Another urgently needed piece. I haven’t found a single article lately along this line. It’s as if Pentagon spending and the economic collapse are occurring in different universes.
Hi Paul,
This too is part of the new-world-order project. Chalmers notes that esoteric, space-based weapon systems are being developed at great expense, and points out that these have no relationship to today’s military requirements. He attributes this state of affairs to the paranoid fantasies of Pentagon generals, and their lobbying clout. But those weapons are quite suitable to military requirements, if Russia and China stand in the way of achieving global power. And indeed, Putin has made it clear that he has had enough of the US running the world, and China is quite determined to be a dominant regional power.
As you point out we have two economic universes here. For projects which serve the interests of the financial elite, such as bailouts for themselves and a strong US military, uncountable billions are always available with little debate. For everything else, the budget comes into consideration, and belts must be tightened.
Here in Ireland this is particularly blatant. After going 400 billion Euro into debt to fund the bailout, Brian Cowan now insists he must cut 2 billion from salaries in the public sector. Why is that one-half percent so important? Why didn’t he give the banks only 398 billion, and leave the public sector alone? This would have made little difference to the banks’ balance sheets, and a very big difference to public-sector workers and their families.
Blustering Brian explains the budget cuts, by saying that Ireland must be attractive on financial markets in order to fund its deficits. He speaks truth here, for once, and this tells us exactly why there are two universes. When a government is running big deficits, it can only survive by borrowing still more on international markets. The bailouts (conveniently) left all governments with huge deficits, so now the elite bankers can dictate exactly what governments can spend their money on. Run your government our way, or we’ll cut off your credit. Clearly Cowan, and the other heads of state, have been told what the conditions will be for future loans.
And those conditions are quite like those the bankers (via their IMF) have been imposing on the global South for decades with their restructuring programs: cut unprofitable social services, privatize profitable social services, remove regulations, undermine unions and worker protections, meet debt repayments, and fund infrastructure development. While the oil-price increases following 1973 were the means of reducing the South to this kind of debt slavery, it has been accomplished in the West with the bailout schemes.
This scenario of debt-imposed austerity can be compared to the inter-war years in Europe. Then as now, these circumstances provide two benefits to elites. First, the billions in debt repayments go into their coffers. Second, with populations desperate for any kind of relief, it provides the opportunity to engineer a new social regime. In Europe it was charismatic Hitler and Mussolini that were tasked with the social-engineering project. In our case, on a global scale, that task has been assigned to Barak Obama, the charismatic leader that the whole world is watching, through the fawning eyes of the elite-controlled mass media.
With a new world order at the level of governments, and a new economic order following the collapse of global growth, it makes sense to impose an appropriate new social order on the masses. The nature of that social order is not yet clear. Naomi Wolf, in her new book The End of America, makes a strong case that we’ll get outright fascism, just like Europe in the 1930s. She presents her observations very cogently in this Youtube video:
In fact the fascist option has frequently been chosen in much of the postwar South, particularly during the era of the disappeared in Latin America. The School of the Americas specializes in storm-trooper training and torture methods, and South Americans will never forget 9/11 (1973), when the CIA replaced Allende with Pinochet. Naomi may be right that the plan is to move these methods across the Rubicon, from Empire to Rome itself.
In order to keep that option open for us in the North, Bush, the elite proxy who laid the foundation work for Obama, established the infrastructure and legal precedents for unrestrained fascism. With the help of the events of 9/11 (2001), and his launch of the pre-prepared ‘war on terror’, governments throughout the West adopted ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation, giving them total police-state power, whenever they find it necessary, provided only that they declare a ‘terrorist emergency’. Constitutions throughout the West now have an opt-out clause.
Obama hasn’t said much in the mass media that can give us clues about the new social order, but he has made it clear that he has big social changes in mind. He talks about a grand bargain, working together, ending partisanship, rebuilding America along new lines, ‘fixing’ pensions and medical care, taking bold decisions, and leaving behind the limits of the past. His watchword is change, but the details are being deferred while he finishes up the bank robbery that was begun by Bush.
We can get some glimpses into the new social order if we look at some of the things Obama and his top advisors have said off-camera of the mass media. Last July 2nd, Obama spoke in Colorado Springs, and he included these words: