Note: this rant was originally written in 2011 but was never posted.
Many times over the years of my research, I’ve seen the relationship between Lenny and George in the story Of Mice and Men, as a metaphor for the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. Obviously, the United States is the big, dumb oaf and the United Kingdom is George – the small, smart one who “takes care of Lenny”. Never has that image been more clear than after listening to Paddy Ashdown as he gave a Ted Talk. Mr. Ashdown said more in twenty minutes than I’ve heard in the last ten years from the American intellectual pygmies we call politicians. They may not be intellectual pygmies in real life, but you’d never know it by their public appearances. They speak to the least common denominator and as a result, they never say anything of consequence – plus the Congressional Record and the condition of our country speaks for itself.
The title of Mr. Ashdown’s talk was: The Global Power Shift.
I’ve listened to it about six times and I’ll probably listen another six times because every time I hear it, I hear something I didn’t hear before. Beginning with the last thing I heard in Ashdown’s talk which could be described as the UK’s Dear John letter to the United States, it was to the effect, ‘yes, we’ve been lovers, we’ve been friends, we’re distant cousins but you’re on the way down and power is shifting so we’re moving to where the power will be.’
According to Ashdown, it’s the end of 400 years of western dominance of the world. It’s the end of the Ottoman empire. Most importantly, it’s the end of fifty years of history in which the world was mono-polar – dominated by the United States. In his estimation, the United States has between 10-15 years before it becomes a has-been power in the world (my words). According to Ashdown, power is shifting to the Pacific Rim and more specifically to China – and Great Britain is going with it. Ashdown quoted what he called, the great Foreign Secretary Canning, “Britain has common interests, but no common allies”. Britain looks at the world through the lens of power and allies themselves on the rising side of the counterbalance.
The next thing he said which we all know, is that power – real power (which means economic power) is shifting up to the “global space” outside the bounds of nation-states and outside the bounds of law. The global space is unregulated and the multinational corporations are exploiting it. Unregulated space also attracts the criminal element so at the moment, the global space is rather like the wild west before the Sheriffs and Judges arrived. He said 9-11 was a demonstration of how transnational crime could reach into our nation-state to rock our security. According to him, it only cost about $4 million to do it. Interesting statistic isn’t it?
According to Ashdown, the solution to the unregulated space won’t be more United Nations institutions. It will be more treaty-based institutions like the World Trade Organization. He said treaty-based institutions are powerful enough to hold even the most powerful nations like the United States to account. The treaty-based organizations will fill the unregulated global space with “sensible governance”.
The last thing he talked about which is what I heard first because it corresponds to the analyses that I’ve done concerning the devolution of government power. He said that vertical construction of government is no longer viable and that the paradigm structure of our time is the network. He said, it’s no longer the case that the security of a country is simply a matter for its soldiers and its ministry of defense. It’s its capacity to lock together its institutions and he was playing the audience when he said:
You in business know that the paradigm structure of our time, ladies and gentlemen, is the network. It’s your capacity to network that matters, both within your governments and externally.
So here is Ashdown’s third law… Ashdown’s third law is that in the modern age, where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others. The most important bit about your structure — whether you’re a government, whether you’re an army regiment, whether you’re a business — is your docking points, your interconnectors, your capacity to network with others. You understand that in industry; governments don’t.
What I heard when I was listening to Mr. Paddy Ashdown were the secrets of the British Empire. Great Britain is a few relatively small islands and yet, they’ve remained a global power and if you listen to Ashdown with a view of history, you will understand how they manage it – and manage is the right word.
Our Founders were British. They understood the game and they warned us to avoid foreign entanglements. The use of the word entanglements was not happenstance. It was precision in language. Great Britain has mastered the art of tying the diplomatic and administrative Gordian Knot. They put the Israeli mill stone around our neck for the purposes of triangulation no doubt. They put the agents of foreign influence into our government through the Council on Foreign relations in conjunction with their sister organization, Royal Institute for International Affairs. And the CIA as I understand it, was a clone and partner with the British MI5. Since it’s hard to view the activities of the CIA as having served American interests, it’s not at all hard to believe that they were always agents of British foreign influence.
During the Reagan Administration, the Heritage Foundation was established and a British Fabian Socialist, Stuart Butler was imported to lead it. Reagan implemented the economic policies recommended by this British socialist beginning the decline of the middle class and giving re-birth to the gilded class through supply-side economics which really means taking from the middle and lower and giving to the wealthy on the theory that somehow all will be better off. The only way that could possibly be true is if poverty is good for you while wealth and comfort is bad and should only be had by the few who are bad enough to deserve it which brings me to the next secret of the British Empire – Stagecraft.
The whole British persona is as carefully crafted for image as a stage is set for a play. I don’t believe it’s possible for them to speak in the manner they do without the head tipped slightly up with nose in the air – the look I call the snoot factor (and I didn’t realize exactly what the snoot factor was until just this moment – but it’s like the Supreme Court Justice said of pornography – I know it when I see it). The snoot factor includes of course, the air of superiority. And with that image and air of superiority, comes the well-practiced ability to say the most absurd things with a straight face causing cognitive dissonance when done in a serious setting and side-splitting hilarity when done on stage.
One of the best performances in a serious setting that I’ve seen was put on by a British Economist named Robert Z. Lawrence. He was masterful in his presentation of the absurd. He even included a magicians trick of hand waving when he said something that was particularly absurd. It was fascinating to watch him. I wrote about it in a piece titled, United States of Accounting Fraud. The title of Lawrence’s presentation was: Blue Collar Blues: Is Trade to Blame for Rising US Income Inequality. In the off-stage, real world of the crass-cultured American that I am, I would say that the corollary question would be: Do Bears Poop in the Woods? But because Lawrence was trained at the London School of Economics and it was a serious venue, he was taken seriously even though the posit was patently stupid.
When I began my research odyssey, it was on the issue of outsourcing which led me to “free trade” policy. Here again, the British influence became obvious after a time. The ‘Free Traitors’ had a script that they repeated like a mantra. It included the ideas of a 19th century socialist named Ricardo and his theories of the 19th century world of comparative advantage. Obviously, there is not much in the world we have in common with the 19th century world. My foray into that venue ended on the day I was having a debate on trade with a newly minted Ph.D in the field of economics when I implored him to THINK ABOUT IT! A day later he came back and said to me: You’re telling me they lied to me? To which I replied: I’m telling you they lied to you. I never heard from him again but I could feel how his world was rocked as was mine when I realized the extent to which our institutions of higher learning were mis-educating our students which brings me to the next secret of the British Empire: knee-capping the competition.
UNESCO, the United Nations institution for education, science and culture originated in London with the 1941 Conference of the Allied Ministers of Education (CAME). According to a history written by Raymond E. Wanner, R.A. Butler, President of the British Board of Education was concerned about postwar reconstruction on the continent. By 1943, there was a resolution for a United Nations Bureau of Educational Reconstruction.
It’s not clear when the educational knee-capping of our young people actually began, but it seems to me that it really took off in the 1960’s with Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs directly by former Carnegie Foundation Director, John Gardner. In 1966, the Carnegie Foundation established the Education Commission of the States with the objective to get all the states to sign an Interstate Compact on Education which in the words of Paddy Ashdown, would be considered a “treaty-based” institution – stitching together the states in a federal system of uniform mediocrity and it’s been all downhill ever since.
If you notice, Britain is steeped in history. They live history. In the United States, if you ask somebody a question about history, they’ll probably be able to give you the third grade script of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower, maybe they know a little about the Civil War or the War in Viet Nam, but they wouldn’t be able to discuss the issues which are far more important than the characters. And I don’t exclude myself in that. One of the lessons of my last decade of research has been on the importance of history because if you don’t understand our history of the last century with our supposed ally, the British, then you can’t understand how we arrived at this time and the root causes of the problems we are experiencing.
I’ve carried on with this a lot more than I intended because it could turn into a book so I’ll just close this – a reminder that General Electric, Goldman Sachs and Cantor-Fitzgerald are all British based companies operating in this country as if they were American companies. The question is – how many other companies that are critical to the functioning of the United States are agents of foreign governments masquerading as American companies?
