Petrograd connection, planning and statecraft:

Saving nations from financial raiders

Wendell W Solomons

Every writer on economic themes must at some moment quote Adam Smith. So did the Chicago monetarists when during the last 30 years their plans advised removing safeguards and allowing financial buccaneers to invade. Citing reforms for a free flow of capital, they let people choke on rogue instruments that included the shares, bonds or securities of WorldCom, Enron and AIG.

Statecraft had known economics. Yet, it is the 18th Century model of Adam Smith that gained popularity in economic texts. His times granted the Professor of Moral Philosophy of Glasgow University an eminence surpassing all others.

Two millennia earlier Aristotle, serving as tutor to Alexander the Great, had been using the term ‘Oikonomika’ (dictionaries derive ‘economics’ from the Greeks.) Further east, advisor Kautila, serving Indian royalty, evoked several volumes entitled ‘Artashasthra’ (‘Worth Treatise’.) It is in year 1757, that we track down the facts that led to the eminence that Adam Smith obtained. In that year, Benjamin Franklin, himself an esteemed elite and Freemason, was asked to account for the wealth of the American colonies across the Atlantic. Here are words recorded when he was called to speak before the British Parliament on wealth:

“That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.”

Franklin’s economics on the role of currency was too much for private financiers.

Their union, the Bank of England had been incorporated on July 27, 1694, as a joint-stock association with a capital of œ1.2 million. The company received the right to issue notes and a monopoly on corporate banking in England in return for an immediate loan to the king of the entire treasure.

They had calculated that such a loan would never be repaid by the king whereas interest would keep accumulating in their hands. (1) The king would thus be obliged to their company (2) while they collected interest in perpetuity on the loan and also received authority to print and issue banknotes as counterpart to treasure. This system would advance their power in the land by leaps and bounds.

After Franklin’s economics, the financiers sped into counter-attacking the American colonies to force them to give up the idea of issuing their debt-free currency, a competitor. Their Bank of England, influenced Parliament.

King George III signed the Currency Act of 1764 to decree that the colonies stop printing their own money. Staging financial terrorism, the bankers also saw to the dispatch of shiploads of counterfeit Colonial Scrip, to contribute to economic depression in the colonies.

Benjamin Franklin recorded, “In one year, the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed.”

This led the colonies into warfare with Britain and two decades later the rebels decided on the unilateral declaration of independence on July 4, 1776.

The Government of George III, however, continued warring with the colonists on money floated by the same financial city of London.

To be continued