August 24, 2006 –
The first task of becoming wealthy is to shed yourself of almost all of the beliefs surrounding investing that you’ve been taught. Most people, no matter where they are educated, go through their educational life learning to become robots whether they realize it or not. The “authority” figure tells them that A+B= D and if the student disagrees and argues that A+B = E , then he or she is given a less than satisfactory grade. So students spit back what the teachers tell them to think, they receive good grades, and the reward for good grades is a good job. But in the process, all remnants of any critical thinking ability are destroyed.
The financial elites throughout history have always sought to control the financial non-elites to retain their power. They accomplish this goal not only through the obvious – by controlling the global money supply, but also through the subtle- by controlling the educational process. In reference to the former, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a patriarch of one of the wealthiest families in the world and a member of one of the most influential banking families in history, once said “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes her laws.”
Control the Money Supply & You Control the People
American elites realized this as well. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, J.P. Morgan consolidated the railway system in the U.S., and then tied fortunes of railway systems to the fortunes of banks and the fortunes of banks to the fortunes of insurance companies. By doing so, he was able to control much of the money flow in the United States. While J.P. Morgan controlled wealth by controlling the railways and U.S. banking systems, John D. Rockefeller controlled all of the petro-dollars in the United States by consolidating all oil refineries and forcing all refineries to sell to him. From oil, Rockefeller moved on to control the iron, coal, shipping and banking interests in the U.S. as well (through Chase Manhattan Bank). Not to be outdone, J.P. Morgan formed U.S. Steel Corporation and formed a virtual monopoly controlling all steel prices in America.
Control the Educational System & You Control the People
When controlling the money supply was not enough, the elites turned to controlling the thought processes of the masses through education. The financial elites founded almost all of the top universities in America including Temple University, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford. Joel Spring’s book Education and the Rise of the Corporate State stated “the development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century classroom was not accidental”. Russell Conwell, a member of the wealthy elite, validated this comment with the statements he made before founding Temple University in Philadelphia:
“The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community….ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men in America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with our money…It is because they are honest men….the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins….is to do wrong.”
In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, masses of students were trained to conform in their thinking and any dissent to the teachings of these universities was controlled by the doling out of poor grades. Even though this was a hundred years ago, not much has changed with the “modern” educational system. For the most part, conformity still is King in the classroom. I distinctly remember one class in which I completed an essay examination where I dissented with the professor. Though I crafted entirely well-constructed arguments to support my dissenting view, the professor “rewarded” my critical thinking with a C+. On the next examination, having learned my lesson, I spit back exactly what I knew the professor wanted to hear, and for my utter lack of critical examination of any of the critical exam issues, I was rewarded with an “A”.
Be a Critical Thinker
In seven years of higher education at the finest learning institutions of America, I can recall just two professors that not only encouraged, but rewarded critical thinking, Professor Renee Fox at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte at the University of Texas. Though I have forgotten the names of many of my other professors, these two professors stood out so much that I can never forget them.
Professor de Uriarte taught me that I could never consider myself educated on any national or global matter if my only source of news was the mainstream media. Why? Because the mainstream media is controlled by the elites and thus filters and censors content so that the masses only receive the content they want you to know. Not much is different in the financial world and this concept was the basis upon which maalamalama was founded. In the first year that I discarded all my beliefs about investing that had been taught to me by Fortune 500 companies, the annual returns of my investment portfolio skyrocketed from 1.5% to over 40%.
Prior to abandoning everything that I had been taught by these companies, I had never earned more than 10% a year from my investment portfolio. This increase was not because of an exceptional year in the stock markets. In fact the major index in the markets I was primarily invested in at the time returned just 6% over that same time period. The change occurred because I realized that the concepts I had been taught were utter nonsense and that there was a much better way to invest.
Thanks JKIM