GEORGIA GUIDESTONES VANDALIZED

Boy!, I was thinking of dynamiting this someday, but this will do. It's time the elite start looking over their shoulders. The masses are coming. And not against each other, but against you. Next is to destroy the seed bank in Northern Europe and the Denver Airport.

Judaism and Christianity: 2000 years of Lies; 60 years of State Terrorism

by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Comment: Considering what we have all been learning about Dominionism since the selection of Fundamentalist Sarah Palin as VP candidate, SOTT thought it would be appropriate to re-run this article about the historical background of Israel and Judaism, the creators of the Bible on which the three monotheistic religions that are destroying the planet are based.



The reader needs to keep in mind that religious fanatics who believe in what is, essentially, a collection of fairy tales, are attempting to take over the world based on what they perceive to be their instructions from a mythical god of war, death and destruction.

A few years ago, when The Secret History of the World was published, I rashly promised that volume 2 would soon be completed and ready for publication. After all, I pretty much knew what I wanted to zoom in on - the topic of Moses and the creation of Judaism - and I already had a good hypothesis and had tons of supplementary support material.



I even had a title: The Horns of Moses (triple entendre!) It should be a piece of cake, I thought. And so, I sat down to write.

I had a pretty good flow going, Moses was coming to life on the computer screen, and then... well, then I started to have doubts. I knew that I knew a lot about Moses from the theological point of view and from the point of view of a lot of alternative research.



I even knew a lot of what the scholars knew - the people who spend their lives studying and analyzing the Biblical texts. But I still felt uneasy. So, I went searching for more source materials and discovered that there was a whole lot more I needed to read before I could complete this project. That's pretty much what I have been doing for the past year or two: reading stuff that nobody except specialists ever reads, and collecting piles of data.

What has been shocking to discover is exactly how much IS known among the scholars that is not known by the general public. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since I have discovered this to be true in other fields, but when the subject is the foundation of religion - stuff people believe in and stake their lives on and use to determine their actions in life - well, it's pretty bad.



In the process, I've learned a lot about the creation of Judaism which is pretty much the "foundation" of Western Society.

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Gee, don't you find that odd?
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A religion created by an obscure Middle Eastern tribe - basically a tribal god - somehow got elevated to be the "God of the Cosmos" and became the model for the Western view of "Godly being"?

And this was done at the expense of the perceptions of spirit that were common to Western Europe before the imposition of the Middle Eastern gods.

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We are taught that Europe was a savage, uncivilized place; but is that true?
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How could it be true when there is so much evidence around us in the form of hundreds of thousands of megaliths, that the ancient Europeans did things that the Middle Eastern civilizations never did?

Well, anyway, as I branched out in my reading to include other references,

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I found that the creation of Christianity is closely associated - even in time, which could be a shocker for some - in some very interesting ways with the creation of Judaism
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there is a direct link between the texts of the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls and a link between the Dead Sea Scrolls and certain ideas that became "Christian property"
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bit by bit, with horrifying sureness, I have come to realize that there is nothing more evil on this planet than the monotheistic religions born in the Middle East.

At some point, of course, I want to explore the role that cometary bombardment may have played in the creation of religion and then to examine the role religion has played in the fostering of lies and deceptions in our world.



After all, today we consider - can't say I'm celebrating - the "birthday of Israel," an event that has brought more misery and suffering into our modern world than any other event since the Global Holocaust of World War II. In fact, the two events are so intimately connected that you could say that the Holocaust has continued as a consequence of the "Birth of the State of Israel."



But there have most assuredly been other Judaism created holocausts throughout the two thousand year history of Western Civilization; the crusades and witch persecutions come immediately to mind.

Judaism supposedly created Israel, and Judaism also is the parent of Christianity and Islam, so the issue of Judaism and Ancient Israel, from which it supposedly emerged, are not trifling topics. The fact is, as a growing body of scholarship demonstrates, there was no "ancient Israel." The Hebrew Bible is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a historical document, and trying to understand the history of Palestine by reading the Bible is like trying to understand Medieval history by reading Ivanhoe.



Niels Peter Lemche, a biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, writes:

For some years, a discussion has raged within biblical - particularly Old Testament - studies between a position called "maximalist" and a second position, usually dubbed "minimalist." This controversy is over the amount of historical information that can be found in the pages of the Old Testament: not much, the minimalist would say; a lot more, the maximalist would argue. [...]

And, of course, the "maximalists" are true believers... those who have controlled the study of the Bible for a very long time; those who created archaeology for the sole purpose of proving the history in the Bible is true...



But archaeology is, little by little, becoming more scientific, and as it has done so, as it has freed itself from the control of True Believers, it has revealed that the Bible is not a historical source.

I approached the subject by first analyzing the biblical accounts of the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, and the sojourn in the desert - in short, the narratives in the books of Genesis through Numbers. After that, I compare the image of the past created by the biblical writers with ancient sources of information from the civilizations of Syria and Palestine in the Bronze Age, which is usually considered as the historical setting of the pentateuchal stories.



It will be shown beyond question that there is very little correlation between the biblical portrait of the past and the non-biblical evidence from actual Bronze Age cultures. We must conclude, however, not that the biblical authors were unsuccessful historians but that they were not at all interested in providing anything like a historical report of the past. They wrote for other reasons, and they used history as the vehicle for their message.



When approaching the literature of the Old Testament, people of modern times must realize that the ancient authors did not write primarily for posterity, that is, for us, but for the benefit of their contemporary audience. They followed the moral and aesthetic expectations of their time; they would have had no idea of the rules that govern modern historical studies and interests. [...]

Is the Exodus narrative historical reflection or literary fiction?

If we insist that the Exodus narrative is not referring to a historical event, then we must be prepared to withstand opposition of a far more serious kind than was the case when we deconstructed the historicity of the patriarchal narratives.

Solid reasoning underlies this critical opposition. The social setting of the Exodus story is vastly different from that of the patriarchal narratives and the Joseph saga, which deal with the fate of a particular family. [...]

Unlike the patriarchal narratives and the Joseph saga, Exodus does not describe the fate of a single family. Now the narratives turn to a larger question: the liberation of a nation. The string of narratives that began with Joseph's family migrating to Egypt ends with several hundred thousand people leaving it. The patriarchs are now no more than the distant ancestors of this nation. ... Later Israelites must accept the acts of that liberated generation [of the Exodus] as their own for the sake of national solidarity and continuity.



They are part of the national heritage. A saying from the exile underscores the relationship between past and present:

"The fathers ate sour grapes, and their children's teeth feel blunt!"

(Jer 31:29)

It reflects the idea that the liberation of their ancestors ("fathers") from Egypt provided freedom for generations yet unborn, that is, the "children." These children and those ancestors are one people. The Israelites perceive themselves as heirs, identifying with their deceased ancestors, their people.



This also means that the ancestors have determined the fate of their descendants because every successive generation relives for itself the experience of its ancestors.

It is interesting to compare this concept - that the Exodus as the liberation of the Jews provided freedom for generations to come - with the concept of the vicarious remission of sins by the crucifixion of Jesus whereby future generations are "set free" by this act.



They are, essentially, the same; peculiar Eastern ideas that have no place in a civilization that originally took personal responsibility quite seriously.

The liberation from Egypt is a critical moment in the history of Israel. A nation and its religion depend upon it. Without it, Israel's nationhood would have been a historical footnote, and its faith in Yahweh as the God of Israel would have remained insignificant. The Exodus represents more than a national liberation: it marks the birth of a nation and justifies that nation's very existence.

Two other events become important "foundation legends" for the Israelites: the revelation at Sinai, and the occupation of Canaan.



The Exodus marks the beginning of the people and the source of its identity, but the people also need a religion and a land. Without both, the people cannot survive but will face annihilation. A national identity requires a concrete, physical space within which to develop. Without its religion, the people would wander aimlessly through the wilderness like ghostly figures.

At Sinai, Yahweh presents himself as the God who liberated Israel from Egyptian bondage - the very same God who at the beginning of history entered into an exclusive relationship with the patriarchs and promised them a beautiful land.

Keep in mind that the stories of the patriarchs were re-written by those who were seeking to create a new nation after the Babylonian exile and the promises of land were put into the mouth of God to show that the manufactured Exodus story was just a step in the fulfillment of God's plan.

Finally, at Sinai, Yahweh becomes Israel's God in concreto. A contract or "covenant" seals this bond between a people and its God. Thus, the law of Yahweh becomes the legal basis for the nation and for the Israelites' everlasting obligation to their God. Two principles of this covenant inexorably solidify their religious identity.



First, the collective religious consciousness of the Israelites confirms that Yahweh is and always will be their God. Second, all Israelites must now and forever conform to the lay of Yahweh, in effect, Israel's "constitution." Thus, the law simplifies what it means to be an Israelite, under God's protection. And anyone who fails to obey is no longer a member of that people.

As for the land, the fulfillment of that promise lies in the future. Yet God makes a pledge at Sinai: if they adhere to the stipulations of the law, the people will inhabit the land and own it. This is not merely a story about a divine revelation; rather, it represents a program for the future of the Israelite nation. Until the people finally live in the "land," one cannot truly call the people "Israel."

In this way, the denial of the historicity of these bedrock elements of the Israelite historical narratives comes close to a denial of the very existence of the Israelite people. Thus, dismissing the Exodus narrative as a historical source is far more serious than taking a critical view of the historical content of the patriarchal tradition. [...]

Predictably, many conservative Christians and Jews become troubled by skeptical voices that question the historicity of the Exodus narratives.



Both Christians and Jews consider themselves Israel's true descendants; therefore, to them, these criticisms represent "negative" or even heretical opinions. They do not view these theories as objective analyses of the Exodus or the revelation at Sinai; they see them as attacks on their own religious identities.

If, however, we disregard such concerns - it is after all not the purpose of a critical investigation to protect the presumed identity between the living and the dead members of a certain religious community - it is quite obvious that the Exodus narrative is largely made up of literary elements that closely resemble the ones already found in the book of Genesis. ...



The book of Exodus represents a literary quilt, pieced together from the fragments of universal and timeless adventure stories and legends. These are examples of narrative art rather than specifically Israelite folk literature. Appreciating the utility of their plots and characters, the biblical authors appropriated these universal tales and reconstituted them with their own Israelite template. [...]

[W]e can see in the biblical stories images of a familiar narrative style, and perhaps that type of mimicry contributed some measure of credibility to an ancient historian's message. [...]

Exodus 1-19 represents a coherent narrative unit that describes the Israelite wanderings from Egypt to Mount Sinai. Yet many literary substrata appear within those chapters - individual vignettes strung together to create "scenes" within the larger Egypt-Sinai complex. The unit begins with Moses' birth and miraculous rescue and ends with his escape to Midian, where God outlines his future mission. The next contains the long section about the plagues that lead ultimately to Israel's liberation.



Finally, a third periscope describes how the Israelites left Egypt and headed toward Sinai.

I would, of course, suggest that the story of the plagues of Egypt is a memory of cometary bombardment, but biblical scholars do not include such speculations in their analyses and so, are somewhat handicapped in interpreting what may or may not be historical.

Initially, this Exodus-Sinai complex seems like a coherent narrative unit. Yet upon further examination, the events and legislation at Mount Sinai represent the narrative's literal and figurative high points.



The importance of the Sinai event is so profound that it disturbs the narrative balance of the Exodus-Sinai complex. Sinai simply disrupts the narrative that takes the reader from Egypt to Canaan. Without regard for the narrative consistency, Mount Sinai bursts into the Israelites otherwise uninterrupted march from the Sea of Reeds to the Jordan River.

For years, Old Testament scholars have recognized the narrative discontinuity between the Sinai complex and the Pentateuch's overall narrative scheme.



They have based this observation not on the narrative itself but on such texts as the brief credo in Deut 26: 5-9

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And you shall say before the Lord your God, A wandering and lost Aramean ready to perish was my father [Jacob], and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and he became there a nation, great, mighty, and numerous.

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And the Egyptians treated us very badly and afflicted us and laid upon us hard bondage.

7.

And when we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, the Lord heard our voice and looked on our affliction and our labor and our oppression;

8.

And the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, and with great (awesome) power and with signs and with wonders;

9.

And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

(Amplified Translation, Zondervan)

These brief recollections of Israel's early history, its liberation from Egypt, and its conquest of the promised land completely ignore the Sinai events. While Israel's life in and migration from Egypt remain pivotal topics, Sinai is never mentioned.



Thus, almost sixty years ago, Gerhard von Rad suggested that the Sinai complex is not one of the original narrative components of the Pentateuch.



For him, these are two originally independent narrative units, on the one side the Exodus and wilderness stories, and on the other the Sinai revelation. They were written independently and only later joined together. (See von Rad, "The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch," in "The problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays - trans. E.W. Trueman Dicken; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

For von Rad, the borderline between the Exodus narrative and the Sinai revelation is in Exodus 14 (Exod 15, the renowned "Song of the Sea," is an independent unit and not part of either complex).... clearly, the Exodus narrative is related to the Passover, and Sinai to the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost). The two traditions merge much later.



The inclusion of the Sinai revelation into the narrative string of the Exodus and wilderness stories must perforce be later than the composition of a credo text such as Deut 26: 5-9.

Of course, the late combination of two originally independent narrative units does not exclude further elaborations and additions, especially those which create smooth literary transitions between the Exodus and Sinai material. Each narrative complex carries its own religious meaning and background. They arose independently and came together at a later date. Consequently, we must consider their historicity separately. If we confirm the historicity of one complex, we cannot assume the historicity of the other.

Moses, the towering figure of the narrative, guarantees the fundamental unity of the Exodus-Sinai wilderness complex. Moses himself functions as the glue that holds together the Exodus-Numbers tradition, each episode of which is inexorably linked to and defined by its hero. There is, however, reason to doubt that Moses is also the historical link between the Sinai revelation and its surrounding narrative complex.



From a historian's vantage point, it might be questionable to see one and the same person as the center of two originally separate narrative units. This observation is important because it is almost impossible to separate Moses from either unit and consider him primary to one of them while secondary to the other.



What is the Exodus narrative without Moses? Could Israel accept the tablets of the law from anyone other than Moses himself?



Everything points to the narrative units' having been composed from the beginning with Moses in mind.

When they wrote their stories about Israel's past, the authors and the collectors of tradition saw Moses as more important than any of the narrative elements that they combined into the Exodus-Sinai wilderness complex. Thus, from the moment of its composition, Moses dominates the Exodus - Numbers complex.



As a consequence of Moses' being an integral part of the narrative units in Exodus-Numbers, it must be concluded that he did not participate in any of the events recorded, which is a paradox since the narratives would not live without his presence. [...]

This uncertainty about Moses' identity surfaces again when we consider his many different roles. In some narratives he is portrayed with a multitude of characteristics, while other narratives characterize him more uniformly. The infant Moses' rescue from the river foreshadows his role as Israel's liberator, the figure of a prototypical ancient Near Eastern adventurer-hero. Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all knew of tales about such child prodigies, a noteworthy example being the Akkadian hero-king Sargon. [...]

The legendary tales of Moses and Sargon foretell the future greatness of two marvelous heroes. Their authors used the rescue theme to distance their heroes from ordinary people. In this way, the hero is allowed to transgress the social conventions that normal people must follow. Without this freedom, no hero would ever succeed in radically changing the fortunes of his nation. [...]

When we consider the several components of the image of Moses in the Pentateuch, his role as the creator and legislator of the Israelite religion is clearly central. At Sinai, Moses mediates the covenant between Yahweh and Israel and conveys the content of God's law to the Israelites. That Moses should also function as Israel's supreme judge and ruler with the same power as the later Israelite kings will, in light of his other functions, hardly come as a surprise.

Moses is simply the unifying literary component in the Egypt-Sinai wilderness complex. Thorough him the authors spin a red thread that connects all the different episodes belonging to this complex of narratives. Yet one question persists: does any of this relate to a historical person called Moses? As we already noted, the Exodus-wilderness complex on the one hand and the Sinai periscope on the other were originally two independent literary units. Unity between them was only reached by introducing the figure of Moses to both narrative complexes.



Before that happened, these narratives developed independently; without Moses, their authors would hardly have succeeded in bringing them together.

It is frequently said that the history of Israel's origin and religion presupposes one central and historical individual and is totally unfathomable without that person. Thus, it is quipped that if there had been no Moses, somebody would have to invent one! They say that Israel's early history is inconceivable without a genuine architect The answer is easy: yes, they did in fact invent Him! [...]

Sinai presents another dilemma. Where exactly did God appear to the Israelites?



The ecclesiastical tradition that connects the present-day Jebel Musa (the Arab name means "mountain of Moses") with the biblical Mount Sinai only partially conforms to the biblical tradition. In the late narrative that begins in Exodus 19, a mountain appears. However, the description of the journey as well as other hints preserved by the narrative - does not point in the direction of Jebel Musa... [but] rather leads toward the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula and, more precisely, to the oasis Kadesh-barnea.

[A]nother problem persists. The divine revelation at Sinai described in the Old Testament cannot be reduced to a part of the history of early Israel. Such a revelation simply goes beyond what is from a historian's point of view acceptable, because God cannot be the subject of historical reflection ... they must rely on empirical facts. By nature, the Sinai revelation is not a historical subject. [...]

[This] applies as well to the desert wanderings. They must also conform to the criteria and scrutiny of scientific research. ...

Already, problems arise. The census in Numbers describes a massive migration composed of several hundred thousand people, who wandered the desert for forty years. And yet the general description in the Old Testament of the Israelite's desert sojourn has little in common with living conditions in such a place; it rather looks like a snapshot of a religious procession within a settled culture. The number of participants is astonishing. How could so many people survive in the desert?



Already the biblical authors were met with such questions and they knew very well how to answer them clearly and absolutely: God provides for his people! Literature can handle miracles, history cannot. The biblical authors interject an intriguing answer to Israel's desert dilemmas, namely, God. Repeatedly, God solves the wanderers' problems with a series of mighty deeds... [...]

So the depiction of the desert wanderings found in Exodus through Numbers is a tradition that does not relate historical circumstances of immigration or life in the desert. This narrative is no more and no less than a literary fiction that has only one goal, namely, to move the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan. Only the most dedicated believer clings desperately to the notion that hundreds of thousand of humans survived forty years in the desert: clearly a barren and inhospitable environment.

To justify the historicity of the desert wanderings, we must modify the number of refugees leaving Egypt and tone down God's miraculous deeds so that we can analyze the historicity of the events they describe. Ultimately, the results will do violence to the biblical descriptions. Why? Because they run counter to the biblical version that not a few persons but a whole nation took part in those events. [...]

If we reduce these stories in the usual, but unlikely, way - taking them to be the memory of only a very small and unimportant group of Asians who escaped from Egypt sometime in the late second millennium BCE - then we must conclude that the Old Testament narratives are unhistorical. The Israelite people never lived in ancient Egypt. The authors of the Biblical narrative may have borrowed from the remembrance of a small group of persons who once had been in Egypt. This group eventually might have become part of the Israelite nation and their tradition a part of the national heritage.

When scholars accept a "small group" hypothesis, they do so to bypass the many historical problems raised by this narrative. Consequently, it is impossible to prove that such a group of emigrants from Egypt ever existed. By drastically reducing the number of people involved in the escape from Egypt, Scholars have made them invisible to the historian. [...]


Ultimately, the authors of the book of Exodus created the narratives as we know them. These writers - just like the authors of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis - created their own narrative universe. They wrote about places and events that never existed... they describe a literary world, not historical facts. [...]

[T]he Exodus and Sinai narratives were combined in a religious environment where the Law - the Torah - was already dominant, in other words, in an Israelite, or preferably Jewish, context. [...]

In other words, the stories were combined, glossed, adjusted, re-written, at a time when they were needed to underpin certain religious and political objectives, a time when the Law was already in place, undoubtedly after the Babylonian exile, or even later.



Some experts suggest that these stories were created under Hellenic influences because quite a few of the Bible stories indicate borrowings from Hellenic sources and concepts.

In spite of the preceding observations, we cannot dispute every last historical connection for the Sinai narratives. Both the Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern sources provide circumstantial evidence of Yahwistic practice at Sinai, although the god Yahweh only later came into possession of a major temple in Palestine.



The book of Exodus tells us how Yahweh reveals himself initially to Moses and then later to all of Israel.



The revelations take place south of the border of ancient Palestine, where we should probably look for Yahweh's original home. Most of the Old Testament evidence appears in material dating from a relatively late literary period; however, other Old Testament passages refer to the mountain of God. As we noted previously, in 1 Kings 19 Elijah ventures into the desert and encounters God at Mount Horeb, evidently a second name for Mount Sinai.



In Judg 5: 5 Yahweh is "the one from Sinai."



In such texts, Yahweh is also seen as an immigrant from the south, ultimately from Edom or Seir.

Furthermore, Yahweh is mentioned outside the Old Testament narratives. Egyptian sources relate stories about an area known as "Shasu Yahweh", inhabited by Shasu peoples. According to the Egyptian sources from the second millennium BCE, the nomadic Shasu lived in Syria-Palestine, east of the Jordan, and on the Sinai Peninsula.



In this context, Shasu Yahweh is located in the Sinai Desert....

Long before scholars began to interpret the Egyptian clues about Yahweh, many tried to find the historical background for Moses' visit to Midian, the first place Yahweh confronted Moses. Apart from the question of the historicity of Exodus 3, one unique feature stands out in this Moses-in-Midian story: if Yahweh appeared in Midian, then Israel's God lived in a foreign land and mingled with foreigners (the Midianites). Evidently this was the case.

Second Kings 5 provides an example of the important connection between Yahweh and a land: the Aramaean Naaman, who had converted to Yahwism, had to bring a "piece" of the land of Israel back to Damascus. On this piece of land he could continue to worship Yahweh. Thus it is only possible to worship Yahweh "in" (i.e. "on") his own land.

This is a curious fact. It reminds me of the legends of vampires that could only sleep in a box of earth from their native land. Connection?

Clearly, the Old Testament consciously connects Yahweh with the southern Palestine, indicating the originality of the information contained in these narratives. These historical kernels in the Exodus narratives suggest that either the Israelites lived in southern Palestine or Midianites (according to other biblical information, the Kenites) brought the worship of Yahweh to Palestine.



Consequently, Yahwism spread throughout the region until finally Yahweh became Israel's national God. In support of such a theory scholars refer to the evidence that Moses' father-in-law was either a Midianite of a Kenite. [...]

Here I must interject a bit about the Kenites:

In the ancient Levant, the Kenites were a nomadic clan sent under Jethro to priest Midian. According to the Hebrew Bible, they played an important role in the history of ancient Israel. The Kenites were coppersmiths and metalworkers. Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, was a shepherd and a priest of the Kenites. The Kenites apparently assimilated into the Israelite population, though the Kenites descended from Rechab maintained a distinct, nomadic lifestyle for some time.

The Kenites were the descendants of Kenan, but have been understood as the descendents of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who murdered his brother, Abel.

Moses apparently identified Jethro's god, El Shaddai, with Yahweh, the Israelites' god. According to the Kenite hypothesis, Yahweh was originally the tribal god of the Kenites, borrowed and adapted by the Hebrews.

(Wikipedia. See also: Jewish Encyclopedia entry)

In other words, according to their own stories, the Jewish god is the God of Cain - the marked murderer - who slew his brother Abel.



That leads to a whole other area of thought and we won't go there now, but it certainly gives us pause to think, to consider the "Mark of Cain" as being integral to Judaism.



We certainly can take note of the fact that, in Christianity and Judaism, the curse of Cain and the mark of Cain refer to the Biblical passages in the Book of Genesis chapter 4, where God declared that Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, was cursed, and placed a mark upon him to warn others that killing Cain would provoke the vengeance of God.

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What kind of god would protect a murderer that way?
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And does this suggest that the Jews writing the bible were fully conscious of this connection and wrote that part into the Genesis story to intimidate others?
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A sort of pre-emptive accusation of "anti-Semitism"?
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One even wonders if circumcision is the fabled "Mark of Cain"?

[T]he Old Testament authors knew that Yahweh once "came out of Sinai" and was a Midianite or Kenite deity. In the re-emerging biblical narratives, Yahweh remains the same, although he chooses another people as his own. [...]

Or the Kenites ARE the Jews.

This study demonstrates that the biblical portrayals of Israel's earliest history - set in the larger contexts of Mesopotamia, Syrian Palestine, and Egypt - are literary compositions rather than historical sources. The biblical authors consulted various ancient tales and legends, but did not approach them with a critical eye. ...

A literary analysis of the Pentateuch proves incontrovertibly that its narratives are not reliable sources for the study of antiquity; rather, they are works of art. Without regard for exact historical data regarding the development of their people, those writers used every weapon in their literary arsenal to create powerful and dramatic narratives. ...



One cannot reconstruct Near Eastern history from these narratives; rather, we must be content with what they are: adventure stories and legends, crafted and written by late author-compilers to discuss "the old days" with their audience. Clearly, that audience did not measure the historic by historical standards.

(Niels Peter Lemche: Prelude to Israel's Past, excerpts through page 63)

Well, that is damning enough when one considers the claims of the modern state of Israel - the lies they told and the myths they created - that justified their stealing the land of the Palestinians.



What is even worse is that, by trying to impose the false image of an 'ancient Israel' that never existed on the land of Palestine, the true history of the land and the people has been not only covered up, it has been categorically denied.



As Keith W. Whitelam writes:

The history of ancient Palestine has been ignored and silenced by biblical studies because its object of interest has been an ancient Israel conceived and presented as the taproot of Western civilization. [...]

The search for ancient Israel, in which I include for shorthand purposes second Temple Judaism, has consumed phenomenal intellectual and material resources in our universities, faculties of theology, divinity schools, theological colleges, seminaries, and departments of archaeology, particularly in the USA, Europe, and Israel.



A quick glance through the prospectuses and catalogues of these institutions will reveal numerous courses on the history and archaeology of ancient Israel conducted in the context of the study of the Hebrew Bible from Jewish and Christian perspectives. This is just as true in 'secular' universities with departments of Religious Studies rather than faculties of theology.



Interestingly, and revealingly, I have been able to discover very few courses on the history of ancient Israel in departments of History or Ancient History. It seems that ancient Israelite history is the domain of Religion or Theology and not of History. [...]

Biblical studies has been dominated from its inception by a concern for the history of ancient Israel as the key to understanding the Hebrew Bible. It has been of fundamental concern for Christian theology since Christianity is conceived of as a religion based upon revelation within history. Philip Davies has demonstrated, however, that the 'ancient Israel' of biblical studies is a scholarly construct based upon a misreading of the biblical traditions and divorced from historical reality. [...]

[T]here are so many facets of history that our political and theological histories do not address. ... Much of the data that pertain to these areas of study are still in unpublished form, hampering the realization of the project [of producing a factual history of ancient Palestine]. However, it is the network of connections in which these scholarly investigations are set which is the greatest hindrance. ...

The cultural and political factors that have dominated biblical studies discourse on ancient Israel have denied the development of a strategy for investigating such issues. Ironically, much of the archaeological work, the regional surveys and site excavations, which have contributed to the paradigm shift are colored by the overwhelming search for ancient Israel, the material reality which, it is presumed, will help to illuminate the Hebrew Bible. ...



It has been difficult to uncover or document sufficiently the subtle political and ideological influences which have shaped historical research in biblical studies.

(Keith W. Whitelam: The Invention of Ancient Israel - The Silencing of Palestinian History.

But that is not to say that there aren't historical elements in the Hebrew Bible as we have already seen!



In fact, if the historians and historians of religion would read their texts with an awareness of both Ponerology and Cometary bombardment of the planet at periodic intervals, what they are seeing that has been, until now, so puzzling, would suddenly begin to make perfect sense.

Considering Ponerology, yesterday I wrote an editorial that included a long quote from psychopathy expert, Martha Stout, in an effort to explain why so many people are susceptible to the machinations of psychopaths.



In that article I mentioned Nachman Ben-Yehuda's exposure of the fraud of Masada, the myth created in the early part of the 20th century, that was utilized to unify (by terror and mind control) Jewish immigrants to Israel, and turn them into efficient killing machines so that they would not feel any pangs of conscience over dispossessing the Palestinians of their land and their lives.

If the reader will take a few moments (heck, it'll take an hour, but it's worth it!) to read The Masada Myth and The Masada Fraud - The Making of Israel Based on Lies, you will have an exact picture of how the Bible itself was written. It is composed of various texts that were written at various times with various political and social agendas similar to those behind the creation of the Masada myth. Some facts are retained, others are suppressed, and there are complete inventions superimposed on the whole.



Voila! You have the Myth of Masada and in the same way, you have the Old Testament and the New Testament!

On the subject of mythmaking and religion, Burton Mack writes about this topic extensively in his analyses of the New Testament. Many of the scholars of the Old Testament also point to myth-making as the reason for its existence but Mack makes it pretty easy to understand.



He writes:

That early Christians engaged in mythmaking may be difficult for modern Christians to accept. The usual connotations of the term myth are almost entirely negative. And when it is used to describe the content of the New Testament gospels there is invariably a hue and cry. That is because, in distinction from most mythologies that begin with a "once upon a time," the Christian myth is set in historical time and place. It seems therefore to demand the belief that the events of the gospel story really happened.



And that means that the story cannot be "myth."



It may help some to note,

1.

that mythmaking is a normal and necessary social activity
2.

that early Christian mythmaking was due more to borrowing and rearranging myths taken for granted in the cultures of context than to firsthand speculation
3.

that the myths they came up with made eminent sense, not only for their times and circumstance, but also for the social experiments in which they were invested. [...]

Every culture has a set of stories that account for the world in which a people find themselves. These stories usually tell of the creation of the world, the appearance of the first people, ancestral heroes and their achievements, and the glorious beginnings of society as a people experience it. Terrain, village patterns, shrines, temples, cities, and kingdoms are often set in place or planned at the beginning of time.



Scholars understand these myths as the distillation of human-interest stories first told in the course of routine patterns of living together, then rehearsed for many generations. Telling stories about one another is what we do. It belongs to the life and work of maintaining human relations and constructing societies. [...]

Epic is a rehearsal of the past that puts the present in its light. Setting the present in the light of an illustrious past makes it honorable, legitimate, right, and reasonable. The present institution is then worth celebrating.

And we saw exactly this process in the discussions of the making of the Myth of Masada.

Naturally, both the past and the present may be highly romanticized or idealized, for epic is myth in the genre of history. The stories of Gilgamesh in ancient Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations were epic. For the Greeks, Homer was epic. Pindar's poetry of illustrious family lines was epic on a small scale.



The local histories of shrines, temples, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period were epic on a medium-sized scale. And the history of Israel, which, from the very beginning of the world aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, was epic for the Jews.

When the [alleged] second temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., the Jews had a problem on their hands. Not only their ancient history, contained in the five books of Moses, but an immense body of literature from the Hellenistic period documented their intellectual investment in the temple-state as the proper goal of human history from the foundation of the world. Christians also had a problem. They had no right to claim the history of Israel as their own.



But early Jewish Christians had wanted to think of themselves as the people of God, heirs of the promises to Israel, or even the new Israel for a new day. ... All of the early myths about Jews were attempts to paint him and his followers in acceptable colors from the Israel epic. But these attempts were fanciful, ad hoc, and incapable of competing with the obvious logic of the Jewish epic.



The Jewish epic was a history that aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, not a Christian congregation. When the temple's end came, however, and the epic's logic was in total disarray, Christians had their chance to revise it in their favor. It was then that revising the Israel epic became a major focus for early Christian myth-making. [...]

And then, from the middle of the second century on, the fur really started to fly. Both Jews and Christians wanted to read the history of Israel in their favor, and each needed the Jewish scriptures as documentation for social formations that did not match the temple-state at the end of Israel's story. Two myths were devised then, and they are still playing havoc with what otherwise might be a reasonable conversation between Christians and Jews about the texts we sometimes call the Hebrew Bible, sometimes the Old Testament. [...]

Just as with each separate writing, so the Bible itself came together at a certain juncture of social and cultural history. The reasons for the selection and arrangement of writings in the Bible cannot be found in any of the individual books read separately. The reasons have to be taken from the Christian authors of the second to the fourth centuries.



Only at the end of this period, when we finally catch sight of the Bible as we know it, will we see that it demands a particular way of reading the history of Israel, puts a special spin on the appearance of the Christ, and grants uncommon authority to the apostles and their missions. By then it will be clear to us that the book was important because it gave the church the credentials it needed for its role in Constantine's empire. We may then call it the myth of origin for the Christian religion.



It will be the Christian myth in the form of the biblical epic that granted the Christian church its charter. It will be that epic that determines the Bible's hold upon our American mind. The Bible's mystique is oddly mis-named by calling it the "Word of God." We must come to see that, or we shall never be able to talk about the Bible in public forum when discussing our cultural history and its present state of affairs.

(Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament)

We have to keep in mind that the event that triggered the creation of the Christian Bible which, ultimately, led us into the trap of the Judaic god of Cain, the murderer, was the conversion of Constantine which, very likely, was at a time of cometary bombardment and extreme social stress.



(Do have a look at the list of Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls to get an idea of how these events have influenced our history, creating social chaos which is the ideal breeding ground for psychopaths and their ascent to power.)

Constantine became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire and called the first council of Christian bishops to meet in Nicaea in 325 CE. Constantine knew a unique opportunity when he saw one the same way that Shmaria Guttman saw that Masada was the ideal story to transform into a myth of Jewish ruthlessness.

When, finally, the Jewish scriptures and the "apostolic" writings were combined in a single book, the church was off and running; it had its story straight. The Hebrew bible could be used to claim extreme antiquity for the Christian religion, and served as the "Christian Epic." Having claimed all these texts, traditions, and ancient history, the Christian church achieved honor in the eyes of the Greco-Roman world. (Which is why they did it!)



Without the Old and New Testaments together, the Christian church would not have had an appropriate pedigree in the eyes of 4th century people. And, of course, that history was amazing! Never mind that it was created by schizoidal psychopaths who wanted to create a Jewish Temple State in Israel with the help of the Persians, or that parts of it were used to justify the kingship of the Hasmoneans.



It had been revised and adjusted so many times, that whatever history had ever been incorporated was now lost in layers of manipulative gloss.

Christianity was driven by two schizoidal urges:

*

to continue the expansion of Christendom by whatever means necessary
*

to "return" to the Holy Land where all the significant events of the founding of the religion were supposed to have taken place

The thrust of Christianity is thus, backward in time, inward toward a psychological repeating of the founding events, and toward a specific location: Israel.

There is a certain irony to this because the original claim that Christianity made on the epic that belonged to Israel was based on the fact that Jerusalem was desolated and destroyed, so of course, God had abandoned it and chosen a new people - Christians - on whom he would bestow his favoritism. It was the destruction of Jerusalem that made it possible for Christians to steal the Jew's epic "history" and interpret that destruction as God's desire to expand his territory to include the whole world.



So why, one might ask, would Christians want to go back to Jerusalem? That's not logical.

But, not to worry: an explanation was soon forthcoming! It was declared that God logically wanted Christians to redeem Israel.

And so, finally, the Global Temple State had a chance to come into being under Christianity - the Catholic Church was positioned at the apex of power; even princes bowed to the pope. The power of God was in its hands and the intent was to shape the minds of all humanity from kings down to the lowliest serf.

The Christian church claims to represents the kingdom of God on earth and its whole rant is that people must prepare for a future life in heaven under threat of an apocalyptic alternative. How's that for mind control? The church can call society to task for not living up to God's standards, all the while pointing to some other time and place (never now, of course), when that kingdom of God will finally manifest.

But, the church itself is exempt from critique!



The church has the Bible as its charter and the Bible has the universal plan, and the Bible is exempt from analysis. The fact is, without the Bible, and the belief in the bible by the masses of humanity as, at the very least, divinely inspired, the church would look pretty stupid. The Bible is the only object in the Christian religions that all forms of Christianity have in common.



For almost 2 thousand years, the church has forced people after people into alignment with the Biblical epic and "history" and the history of Western Civilization that is the result of that ancient epic. The traditions and customs of culture after culture have been subsumed, eradicated, erased from collective memory, and those people have been forced to adopt the Epic of Israel as their own - as if it were their own history. To become a Christian means that one must accept this epic as the only one that matters.



Saying "yes" to the Epic of Israel is the price one pays to become part of Western Civilization.

Additionally, the Bible functions as America's Epic, the dream of creating "One Nation, Under God, indivisible..." One doesn't even have to be a Christian to think that way. One only needs to think of America as the "flowering of Western Civilization" - but don't forget that the roots of that civilization are supposed to be firmly planted in Israel.

Are you getting the impression that Christianity was created to serve Judaism?

Well, that's not exactly the case. Israel was literally created by Christianity in order to fulfill the Christian apocalyptic agenda.



As Keith Whitelam writes:

The production of a "master story" of ancient Israel has formed part of a theological enterprise conducted mainly in faculties of theology and divinity in the West.

The biblical epic of Israel seen through the lens of Christianity, is based on a worldview that is universalist in scope, monolinear in history, hierarchical in power, dualistic in anthropology, and it requires miracles, breakthroughs and other cosmic dramas at regular intervals to rectify social situations that have run amok.

The fact is, the adoption of the Epic of Israel by Western Civilization has created more problems throughout history than it has ever solved.

We cannot go on destroying other peoples and cultures in order to "save them." We cannot go on exploiting our planet because "God gave it to us to do with as we wish". And unless we, as a culture and civilization, really come to grips with the fact that we have believed a pack of lies for over 2000 years, we aren't going to get out of the mess we are in.

Criticism of the Bible has always been considered subversive.



But, the fact is, the Bible is a masterpiece of invention, the product of energetic mythmaking very much like the making of the Masada myth, the sacrificing of Truth. And this sacrificing of Truth is what has shaped the soul of Western Civilization.



As Burton Mack writes:

My own fantasy is to enter a hall and find high ceilings, lovely chandeliers, walls lined with bookshelves, wines in the alcove, hors d'oeuvres by the windows, and a wide table down the middle of the room with the Bible sitting on it. And there we are, all of us, walking around, sitting at the table, and talking about what we should do with that book. Some rules are in order. Everyone has been invited.



Christians have not been excluded, but they are not the ones in charge. All of us are there, and all of our knowledge and expertise is also on the table. There are historians of religion, cultural anthropologists, and political scientists, but also politicians, CEOs and those who work in foreign affairs. The ethnic communities of Los Angels County are all well represented, as are women, the disenfranchised, the disabled, and all the voiceless who have recently come to speech.



Merchants are there, and workers and the airline pilots. Everyone is present, and everyone gets to talk and ask questions. No one has a corner on what the Bible says. We blow our whistles if anyone starts to pout or preach. What we are trying to figure out is why we thought the Bible so important, whether it is so important, how it has influenced our culture, what we think of the story, whether we should laugh or cry at the "ending," how it fits or does not fit our current situation, and whether the story should be revised in keeping with our vision of a just, sustainable, festive, and multicultural world.

Wouldn't that be something?

Why can't we learn to talk about religion and culture in public as we look for ways to imagine and create the sane societies we desperately need in our multicultural world? If we want to do that, and I think we must, the taboo on the Bible that is now in place will have to be broken. [...]



The taboo is the sign that we all are complicit in the unacknowledged agreement to let that story stand. It is time to find out whether we think that wise.

(Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament?)

It's pretty easy to cast most of the blame on Israel for all the horrors of our world today; it's obvious.



But we have to remember that it would all grind to a halt in an instant if Christianity would withdraw its support for the re-creation of Israel which they see as necessary to "initiate the Eschaton." One ought not to forget that it was the Bible Thumping British who started all this with the Balfour Declaration. Of course, one can think that there was blackmail - unusual and excessive pressure - exercised by the Zionists to get what they wanted.



But that doesn't excuse the choices made by Western leaders under the influence of their own pathological, apocalyptic agenda.

And so, what we see, in the end, is a psychopathic minority at the top of all the governments of the world using the faith of Christians and Jews alike (and Muslims) to pursue their rapacious goals of seeking ever more power and plunder.



They do not even realize that they, themselves, or their offspring, will soon find themselves with nothing.



As Lobaczewski writes in Political Ponerology:

The following question thus suggests [itself]: what happens if [psychopaths seek] power in leadership positions with international exposure? ... Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest, ...



They do not understand that a catastrophe [will] ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.

It may be the birthday of the State of Israel, but there is no cause for celebration.



Today Israel celebrates not the birth of nationhood but a 60-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing of an innocent and defenseless people, justified by a 2000-year-old lie.



Rather than celebrate, let us recognize and mourn the fact that the whole world has been made slaves to this Judeo-Christian doctrine of demons and subjects of the synagogue of the vengeful and wrathful god of Cain, the murderer, that seeks to rob us of our humanity, and let us resolve to no longer tolerate the public spectacle of wanton cruelty that is the US, UK-backed Zionist entity and its systematic brutalization and murder of the Palestinian people.

MECHANISMS OF CORPORATE RULE

The men who run global corporations are the first in history with the organisation, technology, money, and ideology to make a credible try at managing the world as an integrated economic unit.
Richard J. Barnett and Ronald E. Mueller, Global Reach

In the twenty-odd years since these words were penned, transnational corporations (TNCs) have consolidated their power and control over the world. Today, 47 of the top 100 economies are actually transnational corporations, 70 percent of global trade is controlled by a just 500 corporations, and a mere one per cent of the TNCs on this planet own half the total stock of foreign direct investment. At the same time, the new free market and free trade regimes (eg. GATT, NAFTA) have created global conditions in which transnational corporations and banks can move their capital, technology, goods, services - freely throughout the world unfettered by the regulations of nation states or democratically elected governments.
In effect, what has taken place is a massive shift in power, out of the hands of nation states and democratic governments and into the hands of transnational corporations and banks. It is now the TNCs that effectively rule and govern the lives of the vast majority of the people on earth. Yet, these new world realities are seldom reflected in the strategies of citizen movements for democratic social change. All too often, strategies are primarily aimed at changing government policies while the real power being exercised by the TNCs behind the scenes is rarely challenged, let alone dismantled. And when the operations of TNCs become the prime target for citizen action campaigns, there is a tendency to employ a more or less piecemeal approach to what is a deeply systemic problem.
As we approach the 21st century, it is imperative that social movements in both the North and the South develop a new politics for challenging the dominant global rule of transnational enterprises.
The following are some of the salient ingredients of the new powers that now give corporations effective control over the lives of peoples and nations in this age of globalisation, and then some suggestions as to changing the situation.

Over the past three decades, as David Korten points out, the world's leading business and governmental elites have been gathering on a regular basis in elite fora such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, and especially the Trilateral Commission to develop a consensus on an agenda for globalisation.

Behind closed doors, these leaders have been able to agree on certain common approaches that include: global economic integration, the harmonisation of various trade, tax and regulatory measures, and an economic philosophy that should guide all nations, combined with political strategies to achieve such changes. With passage of the new free trade agreements to augment the Bretton Woods agreement, and establishment of the World Trade Organisation, this unelected and unaccountable global elite has effectively seized important instruments of governance in the three dominant regions of the world.

Regardless of their nominal home bases, Japanese, American, and European corporate giants have increasingly become stateless, juggling multiple national identities and loyalties to achieve their global competitive interests. No matter where they are operating in the world, these transnational conglomerates can use their overseas subsidiaries, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and strategic alliances to assume foreign identities whenever it suits their purposes. In so doing, they develop chameleon-like abilities to change their identities to resemble insiders wherever they are operating. As one CEO put it: "When we go to Brussels, we're member states of the EEC and when we go to Washington we're an American company too." Whenever they need to, they will wrap themselves up in the national flag of their home governments to get support for tax breaks, research subsidies, or governmental representation in negotiations affecting their marketing plans. Through this process, stateless corporations are effectively transforming nation states to suit their interests.

CORPORATE STATE ALLIANCE
In most of the industrialised countries, business councils composed of the CEOs of the largest corporations and banks, have formed new corporate state alliances. In the U.S., for example, the Business Round Table's 200 members include the heads of 42 of the 50 largest Fortune 500 corporations, 7 of the 8 largest U.S. commercial banks, 7 of the 10 largest insurance companies, 5 of the 7 largest retail chains, 7 of the 8 largest transportation companies, and 9 of the 11 largest utility companies. In countries like Canada, the Business Council on National Issues has organised itself into a shadow cabinet of the federal government with CEOs heading up task forces on major public policy issues. Once policy consensus is reached amongst the principal TNCs, massive lobbying and advertising campaigns are mounted around key policy issues. Armed with a network of policy research institutes and public relations firms, these business coalitions are able to mobilise facts, policy positions, expert analysis, and opinion polls as well as organise citizen front groups for their campaigns to change national governments and their policies. By campaigning for debt elimination, privatisation, and deregulation, business coalitions have effectively dismantled many of the powers and tools of national governments.

The fundamental purposes of the new free trade deals (eg. GATT, NAFTA) are to provide protection among national constitutions for the freedoms of transnational corporations and banks to act unhindered by national laws. As Carla Hills, chief U.S. negotiator for both NAFTA and the GATT, put it: "We want corporations to be able to make investment overseas without being required to take a local partner, to export a given percentage of their output, to use local parts, or to meet a dozen other restrictions." As a result, the "national treatment" clauses in NAFTA and GATT guarantee that foreign investors have the same rights and freedoms as domestic firms. The investment codes in the new free trade regimes ensure that various regulations of nation states are removed, including foreign investment requirements, export quotas, local procurement, job content, and technology specifications. Through this kind of consitiutional protection, the rights of TNCs take precedence over the rights of citizens in their respective nation states. In addition, the legislative authority of the GATT and the NAFTA supercedes the legislation of participating nation states when matters of conflict arise.

The creation of a globalised consumer culture is another key element of the new corporate tyranny. The transnationals want to be able to sell their products with the same basic advertising design in Bangkok and Santiago as in Paris, Tokyo, New York or London. The prime example is the way Coca-Cola has become a global symbol transcending all national and cultural boundaries. Through television images and satellite communications, a homogenous set of perspectives, tastes, and desires can be transmitted to all corners of the globe. It is now estimated that transnationals spend well over half as much money in advertising to create corporate friendly consumers as the nations of the world spend on public education. In turn, all this corporate advertising tends to forge a connection in people's mindsets between private interests (ie. of the TNCs) and the public interest. As a result, a global monoculture is emerging which not only disregards local tastes and cultural differences, but threatens to serve as a form of social control over the attitudes, expectations, and behaviour of people all over the world.

The two main Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have become principal tools by which the new global managers maintain corporate control over nations and peoples, especially in countries of the South. Both the Bank and the Fund are directly linked to the transnational financial sector in terms of the borrowing and the lending ends of their operations. Loan agreements are routinely negotiated in secret between banking and government officials who, for the most part, are not accountable to the people on whose behalf they are obligating the national treasury to foreign lenders. The Bank and the Fund must be regarded, as one observer puts it, "as governance institutions, exercising power through [their] financial leverage to legislate entire legal regimens and even to alter the constitutional structure of borrowing nations." Their own consultants often have the power to "rewrite a country's trade policy, fiscal policies, civil service requirements, labour laws, health care arrangements, environmental regulations, energy policy, resettlement requirements, procurement rules and budgetary policy."

In the 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF used debt renegotiations as a club to force the developing nations into making widespread structural adjustments (SAPs) in their economies. Each SAP package called for sweeping changes in economic and social policies design to channel the country's resources and productivity into debt repayments and enhanced transnational competition. The SAP measures included large scale deregulation, privatisation, currency devaluation, social spending cuts, lower corporate taxes, expanding exports of natural resources and agricultural products, and removal of foreign investment restrictions. In order to obtain the foreign exchange to pay down their debt loads, developing countries were compelled to become export oriented economies, selling off their natural resources and agricultural commodities on global markets while rapidly increasing their dependency on imported goods and services. In effect, the SAPs have become instruments for the recolonisation of many developing countries in the South in the interests of transnational corporations and banks.

The new World Trade Organisation established by the Uruguay Round of the GATT is designed, in effect, to serve as a global governing body for transnational corporate interests. The WTO will have legislative as well as judicial powers. It has a mandate to eliminate all barriers to international investment and global competition. Under the WTO, a group of unelected trade representatives will act like a global parliament with the power to override economic and social policy decisions of nation states and democratic legislatures around the world. At the same time, the world's major TNCs will have a powerful role to play in the new WTO through direct linkages with the trade representatives of participating countries. In the case of the U.S., for example, members of the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations include such corporate giants as IBM, AT&T, Bethlehem Steel, Time Warner, Corning, Bank America, American Express, Scott Paper, Dow Chemical, Boeing, Eastman Kodak, Mobil Oil, Amoco, Pfizer, Hewlett Packard, Weyerhauser, and General Motors - all of whom are members of the Business Round Table.

Systems of Corporate Rule
The following are some of the global systems that have been effectively usurped by transnational corporations and banks.

1. Global Finance

The globalisation of finance markets has been nothing short of revolutionary. The days when national authorities could stabilise financial markets through banking regulations, reserve requirements, deposit insurance, limits on interest rates, and the separation of commercial and investment banking are all but gone. In country after country, there has been a massive deregulation of finance, as well as mergers between commercial and investment banking. Also, TNCs are now bypassing banks altogether to issue their own commercial paper. Information technology has transformed global banking to the point where 2 trillion dollars is transferred everyday around the world. Electronic transfer systems make more than 150,000 international transactions in a single day. The speed and frequency of these money transactions - from Maylasia to Toronto to New York to Miami to the Cayman Islands to the Bahamas to Switzerland - makes it difficult to trace, let alone regulate. Today, the global finance market is dominated by Japanese banks (ie. eight out of the world's top ten.) But this deregulated, global finance market has become fragile and unstable to the point where a financial shock in one country (eg. Mexico) can dramatically upset financial markets in other countries before national authorities have a chance to intervene. Unless radically new regulatory measures are introduced, the fiscal policies of national governments will not only be dictated but also threatened by a volatile, global finance system.

2. Global Industrial Production

As auto, electronics, textile and clothing industries have outgrown their home countries, shifting their production and supplier operations off shore to independent contractors, the "global factory" coupled with a radically new international division of labour has emerged. With the globalisation of production networks, transnational manufacturing firms can quickly move their operations around the world, chasing cheap labour, taking advantage of more profitable investment opportunities, and outflanking the demands of unionised workers. In the auto industry, Ford and GM have forged strategic alliances with Mazda and Toyota to produce for each other's markets while in the shoe industry, companies like Nike and Schwinn have begun to shift from manufacturing to designing, merchandising and distributing. This new global factory, in turn, has resulted in a dramatic loss of manufacturing jobs in the industrial North (ie. the U.S., Japan, Europe) as manufacturing companies have moved their production to low wage, tax free countries in the South. Increasingly, workers around the world find themselves lumped together in the same labour pool to the point where exploitation in Guatemala, Maylasia, or China is felt as wage competition by workers in London, New York, or Montreal. While the staggering wage gap between workers in the North and the South has begun to narrow, there is a very real danger that workers everywhere will be dragged down to low common wage standards by the forces of global competition.

3. Global Product Distribution

Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh, in Global Dreams, describe the "global supermarket" that is transforming agricultural production throughout the world but also undercutting the capacity of nations to ensure that the basic food needs of their populations are sufficiently met. Transnational food corporations are demanding an end to the system of agricultural subsidies, regulation, and protection that has maintained a relatively cheap food policy in the industrial North. At the same time, poor countries in the South who were once self-sufficient in food but are now desperate for foreign exchange to pay down their debts, are forced to turn over valuable agricultural lands to the transnational agribusiness and to convert to the production of cash crops while importing food products to feed their own peoples. "Export or Die" is the message. The introduction of bio-tech production methods - laboratory produced vanilla, bioengineered celery, freeze-resistant flowers and tomatoes, bovine growth hormones for cows, plus long distance food transportation - pose further threats not only to the livelihood of traditional farmers in poor countries but also to the quality and safety of food products in general. Meanwhile, the giant food corporations - General Foods, Kraft, Pilsbury, Philip Morris, Del Monte, President's Choice, Proctor & Gamble, Pepsico etc. - have merged their operations and expanded their marketing strategies on a global basis. National authorities are also finding it increasingly difficult to maintain adequate food inspection at the border, especially for the massive imports of fruits and vegetables that may have been grown in areas where sewage is rampant, leading to expanded use of such chemicals as methyl bromide, a potent threat to the ozone layer.

The corporate dream of turning the whole world into a kind of global shopping paradise is also near at hand. Not only have Coca Cola and Marlborough become universally recognised brand names through massive corporate advertising, but global retailers like Proctor & Gamble, Philip Morris, RJR Nabisco, Kellogg, General Motors, Sears, Unilever, Pepsico, Nestles, and MacDonalds have been spending billions of advertising and promotion dollars each year with the intent of creating a steadily expanding global market based on mass consumption. The strategy is to "sell the same things in the same way everywhere" with little or no regard for local customs, tastes, cultural or religious differences. Giant retailers like Wal-Mart have led the way with development of a chain of superstores designed to sell the largest range of retail consumer goods - food, clothing, hardware, furniture, pharmaceuticals etc. - in towns and cities throughout North America. Using a variety of tactics ranging from low-wage part-time employment, misleading advertising, predatory pricing, competition law violations, and coercive sourcing from suppliers, Wal-Mart has managed to force local merchants out of business and in some cases created ghost towns. Now the most aggressive giant retailer in the world, Wal-Mart has plans to expand its operations into parts of Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

4. Resource Control

Transnational resource giants like Exxon, Mitsubishi, Texas Gulf, Shell, Rio Tinto Zinc, Alcan and a host of energy, mining, forestry and hydro corporations have expanded their operations to the four corners of the earth, posing serious threats to the environment by causing massive oil spills, reversing water systems, flooding huge land tracts, depleting vast forest areas, eliminating fish stocks, and destroying vegetation and wildlife. The only thing new about this is the new atmosphere of deregulation in such areas as environmental protection. The resource and energy codes built into the free trade regimes (eg. NAFTA, GATT) are designed to accelerate the rapid development and export of natural resources. Moreover, the export-or-die demands of the IMF mean that poor countries with resource based economies have no choice but to open their doors to transnational resource companies without regulation or environmental protection. Rapid exports not only accelerate the depletion of non-renewable resources but greatly intensify the global supplies of fresh water that are now being targeted by TNCs. Add to this last persistent destruction of rainforests plus the continuous dumping of hazardous wastes into the ecosystem by companies like Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, and Dupont - there should be little wonder the world is on the verge of an ecological holocaust.

5. Banking, Insurance, Education

Transnational corporations are also rapidly moving in to take over control of basic services such as health care and education which has been the public responsibility of governments in most countries. Through a series of vertical and horizontal mergers, a system of large scale health care corporations is emerging. In the U.S., the major drug companies like Eli Lily are merging with the health insurance industries like PCS for the takeover of hospitals, pharmacies, freestanding clinics, nursing homes and doctors' practices. The world's largest profit oriented hospital companies, Columbia and Health Trust, have merged to form a giant health care corporation with sales exceeding that of Eastman Kodak or American Express. In a deregulated global economy, these new health care giants are poised to play a key role in swallowing up pieces of the public health care system in countries like Canada where there is enormous pressure to privatise. At the same time, transnationals are also invading the education system. In the U.S. organisations like the Business Higher Education Forum and the New American Schools Development Corporation (which funnels corporate finances into profit oriented elementary schools) are composed of TNCs like AT&T, Ford, Eastman Kodak, Pfizer, General Electric, Heinz, and many others. Household brand names like Coca Cola, Pepsico, MacDonalds, Burger King and Proctor & Gamble are also directly involved in developing curriculum for schools along with advertising promotions to help kids "grow up corporate."

6. Patenting of Life Forms

While government regulations over the operations of TNCs are being dismantled in countries all over the world, the monopoly rights of the transnationals over information and technology is now internationally protected under the intellectual property rights components of the GATT and the WTO. Moreover, this international patent right protection has been extended to genetic materials, including seeds and natural medicinals. The patenting of life forms allows transnational companies to secure widespread control over genetically engineered organisms, from microorganisms to plants and animals. Worse still, transnationals are now able to obtain monopoly rights over genetic research concerning an entire species plus any products derived from that research. The W.R. Grace corporation, for example, through its subsidiary Agracetus Inc. has secured a U.S. patent on all genetically engineered or "transgenic" cotton varieties (1992), a European patent on all transgenic soybeans (1994) and has applications pending in other countries to take control of 60 percent of the world's cotton crop, including India, China and Brazil.

Under these conditions, farmers who traditionally save seed from one harvest to replant for their next crop would find themselves in violation of international patent law. Unless they pay a royalty to the TNC that owns the patented seed, farmers around the world are now prohibited from growing their own seed stocks. Furthermore, there are moves to have these global monopoly rights and patent protection laws extended to include the cloning of human embryos.

7. Cultural Cloning

Armed with satellite communications, global entertainment corporations are selling their pop music cultural products all over the world. The target audience of this global entertainment industry is the two-fifths of the people on the planet who are under 20. Bertlesman's pop music empire presently dominates youth markets throughout Europe, North America, Latin America and is now moving into Asia. Sony, Philips and Matsushita have also been expanding into these markets. Sony's prime focus has been on the children's market promoting their toy-like radios [ie. the My First Sony range], kids' music label, and children's video library. The biggest technological leap in the global entertainment during the 1980s came with MTV. By 1993, MTV programs were reaching 210 million households in 71 countries throughout the world. Increasingly, the big six global entertainer corporations are focusing their energies on opening up markets in Latin America and Asia where the greatest growth potential exists. But this expansion is also being challenged as a new form of cultural imperialism. For the poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America the big six penetration of transnational sound will choke off traditional music of the local culture as well as restrict employment opportunities for local artists. At the same time, the global entertainment industry will increasingly generate a homogenised culture that reflects western corporate values and priorities.

New Bases for Social Action
The best hope for countering growing corporate domination lies in the building of social movements whereby people reclaim their sovereign rights over transnational corporations and banks.

Most people now feel that they have lost control over their economic, social, and ecological future. This is not only true among the poor majority in the South, following the damage done by massive structural adjustments, but increasingly amongst the majority of working, middle class peoples in the North. For many, the dream of securing a full time job, a relatively stable, crime free community, in a clean environment with a bright future for their children, has been shattered. In this climate, the politics of fear and the politics of insecurity have become rampant in most of our countries expressing itself sometimes as ethnic violence or, more recently, right wing militias [in America]. As we move towards the 21st century, not only do the postwar engines of economic growth seem to be petering out in their reach for global markets, thereby undermining effective demand and confidence in the new global order and its institutions, but a new set of class divisions and tensions is emerging in our economies and societies, both North and South. Underlying the politics of fear and insecurity is the fundamental question of democracy itself. These conditions, in turn, could create new political opportunities and space for building social movements to take democratic control over transnational corporations that are dominating people's economic, social, and ecological future.

Popular Sovereignty

In the building of social movements today, emphasis must be placed on the notion of popular sovereignty as a common base for action. Throughout this country alone, peoples all over the world have fought for the recognition of fundamental democratic and human rights - the right to adequate food, clothing and shelter; the right to employment, education and health care; the right to clean environment, social equality, and public services; - and the right to self determination and the ability to effectively participate in decisions affecting these rights. Together, these basic communal rights, which constitute the core of popular sovereignty, have been reflected and enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In the new age of corporate tyrant, however, these fundamental human and democratic rights of people have been largely stolen or hijacked. Today, the rights and freedoms of transnational corporations are not only enshrined but take precedence over the democratic rights of peoples, nations, and citizens. The time has come for citizens, through social movements, to reclaim their sovereign rights over transnational corporations.

New Nationalism

The emergence of the corporate state, wherein the reigns of democratic governance have been taken over by corporations and banks, has completely disfigured and distorted the responsibilities of the national governments. The moral and political obligations of nation states to intervene in the market economy in order to ensure that the entire national system - economic, fiscal, social, cultural, environmental, political - functions for the purpose of providing a profitable climate for transnational investment and competition in the new global economy. As the politics of insecurity unfold, however, a right-wing brand of nationalism is likely to arise with new forms of protectionism against immigration, cheap imports, as well as further protection for major TNCs. In other words, "protectionism for the powerful." In this climate, it is imperative that social movements focus their energies on the "corporate state" and resisting the rise of a new right-wing nationalism. People's energies need to be mobilised around a new social version of the nation state in an age of global interdependence, where governments reclaim the power and tools necessary to exercise democratic control over transnational corporations and banks. In effect, the nation state must be retooled to serve the rights of people (ie. popular sovereignty) to secure control over their economic, social, and ecological future. But this new nationalism must be simultaneously carried out in concert with social movements in other countries who are engaged in struggles for democratic control over transnationals.

Citizens Manifesto

In order to build social movements in the North and South who are committed to the task of taking democratic control over TNCs in this new age of corporate tyranny, a common platform and agenda needs to be developed. This could take the form of a common manifest for citizens of the world which would include:

a declaration of the fundamental rights of people to determine their own economic, social, and ecological future;
the sovereign rights of peoples over that of transnational corporations and banks;
the demand that TNCs meet certain basic economic, social, and environmental conditions;
the insistence that governments develop and enact new regulatory measures for exercising democratic control over TNCs; and
the responsibility of social movements to take whatever forms of action are needed to see that people's basic rights are upheld and that democratic control over the operations of TNCs is maintained.

The core of this citizen's manifesto would be the spirit and practice of popular sovereignty. Its prime purpose would be to provide social movements, both in the North and South, with a common platform for action in dismantling the corporate state and challenging the operations of transnational enterprises at local, national, regional, and international levels.

Social movements need to develop the capacities and tools for taking democratic control over TNCs. This calls for strategic planning on the part of social movements. The conventional strategies for addressing the behaviour of TNCs, however, are not adequate for the task of either dismantling the corporate state or effectively challenging transnational regimes. What is needed is a more systematic approach. To begin, it is important for social movements to identify major TNC targets within the main transnational regimes - finance, resources, distribution, services, patents, media etc. - which are a priority for democratic control for people in a given country or region. Connections can then be made between the particular TNC targets and the transnational regime in which they operate plus the way in which the corporate state functions in a given country or region. By drawing these connections, social movements can set the stage for developing strategic plans for exercising popular sovereignty and taking democratic control.

American System Series Part 4: The National Bank

The American System 3: The Mission Before Us

The American System Part 2: Transition into the Credit System

The American System Part 1: Introduction to National Banking

Hidden Deceptions

Madoff Ponzi Scheme Dwarfed by Rubin's

by Henry Makow Ph.D.




The arrest of financier Bernard Madoff Thursday for operating a "Ponzi scheme" costing investors $50 billion made the TV network news. Curiously, a lawsuit the same day against Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for defrauding Citibank shareholders of more than $122 billion, also described as a "Ponzi scheme," got no airplay whatsoever.

As we shall see, Rubin, a Director of Citibank, profited from the shady practices that destroyed the financial system and sent the world's economies into a tailspin. Then, to repair the damage, he and his banker friends put the taxpayer on the hook for trillions.

Rubin didn't get the same publicity as Madoff because of his close connection to Barack Obama.

Robert Rubin's son Jamie was Obama's main Wall Street fundraiser and is now one of his principal advisers. More significant, Obama's economic team consists of Rubin's proteges including Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, Senior Economic Adviser and Peter Orszag, Budget Director. The Times of London has already dubbed them the "Robert Rubin Memorial All Stars."

Clearly, the media don't want people to realize that the candidate of "Change" chose the people responsible for this calamity to be his "economic team." While in the Clinton White House, Rubin, with Summers, helped tear down the regulatory walls between banks, brokerages and insurance companies and freed them to trade in unregulated and little-understood derivatives worth trillions of dollars.


THE LAW SUIT

In an article entitled "Ponzi Scheme at CITI," the New York Post reported: "A new Citigroup scandal is engulfing Robert Rubin and his former disciple Chuck Prince for their roles in an alleged Ponzi-style scheme that's now choking world banking.

Director Rubin and ousted CEO Prince - and their lieutenants over the past five years - are named in a federal lawsuit for an alleged complex cover-up of toxic securities that spread across the globe, wiping out trillions of dollars in their destructive paths.

Investor-plaintiffs in the suit accuse Citi management of overseeing the repackaging of unmarketable collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that no one wanted - and then reselling them to Citi and hiding the poisonous exposure off the books in shell entities.

The lawsuit said that when the bottom fell out of the shaky assets in the past year, Citi's stock collapsed, wiping out more than $122 billion of shareholder value.

However, Rubin and other top insiders were able to keep Citi shares afloat until they could cash out more than $150 million for themselves in "suspicious" stock sales" calculated to maximize the personal benefits from undisclosed inside information," the lawsuit said.

The latest troubles for Rubin, Prince and others emerged in a 500-page investigation by Citigroup investors represented by law firm Kirby McInerney.

The probe was used to amend and add new details to a blanket investor lawsuit filed against Citigroup a year ago. The amended suit called the actions of Citi leaders "a quasi-Ponzi scheme" to hide troubles - and keep Citi stock afloat while insiders unloaded about 3 million shares between Jan. 1, 2004 and Feb. 22, 2008 for huge profits.

In addition to Citigroup, Rubin and Prince, the complaint names Vice Chairman Lewis Kaden, ex-CFO Sallie Krawcheck and her successor CFO Gary Crittenden.

Rubin cleared $30.6 million on his stock sales, while Prince got $26.5 million, former COO Robert Druskin got nearly $32 million and former Global Wealth Management unit chief Todd Thomson got $25.7 million, the suit said."

THE PONZI SCHEME

In an article, "The Great American Ponzi Scheme," Robert Butche writes, "Little did people know that banking and finance had contracted a nasty disease -- one known in the grifter trade as a Ponzi Scheme -- in which sub-prime mortgages were securitized and traded based on an unsustainable promise to pay high returns to investors from monies obtained from subsequent investors."

In the commentary to the NY Post article above, a Ph.D. in Physics explained that his fellow graduates all went to work for big banks, brokerages and Fannie May. They were "hired to do complicated calculations (loop level) borrowed from quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. They can take any number(s) as an input and produce any output as desired. Hence the banks hired at a much higher pay these people than they could earn in Universities or research institutes...Their bosses told them to inflate the value of anything to any number and these people did that."

"No ordinary derivatives trader can ever understand any formula(e) to calculate the value of anything. These are too complicated but intentionally. But there are some conservation laws for energy, momentum etc in physics. Where every (loop level) calculation has to abide by them. In finance and banking there is no such conserved quantity as credit can be created from thin air and destroyed also to that. Hence the fiasco."

BERNARD MADOFF, RAHM EMMANUEL

Madoff was a pillar of Wall Street, one of the founders of the NASDAQ Exchange and a former Chairman. His private Investment business became known for delivering steady returns year after year and attracted billions. Little did anyone imagine he was using new investments to provide returns on old ones. The house of cards came crashing down last week when he confessed to his sons, who promptly reported him. He had lost their money too. He had cheated family and friends.

"Madoff's investors included captains of industry, corporations -- some of which are publicly traded -- that used Madoff almost as a high-yielding cash management account, endowments, universities, foundations and, importantly, many high-profile funds of funds," said Douglas Kass, who heads hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management. "It appears that at least $15 billion of wealth, much of which was concentrated in southern Florida and New York City, has gone to 'money heaven,'" he said.

Madoff's $50 billion scam is described as the largest in history. But it pales in comparison with what Robert Rubin and his ilk have done to the world. With the possible exception of Ponzi himself, most of the scamsters mentioned here are Jewish. A consolation to anti-Semites, the biggest victims probably also are Jews. One Jewish Foundation, which gave away $1.5 million to Jewish causes, closed its doors and laid off its employees. All its money was invested with Madoff.

"This guy [has] killed more Jews then Hitler," one wag said in a forum. "Wait till you read the formal complaint from the SEC and FBI." Then he added facetiously, "Now that the Jew has been thrown down the well, is our country free?"

Thankfully Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is not Jewish, but Obama's Jewish Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel is implicated in the Governor's plan to sell Obama's Senate Seat. Obama was put in power by Illuminati Jews and Masons and there is going to be plenty of corruption.

Just as there was collateral damage when Illuminati bankers put Hitler into power, (the loss of 60 million people) Jews today have got to break rank with the bankers and their political puppets. We're not responsible for their machinations and Jews suffer as much as anyone.

Moreover, Jews are going to be blamed unless we join in exposing and opposing the Illuminati, (i.e. the highest rank of Freemasonry consisting of Jews and non-Jews.) Organized Jewry and many individual Jews are witting and unwitting instruments of the Illuminati bankers' plan for totalitarian world government.

At the same time, we need to ask ourselves whether there is some flaw in Jewish culture that makes so many Jews sacrifice personal integrity for financial success and power.

Finally, wars and depressions don't happen by accident. They are planned by the Illuminati years in advance. They are designed to engineer social and political change. See my "Illuminati Bankers Seek "Revolution" by Economic Means" and "Credit Crunch: Occult Colonization of the Developed World?" The media is controlled by the Illuminati and advances their agenda. That's why the spotlight is on Bernard Madoff and not Robert Rubin.
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Federal Reserve Won't Reveal How it Spent Two Trillion Taxpayer Dollars

Madoff Fraud Hits Many Investors

Panic in Palm Beach
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5333901.ece

Sovietizing the US Economy-The Final Phase