The Following is an excerpt from “Empire of Debt”

“Democracy! Empire! Freedom! Nation building!” The ideas are cast into the murky lagoon of human affairs as if the words were clarifying magic.  Suddenly, wrong is as distant from right, as day from night.  Good from bad… success from failure… how clearly we see things in the crystal waters of our own delusions!

The United States congratulates itself as being the finest democracy the world has ever seen, but the system for ruling Venice eight centuries ago was also democratic.  People voted for people who voted voted for other people, who then voted for yet more people who elected the doge.  The whole idea was to allow ordinary people to believe that they ran the nation, while real authority remained in the hands of a few families-the Bushes, Kennedys, Gores, and Rockefellers of thirteenth-century Venice.

“So easy is it to decieve the multitude,” say Mrs. Oliphant. “The sovereignty of Venice, under whatever system carried on, had alway been in the hands of a certain number of families, who kept their place with almost dynastic regularity undisturbed by any intruders from below-the system of the Consiglio Maggiore was still professed to be a represenative system of the widest kind; and it would seem at the first glance as if all honest men who were da bene and respected by their fellows must one time or other have been secure of gaining admission to that popular parliament.”

To Mrs. Oliphant’s dictum on the multitude, we add a corollary: It is even easier to decieve oneself.  Today, rare are the Americans who are not victims of their own scams.  They mortgage their homes and think they are getting richer.  They buy Wall Street’s products as though there were gambling in Las Vegas and believe they are as clever as Warren Buffet. They went to the polling stations in November of 2004 and believed they were selecting the government they wanted, when the choice had already been reduced to two men of the same class, same age, same schooling, same wealth, same secret club, same society, with more or less the same ideas of about how things should be run.

In Washington, DC the United States Senate meets in the same solemn deceit as the Consiglio Maggiore-pretending to do the public’s business.  While down the street, America’s own doge, George W. Bush, takes up where the Michieli and the Dandolos left off: trying to hustle the East.

Making a very long story short, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as at the beginning to the twenty-first, may people saw a clash of civilizations coming and sharpened their swords.  They were, then as now, the same civilizations, clashing in about the same part of the world- the Middle East.


More tommorrow