However, while the Neolithic revolution occurred spontaneously in several parts of the world, some of the Neolithic societies that emerged in:
Asia
Europe
Central America
and South America, resorted to increasing degrees of social control, ostensibly to achieve a variety of social and economic outcomes, including increased efficiency in food production.
Civilizations emerged just over 5,000 years ago and, utilizing this higher degree of social control, were characterized by towns or cities, efficient food production allowing a large minority of the community to be engaged in more specialized activities, a centralized bureaucracy and the practice of skilled warfare.
...progressively emerged, essentially to manage the administration associated with maintaining and expanding their realms (political, economic and/or religious).
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 formally established the nation-state system in Europe.
Enriched by the long-standing and profitable legacy of their control over local domestic populations, support for the imperial conquest of non-European lands, colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples and the international slave trade, European elites, backed by military violence, were able to impose a long series of changes over:
national,
political
economic
and legal systems which facilitated the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe in the 18th century.
These interrelated political, economic and legal changes facilitated scientific research that was increasingly geared towards utilizing new resources and technological innovation that drove the ongoing invention of machinery and the harnessing of coal-fired power to make industrial production possible.
Beyond this and following several centuries of more and less formal versions of it, Elite political and economic imperatives drove the 'legal' enclosure of the Commons to force people off their land and into the poorly paid labor force needed in the emerging industrial cities.
In these cities, an ongoing series of developments in the organization of:
work in factories
electrification
banking
and other changes and technologies dramatically expanded the gap between rich and poor.
Along with subsequently imposed changes to education and, later:
healthcare
national economies
the global economy
were increasingly structured to profoundly disconnect 'ordinary' people from their land, traditional knowledge and long-standing healthcare practices to make them dependent while dramatically reinforcing an institutional reality progressively consolidated since the dawn of human civilization:
Elite control ensured that the economy perpetually redistributed wealth from those who have less to those who have more.
As noted by Adam Smith, for example, in his classic work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published in 1775:
"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
And this was exemplified, for example, by the 150-year struggle between the bankers working to establish a privately-owned central bank in the newly independent United States and those Presidents (such as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln) and members of Congress who worked tirelessly to defeat it.
Dividend Day at the Bank of England, 1770 (Licensed under the Public Domain)
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Having observed how the privately-owned British central bank, the Bank of England, had run up the British national debt to such an extent that Parliament had been forced to place unfair taxes on the American colonies, the founders in the US understood the evils of a privately-owned central bank, which Benjamin Franklin later claimed was the real cause of the American Revolution.
1816 portrait
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View full-sizeDownload James Madison (March 16, 1751[b] – June 28, 1836) was an American statesman, diplomat, and Founding Father who served as the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. Madison was popularly acclaimed the "Father of the Constitution" for his pivotal role in drafting and promoting the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.
As James Madison, principal author of the US Constitution argued:
"History records that the Money Changers used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money, and its issuance."
"I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."
As it turns out, the battle over who would get the power to issue US money raged from 1764, changing hands eight times, until the bankers' final deceitful victory in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve System.
"The battle over who gets to issue our money has been the pivotal issue throughout the history of the United States.
Wars are fought over it.
Depressions are caused to acquire it.
Yet after WWI, this battle was rarely mentioned in the newspapers or history books.
Why? By WWI, the Money Changers with their dominant wealth had seized control of most of the nation's press."
The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America (with the relevant section of the four-part transcript of the video available here:
Well, consider the formation and ownership of the inaccurately named Bank of England, established in 1694.
By the end of the C17th, England was in financial ruin:
50 years of more or less continuous wars with France and Holland had depleted it.
So, government officials asked the bankers for the loans necessary to pursue their political purposes.
What did these bankers want in return?
"The price was high: a government-sanctioned, privately owned bank which could issue money created out of nothing."
It became the world's first privately-owned central bank and, although it was deceptively called the Bank of England to make people think it was part of the government, it was not.
Moreover, like any other private corporation, the Bank of England sold shares to get started.
"The investors, whose names were never revealed, were supposed to put up 1,250,000 British pounds in gold coins, to buy their shares in the bank.
Despite that, the bank was duly chartered in 1694 and started the business of loaning out several times the money it supposedly had in reserves, all at interest.
Let me restate that for clarity:
The British government legislated to create a privately-owned central bank (that is, a bank owned by a small group of wealthy individuals) that loaned out vast amounts of money it did not have so that it could make a profit by charging interest.
This practice is called 'fractional reserve banking' to make it sound like some sophisticated economic concept rather than a deceitful practice that, should you or I do it, we would be jailed.
"In exchange the Bank would loan the British politicians as much of the new currency as they wanted, as long as they secured the debt by direct taxation of the British people."
"Legalization of the Bank of England amounted to nothing less than the legal counterfeiting of a national currency for private gain.
Unfortunately, nearly every nation now has a privately controlled central bank, using the Bank of England as their basic model.
Such is the power of these central banks, that they soon take total control over a nation's economy.
It soon amounts to nothing else than a plutocracy, rule by the rich."
Before proceeding, if how the banking system works isn't your strong point, this brief video does a good job of spelling out essential points in a non-technical way.
After 5,000 years, the various processes by which local elites, then 'national' elites, then international elites, and now the Global Elite have continuously asserted their control to enhance their capacity to shape how the world works and to accumulate wealth has now reached its climax.
Thus, we are on the brink of being herded into an Elite-controlled technocracy in which, as the World Economic Forum makes clear:
By 2030 'You'll Own Nothing. And You'll Be Happy'...
