Gods of finance & dogs of war by Alex Krainer<\/p>
How high-level banking interests determined the most momentous events in our recent history.<\/p>Read on Substack<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Last March I published an article titled, \u201cThe power behind the throne and the forever wars<\/a>\u201d in which I explored the ultimate, systemic causes behind the West\u2019s insatiable appetite for war. Forever wars have become normalized, part of our everyday reality. In an\u00a0article in the American Journal of Public Health<\/a>, a group of American researchers made the following claim:<\/p> \u201cSince the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In other words, the US started more than 80% of all wars between 1946 and today. For a democratic society, one would have to conclude that the American people are irredeemably bellicose and consistently demand more wars. But as we know, that\u2019s exactly contrary to the truth. With the exception of\u00a0George W. Bush\u2019s<\/strong>\u00a0second term, Americans invariably voted for anti-war candidates. And yet, they always ended up getting more wars. Given that all these wars impoverish Americans and kill millions of people around the world, it should be important for us to understand where exactly this insatiable appetite for war originates and how it becomes policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each new war is heavily marketed and duly justified to the voting public: we had to fight the Communists, then the terrorists or some dangerous new\u00a0Hitler\u00a0<\/strong>like\u00a0Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107<\/strong>,\u00a0Saddam Hussein<\/strong>,\u00a0Moammar Ghaddafi<\/strong>,\u00a0Bashar al Assad<\/strong>\u00a0or\u00a0Vladimir Putin<\/strong>. Tomorrow it\u2019ll be someone else\u2019s turn, always for one good reason or another. But the wars never end, and the propaganda only conceals the true incentives for war that must be systemic. Somehow, it\u2019s become hardwired in the Western systems of governance. These questions have been the motivating drive behind my research for decades now. In last year\u2019s article, I wrote as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn untangling the causal factors behind the many crises we face today, the trail of breadcrumbs always leads to the international banking cartel which appears to have the determining influence shaping the system of governance under which our societies operate. \u2026 In particular, the banking interests appear to be the key movers behind the perpetual warfare we are witnessing today. The better we understand the way the systems work, the more the saying, \u201call wars are bankers\u2019 wars\u201d rings true. \u2026 it has never been about democracy nor about freedom. It is strictly about banking and about the collateral. \u2026 Truly, the\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0group in society to whom the control of collateral makes any difference are the bankers, making them the main group with the incentive to foment forever wars for control of resources.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I recently came across an important and concrete corroboration of all this. In an article titled \u201cHow stolen Alberta oil keeps creating $9 trillion in fraudulent collateral<\/a>,\u201d political economist\u00a0Regan Boychuk<\/strong>\u00a0revealed important insights into the way incentives for war become policy. He made the case that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was about keeping Iraqi oil off the world market in order to maximize the value of 175 billion barrels of newly \u2018proven\u2019 Alberta oil resource.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time of the Iraq invasion, I worked as an oil market analyst and followed the events very closely, which is why I found Boychuk\u2019s case very surprising. As he meticulously traces the events in the US and Canadian oil politics and connects them to the Iraq invasion, Boychuk arrives at conclusions that are staggering, yet compelling and entirely credible. Before we dive in, I wanted to acknowledge the reader who brought this article to my attention, only I meanwhile lost track of who it was: thank you, this was very valuable to my research!<\/p>\n\n\n\n If that was indeed the plan, it was successful: when the US invaded Iraq on 20th<\/sup>\u00a0March 2003, Brent crude oil was trading at around $25 per barrel. By the summer of 2008, it surpassed $146\/bbl. The average price of oil during this period was just over $59\/bbl, more than double what it was in 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It appears that the operation was planned very extensively, and nearly every aspect of it was criminal and fraudulent, from the rationale for Iraq invasion to the way Alberta\u2019s \u201cproven\u201d oil reserves were tallied up to an amazing 175 billion barrels, which would make it the world\u2019s largest oil field, worth $9 trillion in legal collateral. For comparison, the total of Saudi Arabia\u2019s magical, inexhaustible oil reserves supposedly amount to some 260 billion barrels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We must ask, why was this done, who took control of the collateral, and what was it used for? As Boychuk explains, the control over the massive new collateral was taken by Rockefeller banking interests in the United States. \u201cThe bulk of the new credit was used to inflate the giant housing bubble\u2026\u201d The whole operation was, in fact, a massive criminal conspiracy: less than a year after the US takeover of Iraq, the FBI warned publicly about an \u201cepidemic\u201d of financial crimes that could become \u201cthe next Savings & Loans crisis.\u201d As we would soon find out, it did exactly that, only on a much, much bigger scale. The Alberta oil collateral was what made those financial crimes possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The $5 trillion mountain of mortgage debt inflated the epic 2000s housing bubble, whose inevitable bursting precipitated the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. As it usually goes with criminal conspiracies, profits accrued to the conspirators while the inevitable crash devastated the ordinary people: no large bank went bankrupt, no high-level banker faced criminal prosecution, but eight million American families ended up losing their homes. In the aftermath of the crisis, the bankers were rewarded for\u00a0doing \u201cGod\u2019s work<\/a>\u201d with at least $16 trillion in bailouts as detailed in the 2011 Government Accountability Office audit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But before we delve into the most relevant ramifications of this history, I wanted to take a brief detour to address another fascinating aspect of this affair. As I mentioned, as these events were unfolding in the early 2000s, I worked as an oil market analyst. Oil market is the world\u2019s largest and most closely studied commodity market. As such, it has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of real time data collection and news gathering, along with an entire army of analysts and institutions pouring over all that information every hour of every day, and producing thousands of market intelligence reports every year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I studied hundreds of these reports, seeking to understand the economic fundamentals that drove oil\u2019s unprecedented price rise from $25 to $146 per barrel. None of those reports \u2013 literally none of them \u2013 took the finance aspect into consideration. Other than acknowledging the rather obvious war-for-oil relationship, none of the reports suggested the possibility of a criminal conspiracy driving the events. And of course, none of them came even close to predicting the developments during those years. That fact alone should be a huge revelation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I documented in my book, \u201cMastering Uncertainty in Commodities Trading,\u201d the world\u2019s leading oil market forecasters were collectively stuck in a groupthink echo-chamber, producing clever-sounding but worthless analyses, along with hopelessly wrong forecasts. I summarized the two-year forecasts by the world\u2019s leading institutions submitted to the U.S. Energy Information Administration in 2003:<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the event did reinforce my view that analyzing economic fundamentals was an utter waste of time and that large-scale price events always unfold as trends. If prices are going up, you go long \u2013 that\u2019s it. Perhaps in another 20 years or so, we\u2019ll understand why they went up, but meanwhile, take authoritative market analysts and their forecasts with a large boulder of salt. This probably applies to \u201cexperts\u201d in other domains too, including medicine, history, geopolitics, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Returning to our story\u2026 the evidence presented by Regan Boychuk suggests that the events were driven by a high-level bankers\u2019 conspiracy\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Boychuk\u2019s compelling case that high-level banking interests determined the most momentous events in our recent history is profoundly disturbing. As we go about our lives, our perceptions of global events are shaped by the available information and by the narratives propagated through the media. These narratives never explore the possibility that important events stem from high-level conspiracies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the contrary, as soon as people begin to suspect foul play, the narrative police scornfully dismisses and ridicules the loopy conspiracy theorists. Instead, we\u2019re encouraged to believe that things just happen \u2013 randomly \u2013 because, honest errors, misguided regulations, political opportunism, incompetence and perhaps excessive greed. We are always promised \u2018lessons learned,\u2019 and all else gets flushed down the memory hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But we have to ask the question: if all those ingredients consistently benefit one group in society while harming all others, could it be that the group that benefited also orchestrated the events? Perhaps they had a hand in formulating the regulatory measures and legal loopholes exactly for the desired effect? Perhaps they also empowered the right \u201cincompetent\u201d politicians and instructed them to do their bidding? And perhaps they also created the system of incentives that drives the prey into their nets?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long ago, a famous member of this group proclaimed, \u201cPermit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!\u201d In other words, if the bankers hold real power, it matters little who the presidents, prime ministers or kings are.\u00a0Napoleon Bonaparte<\/strong>\u00a0understood this all too well when he said that, \u201cWhen a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This all cuts to the obscure means and relationships that determine the ways our societies are governed. They are obscure because they couldn\u2019t withstand the light of day, and therefore must be concealed and difficult to discern. However, they aren\u2019t entirely invisible and if we pay careful attention, every so often, evidence about the way things really work surfaces through unexpected disclosures, testimonies or through patterns of events. Last February for example, former British Prime Minister\u00a0Liz Truss<\/strong>\u00a0gave us\u00a0a stonker of a revelation<\/a>. Truss appeared in\u00a0Steve Bannon<\/strong>\u2018s War Room and said this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat I found out when I got into No. 10 is, I thought that if I got to the top of the tree, I would be able to implement those conservative policies\u2026 And what I discovered was that I was not holding the levers. The levers were held by the Bank of England, by the Office of Budget Responsibility, they weren\u2019t held by the Prime Minister or the Chancellor\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Truss went on to point out the obvious problem with this: you can sack the Prime Minister, but you can\u2019t sack the BOE officials who hold the levers of power. Around the same time of that revelation,\u00a0Glenn Beck<\/strong>\u00a0dropped a similar clue. In an\u00a0interview with\u00a0<\/a>Tucker Carlson<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0published on 21 February 2024 he shared a story of his encounter with\u00a0George W. Bush<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI thought of something George Bush told me in the Oval Office. I was asking about the policies and how they were going to change, and he said, \u2018Glenn, don\u2019t worry, whoever sits behind this desk, in that chair, is going to have the same advice given by the same advisors and they\u2019ll realize, the President\u2019s hands are tied.\u2019 I walked out of that room horrified\u2026 Why do we even have elections?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n It would be interesting to know who exactly were these\u00a0same advisors<\/em>\u00a0that give advice to US Presidents whose hands are tied? Was it they who advised George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003? Were they doing God\u2019s work then, because that same\u00a0George W. said<\/a>\u00a0that, \u201cGod would tell me, \u2018George, go fight these terrorists in Afghanistan, and I did. And then God would tell me \u2018George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.\u2019 And I did\u2026\u201d Whoever this God was, it\u2019s important for us to recognize that the relationships which George W. and Liz Truss revealed, have been the defining feature of our \u201cdemocracies\u201d for a very long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, the role of financiers largely defined the pathogenic march of Western civilization. This may sound harsh, but the same basic methods they used to drive eight million American families into foreclosure while causing the deaths of over a million innocent Iraqis have been employed and refined for centuries now. The quest for Alberta oil was motivated by the same pathological greed as the quest of gold, copper, tin, rubber, coffee, spices, cobalt, or lithium in other parts of the world at different times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can now better understand how and why, since the 15th century, Western colonial powers destroyed six major indigenous civilizations around the world (Mayas, Incas and Aztecas, India, China and Japan), along with thousands of lesser cultures, tribes and kingdoms. In the process, the colonial powers largely depopulated the native peoples and replaced them with uprooted slaves. The driving motivation has always been an economic one: an unrestrained quest for collateral needed to fuel the financiers\u2019 wealth-extraction process. As\u00a0James Galbraith<\/strong>\u00a0reminded us, \u201cThere is no such thing in economic life as a nonfinancial event \u2026 Finance is the\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0way to understand the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Historian\u00a0Ramsay MacMullen<\/strong>\u00a0said that if we are to interpret history correctly, we need to understand the motivations of groups and individuals who shaped it. I believe that Regan Boychuk\u2019s expose on Alberta collateral contributed an important insight, not only into the bankers\u2019 motivations, but also the means and ways by which they execute their plans. The events around Alberta oil, Iraq invasion, the housing bubble, and the subsequent bank bailouts were certainly not random: it is clear that they were orchestrated by powerful interests in our society for their own benefit and without regard for the harm they caused to so many millions of their victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that no high-level banker was criminally prosecuted for any of this suggests that the perpetrators and their enablers who walked away with a colossal loot were never subject to law enforcement in the same way that the rest of us are. The impunity they enjoy under our magnificent democracies virtually guarantees that they will keep on doing it. In fact, they\u2019re doing it now: today we\u2019re witnessing a scramble for Ukraine\u2019s resources and a revamped scramble for Africa. The drive to destroy Russia is motivated by the desire to take control of Russian resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The financiers and their minions will never relent unless and until they face accountability. But we need to do more than just demand accountability for the crimes committed. If we want to build a world of peace and prosperity, we\u2019ll have to rewrite our societies\u2019 operating systems. We, the people, must demand sovereignty and empower ourselves to plan a future rooted in a genuine love of humanity. How do we do that? We must simply claim that sovereignty and use it. This place \u2013 this planet \u2013 is our birthright; we do not need anyone\u2019s permission to claim it.<\/p>\n\n \n <\/div>![](\"https:\/\/www.activistpost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/EMP-SHIELD-BANNER-400x400-1.jpg\"\/)
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The hardwired pursuit of war<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The real objective of the 2003 Iraq invasion<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a>An epidemic of financial crimes<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe experts\u2019 groupthink echo-chamber<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nRandom events or criminal conspiracies?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
One group always wins<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The sporadic revelations<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a>West\u2019s pathogenic march of history<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s time to change course<\/h4>\n\n\n\n