Friends,
That latest article, "The Post-Bush Regime: a Prognosis", seems to be
spreading all over the internet. I Googled for the words in the
title, and got 14,500 hits. I then Googled for exact matches on the
title, and got 3,510 hits. My thanks to Jim Macgregor, who has been
sending the article to all the websites he's subscribed to. Global
Research seems to be a powerful way to reach people, and so I'll need
to write a follow-on article for them.
This posting is my first draft of that article, so your comments will
be welcome.
____________________
I came across a very intriguing article in the NY Times by Peter
Goodman , Dec 30: "The Free Market: A False Idol After All?"
http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?id=2981&lists=newslog
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/weekinreview/30goodman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
This headline really grabbed my attention. The free market has been
the unquestioned economic story line ever since Reagan's day. What
does it mean when the NY Times -- the flagship of US propaganda --
begins undermining that story line? My attention was grabbed even
more by this quote I noticed in the article: "Untethered market
forces lead to bad things", said Mr. Bernstein of the Economic Policy
Institute. "You simply can't run an economy as complicated as ours on
ideology alone". The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a well-known
neo-conservative think tank-- from which one expects only neoliberal
economic views. What's going on here?? Why are they implicitly but
obviously calling for regulatory interventionism? This brings to mind
as well the recent statements by the Federal Reserve, implying that
new regulations were needed in the credit game.
Keep in mind that this shift from the Economic Policy Institute does
not represent any new economic insight on their part. Everyone with
any smarts, including them, always knew that the free market was
destructive to national economies. Indeed, the purpose of the
neoliberal project was to undermine national sovereignty in general.
This EPI statement is a propaganda shift, a shift in 'the story line'.
Also keep in mind that the US has never really observed the
principles of neoliberalism. We forced other nations to open their
markets, and drop their subsidies and tariffs -- by means of the WTO
and IMF -- but we always reserved the right to ignore those
principles in our own case, as for example with agricultural
subsidies, and the time we prevented China from buying an
American-owned oil company. We never have been running our economy
"on ideology alone". Again, we see that this statement by the EPI is
a change in the story line, not a new insight.
Certainly this EPI shift does not indicate that capitalism is being
abandoned, but it does represent a significant turning point. As long
as neoliberalism was the unquestioned story line, that meant
capitalism was still on the upsurge, still the core of elite
management strategy. If neoliberalism is beginning to fall from
favor, and if this is going to be reflected in the story line, that
suggests the tide of capitalism has passed its highest point, and is
beginning to recede. In other words, capitalism may be past its peak
as a clique tool, and this NY Times piece might be one of our first
signals to that effect, along with the statements by the Federal
Reserve.
And there are indeed good reasons why capitalism should be falling
from favor in the eyes of our clique -- who always look at everything
from a long-range perspective. Capitalism, as a fundamental economic
model, no longer makes much sense for them. Growth for growth's sake
has been a very powerful tool of wealth accumulation over the
centuries; it's done its job well for those at the top of the
financial pyramid. But that growth has now collided with an immovable
barrier: the finiteness of the Earth and its resources.
Certainly our clique intends to continue exploiting and plundering,
but the capitalist formula, objectively speaking, has now served its
purpose -- and its dynamics no longer serve our clique as they have
in the past. The evidence of this lies before us, as the
hyper-inflated capitalist financial bubble is beginning to burst
world wide, and the American economy is kaput. Purely from a
management perspective, isn't it clear that it's time for a
reorganization of the system?
In any case, the rest of this analysis will be based on these five assumptions:
(1) - The neocon agenda is no longer the core of clique tactics.
(2) - The neocon agenda has spread dissent and led people to lose
faith in the system.
(3) - Major programs are going to be launched around climate change
and new energy sources.
(4) - Capitalism is no longer sacrosanct as a basis for economic policy.
(5) - The US economy is in shambles.
Many of us have feared that an economic collapse was in the works --
there is certainly much evidence for that at the moment, with
subprime mortgages, deficits, and all. That fear led us to the fear
that martial law would be imposed, in order to control the resulting
chaos -- and we saw the Patriot Act as being the preparation for
that. That scenario was a core part of the neocon agenda, and that
scenario too I think has now been abandoned, or at least postponed
indefinitely. There are, given our assumptions, better ways to
proceed.
From the clique's perspective, I'd want to set up the next
administration to really turn things around -- to take bold steps to
create a situation that would move Americans back into their comfort
zone. The PNAC agenda was about outright fascism, which made sense if
your plan includes a period of economic collapse combined with more
aggressive warfare. But if the iron boot of fascism won't be
available to control the masses, it makes sense to avoid economic
collapse and 'bring the masses back onside' -- to restore American's
faith in the system. While Bush gave us only fear and dissent, I'd
want the new administration to cheer everyone up, put a smile on
their faces. And nothing cheers folks up like a positive economic
turn around. If capitalist ideology is no longer sacrosanct, that
provides the flexibility needed in order to create such an economic
turn around.
What we are likely to see, then, are a bevy of major government
economic programs, quite different than those of the New Deal, but on
a similar dramatic scale. It's like this time we're getting our New
Deal just before an economic collapse was going to hit, without
having to actually live through another Great Depression. And indeed,
another Great Depression would be inevitable without economic
interventions on the scale of the New Deal. Even the bankers are
beginning to hint in this direction, as they contemplate their debt
write-off nightmare.
The Grand Banner of these economic programs will of course be the
Gore agenda, 'doing something' about climate change and peak oil.
That's been signaled quite clearly. Even the major fronts in the
campaign have been signaled: biofuels, research in and deployment of
new energy technologies, more efficient automobiles, carbon taxes,
and carbon credits. Many of these programs are already well underway,
but that hasn't been emphasized in the media. Thus the new
administration is provided with a head start on their programs, and
will be in a position to take all the credit for them.
This kind of economic agenda could indeed generate a lot of economic
activity. Government-funded development programs could fan out into
increased employment, for example. Or subsidies and taxes could be
used to develop new technologies and create markets for those
technologies -- and we could get a little boom-cycle out of something
like electric cars or solar cells. There is a foundation here, upon
which could be built an economic-recovery program. But if we really
want to put a smile on America's faces, there's a lot that needs to
be added to this foundation.
For one thing, no one smiles if they and their children have no
health insurance. If we are indeed prepared to take 'bold steps' --
which I think makes sense for our clique at this time -- then we can
expect the new administration to implement some kind of program that
ensures all Americans have at least a minimal level of medical
security. That would certainly make the politicians popular as well.
Similarly, unemployed folks don't smile much, and increased
employment needs to be part of any economic recovery program. Thus we
can expect the new administration to undertake programs that are
effective in moving us toward full employment, more so than we might
expect from a Gore agenda alone.
The big problem of course will be how to fund such a neo-New Deal.
According to capitalist economics the US is bankrupt, deeply in debt,
and is hemorrhaging cash-flow losses. We have our fingers crossed
that China won't dump it's deteriorating dollar holdings, but we
certainly can't expect them to fund a New Deal for us by buying up
massive new government security offerings. If capitalism is
sacrosanct, a neo-New Deal is not feasible. If capitalism is no
longer sacrosanct, then a neo-New Deal becomes feasible.
Indeed, any new economic game is always feasible, as long as there is
freedom to declare a new set of rules. Our economy is nothing but a
game, a game played with tokens issued by the Federal Reserve, tokens
whose value and availability is determined by the Federal Reserve. If
they decide to issue a new set of tokens, and base their value on
some new story line, they can do so. Their currency never has been
based on anything real. We've always needed to close our eyes and
trust them in order to get on with life. They've always counted on
that, and they can still count on it.
If they want to change the rules of the game -- the tax, credit, and
regulatory framework -- they can do so. If they want to insulate the
American economy from the global economy, they can do so. If they
want to create a game that operates without economic growth in token
terms, they can do so. If they want to turn the game into a command
economy, they can do that as well. Us peons will be cheered up by
whatever game delivers the goods. We always are. And when we're
getting the goods, we believe we are living in democracies. That's
when our clique feels most secure. The most domesticated of all
sheeple are the ones who believe they are free.
Although the economy at one level is a contrived game, there do need
to be some real resources available for exploitation in order to fuel
real economic activity. And here we can begin to see some of the
pieces of the picture coming together. The Gore agenda -- biofuels et
al -- is all about re-allocating the resources of the Global South to
fuel the engines of the Industrial North. It's a global version of
seizing the Great Plains from the American Indians. Let's look at how
this works in a particular case, the case of Brazil, whom Washington
recently persuaded to begin a massive program of biofuels production.
Biofuels make a lot of sense to Brazilian farmers. They can get a
good price on global markets relative to other agricultural products.
And every farmer loves a strong and reliable market for his products,
and there it is for biofuels -- all those cars, trucks, ships, and
planes running around in the world. If global energy prices go up,
that's all the better for the farmers; the biofuel prices track up
along with them. For Lulu, closing a deal with Washington for biofuel
production scores easy political points with the whole farming
sector. But what does it mean for Brazil? And how much do the farmers
really benefit?
For the Brazilian people, it means their food supply will be reduced
by the same amount that biofuel production increases. If sufficiently
many farmers switch to biofuel production, there will be famine and
starvation in Brazil. If the new administration pushes really hard
for more biofuel production, they are in effect waging a campaign to
starve as many Brazilians to death as possible.
When you take away a people's land, their source of sustenance, for
your own use, you are condemning them to either death, exile, or
virtual serfdom on the land that was theirs. This is true whether you
occupy the land, as we did when we Won the West, or whether you gain
control over the land by other means, such as a strong market price
for biofuels. As we run our fuel-efficient cars, and our Industrial
North, increasingly on biofuels, we are as surely invading Brazil as
if we were doing it with covered wagons and the cavalry. To the
extent we can maximize the conversion of suitable land to biofuel
production, to that extent we are pursuing a path of genocide in the
Global South.
As regards the farmers, they will be little more than serfs, whether
on their independent farms, or as laborers in industrial farming
operations. As in all agricultural sectors these days, the farmer
gets a subsistence price for his products, the consumer pays a
premium price, and the middle men -- the distributors and the
financiers -- get the lion's share of the profits from the overall
transaction. The ultimate 'biofuels vision' would turn the global
South into one big biofuel plantation, and the only people living
down there would be the plantation slaves and their bosses. Once
again we'd have the Industrial North, and the Slave Plantation South,
only this time the South would be producing something the North could
use, instead of growing cotton for export elsewhere.
Who knows, by following such a colonial vision, it might actually be
possible for the automobile, much improved, to survive peak oil.
Given people's attachment to their cars, they'll be able to
rationalize whatever is required to keep those cars purring along.
Keep in mind that it was only a minority of western pioneers who
actually encountered the Indians, and who thought that 'the only good
redskin is a dead redskin'. The bulk of the population in the East
was comparatively liberal and sympathetic to the Indians. And yet
they acquiesced in the systematic genocide, as their 'great nation'
pursued its 'immanent domain'. In general liberal Northerners have
adjusted very well to imperialist excesses of all sorts, particularly
if they perceived themselves as being well off. If it means people
can keep their cars, they won't be in any mind to connect the dots to
mass famines 'down there', which the media will be only to eager to
blame on unfortunate natural causes.
I've been focusing overmuch on biofuels, I fear, as they provide such
a rich picture of the nature of the Gore agenda. In fact, the
appropriation of the resources of the Global South has been the
hallmark of imperialism from the beginning, and a fully exploited
South would not be devoted exclusively to biofuel plantations. There
would also be mines, oil wells, cattle and coffee plantations, slum
factory zones, etc, each area producing whatever it is most efficient
at producing. What is special about the biofuel program is that it
signals a 'final assault' on the Global South, the launching of a
'final solution' to the problem of exploiting the resources of the
South.
Instead of interventions and intrigues, tin horn dictators and market
forces -- instead of all these troublesome mechanisms of indirect
resource management, we are now going for the jugular, the food
supply. We are setting out to clear the land for our use, so that we
can keep the Industrial North running. Most of the people on the land
are for our purposes now redundant, what Kissinger -- author of that
infamous Government report on population control -- refers to as
'useless feeders'. We can see this final solution in operation
already in Sub-Saharan Africa, where six million children die each
year from disease and starvation, and the genocidal process is helped
along by destabilizing interventions of various kinds, while the
media blames it all on droughts and tribal conflicts.
In the decades following World War II the Industrial North
experienced a boom period, under capitalism, based on opening up the
Global South ('Free World') to exploitation by capital generally, no
longer restricted by the old colonial boundaries. Now that the
capitalist growth paradigm has collided with the immovable barrier of
the Earth's finite resources, a bold new strategy is required in
order to keep the engines of the Industrial North running. And once
again that strategy will be based on finding a way to more
systematically exploit the resources of the Global South. The time
has come, evidently, to take a 'final solution' approach to that
exploitation.
At the same time, this strategy is likely to include a shift away
from growth-based economics and the capitalist paradigm. Acquiring
exclusive use of the resources of the South provides the engines of
the North with considerable fuel of various kinds, but the Earth
remains nonetheless finite. An economic game designed more along
feudal lines would be a more suitable response to the reality of
finiteness. We'd want a game where wealth is measured in terms of
'resources controlled', rather than by 'success in speculative
ventures' -- where people play fiefdom games of various kinds, at
various levels, rather than always seeking to innovate and displace
old ways of doing things, thus generating growth and waste. Our
clique can run the casino for such a game, and rake in its desired
take from each transaction, just as well as with any other game.
Capitalism has always been just a tool, the game of choice for a
time. Five hundred years is a long life-span for any paradigm. Did
the Roman Empire last longer?
In such a more feudal-like game environment, we're going to see a
major reversal in the tides of globalization. We're going to see a
resurgence of territoriality and regionalism. China is already
organizing its region in that way, with the SCO and related
initiatives. China has long expressed the desire, nay the natural
right, to regional hegemony, and it seems sincere in wanting only
that. Self-containment is a very long tradition in Chinese culture.
In the expansion of the EU into the former Soviet Block, we see the
creation of another viable regional block, even if it might have been
created for other reasons, under an earlier game plan. Russia fits
nicely into a game of territories, being so vast on its own, and with
a wealth of resources that its neighboring blocks are eager to buy at
market price. A reunion with some of the old Soviet Block to the
south would make a lot of sense for both parties.
This brings us to the North American Union, and the new Amero
currency. Canadians seem to be a lot more aware of the NAU than are
folks in the US. To most Americans (by which I usually mean the US
variety), the NAU is just another conspiracy theory. Canadians on the
other hand have long felt colonized by America, both culturally and
economically. Particularly recently, with both free trade treaties
and heightened security malarkey, Canadians can see that they are
becoming more and more integrated into a North American system of
some kind. They have been much more alert to what's going on, and
they've been tracking the somewhat covert progress of this other
regional block, the North American Union, which is to be made up of
Canada, the US, and Mexico, and which is to have a new currency, the
Amero.
Canada has lots of resources and relatively few people. It's got
uranium, timber, water, wheat, and much else. Mexico brings to the
party lots of cheap labor, lots of good agricultural land, and a
variety of resources that can be more systematically exploited with
the help of some investment in modernization. The NAU amounts to a
colonial expansion on the part of the US, a bit like England
absorbing Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in earlier days. On paper
there might be some kind equality in the arrangement, but in reality
it will be the US operators and the US part of the economy that will
get the lion's share of the benefits. For Mexico, the NAU may turn
out to be a good thing nonetheless, if it spares them the holocaust
being prepared for the Global South.
Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution present us with two alternative
possible futures for South America. The Bolivarian alternative would
be by far the best one for the people of South America. This
alternative would lead to South America as a regional block in its
own right, with its own relatively adequate resource base, oil and
all. This alternative would however save South America from the fate
of the Global South, and hence would seriously reduce the total
resource base available for exploitation by the Industrial North.
As much as I love and support Chavez, and pray for his noble efforts
to succeed, I fear that a resurgence is very likely in covert
interventions in the left-leaning South American upstart nations.
Perhaps there will even a return to the era of the dictators and the
disappeared. The rest of the world, each busy building their own
regional havens, would be quite happy to tolerate US imperialism in
South America -- its traditional back yard -- if in return Washington
reduces its meddling in the rest of the world's affairs, hence the
PNAC rein-in. Our clique cannot afford to let South America achieve
its liberation. In a regionalized world, an Industrialized North
America needs South America as its own regional share of the Global
South, along with whatever it can grab in Africa and elsewhere (eg,
Kenya). The Monroe Doctrine lives on. The new biofuel program in
Brazil is the harbinger of the onslaught to come.
As for global warming, Some people will need to migrate or move to
higher ground. That's all that can really be done in any case. The
Co2 time bomb has already been unleashed, and any continuation of an
Industrial North, even a less wasteful one, guarantees that climate
change will not be reversed any time soon. Besides, as we've seen
with New Orleans and the Southeast Asian tsunami, climate change can
be a handy expediter of the genocide, clear-the-land agenda. Naomi
Klein writes about this in her excellent book, "The Shock Doctrine:
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". And indeed, Shock Doctrine and
Disaster are apt characterizations of the Holocaust scenario we are
on the verge of initiating, as we go for the jugular in the Global
South, using market forces to starve the natives off the land.
rkm
--
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