The Coming Crash: Usury and the Irrelevant Church

By Damon Vrabel

Please, let us stop this usury! - Nehemiah 5:10

NOTE:  Damon thinks this is one of the most important articles he’s written. I think it’s powerful and should get you thinking regardless of your personal views. I also think it’s important to note that he is addressing religion from this perspective, “We need to avoid dialectical conflict... left vs. right, religion vs. non-religion, black vs. white, immigrant vs. citizen, etc. We need to come together to fight the monetary powers that are bringing us all down together.” - Amen to that.

It’s been a wild couple of weeks—increasing unemployment, Greek debt crisis, yet another ridiculous bailout, pressure on Goldman Sachs, accusations of commodities manipulation by JP Morgan Chase, and new freakish levels of market volatility that might be signaling the next phase of market collapse. The many day-to-day issues can leave us dazed and confused, so most people ignore them. Huge mistake.

They are all related to the most powerful force on earth that controls our lives because it is the very foundation of our society—usury. We are ruled not by governments anymore but by financial powers that use interest-bearing debt to exert control over governments, corporations, and people. Almost all other political issues with which we concern ourselves are secondary symptoms of or purposeful distractions from this larger narrative that is never reported by the Wall-Street-funded media. Sadly the church has remained silent as well.

Explaining the details can be extremely complicated, but the basic core to understand is that the US government issues no money. Instead all money comes from private banking institutions with interest attached. At times in the past the US government issued real money for people to use—US notes and coins. But today all money comes from the Federal Reserve’s private banking system by putting the US government, i.e. 308,000,000 Americans, in debt. If the US government were not in debt to the banking system, the American people would have no money.

More technically, the Fed and its Wall Street cartel banks like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs make billions by doing nothing but controlling our money. They have the monopoly license to create the core money in our system from holding US Treasury bonds on their balance sheets. These bonds represent the debt of the United States. Thanks to interest, the bonds pull a large portion of our wages to the banks. The primary purpose of the IRS is to take your wages to pay the interest back to the banks. In effect, Wall Street owns a good bit of your labor. And the more bonds they hold, i.e. the more debt the population is in, the more money they make thanks to the interest flows and the profits from gambling on your debt. The system is very much one of “us vs. them.” Such is the nature of monopoly power and usury.

Economics and Morality

Controlling others and living off their backs by forcing them to borrow with interest in order to have any money is called usury (this does not include standard, self-liquidating bank loans to businesses to fund production). It is a system that ensures everything we do, whether in the public or private sector, feeds Wall Street and the controllers above it. It creates a two-tiered societal pyramid of money pushers on top vs. money users on bottom. The power differential is huge. Everyone is hostage. In doing something as simple as buying food to survive, we contribute to usury because we only have usury-based money, not real money. Like the slaves who built the Egyptian pyramids, today we are stuck building an invisible pyramid of monetary power.

In such a system there is never enough money to pay back all the interest to the money pushers. The only solution is for the money users—government, corporations, individuals—to borrow more. This is the reason our debt continues skyrocketing to increasingly insane levels. It isn’t about politics, but the fundamental exponential math underlying the system—the users must borrow more and more to pay back interest and keep the system afloat. Such math is guaranteed to fail. Iceland and Greece have reached the point of failure. The rest of the Europe and the US will experience failure as well. Then we will see money and assets vacuumed up the pyramid by the money pushers—the banking establishment that owns the collateral and can take your property.

The exponential math not only creates exponential debt growth, but also exponentially increasing:

• Scale – government and businesses keep getting bigger; we get smaller and local communities lose their meaning
• Velocity – the hamster wheel keeps spinning faster; human life suffers
• Consumption – we buy more and more things that break more quickly
• Production – we make more and more things that break more quickly
• Inflation – the dollar buys less and less; we can’t seem to make progress

None of these things have to happen in an economic system. They only happen in ours because of debt-based money, usury, that greatly benefits the top of the pyramid while everyone else suffers to a certain degree depending on their level in the pyramid.

So this system is guaranteed to fail due to not only the impossible math, but also the fundamental immorality. Taken together those five issues paint a horrible picture. Republicans blame Democrats and vice-versa. Nope. It’s all a very simple result of a system based on usury, which used to be considered profoundly immoral. It was a fundamental violation of every major religion. It still is for Islam, but Christianity succumbed long ago. They thought a free market economic system would be beneficial, but got snookered into thinking that usury had to be part of that system. On the contrary, monolithic usury kills the free market.

Our monetary system is a top-down controlling machine, not a free market. It is run not by government, but by the most powerful financial interests in the world. Some people feel in their guts that someone must be stealing from them because they just can’t get ahead no matter how hard they work. Well that’s because it’s true—someone is legally stealing from them. The simple math of usury pulls money from people on the bottom of the pyramid who create real value toward those at the top who create no value. MBAs and others serving the system must reckon with this truth rather than remaining blind. Farmers understand it well, having lost their property over the years to the bankers. Families feel it in the fact that it’s difficult to get enough money to feed the kids compared to 50 years ago when one parent could work a standard week and feed a family of five. Everyone in the system will feel it once the debt system collapses as it is doing in Greece.

Living off the backs of others was called feudalism 300 years ago. It was slavery 100 years ago. Today it’s called the “free market” thanks to the propaganda and fraud of neoclassical economics. It completely ignores the truth of our monetary system, the math behind it, and the eventual collapse that will result from it. Greece is giving us a glimpse, but it is only a mild pre-game warmup compared to what’s coming. The world will rue the day it was ever seduced into accepting usury and the illusion of prosperity driven by nothing but debt.

The Irrelevant Church
On this issue of monolithic usury, the issue from which many of our other problems spawn, the church seems to have no voice. Recently, an older church leader told me, “Keep it up, this needs to be addressed, but you have more guts than me, I don’t want to be killed.” Sobering comment, to be sure, but in the shadow of Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and Martin Luther King, is the church now impotent? Are its leaders now too afraid to speak truth to power, to stand against darkness? Or is the problem that the church is, like most of us, fooled by the myth that we live in a free market so we don’t realize we are immersed in an immoral system of controlling usury?

Lower class Greek citizens are now learning the painful truth about the mythical free market. A few of them have died as the police brutally repress them to enforce the usury system for the rich bankers like Goldman Sachs. Where is the voice of Bishop Romero? “I order you, stop the repression!” Iceland learned the lesson a few months ago. Several other populations have learned the lesson in the past as the controlling debt peddlers punished, conquered, and restructured their countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, England, etc.). The same lesson is coming to the rest of Europe and the United States. But again, the church seems to be oblivious. It failed to heed Martin Luther King’s warning, “One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake…today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake.” The church has fallen asleep.

The Dialectic of Left vs. Right
A possible reason is that the church has been co-opted by the manipulative left vs. right civil war created by the corporate media. In fact, Protestant denominations have split into conservative vs. liberal camps so they war against each other—Wall Street is brilliant at divide and conquer. Some sermons in conservative denominations sound like speeches from conservative politicians. Liberal Christian magazines sometimes seem to be just liberal political magazines with an added dash of Jesus.

Postmodernism should inform us that the left vs. right narrative is contrived to keep people from noticing the real power structure behind Wall Street that controls our lives. As long as the church submits to the false framework, church leaders will be “safe.” But that means they will also be irrelevant because they are not speaking to the primary narrative in our world that has always caused problems and is getting ready to unleash far more pain and poverty in the near future—the issue of monolithic usury and debt servitude. By not speaking against usury, the church has become a pawn of it. So the church has largely been conquered by the same concocted civil war that has divided society.

Dollar Tyranny
Another reason the church may be silent is the simple fact that it depends on money just like everything else does. Since all money in our system comes from usury, it is difficult to even notice it. And what authority would the church have to speak against it since it is itself complicit in it? Anybody or any organization that uses a Federal Reserve Note or a credit/debit card, which everyone must do, is unknowingly participating in usury because, again, all of that money comes from the bonds held by Wall Street. But knowingly or not, how could the church or any organization speak against the very thing that fuels its own existence?

The church’s tax-exempt status may be another reason for the silence. Tax exemption is one of the powerful ways the financial empire system influences and controls other entities. If the wrong person says the wrong thing, the IRS has the ability to suddenly remove the exemption, which doubles the cost of running that organization. The church never should have submitted to such tyranny over what may or may not be said.

Comfort of the Middle Class Bubble

Finally, it seems the comfort provided by the monetary system for the great mass in the middle, which is a key part of the church, keeps us from wanting to really think about it. The illusion of peace and prosperity that has lasted for so long has been nice. Some of us even thought we had that comfort because we were better people, so God blessed us. Reckoning with the truth will be painful for those who believe this. The fact is that our perceived comfort today is a result of the darkness of usury. The middle can only exist because there is a bottom that keeps our system afloat. They are the only reason the middle class exists. Moreover, the comfort is currently an illusion because most in the middle class don’t realize how indebted they are. Total unfunded liabilities currently hidden on the government’s financials put each American in an extra $300,000+ in debt that they currently aren’t aware of. That debt comes from the fact that, again, our money comes from usury.

Since the bubble was built on usury, its very existence is immoral, and everyone who participates in it becomes infected. It is also flimsy because usury means the bubble is sustained by debt. Many are already aware of the hollowness of the bubble since it has destroyed the fabric of our communities and a sense of deeper meaning in life. But others are able to ignore that and focus on the material comfort. What will happen to them once the material comfort itself crashes? It will soon. Some market forecasters predict the final collapse of our debt system will be worse than the Great Depression. The math is clear—it will be worse. Just like Greece, we will then see Wall Street paying the government to crackdown on the people, cancel social programs, and take their assets from them to hand them over to the upper class behind the banks. That is the end result of usury—using debt to control others and take their assets so they have no equity. At that point it will be too late for the church to save the lower and middle classes from violent repression and the upper class from their narcissistic detachment from the horror.

“Silence is Betrayal”

So is there a wing of the church that has not yet sold its soul? Is there a remaining Christian voice against usury, or are Muslims the only people in the world who stand against it? The church must wake up to the truth of our system and become relevant again. This is the civil rights issue of the 21st century, only this time it is not black vs. white but a few money pushers vs. the great mass of users. The power of the bond market is getting ready to wreak havoc. We’re all in it together this time. As Martin Luther King said, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal….That time has come for us today.” Will the real church please speak up?

Damon added the following commentary, “We are heading toward a very dark future, unless we fix it, because our system is built on a fundamental evil--usury. This force has taken over not just our economic system, but our governments, our lives, and everything else from schools, to nonprofits, to families, and even the church. I hope the word gets out on this one. And if you attend a church, regardless of religion or denomination, I think the leadership needs to be informed about this.” 

NOTE: This article is originally published at this website:
http://economicedge.blogspot.nl/2010/05/damon-vrabel-coming-crash-usury-and.html

Dis-Accumulation on a World Scale: Pillage, Plunder and Wealth

By James Petras

Introduction:

Over the past 30 years, wealth has grown exponentially and has become increasingly concentrated foremost in the upper .01%, then the .1%, followed by the 1% and the upper 10% – 20%.

The large scale, long-term concentration of wealth has continued through booms and busts of the real economy, the financial and IT crises. Wealth grew despite long-term economic recessions and stagnation, because the so-called recovery programs imposed austerity on  80% of the households while transferring public revenues to the rich.

The so-called ‘crises of capitalism’ has neither reversed nor prevented the emergence of an international class of billionaires who acquire, merge and invest in each other’s activities. The growth of wealth has been accompanied by the pillage of accumulated profits from productive sectors which are stored as wealth not investment capital.

The dispossession of capital and its conversion to private wealth subsequently led to the rapid expansion of the financial and real estate sector. Capital accumulation of profits has been the source of private accumulation of wealth at the expense of wages, salaries, public welfare, and state revenues.

The growth of private wealth at the expense of productive investments is a world-wide phenomenon which has been facilitated by an international network of banks, political leaders and ‘regulators’ centered in the United States and England.

The single most important aspect of private wealth accumulation on a world-scale is criminal behavior by the elites in multiple locations and involves the violation of multiple laws and regulations.

The Chain of Illegality: From Exploitation of Labor to the Pillage of the Nation

The original source of private wealth is the exploitation of labor by capital,of which a small percentage of the profits are reinvested in expanding production in the ‘home market’ or overseas. The bulk of the profits are transferred into financial networks which in turn illicitly channel the funds into overseas accounts.

The movements of profits ‘overseas’ takes multiple forms (transfer pricing, phony invoices, etc.) and  they are primarily converted to private wealth. These ‘international movements’ of profits are largely composed of mega-thievery or plunder by political and business leaders from ‘developing countries’. According to the Financial Times (17/11/14, p2).  “Up to $1 trillion (dollars) is being taken out of developing countries every year through a web of corrupt activities involving anonymous shell companies that typically hide the identity of their true owners”. (my emphasis)

The $1 trillion of stolen profits and revenues from the ‘developing countries’ (Africa, Asia, South America) are part of a “corruption chain” which is organized, managed and facilitated by the major financial institutions in the US and UK. According to a World Bank report in 2011 “70 percent of the biggest corruption cases between 1980 and 2010 involved anonymous shell companies. The US and UK were among the jurisdictions most frequently used to incorporate legal entities that held proceeds of corruption” (Financial Times, 17/11/14, p2.).

This process of “taking out” or pillage of developing countries feeds into rent seeking, conspicuous consumption and other non-productive activity in the ‘developed countries’ or more accurately the imperialist states.  The principle beneficiaries of the pillage of ‘developing countries’ by the local elites are their counterparts in the top 1% of the imperial countries, who control, direct and manage the financial, real estate and luxury sectors of their economies.

The very same financial institutions in the imperial countries (and their related accountancy, legal and consultancy arms) facilitate the pillage of trillions from the ‘developed’ countries to offshore sites, via massive tax evasion operations, hoarding wealth instead of investing profits or paying taxes to the public treasury.

Long-term, large scale pillage and tax evasion depends on the central role, at both ends of the world economy, of the financial sector. This results in the ‘imbalance of the economy’ – predominance of finance capital as the final arbiter on how ‘profits’ are disposed.

The extremely narrow membership in the dominant financial sectors means that its growth will result in greater inequalities between classes. A disproportionate share of wealth will accrue to those who pillage the revenues and profits of the productive sector. As a result so-called ‘productive capitalists’ hasten to join and lay claims to membership in the financial sector.

The links between ‘productive’ and ‘fictitious’ capital or financial swindle capital, defy any attempt to find a progressive sector within the dominant classes. But the effort to enter the charmed circle of the dominant financial 1% is fraught with dangers and risks . . . because the financial sector has a very dynamic and super-active capacity for swindles.

The entire process of de-capitalizing the economy is underwritten in the US by the financial elite’s controls over the executive branch of government, especially the ‘regulatory’and enforcement agencies -Security Exchange Commission, the Treasury and Justice Departments.

Financial institutions facilitate the inflow of trillions of dollars from the kleptocrats in the developing countries as well as the outflow of trillions of dollars by multi-nationals to off-shore tax havens. In both instances the banks are key instruments in the process of dis-accumulation of capital by dispossessing nations and treasuries of revenues and productive investments.

The ‘hoarding’ of MNC profits in offshore shell companies does not in any way prevent speculative activity and large scale swindles in the for-ex, equity and real estate markets. On the contrary, the boom in high-end real estate in London, New York and Paris, and the high growth of luxury goods sales, reflects the concentration of wealth in the top .01%, .1% and 1%. They are the beneficiaries of ‘no risk’ pillage of wealth in developing countries, receiving lucrative commissions and fees in laundering the illicit inflows of wealth and outflows by tax dodging multi-nationals.

The Inverted Pyramid of Wealth

A small army of accountants, political fixers, corporate lawyers, publicists, financial scribblers, consultants and real estate promoters make-up the next 15% of the beneficiaries of the pillage economies. Below them are the 30% upper and lower middle classes who experience tenuous affluence subject to the economic shocks, ‘market volatility and risks of downward mobility. Below them, the majority of wage, salaried and small business classes experience declining incomes, downward mobility, rising risks of mortgage foreclosure,  job-loss and destitution among the bottom 30%.

Despite wide variations in the class structure between ‘developing’ neo-colonial and developed imperial states, the top 1% across national boundaries has forged economic, personal, educational, and social ties. They attend the same elite schools, own multiple private residences in similar high end neighborhoods, and share private bankers, money launderers and financial advisors. Each elite group has their own national police and military security systems, as well as political influentials who also co-operate and collaborate to ensure  impunity and to  defend the illegal financial flows for a cut of the wealth….

The investigatory authorities of each developed country tend to specialize in prosecuting rival financial institutions and banks, occasionally levying fines – never imprisonment – for the most egregious swindles that threatens the ‘confidence’ of the defrauded investors.

Yet the basic structure of the pillage economy, continues unaffected – in fact thrives – because the ‘show’ of ‘oversight’ and judicial ‘charges’ neutralizes public indignation and outrage.

The Decisive Role of Dis-Accumulation in the World Economy

While orthodox economists elaborate mathematical models that have no relationship to the operations, agencies and performance of the economy and ignore the real elite actors which operate the economy, Leftist economists similarly operate with theoretical premises about capital and labor, profits and capital accumulation, crises and stagnation, which ignore the centrality of pillage, dis-accumulation, and the dynamic growth of wealth by the international 1%.

The research center, the Capital Financial Integrity Group provides a vast array of data documenting the trillion dollar illicit financial flows which now dominate the world economy.

US MNCs have ‘hoarded’ over $1.5 trillion dollars in overseas shell companies, ‘dead capital’, to avoid taxes and to speculate in stocks, bonds and real estate.

Mexico’s ruling elite organizes massive illicit financial flows, mostly laundered by US banks, ranging from $91 billion in 2007 to $68.5 billion in 2010. The massive increase in illicit financial flows is greatly facilitated by the de-regulation of the economy resulting from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Contrary to most leftist critics the main beneficiaries of NAFTA are not Canadian mine owners or US agro-business or auto manufacturers – it is the US and Canadian financial and real estate money launderers.

From 1960 to 2010 the Brazilian 1% pillaged over $400 billion dollars. These illicit financial flows are laundered in New York, Miami, London, Switzerland and Montevideo. In recent years the rate of pillage has accelerate:  between 2000 -2012 illicit financial flows averaged $14.7 billion a year. And under the self-styled ‘Worker’s Party” (PT) regime of Lula DaSilva and Dilma Rousseff, $33.7 billion in illicit outflows were laundered annually – 1.5% of the GDP. Much of the pillage is carried out by private and public “entrepreneurs” in the so-called “dynamic” economic sectors of agro-minerals, energy and manufacturing via ‘trade mispricing’, import overpricing and export underpricing invoices.

According to a study published in the Wall Street Journal, (10/15/12), China’s elite’s illicit financial flows top $225 billion a year – 3% of national economic output. China’s 1%, the business-political elite, finance their children’s overseas private education, providing them with half million dollar condos. Illicit flows allow Chinese ‘investors’ to dominate the luxury real estate markets in Toronto, Vancouver, New York and London. They hoard funds in overseas shell companies. The Chinese corporate kleptocrats are the leaders in the drive to deregulate China’s financial markets – to legalize the outflows.

The scale and scope of China’s elite pillage has provoked popular outrage that threatens the entire capitalist structure – provoking a major anti-corruption campaign spearheaded by China’s President Xi Jinping. Thousands of millionaire officials and business people have been jailed, causing a sharp decline in the sales of the world’s luxury manufacturers.

India’s capitalists- as kleptocrats – have long played a major role in de-capitalizing the economy.  According to the Financial Times (11/24/14, p3) the Indian elite’s illicit financial flows totaled $343 billion dollars from 2002 to 2011. The Indian Finance Ministry immediately threw up a smoke screen on behalf of the 1%, claiming the Indian elite had only $1.46 billion in Swiss accounts. Most of India’s wealthy have taken up with holing their illicit wealth to  Dubai, Singapore, the Cayman and Virgin Islands as well as London.

India’s neo-liberal policies eased the illegal outflows. Massive corruption accompanied the privatization of public firms and the allocation of multi-billion dollar assets such as mobile phones, coal fields and energy.

Indonesia, – percentage-wise is the leader in the outflow of illicit flows – fully 23% of annual output. The 1% elite of foreign and domestic capitalists, plunders natural resources, timber, metals, agriculture and dis-accumulates. Profits flow to foreign accounts in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Los Angeles, London and Amsterdam.

Ethiopia, with per-capita income of $365 dollars, is the site of vast pillage by its ruling elite. From 2000 to 2009, over $11.7 billion dollars in illicit financial flow was laundered mostly by US banks. These outflows enriched the Ethiopian and the US 1% and provoked famine for Ethiopia’s 90%.

Conclusion

The illicit financial flows surpass the capital invested in productive activity. The process of dis-accumulation of capital through relocation is channeled to overseas shell corporations and private bank accounts and beyond into financial holdings and real estate. The accumulation of private wealth exceeds the sums invested in productive activity generating investments and wages. 

Massive perpetual tax evasion means higher regressive taxes on consumers (VAT) and wage and salaried workers, reductions in social services, and austerity budgets targeting food, family and fuel subsidies. The past thirty years of deregulated capitalism and financial liberalization, is a product of the financial takeover of state regulatory agencies. The signing of free trade agreements has provided the framework for large scale long-term illicit financial flows.

While illicit financial flows have financed some productive activities, the bulk has vastly expanded the financial sector. The absorption of illicit flows by the financial elite has led to greater inequalities of wealth between the 1% – 10% and the rest of the labor force.

Illicit earnings via mega swindles among the largest and most respected US and EU banks, has curtailed the amount of capital which is available for production, profits, wages and taxes. The circuits of illicit capital flows militate against any form of long-term economic development – outside of the wealth absorbing elites which control both the financial and political centers of decision-making.

The growth and ascendancy of financial elites which pillage public treasuries, resources and productive activity, is the result of an eminently political process. The origins of de-regulation, free trade and the promotion of illicit flows are all made possible by state authorities. First and foremost, finance capital conquered state power – with the cooperation of “productive capital”. The peaceful transition reflected the interlocking directorates between banks and industry, aided and abetted by public officials rotating between government and investment houses.

The entire African continent was pillaged by billionaire rulers, many former nationalist politicians (South Africa), ex-guerilla and ‘liberation leaders’ (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau), in collaboration with US, EU, Chinese, Russian and Israeli oligarchs. Trillions of dollars were laundered by bankers in London, New York, Zurich, Tel Aviv and Paris. 

Growth of the commodity sector bolstered Africa’s decade long expanding GDP – and the mega-outflows of illicit earnings. World-wide, billionaires multiplied profits ‘received’, but wages, salaries, pensions and health coverage declined! Swindles multiplied as outflows accelerated in both directions. The higher the growth in China, India, Indonesia and South Korea the bigger and more pervasive the corruption and outflows of wealth-led by “Communist” neo-liberals in China, Indian “free marketers” and Russian “economic reformers”.

The World Bank’s and IMF’s proposed “economic reforms”  ‘freed’ the incipient political kleptocrats of controls and unleashed two-sided illicit financial flows – laundering funds from abroad and establishing trillion dollar offshore tax dodging citadels.

Illicit swindles dwarfed earnings from ‘capital accumulation’. The relations between capital and labor were framed by the organization and policies dictated by the directors and operators of the trillion-dollar financial networks based on the pillage of treasuries and the wealth of nations.

The center of China’s growth is shifting from manufacturing and the exploitation of labor, to real estate and “financial services”, as worker’s demand and secure double-digit increases in wages. The exploiters of labor turned predators of the national treasury.  Under the pretext of “stimulating” the construction sector, real estate speculators in tow with Communist Party officials, absconded with over a trillion dollars from 2009 to 2014. According to Jonathan Anderson of the Emerging Advisors Group “over a trillion dollars” has gone missing in China in the past five years (Financial Times, 28/11/14, p 1.).

Factories still produce, agro-business still exports, the paper value of high tech companies has risen into the high billions, but the ruling 1% of the system stands or falls with the illicit financial flows drawn from the pillage of treasuries. To replenish pillaged treasuries, regimes insist on perpetual ‘austerity’ for the 90%: greater pillage for the 1%, less public revenues for health care which results in more epidemics. Less funds for pensions means later retirement — work till you die.

The plunder of the economy is accompanied by unending wars – because war contracts are a major source of illicit financial flows. Plunder oligarchs share with militarists a deep and abiding belief in pillage of countries and destruction of productive resources.  The one reinforces the other in an eternal embrace – defied only by insurgents who embrace a moral economy and who proclaim the need for a total change – a new civilization.

NOTE: This article is originally published at this website:
http://www.99getsmart.com/dis-accumulation-on-a-world-scale-pillage-plunder-and-wealth