"A Full Confession"
by Paul Rosenberg
"You can’t write about this till I’m gone,” he said, “but that won’t be long.” I hadn’t been to Jay’s Bar in a while, but I was invited by my old friend Martin. He was a basically nice guy who ended up working for an elite group.
I ran into Martin at my old gym, as I stopped one day to visit. He wasn’t looking well. I knew he had a fairly serious condition and was getting on in years, but he had been holding it at bay the last time I saw him. This time he was clearly close to his end, and had come to the gym to say his goodbyes. And so, when he invited me to meet him at Jay’s (“the same place I saw you last time”), I had to go.
We sat in a quiet spot, and I listened as he told me how close he was to death. That was two weeks ago as I write this. I saw his obituary this morning but will skip the funeral for reasons that may shortly become clear.
The Confession Begins: Martin ordered a triple scotch. I had never seen him drink before, except for a bit of white wine. But I followed his pattern, ordering a scotch on the rocks. “I have things that I need to tell you,” he began. “You know most of it fairly well, but you’ve never had confirmation before, and that makes a difference.” I nodded.
“I’ve read two of your books and half a dozen issues of your newsletter, you know.” “No, I didn’t,” I replied, “but thank you.” He smiled, raised his glass slightly, and took a big drink. He seemed like he was trying to relax, but his body was limited in its ability to feel comfort. It was an odd and troubling thing to notice. “Let’s start with the industrial revolution, shall we?” “That’ll be fine.”
“As iron and steam power moved across the continent they brought an economic revolution, and political revolutions followed. Through the middle 1800s nearly every monarchy was disrupted in one way or another. The aristocracy was pulled off the stage. Such people, however, don’t just accept displacement, and they fought to retain lordship in some form. I haven’t read it yet, but you wrote on this, didn’t you?” “Yeah, I said that these people seem to have demonetized silver and moved into central banking.” “Well, it wasn’t ‘seemed to.’ They very definitely did.” “Thank you,” I said. And he was right, getting confirmation helped me in some internal way.
He went on. “Land was no longer the store of value it had been since the beginning, and currency was taking over. And so the aristocrats plunged into banking. This put the British royals at the top of the hill, since they retained their positions and had a central bank that used debt as currency.
So the displaced aristocrats opened one central bank after another, on the model of the Bank of England. And since they had connections to Queen Victoria, they could be authorized by the major power of the day, the owner of the most important currency. Central banks became new duchies, keeping their owners in elevated positions.”
Then he stopped and took another long pull from his scotch. He was clearly using it as a painkiller. I took a sip of mine. "You realize that this isn’t going to change anything,” he said. I said nothing and waited.
“I’m telling you these things because I care about you. You’re an honest man, and you shouldn’t be stuck in uncertainty. But telling this to the world won’t change anything. They’ll just tune you out. They already tune you out, don’t they?” “Yeah, Martin, lots of them do.” “It deprives them of illusions. They can’t live without them.” “Well, I’m not sure it’s just illusions. A lot of them are so battered by daily events that the outside voice soon fades away.”
“I think you’re being kind to them, Paul. I have studies saying that they live in a ‘society’ bubble and can’t listen anything outside it.” He had a point, of course, but I quickly responded with, “Not all of them, though.” “What do you mean?” “I have people who’ve subscribed to my newsletter for years. Not a huge number, but still I have them. They pay to hear things that go past the illusions… or at least as well as I can get past them.”
“You do plenty well,” he said, to which I responded with a non-verbal thank you. “And these people stay with you over some significant period?” “Ten years or more for many of them.” “Well, then perhaps there is some hope… but we’re still talking about a tiny fraction.” “True enough,” I admitted.
The Thorn In Their Side: Our conversation paused for a few minutes, while the afternoon bartender came around, asking if we wanted anything else. (We didn’t.) We each had a few of the nuts he left on our table, and we sipped more of our drinks.
“America was a thorn in everyone’s side,” he said. “Even after they had a central bank. These people believed they were given their rights by God… and it made no end of trouble.” “How do you mean, Martin?” “Oil was the big one. None of the rulers saw the internal combustion engine coming, and once it did oil and refining become huge… but Americans owned the mineral rights to whatever land they held. That meant that the greatest new source of wealth was firmly in the hands of plebs… of common people. That was a problem.”
“Yes,” I injected,” I heard an old oil man talking about that once. In Europe mineral rights remained with the rulers, not the land-owner.” “Right, which is why American oil production led the way, and why American oil companies weren’t state-owned, like in Europe. Huge power fell into the wrong hands…” “As your old bosses saw it, at least,” I quickly added.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’m giving you their point of view. But,” he went on, “ that only mattered until the industry was developed. After that, our groups could just hire American engineers. Then they could do things as well as the Americans, and our groups gathered the oil everywhere else.”
Martin continued talking for a while, but mainly about his childhood and early career. Then, he moved back to the problem that America posed to rulers. “In America, at least in the early days, people believed they were the primary factors; that they created rulership structures for their own sake… that the structures had no validity, except to serve them.”
I hesitated at his statement. I had written about this at some length, and while I very much support that concept (and a lot of colonials did too), there were people with power (Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists in particular) who pushed the opposite view. “Aren’t you sounding like an idealist here, Martin?”
He stopped, thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, I suppose I am, but that’s not the case. When you look at it from the perspective of my groups, it seemed that way. In every other country people felt like creatures of the state, but in America we kept running into roadblocks, because people believed the state to be a creature of their own making.” “Ah…” I said. “That would be a frustration on the other side.”
Then he explained that he was the person who got the “We can’t contaminate a culture” dogma into "Star Trek," and into the "Next Generation" series in particular. He had lived and worked in LA for some years and pushed this idea to the money-men behind the venture. “The purpose of the whole thing,” he said, “was to reverse this American ideal. And we were terribly successful. Even the spin-off series maintain the illusion that people derive from cultures, rather than the other way around.”
“It’s funny,” I told him, “that always rubbed me the wrong way, though for the longest time I wasn’t sure why.” He smiled, pleased to have given me a gift. Then he motioned to the bartender and asked for another triple scotch. I demurred. We sat in silence till his drink arrived and he took another two swigs. He was getting drunk by this point, but he was finally sitting comfortably… loosening up in his speech too.
“I’m glad to be back here,” he said while making a wide gesture with his arm. “I grew up with people like these (the half-full bar included pretty much everything from manual laborers to lawyers), and I still like them…” Then he stopped and eyed two men and a woman in the corner who had to be politicians. “Except the little cluster of parasites,” he spat out, which surprised me. “Didn’t you work with politicians?” I asked. “Yeah!” he went on, a bit too loudly, “and do you know how eagerly and cheaply they sell themselves?”
“I have some idea.” “A fraction of one percent of a project,” he said. “So,” I added with a smile, “you’re like Rick in Casablanca. You don’t mind a parasite, but you object to a cut-rate one.” At that he burst into laughter; it was the only time I’d ever seen him laugh like that. Then he composed himself, finally realizing that he was too loud.
“I guess that’s true, but they really are cut-rate parasites. As long as they get enough money for publicity campaigns, they’ll sell you anything you want…” He paused, and looked like he might not finish the thought. “What?” I half-demanded.
He looked at me hard, deciding about something, then went on. “The sickest part of it all,” he said, “is that people respond to them, no matter how stupid they are. Every election they spout the same bullshit, which any sane adult knows is bullshit, and they vote for them just the same.”
“Yeah, I know.” “No, Paul. You don’t!” I waited. “I made a living only because most people support their abusers… they respond to any and every fictional fear… their imaginations are weaponized against themselves.” I paused a moment, then nodded my understanding, not just of his statement, but what he was implying. We sat in silence for what seemed a long time, until his phone rang. It was his wife, who would drive by and pick him up in twenty minutes.
What’s Next: I knew this would be my last time with Martin, and that he didn’t want to speak any further of his failing health and impending death.
“And what of the near future?” I asked. “2009 was a colossal mistake,” he said. “They could have survived a crash then. They had cooperative national leaders and willingness to believe was still riding the 9/11 surge. Plus, there was no alternative to the banking system. A crash would have hurt, but the game would have gone on.
“Now they’ve got people with fear fatigue, sex fatigue, ridiculous rulers and serious alternative currencies. On top of that, European banking is in uncharted waters, tied to a hopeless system of bond-issuance. They’re facing real trouble. They have amazing surveillance systems, but everything else is in question.”
“The surveillance concerns me deeply,” I said. “Yes, I understand… None of us could believe our luck with Facebook and Google. The whole world fell for the oldest scam in the book, selling their souls for services they could have purchased for a few dollars per month. No one expected that.
“But during those same years, politicians became true believers. We have 20-somethings in the US congress, who know almost nothing and who actually believe in socialism, for God’s sake! And we have an inveterate self-promoter in the White House who will do who-knows-what tomorrow morning. The politicians on the left actually believe the bullshit they sell, and many on the right see Trump as a demi-god. Who could have imagined that? It threw a wrench into the gears.”
“So what’s next?” “At some point, something will go wrong and financial structures will break. Already Facebook and their friends are getting ready for the dollar to fail. Wal-Mart’s in the game too. They talk nice, but they’d love to supplant the central banks. And if my group can fight them off, what of Bitcoin? They can’t do everything at once, and they’ve already attacked Bitcoin a dozen times with no enduring effect.”
I asked for an explanation of that statement, and he provided it. “They got the Department of Justice to sell all the Bitcoin they had seized. They did it in coordinated dumps at critical times. They succeeded in beating the hell out of the Bitcoin price, but the thing refuses to die.” I couldn’t help smiling, but remained silent. “Incredibly, the commercial systems of the world may end up resting on your Bitcoin people… if they can bear the load. My groups had the greatest lucky streak in history, but it seems to be running out.”
Then his phone beeped. It was a text from his wife. She was a couple of blocks away and would pull up in front. We started, slowly, to extract ourselves from the booth, pay the bill, and head to the front door. “Do you think your Bitcoiners can survive that pressure, Paul? Can they be the adults in the room?” “I know some of them can, Martin.” “I hope it’s enough,” he said.
His wife pulled over and we walked the five or ten steps to where she stopped. “I won’t see you again,” he said. I hugged him, we both shed a few tears, and I helped him into the car. But before the door shut, he turned and said, “I hope your people can do it.” Then the door shut and he was gone. And so I leave it with you. Can we rise to the occasion and be the adults? Because it might come down to us."
* As noted previously, all events related to Jay’s Bar are fictional, though often related to real people and/or events.
