-Caveat Lector- Kris Millegan wrote: > > A funny thing is, that if ya follow the ships, first, slaves, sugar and rum > then some ships did duty in opium, then coolies, and last as oil tankers. While we're on the subject of Bob's interesting postings, and how "if ya follow the ships...", here's something Bob posted to your list this past winter which was REALLY interesting (if memory serves, Das Goat also thanked him for posting such "classic Bucky"). an exerpt from: "Critical Path" Legally Piggily, by R. Buckminster Fuller -repost- Meanwhile in history, we have millennia of people venturing forth on the world's waters-developing the first rafts, which had to go where the ocean currents took them; then the dugouts, with which they paddled or catamaraned and sailed in preferred directions; and finally the ribbed-and-planked ship, suggested to them by the stout spine and rib cage of the whales, seals and humans-stoutly keeled and ribbed, deep-bellied ships. With their large ships made possible by this type of construction, sailors came to cross the great seas carrying enormous cargoes-vastly greater cargoes than could be carried on the backs of humans or animals. Ships could take the short across-the-bay route instead of the around-the-bay mountain route. The Phoenicians, Cretans, and the Mycenaeans, together, in fleets of these big-ribbed and heavily planked ships, went to Troy and besieged it. Up to this time the besiegers of Troy had come overland, and they soon ran out of food. But the Troy-besieging Greeks and Cretans came to Troy in ships, which they could send back for more supplies. This terminally-turned-around voyaging back to the supply sources and return to the line of battle was called their "line of supply." The new line-of-supply masters-the Greeks-starved out the Trojans. The Trojans thought they had enough food but had not reckoned on the people besieging them having these large ships. The Trojan horse was the large wooden ship-that did the task of horses-out of whose belly poured armed troops. At this time the power structure of world affairs shifts from control by the city-state to the masters of the lines of supply. At this point in the history of swiftly evolving, multibanked, oarand sail-driven fighting ships, the world power-structure control shifts westward to Italy. While historians place prime emphasis on the Roman legions as establishing the power of the Roman Empire, it was in fact the development of ships and the overseas line of supply upon which its power was built-by transporting those legions and keeping them supplied. Go to Italy, and you will see all the incredibly lovely valleys and great caste/los commanding each of those valleys such as you saw in the typical city-states, and you can see that none of those walls has ever been breached. Also in Italy-in the northeastern corner-is Venice, the headquarters of the water-people. The Phoenicians~phonetically the Venetians-had their south Mediterranean headquarters in Carthage in northern Africa. In their western Mediterranean and Atlantic venturings the Phoenicians became the Veekings. The Phoenicians-venetians....in their ships voyaged around the whole coast of Italy and sent in their people to each caste, one by one. The Venetians had an unlimited line of supply, and the people inside each costello did not. The people inside were starved out. Thus, all of the regional masters of the people in Italy hated the Venetians-Phoenicians... veekings who were able to do this. There being as yet no Suez Canal, the new world power structure centered in the ship mastery of the line of supply finally forcing the Roman Empire to shift its headquarters to Constantinople some ten centuries after the fall of Troy. The Roman emperor-pope's bodyguards were the Veekings-Vikings, the water-peoples' most powerful frontier fighters. The line of supply from Asia to Constantinople was partially caravan-borne and partially water-borne via Sinkiang-Khyber Pass-Afghanistan or via the Sea of Azov, the Caspian and the Black seas. >From Constantinople, the western Europe-bound traffic was rerouted from overland to waterway routes. Because the Asia-to-Constantinople half of the trading was more land-borne-via-caravans, whose routes were dominated by the city-state-mastering Turks, Constantinople in due course was taken over by the Turks who established the Byzantine Empire in the Aegean Sea and Asia Minor. Before leaving the subject of the great power-structure struggle for control of the most important, greatest cargo-tonnage-transporting most profitable, Asia-to-Europe trade routes, we must note that the strength of the Egyptian Empire was predicated upon its pre-Suez function as a trade route link between Asia and Europe via the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, overland caravan to the Nile, and then water-borne to Alexandria, or via Somaliland, overland to the headwaters of the Nile, and thence to Alexandria. The latter route was not economically competitive but was the route of travel of the ship-designing and -building arts that in due course brought the stoutly keeled, heavily ribbed, big-bellied ships into the Mediterranean. We have seen the Greek Alexander the Great crossing Persia and reaching the Indian Ocean, thus connecting with the Phoenician trading to Asia. A thousand years later the Crusaders�ostensibly fighting for holy reasons�were the Indian Ocean�Phoenician-Venetian-Veeking water-borne power structure fighting the older overland�Khyber Pass power structure over mastery of the trade route between Asia and Europe. In our "Humans in Universe" chapter we spoke about the 600�200 B.C. Greeks' discovery that our Earth is a sphere and a planet of the solar system. This was the typical scientific product of a water-navigation people. We witnessed also the originally horse-mounted Roman Empire's destruction of such knowledge, as their earlier grand strategy sought to reestablish the Asia-to-Europe trade pattern via Constantinople and the inland, overland, Khyber Pass route. This explains why the power structure saw fit to Dark-Age-out the mariners' spherical concept. It explains Ptolemy's 200 A.D. conic map's cutting off the around-Africa route mapped by Eratosthenes 400 years earlier. With the world three-quarters water the bigger ship-producing capability was the beginning of a complete change in the control of human affairs. Higger and better engineering was developed. The rival power structures were focused on the water supply lines. The Romans' overland road to England became obsolete. The Phoenician ships sailing out through Gibraltar into the Atlantic outperformed them. This shifted the battles among the world trade-route power structures from on-the-land popular visibility to popularly unwitnessed seascape. Long years of great battles of the corsairs, the pirates of the Barbary Coast, and so forth were unwitnessed and unknown to the land people. Who the power structures might be became popularly invisible. Finally, bigger ships got out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, around Africa to the Orient, and then around the world. Thus, "those in the know" rediscovered that the world is a sphere and not an infinitely extended lateral plane. Great battles ensued--waged under the flags of England, France, and Spain--to determine who would become supreme master of the world's high-seas line of supply. These great nations were simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery. Always their victories were in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures were always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers. Because the building of superior fleets of ships involved a complex of materials to produce not only the wooden hulls but the metal fastenings and the iron anchors and chains and the fiber ropes and cloth sails, and because woods from many parts of the world excelled in various functions of hull, masts, spars, oars, etc., large money credits for foreign purchase of these and other critical supplies brought control of the sea enterprising into the hands of international bankers. The building of invisible world-power-structure controls operates in the following manner. Suppose you know how and have the ambition, vision, and daring to build one of these great ships. You have the mathematics. You have the positioning of numbers that enables you-or your servants to calculate the engineering data governing the design of hulls, spars, rigging, etc., and all the other necessary calculations for the building of a ship capable of sailing all the way to the Orient and returning with the incredible treasures that you have learned from travelers are to be found there. One trip to the Orient-and a safe return to Europe-could make you a fortune. "There are fabulous stores of treasures in the Orient to be cashed in--if my ship comes in!" The building of a ship required that you be so physically powerful a fighting man-commanding so many other fighting men as to have a large regiment of people under your control-that you must have the acknowledged power to command all the people in your nation who are carpenters to work on your ship; all your nation's metalworkers to work on the fastenings, chain plates, chains, and anchors of your ship; all those who can make rope and all the people who grow fibers for your rope; all the people who grow, spin, and weave together the fabrics for your sails. Thus, all the skilled people of the nation had to be employed in the building and outfitting of your ship. In addition you had to command all the farmers who produced the food to feed not only themselves but also to feed all those skilled people while they built the ship-and to feed all your army and all your court. So there was no way you could possibly produce one of these great ships unless you were very, very powerful. Even then, in building ships, there were many essential materials that you didn't have in your own nation and so had to purchase from others. You also needed working cash-money to cope with any and all unforeseen events that could not be coped with by use of muscle or the sword-money to trade with. It was at this stage of your enterprise that the banker entered into the equation of power. Up until 1500 B.C. all money was cattle, lambs, goats, or pigs-live money that was real life-support wealth, wealth you could actually eat. Steers were by far the biggest food animal, and so they were the highest denomination of money. The Phoenicians carried their cattle with them for trading, but these big creatures proved to be very cumbersome on long voyages. This was the time when Crete was the headquarters of the big-boat people and their new supreme weapon-the lines-of-supply-control ship. Crete was called the Minoan civilization, the bull civilization, worshipers of the male fertility god. The pair of joined bull's horns symbolized that the particular ship carried real-wealth traders-that there were cattle on board to be exchanged for local-wealth items. The Norsemen with their paired-horn headdress were the Phoenician, Veenetian, Veeking (spelled Viking but pronounced "Veeking" by the Vikings). Veenetians, Phoenicians. (Punitians, Puntits, Pundits. Punic Wars. Punt = boat = the boat people. Pun in some African Colored languages means "red," as in Red Sea.). The Veekings were simply the northernmost European traders. The Veekings, Veenitians, Feenicians, Friesians-i.e., Phoenicians, Portuguese-were cross-breeding water-world people. Graduating from carrying cattle along for trading in 1500 B.C. the Phoenicians invented metal money, which they first formed into iron half-rings that looked like a pair of bull's horns. (Many today mistake them for bracelets.) Soon the traders found that those in previously unvisited foreign countries had no memory of the cattle-on-board trading days and didn't recognize the miniature iron bull horn. If metal was being used for trading, then there were other kinds of metal they preferred trading with people--silver, copper, and gold were easy to judge by hefting and were more aesthetically pleasing than the forged iron bull horn symbols. This soon brought metal coinage into the game of world trading, with the first coin bearing the image of the sovereign of the homeland of the Phoenicians. This switch to coinage occurred coincidentally at just about the same time as the great changeover from city-state dominance to line-of-supply dominance of the power-structure group controlling most of world affairs. This was the time when the Phoenicians began trading with people of so many different languages that, in need of a means of recording the different word sounds made by people around the world, the Phoenicians invented phonetic spelling-Phoenician spelling-which pronounced each successive sound separately and invented letter symbols for each sound. With phonetic spelling human written communication changed very much-from the visual-metaphor-concept writing of the Orient, accomplished with complex idea-graphics (ideographs), several of which frequently experienced, generalized cartoons told the whole story visually. It was a big change from ideographs to the Phoenicians' phonetic spelling, wherein each letter is a single sound-having no meaning in itself-and whereby it took several sounds to make a whole word and many such words to make any sense-i.e., a sentence. This is the historical event that Ezra Pound says coincides with the story of the Tower of Babel. Pound says that humanity was split into a babble of individually meaningless sounds while losing the conceptual symbols of whole ideas-powerful generalizations. You had to become an expert to understand the phonetic letter code. The spelling of words excluded a great many people from communicating, people who had been doing so successfully with ideographs. This gradual alteration of world trading devices from cattle to gold brought about the world-around development of pirates who, building small but swift craft, could on a dark night board one of the great merchant ships just before it reached home, richly laden after a two-year trip to the Orient, and take over the ship and, above all, its gold. With the gold captured, the pirates often burned the vanquished ship. As already mentioned in our Introduction, it was in 1805, 200 years after the founding of the East India Company, that the British won the Battle of Trafalgar, giving them dominance of all the world's lines of supply. They now controlled the seas of the world. It was said by world people that the British Empire became the first empire in history upon which "the sun never set." In order to get their gold off the sea and out of reach of the pirates, the British made deals with the sovereigns of all the countries around the world with whom they traded, by which it was agreed from then on to keep annual accounts of their intertrading and at the end of the year to move the gold from the debtor's bank in London to the creditor's bank in London to balance the accounts. In this way they kept the gold off the ocean and immune to sea pirate raiding. This brought about what is now called the "balance of trade" accounting. The international trading became the most profitable of all enterprises, and great land-"owners" with clear-cut king's "deeds" to their land went often to international gold moneylenders. The great land barons underwrote the building of enterprisers' ships with their cattle or other real wealth, the regenerative products of their lands, turned over to the lender as collateral. If the ship did come back, both the enterpriser and the bankers realized a great gain. The successful ship venturer paid the banker back, and the banker who had been holding the cattle as collateral returned them to their original proprietor. But during the voyage (usually two years to the Orient and back to Europe) the pledged cattle had calves, "kind" (German for "child"), and this is where the concept of interest originated, which was payable "in kind"-the cattle that were born while the collateral was held by the banker were to belong to the banker. When the Phoenicians shifted their trading strategy from carrying cattle to carrying metal money, the metal money didn't hai'e little money"kind"-but the idea of earned interest persisted. This meant that the interest was deducted from the original money value, and this of course depreciated the capital equity of the borrower. Thus, metallic equity banking became a different kind of game from the original concept. In twentieth-century banking the depositors assume that their money is safely guarded in the vaulted bank, especially so in a savings bank, whereas their money is loaned out, within seconds after its depositing, at interest payable to the banker which is greater than the interest paid to the savings account depositor and, since the metal or paper money does not produce children-"kind"-the banker's so-called earned share must, in reality, be deducted from the depositor's true-wealth deposit. The merchant bankers of Venice came to underwrite the Venetians' (the Phoenicians') voyaging ventures. Such international trade financing swiftly became the big thing in the banking game. The "Merchant of Venice"Shylock and his "pound of flesh forfeit" of the debtor-was Shakespeare's way of calling attention to the fact that the bankers' "interest" was in reality depleting the life-support equity of both the depositors and the borrowers. It was the financing of such international voyaging, trading, and individual travel as well as of vaster games of governmental takeovers that built the enormous wealth-controlling fortunes of early European private banking families. It was under analogous circumstances of financing inter-American-European trade that, in the late nineteenth century, J. P. Morgan became man of great power. By having his banking houses in Paris and London, Philadelphia and New York, he was able not only to finance people's foreign travel, all their intershipment of goods, and to give letters of credit, but also to finance and control major "new era" railroading, shipbuilding, mining, manufacturing, and energy-generating enterprises in general. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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