America’s Fourth Great Awakening — Part I
1948 to 2001
Joseph F. McCormick and David A. Palmer, Ph.D
When World War II was over, predictably, the United States was stronger than ever industrially, nearly untouched by wartime violence on its own soil, at a cost of less than 1% of the staggering total 80 million dead from violence, disease, and starvation (over 10% of the population of four countries, Germany, Japan, Russia, China were lost). America was in control of over two thirds of the world’s gold reserves including now Germany’s as its “trustee.” It was in control of the new international monetary system as well as the financial institutions that would profit from massive loans for war “reconstruction and development” for the next several decades.
“Reconstruction and development” was managed by the same American institutions that financed and provided technical assistance to the buildup of German war fighting capacity from 1924 to 1939 (see previous essay). For these institutions war was a windfall business with opportunities to “invest” in all phases from buildup to cleanup, a practice that began in the Civil War and has only been more deeply institutionalized and enculturated.
Most importantly, America was at the center of the emerging new international order of governance, the institutions and system of international law that would evolve around the United Nations whose mission had been re-defined from war fighting to peace-keeping.
Out of this traumatic/dramatic Imperial experience arose a re-awakened Utopian movement that would, in a couple of decades, explode into a full scale rebellion against the, by then, fully mature Military Industrial Complex (MIC), warned of by World War II Supreme Allied Commander and later president Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address.
Military Industrial Complex is an often used phase, but what exactly is the MIC and its dependency the “Military Industrial Congress Complex” (MICC)? In a 1969 speech (subsequent book on the subject) “budgethawk” U.S. Senator William Proxmire describes these amorphous entities:
In a survey of defense contractors in the course of his research Proxmire discovered “Retired military officers played an important role in the Military Industrial Congress Complex. He discovered that 2,072 retired military officers were employed by the 100 contractors who replied to his survey. This was an average of almost 22 per company. However, when he considered the ten most successful contracting companies, this increased to an average of 106. This included Lockheed Aircraft Corporation (210), Boeing Corporation (169), McDonnell Douglas Corporation (141), General Dynamics (113), North American Rockwell Corporation (104), General Electrics Company (89), Ling Temco Vought Incorporated (69), Westinghouse Electric Corporation (59), TRW Incorporated (56) and Hughes Aircraft Company (55).”
Proxmire further states that as the defense budget tripled in the decade prior to Kennedy’s administration from $13 billion to $47 billion Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, later beneficiary of Kennedy assassination, along with chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Richard Russell from Georgia were at the center of the MICC process of deciding who received contracts, 86% non-competitive.
In fact the MIC and the MICC are an outgrowth of the British Imperial Project which built the empire around a mercenary force complemented by a force of “regulars” aimed at controling the resources and markets needed to weave together a global trading network. After the 1860’s demise of the British East India Company the Project, now migrated to America, began in the second half of the 19th century to build the MIC and MICC (MG Smedley Butler, two time Medal of Honor winner, confronted this “system” in a series of 1930’s speeches and a book called War is a Racket.) By the time Eisenhower gave a name to this shadow entity it was already deeply institutionalized in the Imperial culture.
The Imperial Project and MIC/MICC sub-culture had traumatized millions of people in its ambition to put in place a “new order” over the course of centuries. It had hidden much from “the people” and it was time for truth, if not reconciliation.
By the 1960’s the beatnik counter culture married with the civil rights movement married with rock and roll and resistance to the war in Vietnam was a perfect cocktail for an American “Cultural Revolution” (nearly precisely coincident with the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, a synchronicity of collective consciousness repeated many times in Imperial history — 1770’s, 1840’s, 1910’s, and 1960’s, all of which saw popular disruptions in many seemingly disconnected venues around the world.)
After WWII America had been desperate to return to normalcy, to put the suffering of war and Depression behind them. Returning veterans just wanted to find a good job, a “good girl,” settle down, and raise a family. They preferred to settle in “the suburbs,” a recent invention by land use planners, designed without sidewalks to support the car industry, with convenient access to “shopping centers” to support the retail industry, and connected to highway networks to support efficient long distance commutes to urban employers (see: Geography of Nowhere.)
The new, plasticized American dream was now a distant, commericalized cousin to the original utopian “ideal commonwealth” expressed by Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” or by John Winthrop’s 1630 “City of a Hill” sermon to his fellow pilgrims (see our earlier essays on these topics.)
Perpetual war
In 1946 Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri defined a new type of war, a perpetual “Cold War” and the new enemy for the next generation — i.e. “imperialistic” communism and international socialism.
“Cold war” is a carefully crafted political term — like a war on terror, poverty, cancer, crime or drugs — it is unwinnable from the outset, but has the benefit of raising alarm and transferring power to new “protective” institutions (like the “Defense Department,” an ironically named permanent “War Department,” arising from the National Security Act of 1947.) This became the perfect rationale for sustained industrial growth: a looming threat that took vast resources to never defeat.
Churchill, graduate of Sandhurst, architect of Gallipoli and veteran of the trenches, son of the Seventh Duke of Marlborough, arch-imperialist with a nearly equal utopian bent, member of the World Federalist movement, Nobel Prize winning historian with sweeping global vision was one of the leading architects of the post war world order.
As much of a visionay global strategist as Churchill was, Roosevelt was an equally visionary domestic strategist, nearly singlehandedly constructing the modern social-welfare state, a public-private debt financed model replicated throughout the world (intellectural blueprint provided by the Keynesian Revolution in macro-economic thinking.)
In 1944 at the White Mountain Lodge in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, representatives of forty four nations, the heart of the “United Nations” war-coalition convened to flesh out the master plan for the post war order. It was a system which would include new global institutions like the IMF, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank. It would be stabilized by gold, two-thirds of which was held by the United States and the gold-backed U.S. dollar, the creation of which was controlled by the private banking syndicate which owns the Federal Reserve Bank. Following the war half of Germany’s gold would be held “in trust” by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 37%, and the Bank of England in London, 13%, placing 75% of the world’s gold supply in the hands of the U.S. and the UK.
Not surprisingly Russia, far down the list in gold reserves, was the only one of the forty four participating countries that refused to ratify the Bretton Woods system, dismissing it as an “extension of Wall Street.” Indeed it was an extension of Wall Street and the Square Mile of London and remained so till Nixon took the U.S. of the gold standard in 1972.
The lead architect of the Bretton Woods System was economist John Maynard Keynes of Cambridge University. His Magnus opus The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, published in 1936 amidst the great depression, advocated for a new form of capitalism, called “managed capitalism.” In the system he advocated, and adopted at Bretton Woods nearly precisely as he envisioned, the private financial syndicates of New York and London would serve as the financiers of government development and social spending. The result would be inflation in the size of government employment and spending such that it “balanced” (merged with?) the power of industrial interests.
This economic theory was the central guiding force for postwar world development. It advised deficit spending specifically intended to inflate the size of the government sector to over 25%, in time, in countries like France and Sweden to over 45%. The result was a system of managed social-capitalism that sought to balance economic growth with social welfare to eliminate the extremes of either.
In this new system people were to be transformed — through the industrial educational system, rooted in the Prussian Model of the 1830’s mentioned in a previous essay — into busy managers, employees, and consumers of products and services pursuing the “plasticized American Dream.” They were to become spectators of government policy making, leaving the messy “sausage making” process to “the professionals,” 75%+ being lawyers i.e. professional agents who divide their loyalties between “the people” that elected them and the principals of the Imperial culture who provide their funding and lobbied them through a discreet, professional class of “contact men,” the MIC name for lobbyists in the 1950’s.
In 1945 a year after the Bretton Woods agreement with the inevitable collapse of the German-Japan axis, the Churchill-Roosevelt plan for a post-war version of a “United Nations” was made public. The UN was to be the pre-envisioned “solution” to the future “problem” of war. It was clothed in beautiful words and sentiments in its founding documents, all written by the most skillful communicators of the day, but as an institution it was destined to have critical weaknesses from the beginning. A perfunctory multi-racial, multi-national echo chamber controlled by the “big five,” that was to make a mockery of a truly representative consultative process.
It captured the imagination, however, of the growing internationalist peace movements, particularly in the United States and England, and offered a high profile New York venue for representatives of all nations to assemble. It was never, however, intended to govern policy of any substance or consequence. The real international order, where the power would be held and the real decisions would be made would remain in the international financial system and the network of “gentleman’s” clubs and auxilliary venues that had long formed the heart of the Imperial Project.
The United Nations would be the successor to the League of Nations. The League of Nations following World War I may or may not have been a sincere effort at crafting an international order, but it assuredly served dual agendas. On the one hand it was to be a venue for international coordination and peace building, on the other hand it would serve as the venue from which a lattice of international institutions could be created.
John D. Rockefeller Sr., who donated the land and buildings for the League of Nations, and whose son donated the land for the United Nations in New York, was a committed internationalist. It could be argued that his motives combined capitalistic, philanthropic and PR interests.
A careful analysis of the central role the Rockefeller Foundation played in facilitating what came to be known as the post WWII international order, including the United Nations and associated organizations like the World Health Organization, started in 1915 as a project of the Rockefeller Foundation under the name of International Health Division, will clearly show imperial vision in the entire process. Surely people like the Rockefellers and Morgans were not the sole guiding hands, but none more influential.
Churchill, the son of an American heiress whose father was a partner of “railroad & shipping king” Cornelius Vanderbilt, was a former Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–1929) and son of another. He was fully “read in” on the financial operations of New York and London as they had evolved since the earliest days of “The Company” around which the British Imperial Project of the late 1500’s was formed (see our earlier essay on this topic.)
As maybe the leading student of the Nazi build-up, author of The Gathering Storm, he was surely aware of international financial lawyer John Dulles’ (later U.S. Secretray of State) facilitation of American investment in re-building of Germany from 1924 to 1939. Churchill, a professional soldier and war correspondent saw war as a process of “civilization building” and so too did his Imperial patrons, including the Rockefellers (who asked Churchill to write John D. Sr.’s biography, but later “demurred” over price.)
By 1946, John D. Rockefeller’s grandson David, the youngest and most visionary among the “five brothers” — who did his senior thesis at Harvard in 1936 on Fabian Socialism — inherited his grandfather’s big dreams for his family as “guides to humanity.” His family, as with many families of the Imperial Project inspired by the Eugenics movement of the early 20th century, held a belief in the superiority of their genetics. (The Carnegie, Rockefeller and Harriman families as well as many of America’s elite universities are reported to have been at the center of funding this research, including when it spread to Germany in the 1920’s to be adopted by the Nazis.)
David Rockefeller directed not only the largest international bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, was a director of the Federal Reserve, but also served as a, and maybe the, leading advocate for, and beneficiary of the growth of the UN and the Bretton Woods system. He was to serve as its big brother and patron through to his death in 2016 guiding the process through formal and informal networks he or his father or grandfather founded or participated in.
David Rockefeller founded the now infamous Bilderberg Conferences, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a member of others “gentlemans clubs” like the Business Roundtable and the Bohemian Club. All private venues where influential men could “exchange views,” build trust and cooperation, and make plans with assurance of anonymity.
[NOTE: We have written much about the influence of men like J.P. Morgan Sr. and Jr. and John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Jr. as well as now David Rockefeller because the institutions they created still dominate global policy today. These men, their associates, and progeny have been at the center of the Imperial Project for 150 years primarily due to the circumstances of their birth or lives. Having amassed vast wealth and international commercial interests they were the first Americans to adopt global visions for the development of civilization along the trajectory of the Project. Their sons and daughters were raised in this culture and thus, as any child would do, adopted its values, coming to view itself as the “parent class” responsible for guiding and taking care of the less responsible, less well organized, less educated, more child-like masses of people. When the Eugenics theories emerged in the late 19th century they naturally assumed their genetics were favored — they, after all, had risen to the top of the social hierarchy and thus assumed the White-Man’s Burden to colonize the world with “American [business] values.” Were they bad, wrong or evil for doing this? No. They were the symbolic representations of the King, Ruler, Father archetypes within all of us. In this sense, they were our teachers and exemplars for the uses, misuses, and abuses of material power.]
World War II set the stage for the next evolution of a global order. The path to “global unity” had been cleared, but it wasn’t to be the universal unity of the Holy Spirit imagined by medieval theologian Joachim de Fiore (see our essay on this topic.) It was to be a less universal unity, one that emerged from the utter exhaustion of war, particularly by the Europeans who had no energy or means of resisting anything — like the European Union, the fruit of the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community — especially something that sounded so good with its promises of “peace and prosperity for all.”
In psychological terms the forty year Cold War drumbeat of anti-Soviet propaganda can be viewed as a projection, an uncomfortable aspect of ourself we prefer to cast onto others. In fact, the Soviets were proven incapable of world domination, but the more skillful architects of the Bretton Woods system were not. From the perspective of the late 1940’s it was clear who would ultimately win the Cold War — just as with WWII — it would be the Americans.
Compared with the United States, by any measure the Soviets were a third rate industrial power with minimal gold reserves, difficult to develop/export natural resources, and an undereducated population. Their possession of nuclear weapons was their only claim to international power. In other words, they were another “perfect enemy.” One, like Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, that seems very scary and “foreign,” and is in fact brutal, but ultimately destined to self-destruct. The fear of this type of enemy is used as a justification for growing the MIC and consolidating international institutions otherwise unjustifiable in the absence of such a “threat.”
Response to the utopian up-wising
By the mid-1970’s, alarmed by the scale and intensity of the awakening of the social movements, the Imperial Project re-grouped. It was clear they needed more innovative strategies and methods of social control than had been applied in the 1920’s (see previous essay.)
(The re-awakening of the Utopian Culture that became dormant during the Great Depression and WWII is the subject of our next essay, 1948 to 2001 Part II.)
In 1975 a comprehensive study of the events of the previous decade resulted in a report called The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies to David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, a social network of senior U.S., European, and Japanese industrial and cultural leadership. From this social network of international governors and civilization builders emerged a comprehensive set of strategies for “managing the excesses of democracy,” including:
A method for channeling activist energy into “the system” through the creation of the Non-Profit Corporation, a legal form that required anyone seeking to engage in organized social or political activity, including lobbying, to be registered with the IRS and thus be subject to audit and oversight. To organize politically was to be “allowed” but henceforth carefully regulated by IRS Code 501c3 — expanded beyond churches in the 1969 Tax Reform Act — so as to deter extremism. This meant you had to have a bank account, a registered address, and the education, usually a college education, needed to comply with the government regulations. Moreover, to grow your organization required the capacity to raise funds, usually in the form of grant proposals that fully detailed and disclosed the scope of your intended activities.
Related to this method of control was to professionalize and organize the field of “philanthropy” such that anyone seeking to raise funds for a social or political cause would submit a grant application to a foundation thereby making the program officer of the foundation an insider in their nascent social or political venture. The philanthropic community was organized into a couple of national associations and each encouraged, at annual conferences, to adopt a portfolio of causes, each cause having at least a handful of foundations to serve as their assigned “big brother or sister.”
For example, if you were interested in labor rights, saving trees, native American health, teaching children, the rights of the disabled, or legally defending immigrants there was a specific set of foundations you could turn to. These foundations managed the flow of funds (in actuality, often a small percentage of corporate profits designated for these purposes) to their respective portfolios, ensuring that if any became too large, disruptive, or critical of “the system” their funding could be limited or withdrawn or their founding leadership replaced (often justified by “founder’s syndrome.”)
The philanthropic world reflected the corporate and financial world from which it was fed, a hierarchy that recognized who the kings and princes were. The Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations being if not kings, certainly the grand dukes of “philanthropy,” a term that means “love of humanity,” but in practice is too often fearful and mistrusting of humanity’s capacity to self-organize in unpredictable ways.
Another strategy for social control was to expand consumer credit, originally deployed in 1920’s (see our previous essay.) To further addict people to spending “credit cards” were invented in 1958 by the Bank of America. MasterCharge and “competitor” Visa emerged in the 1960's. This device for extending easy credit for impulse purchases was responsible for increasing average household debt from about 40% of annual income in 1955 to over 100% fifty years later. Along with the lower bar for first time mortgages this combined debt burden ensured long term loyalty to “the system” as vital life energy was spent month by month to keep up with payments.
The mortgage is a particularly deceptive and unjust social invention.
By standard banking practice the bank is allowed to simply “create” up to 90% of the funds for a mortgage on its ledger, with only 10% borrowed from a larger bank or taken from deposits. If the home owner defaults due to illness or loss of income, however, even in the last couple years of a thirty year mortgage the bank has first claim on the property thus potentially not only receiving a thirty year stream of payments with interest, but an appreciated asset that can be readily resold at current market value (less legal fees and agent’s commission.) A zero risk, no stress proposition for the bank that returns well over two, some times three times the original mortgage value in the case of late term default especially if the government guarantees the mortgage. The homeowner/employee on the other hand bears a heavy, stress-producing, thirty year burden that often results in sickness or death toward the end of the mortgage. Hence the ominous term for this financial instrument derived from the word mort meaning death.
Yet another social control, the consolidation of the sports and entertainment fields into a “weapon of mass distraction,” ramped up originally in response to the populist movements of 1886 to 1928 (see previous essay), they were ramped up again after the disruptions of the 1960’s. The four major sports leagues, NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL, and later NASCAR became spectacles for venting vicarious aggression not dissimilar to the ancient Roman Forum.
The employee/consumer/homeowner needed to regularly syphon off frustration, anger, and even rage from the monotony and institutional injustice of the industrial culture lest it be turned against “the system.” Sports and mass entertainment also became the means by which black people could be pacified as they watched people of their race transformed into millionaire sports heros, TV and movie stars.
The 1994 murder “trial of the century” of football hero turned movie star OJ Simpson, for example, symbolized just how important such black stars were to “the system.” He was a prince among the relatively small number of high profile black stars who were a needed source of false hope, false pride, and as a syphon for “rage against the machine” for millions of institutionally oppressed black people.
Another old social control strategy, perfected under British rule of its various colonies, has been to “fan the flames of partisanship.” During the time of the Roman Empire this strategy was referred to as divide et imperia. By identifying tribal rivalries and “managing them” a few thousand Romans, and later British, could sustainably govern a colony, in the case of India, of millions.
America is no different. The left-right “conflict system” is rooted in an archetypal need to integrate the values of the father (patriarchal: law & order, military protection, and a healthy economy) with those of the mother (matriarchal: education, equality, clean air, water, food, and social justice.) Shortly after WWII these polarities, otherwise managed well in most functional households, began to sharpen in society, helped along by the culture shaping machinery of the Project. The consolidated news media and public relations industry can now “manage” partisan opinion without anyone ever asking how it is that both “sides” are not only funded, but fueled with basic talking points by the same source (see our analysis of “the men behind the curtain” in our previous essay.)
Yet another social control strategy was the emerging field of digital information gathering on U.S. citizens, a technical improvement to the written lists first compiled by the 1919 Radicals Division (we will discuss its trajectory of Algocracy, government by algorithym, in the next essay.)
It had long been recognized that sufficient data could be recorded about a person to create an accurate profile of his or her behavior and activities. The 1960’s space race gave birth to Silicon Valley which by the 1970’s had matured into a range of companies capable of processing vast amounts of data using recently developed silicon micro-chip technology. Prior to this information era it took humans to gather, process and organize information to create a profile on a non-conforming individual. This was the purpose of the official intelligence gathering agencies (FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA.)
With the advent of the mainframe computer a new means of surveillance came forth that provided accurate information about who was supportive and who was not supportive of “the system” just by analyzing behavior patterns. By the 1970’s “signal” intelligence offered the means of surveilling a far larger proportion of the population than the FBI or NSA had previously had the budget or capacity for. This capacity has now only matured with the merger of private consumer and financial with government databases to include the buying behavior — an indicator of values — of every living American citizen.
Like all such violations of privacy the information stored in these “digital dossier” can and are being misused for the purposes of compelling compliance and intimidating critics, especially if there are aspects of “the file” that would be embarrassing or shameful is disclosed publicly, one of the most valuable fruits of any spy operation.
The roots of this “poison tree of spying” on— then anonymously targeting eachother — can be discerned with not too much investigation. The origins are the British MI5 and MI6 which trace their roots to Elizabethan prime minister William Cecil, Francis Walsingham, Francis Bacon, and John Dee on missions to gather intelligence on the courts of Europe (see our previous essay that addresses this topic including recent patrons of William Cecil’s 500th birth anniversary.)
David Rockefeller was a member of the Office of Special Services during WWII, the organization out of which the CIA emerged. The OSS was founded by “Wild Bill” Donovan a bonafide hero of WWI then, due to his reputation, used by the Rockefeller Foundation and J.P. Morgan to travel the world in the 1920’s and 30’s studying and gathering intelligence on the rise of global communism.
Rockefeller was not only schooled in the strategic value of philanthropy as a means of putting an amicable public face on otherwise unamicable business dealings, but also a means of gathering valuable social intelligence (i.e. “putting out cheese” as a way to determine where all the mice live.) As Cecil knew as far back as the 1580’s when he dispatched Dee, Walsingham and Bacon if you were to maintain your rank it was vital to “knowing everything about everyone.”
The relationship between the FBI, the CIA and the social network around David Rockefeller was very close, giving him and this small group the inside knowledge to intimidate anyone, including a sitting president, whose policy diverged from the Imperial Project’s vision.
By the 1980’s the basic mechanisms for social control were in place to make sure America would not have another major social disruption. With new systems in place it was now mainly a matter of time and further consolidation.
The ’80’s and ’90’s saw unprecedented levels of corporate mergers in direct contravention and circumvention of long established anti-trust laws. Entire industries were “rolled up” such that a handful of players dominated entire commercial fields. In media for example, one corporation, The News Corporation, consolidated previous competitors into one entity, Time-Warner-AOL-CNN, etc., etc., etc.
Prior to this time the social contract among the vast majority of American businesses, most small or family owned, included loyalty between the employee and the employer. When someone had a crisis in their life the employer often tried to support them. This loyalty was reciprocal and created a trusting work environment. This aspect of the social contract changed with the rise in the ‘80’s of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) and Leveraged Buyouts (LBO’s) and the proliferation of the MBA education. Within two decades employee turnover skyrocketed.
Based on backroom MBA analysis, corporations had higher value when sold in pieces as separate business units. The betrayal of trust and destruction of “brand equity” sucked what soul still existed in many corporations out of them. In time, it was more and more “every man for himself,” a lonely, hostile “bonfire of the vanities.” The expectation of loyalty and long term job security were by and large eliminated from the equation. The heart was being eliminated from “the machine.”
By the 1990’s following the collapse of the Soviet Union when most social movements had been successfully mainstreamed by the 501c3 there was an uneasy domestic “peace.” It was broken briefly by the anti-globalization WTO protests, but the approach of the new millennia loomed large on the horizon. There seemed to be an awareness that change lay ahead.
The responses from the Imperial Project to predictions of economic disruption from peak oil, south to north immigration pressure, overpopulation, rapid technological change and climate change, among others — all colored by Christian end times prophesy — was a militarized police force and a redirecting of Cold War military “assets” toward securing Middle Eastern and Eastern Caspian oil (Afghanistan pipeline project.)
In this atmosphere a small group of Neo-conservative think tank experts produced a document called The Project for a New American Century that specifically forecast the need for a “new Pearl Harbor” event to move the American public to support a new, more aggressive global role i.e. yet another unwinnable war, a “global war on terror.”
