This essay is written in response to an article which is highly rational and not `conspiracy-minded’ according to the current mind-set: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever. This article deals with the price-fixing activities of money-center banks and allied financial institutions, activities which are proving to be wider ranging and larger in scale than even cynics, or even-even `conspiracy theorists’, had guessed. I’ll return to thus article’s topic after dealing with some slightly more general issues.
Any coherent response to the title, “Conspiracies Confirmed!?,” depends upon the definition of `conspiracy’. There are those who see grand conspiracies, many of whom are good thinkers and are capable of honestly dealing with evidence of large-scale criminal acts on the part of political or military leaders, officers of criminal investigation agencies or national security agencies, bankers or executives in the petroleum industry. The list is somewhat open-ended though we can rapidly run out of potential criminal conspirators who are meaningful on a national scale or even the regional scale of a large country such as the United States. When we move down toward city streets, we’re speaking of the variety of neo-Nazi, African-American, Latin-American, and other gangs which fill—very roughly—the ecological niche once dominated in some cities by the Mafia and related gangs. Those who understand the nature of these street-level criminal conspiracies insist on thinking that there are no corresponding gangsters and criminal conspiracies at the level of the centralized governments. The great historian, Lord Acton, writing in an age of far less moral decay, told us that the problem with powerful centralized governments is that they attract men with the moral characters of gangsters. (Along with a larger body of men willing to go above and beyond the call of duty and a much larger body of ordinary decent folk who just want to be paid for a day’s work while accumulating benefits toward retirement.)
Criminals are many in all ages of men and in a morally disordered age will operate in a manner almost open. The United States is morally disordered for sure and so are the remainder of Western countries. After a couple centuries of destruction of their social order by colonizers (including American and British drug smugglers from as early as the 1700s) and then their own home-grown communists, China seems to be even more damaged than the United States.
Disorder reigns, despite the number of human beings who are at least decent when times are good and a fair number of human beings with deeper moral integrity. (The weaker and less discerning have shown surprising strength in community when they’ve had good leadership; as examples, consider the individual families or parishes or towns who risked their own lives to help Jews and other victims of the Nazis, but, so far as I know, only when leaders were strong and of good moral character.) At all levels of the West and China, of most African and Latin American countries, in all realms political and economic and judicial, there are pockets of gangsters who engage in various sorts of battles against each other and against the befuddled general citizenry as well as a scattering of would-be honest political and other leaders who are now in quite over their heads. The gangsters battle each other in the way of barbarian warriors who are fighting for the right to loot from the general citizenry.
Gangsters. Merely criminals and not wizards of great occult power. Some of these gangsters are pirates and some are failed and incompetent Alexanders. (See Pirates and Emperors if you’ve never heard the story.) These criminals leave behind tracks not so hard to see, if not so grand as those of Alexander, but we modern Americans, and others in the West to a lesser extent, insist on seeing our leaders in terms perhaps appropriate to the generation of leaders known at the Founding Fathers, men who were sinners like the rest of us but also more noble in many of their public activities. Even our two would-be Napoleons, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, were at least interesting men of moral substance, not mere thugs as nearly all leaders of the modern West have been, including the `great’ presidents of the United States. We try hard to fit what happens into the narratives pushed into our heads during our public school days but it be impossible to fit Operation Keelhaul and related operations against civilian refugees, the War Against the Vietnamese Peoples, the Cold War as a whole, the take-down of the Twin Towers (impossible that the government’s story is true according to any firemen or engineers I’ve found willing to talk even `in secret’), the current and ongoing theft of the assets of ordinary Americans to keep money-center bankers, central-government politicians, and military contractors flush with cash. This is just a sampling of historically recent, large-scale criminal conspiracies for which we have detailed facts or at least strong evidence of the circumstantial sort.
This stuff simply doesn’t fit into the narrative most Americans and Europeans hold even when we add in some well-known aspects of the Gilded Age and its Robber Barons, most of whom seem to have at least been competent thieves who didn’t need to destroy a billion dollars of wealth to steal a few tens of millions. With these odd facts sticking out all over the place when anyone tries to fit them into the stories we were fed in American high schools—many weren’t bad stories for teenagers who need to have higher standards before learning about sinful men—then some will try to generate their own narratives, sometimes involving grand mystical conspiracies run by Illuminati or Freemasons or other wizards behind the screen or the Comintern or Communist International which was created to “fight by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.”
So there are some gangsters, ideological or other, who admit to enough that the conspiracies aren’t even secret. Over time, the victims and others also come to know about many individual criminal conspiracies (projects), such as criminal exposure of workers in an industry to poisonous substances or bid-rigging for highway construction or laundering of drug-cartel money. We now learn from, Matt Taibbi, an honest and insightful investigative journalist, that Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever.
The money-center banks and some other well-placed financial big-boys have been systematically colluding to set precious metal prices as well as a variety of loan and investment rates, in the process stealing from municipal governments, school districts, states, entire countries, the endowment funds of charities, pension funds, those who borrow to buy houses or cars or iPads; all of us. Anyone who’s borrowed money or put money in the stock markets or bond markets in recent decades has had their pockets picked. So far, the American and other regulators have let them off with fines which were a fraction of executive bonus pools and, when some of the injured parties brought civil suit, a judge let the banks off after the lead attorney for the rate-collusion defendants argued that “while the banks may have lied to or cheated their customers, they weren’t guilty of the particular crime of antitrust collusion.” Taibbi adds, “This is like the old joke about the lawyer who gets up in court and claims his client had to be innocent, because his client was committing a crime in a different state at the time of the offense.”
Essentially, they defended themselves by saying those who thought the banks were anything other than self-interested parties getting together to collude toward their own greater profits had deluded themselves and deserved what they’d gotten.
We still probably know only a part of the greater story—more of these schemes are coming to light, but what is known paints a picture of a vast conspiracy which is pretty much a bankers’ version of a Viking invasion, probably complete with starving or enslaved masses before our economic problems are over. It’s likely that these schemes have been the proximate cause of our current economic and political disasters. I say, “proximate,” because much of the world was fragile after centuries of exploitation of various sorts and the countries of the West had been keeping open their self-inflicted wounds from World War I and other strange and stupid events. Since few are even talking about those problems, major collapses of our institutions, including entire countries, would have come at some point even if we and our leaders were honest in the more personal ways.
You can’t solve the problems you refuse to acknowledge and to investigate, whether those problems are criminal conspiracies or the problems of a civilization with eroded foundations. But this is odd. As I noted near the beginning of this essay, those who see street-level conspiracies (involving a few millions a their grandest) refuse to admit that larger opportunities, the wealth controlled by large countries or money-center banks or the power of the American military, will simply draw more ambitious gangsters. In a similar way, those who speak of moral decay in such matters as sexual behavior or cultural standards refuse to see the decay is still more advanced in our political and economic behavior, in our government and business and religious institutions.