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Back when the Jack Abramoff scandal was first heating up, somebody said to me, "It's *all* about money-laundering." Meaning not just that scandal, but all the other scandals as well. And that's as true now as it was six years ago.
For anyone who doesn't have the patience to get through the clutter at the start of the video, the heart of it is Julian Assange saying that the banks are more afraid of WikiLeaks than anyone else -- as can be seen in the fact that the banks did more to try to shut them down. That there has been a sweeping extraction of money from poorer countries like those in Africa -- and that most of the money ends up in London, or in places like the Cayman Islands. And that getting at what is really going on with the banks is the key not only to the ending the financial abuses but to unraveling the entire global power structure.
I'd never thought of it that way -- but hearing Assange say it, it all makes sense. The whole idea of Swiss banking, after all, was invented by French aristocrats during the Revolution as a way of getting their ill-gotten gains out of the country and keeping them out of the hands of the French nation. And ever since then, it has been the ability of the wealthy to rob everyone blind and put the proceeds where they can't be found that has kept them in control.
It isn't just a lopsided tax system and the crushing of the unions that have led to our present condition of lopsided inequality. Those have certainly contributed, but more than anything it's the ability of the wealthy to extract value from anything in sight -- workers, natural resources, the school system, and the Social Security trust fund if they can get their hands on it -- and spirit it away to where it will never be found.
Assange knows this, and he knows it's what he's really fighting. The bankers aren't the ultimate enemies in themselves -- but they're the facilitators who make all the other con games possible and who pull the strings to keep it going.
For that matter, this is why we have a "war on terror" that's exclusively directed against Islam, and why there is a particular effort to demonize Sharia law -- it's because Sharia prohibits usury and thus makes banking as we know it impossible.
The key insight of Watergate was "follow the money." That still applies -- but now we have to follow the money not just into the pockets of some corrupt politician, but both backwards and forwards to see who it benefits, whom it corrupts, and how it gets from one to the other. We know about Nixon -- but we have a lot less of an idea about the people who owned Nixon and what they wanted from him.
And that is where all this is heading -- and why certain people will do anything to stop it.
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