The only thing more rampant than conspiracy theories are rejections, dismissals and ridiculings thereof. The ratio of blogs and newspaper commentaries reacting against conspiracy theories to blogs and newspaper commentaries positing conspiracy theories must be approaching the critical mass of ten to one by now. So muscle-bound is the reaction against even none-existent conspiracy theories that established orthodox history, even common sense, is being swept aside by the tsunami of hyper-charged, irrational skepticism.

It’s as though mainstream opinion is now gripped by a feverish desperation to disavow the notion there is ever any group of people anywhere ever conceiving of any secret scheme to enrich or empower themselves. The free market ideology, which began as a flakey fringe proposal for how nations should manage (or rather, neglect to manage) international trade accounts, graduated to a political proposal for how all government ministries ought to operate. Largely successful in this, the ideology has now mission-creeped into an overarching philosophy of how all human relations, national and individual, political as well as economic, should be defined.

In this cataracted view, things like wars, currency collapses and investment bubbles “just happen” according to unseen and unpredictable hidden hands that don’t really exist, just like the mysterious forces that move stock markets up and down. If that’s the case, then it really is the end of history because the library of history groans under the weight of stories of small groups of people working in secret to plan and execute schemes of self-enrichment and self-empowerment. If that is no longer the case, the mainspring of history up till now has been radically dislodged.

Somehow, I don’t think so.

Two books, one recent, the other aged but made highly relevant again by recent events in the financial industries, lay bare the mechanics of how economics and societies the world over have been systematically manipulated by small groups of people to take on the shapes and dynamics that we’re familiar with as our day-to-day lives.

Super Imperialism, by Murray Brown, was first published in 1972, whereupon it was translated and released in several languages around the world, and then was updated in 2003 and re-released. In all the libraries of the lower mainland, however, only one copy exists, at Simon Fraser University. It is available, on the other hand, and thanks entirely to the author, in pdf format, freely downloadable at michael-hudson.com/books/superimperialism.pdf.

Soldiers of Reason: The Rand Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire, by Alex Abella was published only earlier this year. The Rand Corporation is the grandfather of, and model for, all think tanks that followed its creation in the 1940s. Initially formed as a private very small university with no students or classes during the Second World War to research questions posed by one client only—the US Airforce—the Rand Corporation diversified in the 1950s and 60s to create the intellectual underpinning for most of what accumulated as US political history in the second half of the 20th Century right up to today.

US political strategies in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, throughout Latin America, Indochina and the Middle East—scenes of egregious interference and much pain and suffering, not to mention the birthplace of more chickens coming home to roost than America can presently handle—all began as “what if?” scenarios first raised in the hallways of Rand.

The Cold War rivalry between Russia and America itself, the defining geopolitical reality of the later 20th Century, was conceived, planned and executed by the Rand Corporation and by alumni of it who went into public office or into headquarters of major corporations with Rand plans in mind. Virtually every name associated with the neo-conservative movement that arrived at its apogee in the first W Bush term came through the Rand Corporation.

Every governing philosophy we find so distasteful today—from BC Premier Gordon Campbell’s first term mania to cut taxes based on the reasoning that that would raise government revenues, to disgraced outgoing Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan’s insistence on “free market” solutions to the chronic housing deficit, to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “corporate voluntarism” approach to environmental stewardship and culture and arts, and his punishment-only approach to crime, all find their cockamamie genesis and philosophical foundation initially in Rand Corporation papers. These were published and disseminated in order to create just such widespread local, regional and national governing regimes tuned in to the needs of, first the US Airforce, and then US national interests generally.

Pinochet’s Chile, Thatcher’s England and Reagan’s America were directly constructed out of models first built up at Rand. And finally, the notion that “free market” relations—the idea that all historical, social, cultural and economic trends in history—are the cumulative product of discrete individual choices aimed always at self-interest alone is itself a notion invented and promoted explicitly by the Rand Corporation as part of its overall aim to aid and abet US national interests. This is ironic since Rand itself perversely debases its own glaring counter-example to this very notion. In itself The Rand Corporation is anything but an example of a “free market” force shaping and conditioning social, economic and cultural trends.

Brown’s thesis in Super Imperialism is that national power, as opposed to the private profit interests of corporations, is what has determined the patterns of 20th Century history, most characterized by chronic and deepening third world debt, massive imbalances in national trading accounts leading to two epoch-defining world wars, and pre-eminent and unprecedented imperial power, embodied in the US.

Balance of payments between nations is the critical factor in 20th Century history, argues Brown, formerly the balance of payments analyst at Chase Manhattan Bank. If private corporate profit were the driver of history, Brown points out again and again, then stability, equality and the rule of law would have characterized 20th Century history. Instead, intentional instabilities, enforced inequalities and profligate rule making and breaking litter that history, highlighted by two wars creating massive destruction of capital and the most uneconomic use of resources, both mineral and human, in the history of the planet.

But this financial instability, economic inequality and inattention to the rule of law that generated massive wars, near nuclear Armageddon, post-colonial pain, and rampant militarism, served, and continues to serve, national power interests well, even while it debases corporate profit interests terribly.

In Brown’s telling, recent capital and credit carnage on Wall Street and among banks is the result of this manipulation and abuse by national power dynamics, not the other way around.

He may be believed or not, but Super Imperialism contains, hands-down, the best, most cogent, exhaustive and understandable explanation of modern financial history available. What’s clear and beyond dispute is that there is no such thing as “free market” relations on the level of trade between nations. There is no escaping the fact of life, a law of nature, really, that national political policy plays an overarching role in establishing parameters and patterns of trade between nations, and hence in all nation’s internal economic lives as well, right down to what will be mined, fished or cut down and what the national work force will do and for how much money and what they will be able to buy with it. Within a system, there could very well be free market accumulations of individual choices, but the system itself, the parameters inside which those choices can be made, are strictly and always the deliberate creation of national power nodes acting in response to other national power nodes.

The defining event in the life of Rand Corporation was the US war in Vietnam. This event also happens to be the culmination of over 300 pages of Brown’s meticulously detailed history of 20th Century financial machinations. The Rand Corporation in a way lost its nerve with this debacle of its own creation. Star of the outfit, Daniel Ellesberg, absconded with the Pentagon Papers, created at Rand, and conspired to have them published in the New York Times in a slow drip drip of revelations—the “leak” Nixon instructed his “plumbers,” Haldeman, Erlichman, Liddy, et all, to fix, of which Watergate was the result. Thereafter, the neo-cons Rand had bred inside its relatively reasonable confines decamped to other new and more radical think tanks unfettered by conservatism, tradition, or more long-range and moderated views of national power. These products ultimately stepped into roles of power itself in the first W Bush administration and took that nation, and the world, to the even greater catastrophe of a US-Islamic world war, and incidentally, bankrupting the nation in the process.

The epilogue of Brown’s book, penned in 2003, has been superceded by events the last few weeks. Read correctly, the collapse of the credit system we are witnessing today marks the opening movements of a massive redistribution of national power, one long overdue, since balance of payments is the key driver of national power, and the US has been in increasingly massive balance of payments deficits for decades.

In the game of nations, Canada customarily places its bets on the favorite. But the horse that’s been leading since the second world war just broke its leg on the back stretch. Time, as Paul Martin said last week, to change our bet.

Unless, of course, you believe that, unlike all previous history, there is no national competition, no small groupings of men conspiring to enrich or empower themselves or their national governments, and no schemes or plots or plans conceived or executed to those ends, nor any effects of them discernible in the society, culture and economy that surrounds you. Unless, that is, you adhere to the plugged-ear idea that there are no conspiracies.