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Lessons from the early Industrial Revolution

The King-Church combine

Anthropogenic climate change as of about 1800 started with the need for social change. Europe was filthy and disorganized. Few people lived long; many succumbed to disease and starvation. Women were almost never educated- but frequently burnt for being witches. While Papin and Leibnitz were inventing the steam engine, and Newton was writing his Principia Mathematica, London was hit by the plague and largely burnt down.

At that time, the social order was essentially ruled by kings and the Church. In France, Louis XIV alone controlled the minting of money and manufacture of arms and ammunition. Nothing could be printed there without his Imprimatur. His divine rights and powers were sanctified by the Church. There was no salvation outside it, and Constantine the Great had donated the entire Western Roman Empire to it. The Catholic Church thus theoretically owned Europe and delegated powers to puppet governments - symbolically by anointing monarchs. That is why the future Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Henry IV, had to cross the alps barefoot in the midwinter of 1077 to kiss the big toe of Pope Gregory VII at Canossa. Louis and his cardinals thus jointly enjoyed God-given monopolies to murder Frenchmen, tell them what to think, and pay legislators to lay down, and enforce, the law as they pleased. Princes and prelates lived in luxury, other people were mostly taxed and exploited into misery.

It was almost impossible to crack the King-Church combine in continental Europe. But England was far from Rome, and largely Protestant. People there had greater freedoms to think and believe as they pleased. During the 18^th century it seethed with new- and for that time- revolutionary ideas. See, for instance, the writings of J Locke, Erasmus Darwin- Charles' granddad, D Hume, and Adam Smith. These men had enormous faith in reason, science, democracy, free competition and enterprise. The English North Country was further from Rome and so poor, bleak and barren, that many people there did not merely protest against monarchical and ecclesiastical powers, they dissented- vigorously.

That self-confidence and idealism expressed itself practically in projects to use A Darby's coke fired iron smelters, J Watt's improved steam engine, J Priestly's chemistry... for the betterment of mankind. They realized that there was a great need for cheap goods mass-produced with the then most modern technologies. They also realized that researching and building blast furnaces, steel and textile mills, ceramic and glass works, cost much money that they did not have.

Adam Smith's Invisible Hand argument solved the problem. It enabled numerous small farmers, craftsmen and shopkeepers to deposit their savings with bankers. These savings hardly earned more interest than inflation. The banks freely combined and invested them into highly profitable high-tech mass-production industries. Textile mills using R Arkwright's spinning and weaving machines were soon bankrupting hand looms. Mass-produced mugs and plates rolled out of J Wedgwood's ceramics factories, and assembly-line hardware - horse shoes, axles, screws, nails.. put village smithies out of business. Mechanized seed sowing drills (J Tull), and horse drawn reapers enabled rich industrialists to undersell, buy out, and consolidate small farms into agribusinesses.

As rural communities were ruined in the 18^th century, villagers streamed to towns to become minimum wage slaves in dark satanic mills. Corn laws were also passed to facilitate cheap imports while village commons were enclosed and incorporated into huge private estates.

The price of Progress

As of the early 19^th century, railroads and canals spread across England- and then the rest of the world. More goods could then be sold more widely due to economies of scale. Factories running continuously at full capacity required relatively less labour and smaller investments. Once a big factory had killed all its small competitors in this way, it had a monopoly, and could slowly raise its prices.

Adam Smith's Invisible Hand did not only help capitalists to interlock their Directorates freely to acquire monopoly powers for themselves, it also helped them to organise the 'free market economy' so as to disorganise all competitors that might grow to dispute their powers. Massive propaganda for 'Free competition, free enterprise, individual initiative, private property.." justified the establishment of cartel-government controlled Monopolies Commissions to force butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers etc.,- to compete freely while the Directorates of massive monopolies interlocked more freely. Deliberately fragmented markets enabled bigger predators to consume smaller prey more easily.

Systematic cheating

When wage slaves drank and danced, also to console themselves for the loss of rural liberties, lands, shops, and the beauty of nature there, they were accused of vice, debauchery and licentiousness. Women and children were forced to work 80, and more, hours a week- and accused of sloth and indolence when less than eager to do so. It was said that the devil gets into a man in his spare time- the unemployed were flogged and sent to workhouses.

Workers could not save more than small fractions of their meager wages. Such small sums earned little interest because bankers were not interested in bothering with them. But the members of the banker-borrower brotherhood invested far larger proportions of their far larger profits and dividends into each other's businesses at far higher interest rates or dividend shares. Vast quantities of number money were made as the value of the same coins deposited by small savers was copied over and over again in this way.

The little people were, in fact, cheated out of their fair share of profits made on industrialized production processes while their savings were sterilized. But, while exploited workers drowned the sorrows in drink and "depravity", their exploiters compounded their interests and prided themselves on their prudence, thrift, industry, enterprise, perseverance and intelligence. They were paragons of virtue, upright, highly respectable citizens who deserved all of their wealth and power.

Beginnings of Banker Capitalism

Smith's Invisible Hand could not conceal all the injustices of bank lending. Aristotle and Mohammed said lending at usury (usage, interest) was unjust. Aquinas pronounced it contrary to natural law. Why should lenders earn increments to the money they lent out while doing nothing- and then relend repaid capital and accumulated interests while doing even more nothing?

There is simple theft, organised crime, and the creation of money at little or no cost and spending into circulation at a high face value. The difference is a form of theft perpetrated by those who create the money from all of the rest of the population. Bank 'lending' makes it possible to create practically unlimited amounts of money out of nothing. A person who deposits his/her savings in a bank is the legal owner of those savings. The bank owns the money it lends out- borrowers are legally obliged pay it back to the bank- with interest. Borrowed moneys may be spent to build factories, pay workers least, and charge clients most. Builders and workers then redeposit into banks that fraction of their wages that they do not spend on living. That re-deposited money is new money created out of nothing in the banking system. Meanwhile, the banks earned all of the unearned increment (agio) for having created the money they lent to capitalists out of nothing at far higher rates than they paid depositors. Re-deposited money can be relent to capitalists, repaid to workers who re-deposit a part of it - and so on, over and over again, creating huge piles of worthless numbers in accounts.

Money creation by bank lending is a fraud.

The concentration of wealth and power around the banker-borrower combine enabled it to acquire control of most of England's key industries.As of about 1800, it owned controlling shares of all coal and iron mines in England- hence of its armaments and munitions industries. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to consolidate that country's banking monopoly, and to represent its interests, and those of its capitalist clients. These people's vast wealth and estates needed protection. Providing law and order was the government's job - and the money-murder monopolists had what the government needed to do it.

People do not always vote for taxes or pay them voluntarily- especially if they know that their government will use them to pay police to spy on them and to repress their 'disorderly conduct'. Some grease is necessary to oil the taxation machinery, and the palms of elected representatives. So the government of England and its banker-capitalists formed an internal colonialism combine. One part taxed its people. The other cheated them with credit money creation. Both used their money creation-murder monopolies to repress the 'disorderly conduct' of those who were not happy with this arrangement. They also paid legislators to lay down the law and decide how it should be enforced.

Getting people to vote for taxes and accept the injustices of money creation and enforced taxation requires more or less exclusive control of what people think and how they behave - hence of the media. If one part of a society has a monopoly to control its money, murderers and media, it has absolute, totalitarian control over the rest. Raw power is then hidden behind a façade of fake freedom and democracy while those who suffer from the injustice are dumbed down with brainwash, beaten and exploited into submission. Though the free-market democracy window dressing changed, the Cartel-Puppet government's internal colonialism differed little from that of the monolithic Catholic Church and numerous kings like Louis XIV.

The workers knew that they had been cheated, but did not know what to do about it. There were riots- such as those organised by N Ludd around 1800. Shouting, waving banners and smashing machines did them no good. The police and army had all the guns, and the banker-capitalists controlled all the arms and munitions factories. When workers tried to unionize, they were accused of monopolizing labour, and infiltrated by 'leaders' who made sure they bargained for higher wages rather than for fair shares of company profits and the suppression of the monopoly to create money out of nothing by calling it 'lending'.

How lucre transmuted into lies

Really ambitious theft by money creation had to be a monopoly.If it were not, everyone would be able to cheat everyone else in the same way. There were two ways of acquiring and strengthening that monopoly: guns and money. The capitalists made most money by selling their murder machinery to their government. That government sent the likes of N Ludd to the likes of Australia- in chains, whether they liked it or not. There, they were officially informed that it was their patriotic and religious duty to make the place fit for Christian civilization and white supremacy. Guns were put in their hands to shoot heathen, inferior black-, brown- and yellow- fellas with. The more they shot, the more of the land they cleared they would be able to keep for themselves. The rest accrued to the crown.

Going to the other side of the earth to kill the initially hospitable and friendly people there to steal their land is contrary to several biblical commandments. However people in power in Europe proved that this was impeccably Christian behaviour. The pope himself had decreed that heathens were not humans, and that their lands were 'terra nullis'- nobody there. As England acquired more external colonies, capitalists ac­quired more, markets, cheap labour and raw materials. At that time, Europeans were deliberately indoctrinated with feelings of religious and racist superiority.

The close collaboration between England's Government and its Bank worked well for a while. It created the British Empire. The cartel contributed more to the government if it made more. Tight symbiosis between the military industrial banking cartel and the government was profitable to both. The government gave its industrialists large contracts at taxpayers' expense, not only for weapons,. It subsidized exports, collected duties on imports, organized education and research to meet industrialists' needs. It also enacted legislation to protect cartel interests much more than those of workers or the natural environment. The smoke, grime, noise, and the industrialized destruction of the earth's living cover spread out from England over the rest of the world.

In countries, like India, where people were locked into their trades for caste or other reasons, hundreds of thousands of local hand-weavers and other craftsmen starved as imported machine-made textiles, or other wares, undercut the lowest prices they could offer. Money made in this way could be used to create new industries for products and services that did not exist before- for instance in telecommunications and transportation, and to extend monopolized-fragmented markets elsewhere. Everybody was rich but the poor - and they didn't matter anyway. Or, so thought England's rich and powerful. The 10-month 1926 General strike proved that her workers were fed up with almost two centuries of ruthless exploitation and seeing their sons off to die in foreign wars that enriched only capitalists. British ceased to be best. The Empire went into decline thereafter.

The 19^th century was, in many ways, also a time of great progress. 18^th century squalor and superstition were mopped up as sanitation and education improved. Women began to get voting rights as well as educations. It was a time of organisation, classification and codification. Streets were named, maps made, plants and animals studied and categorized. Science seemed to be a cornucopia of wonders- electric lighting and motors, the telegraph and telephone, new cures for old diseases- vaccination, disinfection- improved the quality and length of many people's lives. Populations increased rapidly.

Monopolize the power business to be powerful

When the Industrial Revolution began, Europe was on the monarch minted metal money standard - hence continental colonizers' eagerness to steal other peoples' gold and silver. That Revolution had made energy and metals indispensable for a great many purposes, including the mass-production of armaments. It was important to control the sources of metals and energy widely. Coal was largely replaced by oil - but nuclear is more monopolizable and can be used to make weapons that go off with bigger bangs. Controlling the mining of metals is still important for murder monopolists. They made much money during the last century by fomenting wars between other peoples, lending their governments the money they need to buy monopolized weapons with- and to get their subjects to pay the bills for losing their lives.

Monopolies make most money if they sell as much as possible of their products at the highest possible prices- and preach the virtues of free competition for everyone else. The banking-energy-military-industrial cartel could increase its powers and spread its influence wider by buying out key industries- transport, electricity production, chemicals,.. to ensure that all automobiles, trucks, aircraft, power stations ran only on its monopolized fuels, most gadgets use most electricity, metal, glass, and most concrete is cast. These processes use much energy and put much heat into the environment.

The fact that industry and transport could be powered by ambient heat without heating or polluting the environment in any way, and that electricity could be made similarly in small local generators, is never mentioned. Such things are forbidden by the Second Law of Thermodynamics- another fraud. This decrees that useful energy must always be made with monopolized fuels. Railways use much less metal and energy than automobiles do. So railroads had to die while countrysides were covered with concrete. The list of ways we are being duped into consuming energy, metals, concrete and petrochemicals- detergents, plastics, pesticides, artificial fertilizers, synthetic rubbers...- unnecessarily- is endless.

The word 'economy' is from oikos (home) nomos (order). Global warming, and the filth and noise we make to make and consume energy, have nothing to do with scientific law. We make them because we have so organised our social order that it depends on the creation of credit money with supposed intrinsic value- and this fraud now needs to be supported by monopolizable energy. This is like burning the home down to maintain order in it. That order is not real order. Suppressing dissent due to injustice within a society does not eliminate it. Hatred accumulates and is released in singularities- revolutions and wars.

Mining and energy companies are now plundering third world countries so that the cartel and its puppet governments can continue to maintain their kind of order in first world countries. Totalitarian power is still supported by monopolies to murder and make new money out of nothing- but other peoples and their nature are now being murdered as well. That trick will not work forever. Money supplies are now growing exponentially in first world countries while the values of their currencies are falling to zero. A study of the last years of the Roman Empire gives some idea of what happens after that.

Numbers game.

They add numbers to their accounts. But you are not allowed to do that. So, any number: you lose.

When governments stopped issuing metal money around 1900-20, bank notes were called 'Promissory Notes' because they could theoretically be redeemed in gold from reserves in bank's vaults. The banks lent out much more money than savers had deposited in them, and printed promissory notes whose total face value was many times greater than the value of the gold in their vaults. This was known as 'Fractional Reserve Banking' because the fraction kept in reserve was much smaller than the money value banks created out of nothing and spent or lent into circulation. Much worthless printed paper and many recycled numbers with imaginary intrinsic value were re-deposited, not by humble worker-savers, but by borrower capitalists who had made huge profits with their efficient industries, monopolies obtained by killing small competitors, and other clever combines.

The large sums invested by these capitalists earned far higher interest rates than those accorded to the little folk. Banks prefer to lend to the rich- such investments are safer, returns are larger, and bookkeeping is simpler. Capitalists could usually borrow at lower rates than humble folk- possibly even at lower rates than they paid on borrowed capital. Astronomical fortunes could be made in this way if money was recycled rapidly. Capitalists could also invest in each other, recycle dividends and capital similarly. So the rich could go on becoming richer by creating practically unlimited quantities of paper and number money, on company shares, with deficit spending and the like, while the little folk, who were incapable of creating money out of nothing, were swindled out of what little real value they had by taxation and inflation.

One can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But one cannot fool all of the people all of the time. The cartel's freedoms to monopolize energy, murder, and money creation cannot go on forever. Industrialized automation and economies of scale are passing their use-by dates. People are becoming fed up with advertising and planned obsolescence, over-consumption and taxation, seeing their sons sent off to die in foreign wars while they are thrown out of their homes, farms and jobs. The industrialized destruction of nature to produce a lot of rubbish nobody wants is becoming idiotic. The cartel-government socio-economic order has become obsolete.

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