Carl
16th June 2014, 05:09 PM
The West Needs Shorter Leaders (http://bullionbullscanada.com/intl-commentary/26537-the-west-needs-shorter-leaders)
Historically, those committing serious financial crimes were often executed for their transgressions (or sentenced to some similarly suitable punishment), and one nation (China) currently punishes its own financial criminals in this manner. Another commentator, Jason Zweig, has neatly summarized the history here:
The history of drastic punishment for financial crimes may be nearly as old as wealth itself.
The Code of Hammurabi, more than 3,700 years ago, stipulated that any Mesopotamian who violated the terms of a financial contract – including the futures contracts that were commonly used in commodities trading in Babylon – “shall be put to death as a thief.”…
In medieval Catalonia, a banker who went bust wasn’t merely humiliated by town criers who declaimed his failure in public squares throughout the land; he had to live on nothing but bread and water until he paid off his depositors in full. If, after a year, he was unable to repay, he would be executed – as in the case of banker Francesch Castello, who was beheaded in 1360. Bankers who lied about their books could also be subject to the death penalty.
In Florence during the Renaissance, the Arte del Cambio – the guild of mercantile money-changers [i.e. bankers] who facilitated the city’s international trade – made the cheating of clients punishable by torture… [emphasis mine]
The rationale for applying this ultimate sanction to the most-serious financial crimes of today is simple. Even a modern-day Gun Nut, fully armed with quasi-military weapons can snuff-out the lives of no more than a few dozen innocents with their senseless slaughters.
Conversely, in our modern era of endless/unpunished financial mega-crimes; the victim-counts run much, much higher. A single Financial Criminal (i.e. banker) can financially devastate the lives of thousands, or even millions. Collectively, today’s Financial Criminals are directly responsible for the 100+ million permanently unemployed victims (across the West), what their parrots in the media call “the New Normal”.
In reality; it is the $trillions which the Financial Criminals have cumulatively plundered in their endless frauds which has hollowed-out our economies to the point where the phrase “full employment” is now nothing but fantasy-words which issue from the mouths of lying politicians. It is this hollowing-out (through financial crime) which has also cut in half the standard of living for hundreds of millions more across the Western world, transforming our Middle Class populations into the Working Poor.
Individually, millions more Victims have suffered total financial devastation (i.e. bankruptcy) at the hands of the Financial Criminals. Foreclosure-fraud, stock market fraud, pension fraud, LIBOR-fraud, and assorted other, serial crimes have left a wake of financial carnage unprecedented in human history.
Then there are the mass-lootings of the bankers. When the reckless gambling of these Big Banks spins so totally out of control that they blow-up their own financial system(s); the Big Banks can (and have) looted wealth by the $trillions. The Big Banks on the losing end of these reckless, gigantic, and generally illegal bets are indemnified by the people, so that the Big Banks on the winning end can be paid off.
The travesty and fraud and crime here is that both sets of these Big Banks are mere tentacles of the One Bank, a financial monolith which not only controls virtually all of the world’s Big Banks, but 40% of the entire global economy, according to the mathematical modeling of a trio of Swiss academics. The “gambling losses” are a fraud, massive paper-shams where one Big Bank tentacle incurs some gigantic, financial liability to another tentacle. Only the stealing (from us) was/is real.
First the Financial Criminals plundered our public treasuries. They called those mega-crimes “bail-outs”. But the public treasuries are now all empty, as hollowed-out as our overall economies; so now the Leaders of our governments (servants of the Financial Criminals) have brought us “the bail in”. As the banksters create their new (sham) gambling-losses, they now simply point at the asset-category of private property which they want to steal, and our Leaders rubber-stamp/legitimize that crime.
So how does this litany of unpunished financial mega-crimes relate to the title of this piece? History has shown us that most real/lasting Change requires both sacrifice(s) and symbolism. In preserving this Crime Syndicate system (for the exclusive benefit of the bankers); our Leaders have been outspoken proponents of “making sacrifices” – our sacrifices.
We made the sacrifices when the bankers got their bail-outs. We make the sacrifices as the bankers loot our pensions, so that bankrupt governments can temporarily make their interest payments to these same bankers. We are about to make even bigger sacrifices, as ‘bail-in fever’ sweeps across the Corrupt West.
Our Leaders, the puppet-sycophants of the One Bank, have not merely legalized/legitimized much of the bankers’ white-collar crime-wave, they don’t merely turn a blind-eye to all the Financial Crime which they have not legalized, but now they actively assist the bankers in the mass-lootings of their own populations.
Clearly, the serial, criminal acts of our Leaders in aiding-and-abetting history’s worst financial criminals can be classified as nothing less than “treason”. Consequently, it is now (far past) time for them to make the “sacrifices”. This is where the “symbolism” comes in.
Far more important than punishing the current legions of traitor Leaders is to deter future politicians from serving the bankers, at the expense of their entire populations. Such “maximum deterrence” requires powerful symbolism. Zweig notes that History supports this perspective:
…But financial crimes weren’t merely punished; they were stigmatized. Dante’s Inferno is populated largely with financial sinners, each category with its own distinctive punishment: misers who roll giant weights pointlessly back and forth with their chests, thieves festooned with snakes and lizards, userers draped with purses they can’t reach, even forecasters [i.e. economists] whose heads are wrenched around backward to symbolize their inability to see what is in front of them…
In the 17th century, the British state cracked down ferociously on counterfeiters and “coin-clippers” (who snipped shards of metal off coins, yielding scraps they could later melt down or resell). The offenders were thrown into London’s notorious Newgate prison. The lucky ones, after being dragged on planks through sewage-filled streets, were hanged. Others were smeared with tar from head to toe, tied or shackled to a stake, and then burned to death. [emphasis mine]
Powerful symbolism. Obviously, with our modern wave of organized financial crime far larger, worse, and more endemic than anything seen in any of these previous eras; we require some equally powerful symbolism. However, tarring, shackling, and then burning-alive culprits seems a little too-gruesome a penalty – even considering the size/severity of the betrayal by our current, traitor Leaders.
Making a suitable sampling of these Leaders one foot shorter seems to be equally effective symbolism, especially if we “shorten” these traitors from the top. In contrast to how our (corrupt) Leaders require millions and millions of us to make (pointless) “sacrifices” simply to preserve the status quo for the (few) Financial Criminals; it will require only a small number of them to make the “supreme sacrifice” for us.
Why not focus our wrath (and punishment/symbolism) on the Financial Criminals, themselves? Because after years and years of refusing to punish ever-larger, ever more-frequent, and ever more-serious crimes; our traitor Leaders have made it crystal-clear that the bankers will never be punished for their organized crime; unless/until our Leaders acquire a new attitude.
Shortening several dozen of these Leaders (across the West) by one foot would seem to be precisely the “tonic” necessary to engender such an attitude-improvement, convincing our Leaders to begin directing their efforts at punishing the Criminals rather than punishing their Victims.
There are two paths toward the “sacrifice and symbolism” necessary to effect real change in our hopelessly corrupt societies. There is the process of Law, and then there is “mob justice”. There is still time, through the process of Law, for the least-corrupt of our traitor Leaders to act now to punish the most-corrupt – preferably through having them shortened by the prescribed amount.
Some readers may view it as simple naivety to expect (after so many years of endemic corruption) the least-corrupt of our Leaders to – voluntarily -- act to remove the most-corrupt Leaders from their positions of power. However, a powerful argument can be made that motivating the least-corrupt to act now is little more than enlightened self-interest on their part.
If our traitor Leaders, least-corrupt and most-corrupt alike, simply wait for the (inevitable) mob-justice to put an end to the bankers’ reign of financial tyranny/terrorism; it won’t matter if those who are “sacrificed” by the Mob are the (somewhat) innocent, or the (most) guilty. All that will matter – by that time – is that the sacrifices be large, and the symbolism extremely vivid.
History also tells us that when the Mob is put in charge of “culling” corruption at the top that they show little inclination to keep the number of such “sacrifices” to a minimum. Rather, much like the bankers and politicians have been indiscriminately punishing us, year after year, decade after decade; the Mob tends to be equally “indiscriminate” in handing out its own justice.
The West needs shorter leaders – and the sooner, the better.
Historically, those committing serious financial crimes were often executed for their transgressions (or sentenced to some similarly suitable punishment), and one nation (China) currently punishes its own financial criminals in this manner. Another commentator, Jason Zweig, has neatly summarized the history here:
The history of drastic punishment for financial crimes may be nearly as old as wealth itself.
The Code of Hammurabi, more than 3,700 years ago, stipulated that any Mesopotamian who violated the terms of a financial contract – including the futures contracts that were commonly used in commodities trading in Babylon – “shall be put to death as a thief.”…
In medieval Catalonia, a banker who went bust wasn’t merely humiliated by town criers who declaimed his failure in public squares throughout the land; he had to live on nothing but bread and water until he paid off his depositors in full. If, after a year, he was unable to repay, he would be executed – as in the case of banker Francesch Castello, who was beheaded in 1360. Bankers who lied about their books could also be subject to the death penalty.
In Florence during the Renaissance, the Arte del Cambio – the guild of mercantile money-changers [i.e. bankers] who facilitated the city’s international trade – made the cheating of clients punishable by torture… [emphasis mine]
The rationale for applying this ultimate sanction to the most-serious financial crimes of today is simple. Even a modern-day Gun Nut, fully armed with quasi-military weapons can snuff-out the lives of no more than a few dozen innocents with their senseless slaughters.
Conversely, in our modern era of endless/unpunished financial mega-crimes; the victim-counts run much, much higher. A single Financial Criminal (i.e. banker) can financially devastate the lives of thousands, or even millions. Collectively, today’s Financial Criminals are directly responsible for the 100+ million permanently unemployed victims (across the West), what their parrots in the media call “the New Normal”.
In reality; it is the $trillions which the Financial Criminals have cumulatively plundered in their endless frauds which has hollowed-out our economies to the point where the phrase “full employment” is now nothing but fantasy-words which issue from the mouths of lying politicians. It is this hollowing-out (through financial crime) which has also cut in half the standard of living for hundreds of millions more across the Western world, transforming our Middle Class populations into the Working Poor.
Individually, millions more Victims have suffered total financial devastation (i.e. bankruptcy) at the hands of the Financial Criminals. Foreclosure-fraud, stock market fraud, pension fraud, LIBOR-fraud, and assorted other, serial crimes have left a wake of financial carnage unprecedented in human history.
Then there are the mass-lootings of the bankers. When the reckless gambling of these Big Banks spins so totally out of control that they blow-up their own financial system(s); the Big Banks can (and have) looted wealth by the $trillions. The Big Banks on the losing end of these reckless, gigantic, and generally illegal bets are indemnified by the people, so that the Big Banks on the winning end can be paid off.
The travesty and fraud and crime here is that both sets of these Big Banks are mere tentacles of the One Bank, a financial monolith which not only controls virtually all of the world’s Big Banks, but 40% of the entire global economy, according to the mathematical modeling of a trio of Swiss academics. The “gambling losses” are a fraud, massive paper-shams where one Big Bank tentacle incurs some gigantic, financial liability to another tentacle. Only the stealing (from us) was/is real.
First the Financial Criminals plundered our public treasuries. They called those mega-crimes “bail-outs”. But the public treasuries are now all empty, as hollowed-out as our overall economies; so now the Leaders of our governments (servants of the Financial Criminals) have brought us “the bail in”. As the banksters create their new (sham) gambling-losses, they now simply point at the asset-category of private property which they want to steal, and our Leaders rubber-stamp/legitimize that crime.
So how does this litany of unpunished financial mega-crimes relate to the title of this piece? History has shown us that most real/lasting Change requires both sacrifice(s) and symbolism. In preserving this Crime Syndicate system (for the exclusive benefit of the bankers); our Leaders have been outspoken proponents of “making sacrifices” – our sacrifices.
We made the sacrifices when the bankers got their bail-outs. We make the sacrifices as the bankers loot our pensions, so that bankrupt governments can temporarily make their interest payments to these same bankers. We are about to make even bigger sacrifices, as ‘bail-in fever’ sweeps across the Corrupt West.
Our Leaders, the puppet-sycophants of the One Bank, have not merely legalized/legitimized much of the bankers’ white-collar crime-wave, they don’t merely turn a blind-eye to all the Financial Crime which they have not legalized, but now they actively assist the bankers in the mass-lootings of their own populations.
Clearly, the serial, criminal acts of our Leaders in aiding-and-abetting history’s worst financial criminals can be classified as nothing less than “treason”. Consequently, it is now (far past) time for them to make the “sacrifices”. This is where the “symbolism” comes in.
Far more important than punishing the current legions of traitor Leaders is to deter future politicians from serving the bankers, at the expense of their entire populations. Such “maximum deterrence” requires powerful symbolism. Zweig notes that History supports this perspective:
…But financial crimes weren’t merely punished; they were stigmatized. Dante’s Inferno is populated largely with financial sinners, each category with its own distinctive punishment: misers who roll giant weights pointlessly back and forth with their chests, thieves festooned with snakes and lizards, userers draped with purses they can’t reach, even forecasters [i.e. economists] whose heads are wrenched around backward to symbolize their inability to see what is in front of them…
In the 17th century, the British state cracked down ferociously on counterfeiters and “coin-clippers” (who snipped shards of metal off coins, yielding scraps they could later melt down or resell). The offenders were thrown into London’s notorious Newgate prison. The lucky ones, after being dragged on planks through sewage-filled streets, were hanged. Others were smeared with tar from head to toe, tied or shackled to a stake, and then burned to death. [emphasis mine]
Powerful symbolism. Obviously, with our modern wave of organized financial crime far larger, worse, and more endemic than anything seen in any of these previous eras; we require some equally powerful symbolism. However, tarring, shackling, and then burning-alive culprits seems a little too-gruesome a penalty – even considering the size/severity of the betrayal by our current, traitor Leaders.
Making a suitable sampling of these Leaders one foot shorter seems to be equally effective symbolism, especially if we “shorten” these traitors from the top. In contrast to how our (corrupt) Leaders require millions and millions of us to make (pointless) “sacrifices” simply to preserve the status quo for the (few) Financial Criminals; it will require only a small number of them to make the “supreme sacrifice” for us.
Why not focus our wrath (and punishment/symbolism) on the Financial Criminals, themselves? Because after years and years of refusing to punish ever-larger, ever more-frequent, and ever more-serious crimes; our traitor Leaders have made it crystal-clear that the bankers will never be punished for their organized crime; unless/until our Leaders acquire a new attitude.
Shortening several dozen of these Leaders (across the West) by one foot would seem to be precisely the “tonic” necessary to engender such an attitude-improvement, convincing our Leaders to begin directing their efforts at punishing the Criminals rather than punishing their Victims.
There are two paths toward the “sacrifice and symbolism” necessary to effect real change in our hopelessly corrupt societies. There is the process of Law, and then there is “mob justice”. There is still time, through the process of Law, for the least-corrupt of our traitor Leaders to act now to punish the most-corrupt – preferably through having them shortened by the prescribed amount.
Some readers may view it as simple naivety to expect (after so many years of endemic corruption) the least-corrupt of our Leaders to – voluntarily -- act to remove the most-corrupt Leaders from their positions of power. However, a powerful argument can be made that motivating the least-corrupt to act now is little more than enlightened self-interest on their part.
If our traitor Leaders, least-corrupt and most-corrupt alike, simply wait for the (inevitable) mob-justice to put an end to the bankers’ reign of financial tyranny/terrorism; it won’t matter if those who are “sacrificed” by the Mob are the (somewhat) innocent, or the (most) guilty. All that will matter – by that time – is that the sacrifices be large, and the symbolism extremely vivid.
History also tells us that when the Mob is put in charge of “culling” corruption at the top that they show little inclination to keep the number of such “sacrifices” to a minimum. Rather, much like the bankers and politicians have been indiscriminately punishing us, year after year, decade after decade; the Mob tends to be equally “indiscriminate” in handing out its own justice.
The West needs shorter leaders – and the sooner, the better.