After having returned back home to Berkeley last week, I assumed that I was finally finished with writing about Mexico City -- but apparently not.
One of the top images from there that still keeps popping into my brain, one that I apparently brought back home in my luggage, is a flashback to Mexico City's glorious main cathedral -- and that image still haunts me. From floor to ceiling, it seemed like the whole place was garishly covered with gold. Gold. Gold everywhere you looked. So now I feel compelled to write about that.
All that wealth in just one single church. Enough gold to keep me and all of my friends in riches for the rest of our lives.
But the wealth in just this one cathedral represents only a minuscule fraction of the fabulous tons and tons of gold that Spain extracted from Latin America a few centuries ago -- so much gold. Scrooge McDuck woulda gone nuts.
But what actually happened to all that gold? Did it make Spain rich? Sure, for a while. Spain used to be the richest nation on earth. But then wars were declared and squabbling began and this and that happened -- and then suddenly all that wealth was gone, just gone. https://www.amazon.com/Visions-Lost-Future-World-Stillwater/dp/1532803850/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Which reminds me of the vast wealth of another nation -- ours. America also used to be the richest nation on earth. Not any more. First Franklin Roosevelt died and the Dulles brothers and Richard Nixon schemed their evil schemes to steal what they could from the New Deal. https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Chessboard-Dulles-Americas-Government/dp/0062276174
And what ever happened to all that gold in Fort Knox -- let alone all that gold in the Social Security slush fund. And then 9-11 happened, the most evil scheme of them all -- and eleven trillion dollars in "war" blood-money suddenly began disappearing down this or that rat hole too. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/16/donald-trump-v-the-spooks/
And now America, like Spain, is no longer the richest nation in the world. What the freak happened? This and that. http://www.mintpressnews.com/genocide-in-yemen-media-complicit-in-us-saudi-war-crimes/224106/
Mexico City still has its grand gold-encrusted cathedral to remind us tourists of what the power and glory of the old Spanish empire used to look like. But we Americans don't even have something like that left to remind us -- except perhaps the glaring monument of our gigantic national debt.
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Republished from Jane Stillwater's blog at http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2017/01/all-that-wealth.html
Comments
Sheila Newman
Sun, 2017-01-22 13:15
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On the subject of stolen gold
What about Gadaffi's gold? What was it, $53b? Where did that go? Got to be the biggest single recent financial mystery on the planet, and should fuel novels similar to King Solomon's mines. I'll race you to write one. You will probably win because I have so much else to write. And the Vatican, of course.
By the way, Henry VIII got a lot of cash from the new bourgeois traders who brought back the gold from the Americas when he sold off the monasteries in exchange for bourgeois cash in the 16th century. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I went into industry stimulation, importing skilled immigrants and big business. That tradition stood the Brtish royals (and their many cousins) in good stead as coal smelting technology was developed and mining towns evolved into corporate structures. Oliver Cromwell came from bourgeois stock who bought into british farms with their slave and gold money and he used a rump formed largely of his relatives to rig parliament to convict Charles I.
You can read about all these things (except Gaddafi and the Vatican) in my book, (cheapest at Lulu) DEMOGRAPHY TERRITORY LAW 2: LAND-TENURE & THE ORIGINS OF CAPITALISM IN BRITAIN By S.M. Newman
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