Last March I published an article titled, “The power behind the throne and the forever wars” in which I explored the ultimate, systemic causes behind the West’s insatiable appetite for war. Forever wars have become normalized, part of our everyday reality. In an article in the American Journal of Public Health, a group of American researchers made the following claim:
“Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq.”
In other words, the US started more than 80% of all wars between 1946 and today. For a democratic society, one would have to conclude that the American people are irredeemably bellicose and consistently demand more wars. But as we know, that’s exactly contrary to the truth. With the exception of George W. Bush’s second term, Americans invariably voted for anti-war candidates. And yet, they always ended up getting more wars. Given that all these wars impoverish Americans and kill millions of people around the world, it should be important for us to understand where exactly this insatiable appetite for war originates and how it becomes policy.
The hardwired pursuit of war
Each new war is heavily marketed and duly justified to the voting public: we had to fight the Communists, then the terrorists or some dangerous new Hitler like Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Ghaddafi, Bashar al Assad or Vladimir Putin. Tomorrow it’ll be someone else’s turn, always for one good reason or another. But the wars never end, and the propaganda only conceals the true incentives for war that must be systemic. Somehow, it’s become hardwired in the Western systems of governance. These questions have been the motivating drive behind my research for decades now. In last year’s article, I wrote as follows:
“In untangling the causal factors behind the many crises we face today, the trail of breadcrumbs always leads to the international banking cartel which appears to have the determining influence shaping the system of governance under which our societies operate. … In particular, the banking interests appear to be the key movers behind the perpetual warfare we are witnessing today. The better we understand the way the systems work, the more the saying, “all wars are bankers’ wars” rings true. … it has never been about democracy nor about freedom. It is strictly about banking and about the collateral. … Truly, the only group in society to whom the control of collateral makes any difference are the bankers, making them the main group with the incentive to foment forever wars for control of resources.”
I recently came across an important and concrete corroboration of all this. In an article titled “How stolen Alberta oil keeps creating $9 trillion in fraudulent collateral,” political economist Regan Boychuk revealed important insights into the way incentives for war become policy. He made the case that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was about keeping Iraqi oil off the world market in order to maximize the value of 175 billion barrels of newly ‘proven’ Alberta oil resource.
At the time of the Iraq invasion, I worked as an oil market analyst and followed the events very closely, which is why I found Boychuk’s case very surprising. As he meticulously traces the events in the US and Canadian oil politics and connects them to the Iraq invasion, Boychuk arrives at conclusions that are staggering, yet compelling and entirely credible. Before we dive in, I wanted to acknowledge the reader who brought this article to my attention, only I meanwhile lost track of who it was: thank you, this was very valuable to my research!
The real objective of the 2003 Iraq invasion
Boychuk believes that the real objective of the US invasion of Iraq was not to steal Iraqi oil but to keep it off the market in order to boost oil prices and thereby maximize the value of collateral in the form of Alberta oil whose production had been ramping up since the late 1990s. “The same day Marines pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue, completing the occupation, the US officially recognized 175 billion barrels of bitumen reserves as proven and thus legal collateral for private money creation.” That very day, then-US Energy Secretary Edward Abraham said that, “From now on, when the Americans talked oil, they would be counting the reserves sitting beneath the forests of northern Alberta.”
If that was indeed the plan, it was successful: when the US invaded Iraq on 20th March 2003, Brent crude oil was trading at around $25 per barrel. By the summer of 2008, it surpassed $146/bbl. The average price of oil during this period was just over $59/bbl, more than double what it was in 2003.
It appears that the operation was planned very extensively, and nearly every aspect of it was criminal and fraudulent, from the rationale for Iraq invasion to the way Alberta’s “proven” oil reserves were tallied up to an amazing 175 billion barrels, which would make it the world’s largest oil field, worth $9 trillion in legal collateral. For comparison, the total of Saudi Arabia’s magical, inexhaustible oil reserves supposedly amount to some 260 billion barrels.
An epidemic of financial crimes
We must ask, why was this done, who took control of the collateral, and what was it used for? As Boychuk explains, the control over the massive new collateral was taken by Rockefeller banking interests in the United States. “The bulk of the new credit was used to inflate the giant housing bubble…” The whole operation was, in fact, a massive criminal conspiracy: less than a year after the US takeover of Iraq, the FBI warned publicly about an “epidemic” of financial crimes that could become “the next Savings & Loans crisis.” As we would soon find out, it did exactly that, only on a much, much bigger scale. The Alberta oil collateral was what made those financial crimes possible.
The $5 trillion mountain of mortgage debt inflated the epic 2000s housing bubble, whose inevitable bursting precipitated the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. As it usually goes with criminal conspiracies, profits accrued to the conspirators while the inevitable crash devastated the ordinary people: no large bank went bankrupt, no high-level banker faced criminal prosecution, but eight million American families ended up losing their homes. In the aftermath of the crisis, the bankers were rewarded for doing “God’s work” with at least $16 trillion in bailouts as detailed in the 2011 Government Accountability Office audit.
Other, independent researchers arrived at higher figures, as much as $29 trillion. As a longtime market analyst, I’m always inclined to double whatever bad numbers government agencies concede. In that sense, the $29 trillion figure probably strikes closer to the truth. How much money is $29 trillion? It’s more than $85,000 per man, woman and child living in the US – a very handsome loot if you know how to plan and execute it.
The experts’ groupthink echo-chamber
But before we delve into the most relevant ramifications of this history, I wanted to take a brief detour to address another fascinating aspect of this affair. As I mentioned, as these events were unfolding in the early 2000s, I worked as an oil market analyst. Oil market is the world’s largest and most closely studied commodity market. As such, it has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of real time data collection and news gathering, along with an entire army of analysts and institutions pouring over all that information every hour of every day, and producing thousands of market intelligence reports every year.
I studied hundreds of these reports, seeking to understand the economic fundamentals that drove oil’s unprecedented price rise from $25 to $146 per barrel. None of those reports – literally none of them – took the finance aspect into consideration. Other than acknowledging the rather obvious war-for-oil relationship, none of the reports suggested the possibility of a criminal conspiracy driving the events. And of course, none of them came even close to predicting the developments during those years. That fact alone should be a huge revelation.
As I documented in my book, “Mastering Uncertainty in Commodities Trading,” the world’s leading oil market forecasters were collectively stuck in a groupthink echo-chamber, producing clever-sounding but worthless analyses, along with hopelessly wrong forecasts. I summarized the two-year forecasts by the world’s leading institutions submitted to the U.S. Energy Information Administration in 2003:
All the submitted forecasts for 2005 were clustered between $19 and $24 per barrel. Indifferent to these authoritative predictions, crude oil reached over $66/bbl that year, more than three times higher than the average EIA forecast. Of course, like the rest of the analysts, I did not understand the real reasons behind this large-scale price event.
But the event did reinforce my view that analyzing economic fundamentals was an utter waste of time and that large-scale price events always unfold as trends. If prices are going up, you go long – that’s it. Perhaps in another 20 years or so, we’ll understand why they went up, but meanwhile, take authoritative market analysts and their forecasts with a large boulder of salt. This probably applies to “experts” in other domains too, including medicine, history, geopolitics, etc.
Returning to our story… the evidence presented by Regan Boychuk suggests that the events were driven by a high-level bankers’ conspiracy…
Random events or criminal conspiracies?
Boychuk’s compelling case that high-level banking interests determined the most momentous events in our recent history is profoundly disturbing. As we go about our lives, our perceptions of global events are shaped by the available information and by the narratives propagated through the media. These narratives never explore the possibility that important events stem from high-level conspiracies.
To the contrary, as soon as people begin to suspect foul play, the narrative police scornfully dismisses and ridicules the loopy conspiracy theorists. Instead, we’re encouraged to believe that things just happen – randomly – because, honest errors, misguided regulations, political opportunism, incompetence and perhaps excessive greed. We are always promised ‘lessons learned,’ and all else gets flushed down the memory hole.
One group always wins
But we have to ask the question: if all those ingredients consistently benefit one group in society while harming all others, could it be that the group that benefited also orchestrated the events? Perhaps they had a hand in formulating the regulatory measures and legal loopholes exactly for the desired effect? Perhaps they also empowered the right “incompetent” politicians and instructed them to do their bidding? And perhaps they also created the system of incentives that drives the prey into their nets?
Long ago, a famous member of this group proclaimed, “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!” In other words, if the bankers hold real power, it matters little who the presidents, prime ministers or kings are. Napoleon Bonaparte understood this all too well when he said that, “When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation.”
The sporadic revelations
This all cuts to the obscure means and relationships that determine the ways our societies are governed. They are obscure because they couldn’t withstand the light of day, and therefore must be concealed and difficult to discern. However, they aren’t entirely invisible and if we pay careful attention, every so often, evidence about the way things really work surfaces through unexpected disclosures, testimonies or through patterns of events. Last February for example, former British Prime Minister Liz Truss gave us a stonker of a revelation. Truss appeared in Steve Bannon‘s War Room and said this:
“What I found out when I got into No. 10 is, I thought that if I got to the top of the tree, I would be able to implement those conservative policies… And what I discovered was that I was not holding the levers. The levers were held by the Bank of England, by the Office of Budget Responsibility, they weren’t held by the Prime Minister or the Chancellor…”
Truss went on to point out the obvious problem with this: you can sack the Prime Minister, but you can’t sack the BOE officials who hold the levers of power. Around the same time of that revelation, Glenn Beck dropped a similar clue. In an interview with Tucker Carlson published on 21 February 2024 he shared a story of his encounter with George W. Bush:
“I thought of something George Bush told me in the Oval Office. I was asking about the policies and how they were going to change, and he said, ‘Glenn, don’t worry, whoever sits behind this desk, in that chair, is going to have the same advice given by the same advisors and they’ll realize, the President’s hands are tied.’ I walked out of that room horrified… Why do we even have elections?”
It would be interesting to know who exactly were these same advisors that give advice to US Presidents whose hands are tied? Was it they who advised George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003? Were they doing God’s work then, because that same George W. said that, “God would tell me, ‘George, go fight these terrorists in Afghanistan, and I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did…” Whoever this God was, it’s important for us to recognize that the relationships which George W. and Liz Truss revealed, have been the defining feature of our “democracies” for a very long time.
In 1924, Britain’s former finance minister, Reginald McKenna said that, “… banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.” In 1844, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said that, “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Sir William Pitt, Prime Minister in 1770 wrote that, “A long train of these practices has at length unwillingly convinced me that there is something behind the throne greater than the King himself.” As we now know, that something is the moneylending oligarchy or the financiers.
West’s pathogenic march of history
Indeed, the role of financiers largely defined the pathogenic march of Western civilization. This may sound harsh, but the same basic methods they used to drive eight million American families into foreclosure while causing the deaths of over a million innocent Iraqis have been employed and refined for centuries now. The quest for Alberta oil was motivated by the same pathological greed as the quest of gold, copper, tin, rubber, coffee, spices, cobalt, or lithium in other parts of the world at different times.
We can now better understand how and why, since the 15th century, Western colonial powers destroyed six major indigenous civilizations around the world (Mayas, Incas and Aztecas, India, China and Japan), along with thousands of lesser cultures, tribes and kingdoms. In the process, the colonial powers largely depopulated the native peoples and replaced them with uprooted slaves. The driving motivation has always been an economic one: an unrestrained quest for collateral needed to fuel the financiers’ wealth-extraction process. As James Galbraith reminded us, “There is no such thing in economic life as a nonfinancial event … Finance is the only way to understand the economy.”
Historian Ramsay MacMullen said that if we are to interpret history correctly, we need to understand the motivations of groups and individuals who shaped it. I believe that Regan Boychuk’s expose on Alberta collateral contributed an important insight, not only into the bankers’ motivations, but also the means and ways by which they execute their plans. The events around Alberta oil, Iraq invasion, the housing bubble, and the subsequent bank bailouts were certainly not random: it is clear that they were orchestrated by powerful interests in our society for their own benefit and without regard for the harm they caused to so many millions of their victims.
It’s time to change course
The fact that no high-level banker was criminally prosecuted for any of this suggests that the perpetrators and their enablers who walked away with a colossal loot were never subject to law enforcement in the same way that the rest of us are. The impunity they enjoy under our magnificent democracies virtually guarantees that they will keep on doing it. In fact, they’re doing it now: today we’re witnessing a scramble for Ukraine’s resources and a revamped scramble for Africa. The drive to destroy Russia is motivated by the desire to take control of Russian resources.
The financiers and their minions will never relent unless and until they face accountability. But we need to do more than just demand accountability for the crimes committed. If we want to build a world of peace and prosperity, we’ll have to rewrite our societies’ operating systems. We, the people, must demand sovereignty and empower ourselves to plan a future rooted in a genuine love of humanity. How do we do that? We must simply claim that sovereignty and use it. This place – this planet – is our birthright; we do not need anyone’s permission to claim it.
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