Stuart M. Butler—a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, who published two seminal essays on the subject in 1979 and 1980 respectively. The idea was not Butler’s, however. Sir Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor of the Exchequer of Great Britain, had introduced it to Parliament. Howe, in turn, had acquired the idea from Professor Peter Hall, an urban planner based at Reading University. Professor Hall had developed the concept of a “freeport” as a means of developing the depressed inner city—creating unabashedly capitalist enclaves, within which “workers parties” could also be established. Professor Hall was a Fabian—on the Society’s executive committee. The idea would spread among conservatives who assumed it had originated with one of their own. Howe led the way in merging the idea with that of the free trade zone, which when enlarged to encompass multiple nations would dismantle tariffs, customs and duties. Managed globalist capitalism would be unleashed via so-called free trade agreements (FTAs). The antecedent to these was, of course, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) which was signed back in the 1940s as part of the process that included Bretton Woods and the UN, with the founding of satellite organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In theory, globalist free trade would raise the level of prosperity for all. Economists spoke of putting “comparative advantage” to work. In practice, it allowed corporations to move operations to where labor was cheapest, least organized and least educated; where environmental standards were lax; and where the cooperation of local officials could be guaranteed through bribes and other forms of corruption. Wall Street soared; Main Street suffered. A few analysts led by Paul Craig Roberts would finally break ranks and offer their theory of “absolute advantage” (see especially the article he co-authored with Charles Schumer in the New York Times, Jan. 6, 2004. For a detailed account of how Fabian-managed globalist capitalism would destroy indigenous peoples, economies and cultures, see John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2004). Globalist capitalism in practice, unlike its theoretical classical-liberal, laissez faire and libertarian images (which many libertarians unfortunately struggled to maintain), had made peace with Fabian-derived welfare-statism. It had few qualms about cooperating with expansionist government—provided, of course, that those in government embraced globalism. The neocons at its helm in America saw themselves as the vanguard of a new manifest destiny: taking “liberal democracy” to the rest of the world, in echo of what Cecil Rhodes had envisioned for British society almost a century ago. The neocons would form liaisons of convenience with, e.g., the so-called Religious Right. Although they were materialists in practice, such a liaison enabled them to get many of their people elected to office by masquerading as Christians. Once in office, of course, they continued the secularist agenda. Example: abortion. Republicans are constantly running on anti-abortion sentiment. Yet not one Republican elected to high national office has lifted a finger to stop the practice. Leading neocons have furthered the New International Economic Order, not Christianity. They have no more real interest in spiritual matters than they have in quantum physics.

Page 27 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

While we would hear a lot of rhetoric about the need for competitiveness and the evils of protectionism, there would also be no more desire for genuine competition among the upperechelon players than there had been among the robber barons of the late 1800s. We were approaching a new turning point, where economic coercion would become the norm as entire industries were destroyed and people were forced out of work. The once-thriving textile industry is an example. Former textile workers were told, in effect, to “reinvent themselves” for the “jobs of the future” (i.e., cooperate or starve). Almost none understood what was happening to them. Who were the upper-echelon players? The ideal participants in this system were multinational and transnational corporations whose only loyalties were to money and power—those Brzezinski had lauded back in 1970 in Between Two Ages. They had none to nationality, and this meant the fulfillment of CFR and Trilateral Commission member Richard Gardner’s call for the slow erosion “piece by piece” of national sovereignty (CFR journal Foreign Affairs article “The Hard Road to World Order,” 1974). It would shortly be clear to anyone who knew what to look for: the globalist process being furthered by Fabianpermeated superelites, and the sovereignty of the U.S. under our Constitution, were on collision course; also on collision course was this process and the continuation of a financially independent middle class in America. The two collisions came with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993—yet another pivotal event which had the support of the Bushes, the Clintons, and even talk-show host Rush Limbaugh who otherwise bashed Bill Clinton mercilessly (the incongruity here went unnoticed). What public debate over NAFTA had taken place was overshadowed by mainstream media reportage on O.J. Simpson. In such ways America’s masses were easily distracted. NAFTA went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994, and began a long-term exodus of millions of manufacturing jobs from the U.S. What replaced them were so-called “service sector” jobs which required a quite different skill set and paid considerably less. Since the Federal Reserve was pumping unprecedented quantities of printing-press money into circulation and the Dow was soaring to record heights, the economy “boomed.” Further empowering the boom was the explosion in changing technology including the cell phone, the Internet, the iPod, and so on. Clearly if you didn’t have a six-figure job in the newly-emerged, fast-paced tech sector, it was your own fault! As a result, few people noticed the seismic shift that was taking place. While some of the major innovators (e.g., Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.com) survived, the “tech boom,” built up on the Fed’s credit expansion, proved unsustainable overall. “Dot-coms” went out of business by the thousands. The losses in manufacturing jobs continued. Several writers had begun calling our trade policies a “race to the bottom” (see Alan Tolenson, The Race to the Bottom, 2002). By the middle of the decade the number of job losses had risen to over 2.4 million. Personal debt was skyrocketing, however, as a “housing boom” replaced the “tech boom”— another unsustainable bubble. When people could not pay their debts, they were foreclosed on; foreclosures were soon at record highs. The average American’s savings rate had gone negative. As everyone knows, the system nearly collapsed in 2008. The superelite-owned investment banks and other large corporations received bailouts, of course. The Federal Reserve oversaw the creation of over $1 trillion out of thin air to save from collapse corporations deemed “too big to fail.” Elite-paid “economists” refused to grasp the notion that the solution to problems Page 28 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

created by spending and debt is not more spending and more debt. Now, the 2000 decade has ended with this country mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression despite the “economists” seeing “green shoots” of recovery that do not exist outside government numbers. Job losses, business closings, foreclosures, and simple abandonments of homes in the real economy have now turned once-thriving, healthy communities into ghost towns. The unemployment rate—the real one which counts “discouraged workers” who have given up, those who have left the labor force to “reinvent themselves” as students, those working parttime but seeking full-time work, etc.—is over 20 percent! NAFTA’s effects on Mexico have been worse. Mexico has long been more vulnerable than America. Mexican farmers could not compete with American “Agra-Biz,” resulting in a mass exodus of newly unemployed Mexicans. Those able to do so, came here. They crossed our wide-open Southern border by the millions in search of work. Their willingness to work for lower wages than native-born Americans sent still more of the latter to the unemployment lines. Thus our present illegal immigration epidemic, which at its height resulted in almost a tenth of all citizens of Mexico residing here—is also a product of Fabian-permeated trade policy. III. “Free trade”—corporatist trade managed by Fabian-permeated governments and corporations working closely together—effectively merges economies, and because since Keynes the idea of an economic system without government oversight has been anathema, “free trade” slowly turns national borders into meaningless lines on maps. It shifts the locus of control to supranational organizations such as the WTO, created in 1995 by the second GATT. It had done this in Europe, where trade agreements made following World War II gradually morphed into the European Union. Small wonder that by the 2000 decade the idea had surfaced that we would soon see the U.S., Canada, and Mexico merge into a North American Union—a natural offspring of NAFTA. The idea of a North American Community was promoted openly by the CFR in its now-wellknown Building a North American Community (2005), less openly by the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) founded in March of that same year, and by Professor Robert Pastor of American University in a earlier book entitled Towards a North American Community (2001). Professor Pastor vigorously denies promoting a North American Union, insisting that his conception of a North American Community respects the sovereignty of the three nations. We should recall Arnold Toynbee’s words, of course, when evaluating Pastor’s denials in light of the precedent set by the formation of the EU which also began with post-WWII trade agreements. And we should note remarks such as the following: “[P]olitical considerations are more important than economic ones. Since the existence of Europe is at stake, integration is more of a political than an economic desideratum. Political integration can be facilitated by economic cooperation, but mere economic union is unthinkable” (R.F. Sandwald and J. Stohler, Economic Integration: Theoretical Assumptions and Consequences of European Integration, 1959, p. 42). There can be no doubt that North American power elites learned from studying the European example. It very much appears, though, that exposure over the uncensored Internet, and the publication of Jerome R. Corsi’s bestselling The Late Great U.S.A. (2007), have significantly weakened the North American Community effort for the moment, just as exposure forced the Page 29 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

elites to set aside their plans for an Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) proposed in 1994 to go into effect in 2005. I can visualize the superelite fuming; they would shut down the uncensored Internet if they could. But too much commerce and communication now depends on it. The uncensored Internet is a liability for them, but not a fatal one. No one really thinks elite-sponsored economic integration has gone away, after all. Under Barack Obama, the SPP is continuing as the North American Leaders Summit. Several universities, including Pastor’s own American University and Arizona State, have programs or institutes devoted to “North American Studies.” Organizations such as the North American Forum on Integration, with which Professor Pastor is also involved, still sponsor annual conferences aimed at students. And there is every reason to believe that the ongoing decline in the value of the dollar—a product of Federal Reserve / U.S. Treas. Dept. printing presses going full blast—is deliberate. This process was made much easier when President Richard Nixon severed all remaining ties between the dollar and gold in August 1971 and cynically declared, “We are all Keynesians now.” Gold was then $35/oz. Early last month it skirted $1,200/oz., an index of actual dollar devaluation. Attendees at the recent G20 meeting spoke openly of replacing the dollar with a global currency. This sort of move would doom the U.S. by dooming its economy! Given this, there are liberty-loving Americans who are giving up on reversing this madness and out of concern for family members planning their exit strategies, some to Central or South American countries and some elsewhere. The superelite will doubtless try to orchestrate a seamless replacement of the dollar with a global currency. They do not like disruption; it awakens the sleeping sheeple. But they are not all knowing or all powerful. They could lose control. What happens on U.S. soil should we experience a currency collapse with hyperinflation is a matter of speculation; we’re in uncharted territory here, for never before has an economic system as large as that of the U.S. been threatened this way before. Those remaining on U.S. soil may find themselves too busy obtaining food to stand up for U.S. sovereignty. A number of scenarios speak darkly of an impending breakup of the U.S. under such circumstances. As many know, there are secession movements of various stripes in various parts of the country. Separation may not be the panacea it seems. Such a result would yield weaker nations, all of them struggling with most of their people unprepared for independence. The superelites would doubtless have their assets well protected, and would play former states or regions or populations or ethnic groups against one another, as they have done countless times past. Former Americans would be closer to, not further from, the long term goal shared by the Rothschild-Rockefeller axis and the Fabian Society: world government, always intended to follow the destruction of the United States of America however the latter is accomplished. The odds are very good that the New International Economic Order will be governed in the manner of China but Westernized: as an oligarchic corporatocracy, collectivized via the educational system and political correctness, that would at last embrace the socialism Fabians originally wanted—except, of course, at the superelite level. If there is any remaining resistance, we can expect the Tasers to come out. Recall H.G. Well’s chilling words from the last installment in this series: “Countless people ... will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to estimate its promise we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and gracefullooking people.”

Page 30 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

IV. There is much more to be said about Fabian permeation than space limits permit here. Suffice it to say, Fabian direction has completely reshaped British-American economics. What is essentially now a command economy has, for the first time in history, been able to pass itself off as market-driven—and it is, if you control the markets. Alan Greenspan references the Fabians in The Age of Turbulence (2007), crediting them with having had a “tempering effect” (p. 265) on market capitalism that kept the latter politically palatable. Both Britain’s past prime minister, Tony Blair, and its present one, Gordon Brown, are past presidents of the Fabian Society. Last spring, the latter paid newly anointed President Obama a visit. Obama is a disciple of the Saul Alinsky school of Fabianism and has used Alinsky’s techniques (Rules for Radicals, 1971) very effectively. It is dismaying to have to note that the two dominant forces in American politics right now, the neocons of the Republican Party and the PC-type liberals who backed either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in 2008, are both instruments of Fabian permeation. While appearing to lock horns in mainstream media for public consumption, each has done its part to destroy our Constitution and undermine our national sovereignty. Each is still viewed in partisan terms, although both are controlled by the same entity whose true identity remains almost unknown. Many of those working to make it known are dismissed in the mainstream media and by pseudo-sophisticates who identify with authority as “conspiracy nuts.” Conclusion. In this series we have spelled out Four Cardinal Errors That Have Almost Ruined Our Republic. Again: (1) We failed to secure full economic independence from Great Britain and especially British bankers. (2) We embraced an educational system set up on principles alien to those of our Founding Fathers. (3) We rejected Christianity and embraced materialism. (4) We failed to recognize Fabian penetration and permeation. The implication of all this is that for America, time has grown very short! Indeed, the likelihood of success in saving the U.S. qua republic—a system founded on morality, limited government, and sound money—is unlikely. I am writing under the assumption that future historians, if there be such, will want to know why the greatest civilization in human history lost its sense of direction and self-destructed. We may thus note a number of pivotal moments or events: (1) 1791: Alexander Hamilton was allowed over Thomas Jefferson’s explicit objections to create the first Bank of the United States, allowing the bankster class of the day to establish a presence here—which never left; (2) 1840s: the creation of government schools based on an ideology hostile to individuality and freedom; naturally they slowly ceased to produce citizens educated for a free and sovereign republic; (3) 1865: President Abraham Lincoln saved the Union but in so doing established the political supremacy of the federal government over state and local governments, thus paving the way for further economic as well as political centralization; he also opened the door wider to meddling by British bankers; (4) Early 1900s: Americans did not recognize the arrival of Fabian socialist thought when it came to our shores under an assumed name; (5) 1913: President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, in effect granting superelite control over the U.S. economy through control over its monetary system. (6) 1944: GATT set the precedent as the first globalist trade agreement, as part of the rise of institutions (the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) that began the migration of power to the global level; (7) 1971: President Richard Nixon severed the dollar’s ties to gold, allowing free reign to Federal Reserve / U.S. Treasury Dept. money creation which allowed the build-up of our present edifice of debt; (8) 1993: NAFTA was passed and Page 31 of 32

Steven Yates – The Four Cardinal Errors That Almost Destroyed America

went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994. Since that day, America has lost millions of middle class jobs which will probably never return; an equivalent destruction of Mexico’s economy, meanwhile, sent those workers here. The long-term effect may be the dissolving of our Southern border. Doubtless, those who have followed me to this bitter end are asking that perennial question, What can we do? I have suggested—and I am not being facetious—developing an exit strategy. The beginnings of de facto colonies of American ex-pats already exist in many Central and South American countries. Of course, without guiding principles, efforts by expatriated Americans to form colonies elsewhere will only delay the inevitable arrival of world government and “scientific” totalitarianism to their new doorsteps. Based as it is on unsound economics, the New International Economic Order will eventually collapse. It might take a couple of generations. What will the result be? The worst depression the world has ever seen! Billions of people will literally starve to death or die fighting each other for food and other resources! What can we do to prevent this kind of world? Begin developing personal goals, social goals, economic systems and a spiritual state, working towards a society that avoids the Four Cardinal Errors. That, of course, is another long story. In a future series, I hope to offer some suggestions. End of series.

Steven Yates has a doctorate in philosophy and has taught the subject at a number of Southeastern colleges and universities. He is the author of two books: Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994) and Worldviews: Christian Theism versus Modern Materialism (2005). His articles and reviews have appeared in refereed philosophy journals such as Inquiry, Metaphilosophy, Reason Papers, and Public Affairs Quarterly, as well as on a number of sites on the Web. He also writes regular columns for a conservative weekly, The Times Examiner. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina with two spoiled cats, Bo and Misty E-Mail: Not Available ###

Page 32 of 32