Friends, Up until December 3rd, it was very difficult to predict what might happen in 2008. We had every sign that a nuclear attack was being prepared for Iran. There was talk of the neocons declaring a national emergency, suspending the Constitution, and cancelling the next election. Basically, the neocons seemed to be out of control, deranged almost, and we didn't know what might be coming our way. On December 3rd, when the National Intelligence Estimate was made public, declaring that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, it immediately became apparent that the Iran attack was off, simplifying the picture a bit. In the ensuing days, by watching how Bush was responding to the new circumstance, it became apparent the cancellation of the Iran project was not something that was wanted by the White House. Higher ups had made the decision. As subsequent events have unfolded, it becomes clear that more than Iran was cancelled. The whole neocon program is being rapidly reined in. I talked about these things in great detail in an earlier posting, "dialog on recent themes". But that analysis didn't try to anticipate very much about the next administration, except in broad strokes. I think the picture is now beginning to come into focus. It took me a while to put the pieces back together again, after the December 3rd announcement shook up the table a bit. I think we can see the focus of the next administration by watching Al Gore. He's going around preaching the gospel of climate change, and that is rapidly becoming the new cause celebre for the 'international community'. It's more than a campaign by Gore, we're seeing a campaign being supported by the mass media, by the powers that be. We are clearly being prepared for a 'new show', after the 'Bush show', and the 'new show' is going to be about carbon taxes and credits, new energy sources, more efficient cars, biofuels, and all those other things that are allegedly related to climate change and peak oil. In order to clear the way for the new show, it seems pretty clear that the new administration will begin with some easy political wins, by rapidly cleaning up some of the obvious messes left by the neocons. Closing down Guantanamo, and declaring that rendition flights have been abandoned, would gain a lot of points at no real cost (secret flights and prisons would undoubtedly continue). Iraq has already been destabilized and prepared for balkanization, and permanent US bases have already been built. Another easy win will be for US troops to withdraw to their bases and the oil fields, for the war to be declared over, and for Iraq to be split up into ethnic provinces, leaving them to squabble among themselves. It can all be portrayed in the media as a 'victory for peace and democracy'. What then, can we expect from this new show? What consequences are likely to follow from implementing the kind of policies that Al Gore and the media have been talking about, around climate change, energy independence, etc.? At a general level, it is clear that those kinds of policies do not involve fundamental changes in how our societies operate. We'll still have cars, only they might be a bit more efficient, and we'll be paying more for fuel and taxes to operate them. We'll still be shipping products from China that we could produce locally, and we'll still be depending on long-distance trucking. We'll still be using agricultural methods that are highly petroleum-dependent, for tractors, fertilizers, and pesticides. Research and development of new energy sources will lead to lots of government subsidies, and it may get us a bit more energy, but not nearly enough to replace petroleum. As long as our transport and other infrastructures remain basically unchanged, we remain unsustainable, dependent on petroleum, and none of the Gore-like initiatives change the overall energy picture, carbon picture, or climate picture in any significant way. On the face of it then, the whole new show is destined to fail. Climate change will not be alleviated and peak oil will loom as alarmingly as ever, albeit postponed for a bit. Are we to assume then that our new leaders are stupid? I have found that the presumption of 'government incompetence' is seldom a useful assumption in evaluating the behavior of governments. We only reach such a conclusion if we take their official rhetoric at face value. In terms of 'achieving democracy', the official rhetoric, Bush has been 'incompetent' in Iraq. But in terms of the real agenda -- building permanent bases and controlling the oil -- he has in fact been successful. I have found that this is always the pattern: some real agenda is always being achieved by the policies in force, despite the apparent bungling in terms of the official agenda. In order to begin figuring out what the 'real agenda' is, behind Gore-like policies, let's look first at one example: biofuels. Producing biofuels does give us another energy source, but it also removes land from food production. As a consequence of the already-existing biofuels market, market prices for grain and other potential biofuels are now being driven by energy prices. Global food prices are therefore rising rapidly, while at the same time food-production acreage is being reduced. These two things will directly and drastically increase world hunger, particularly in the poorest regions. A Gore-inspired administration will be promoting an expansion of biofuel programs on a global scale, and it will be patting itself on the back for its noble energy-saving deeds. All of this will be occurring in a context where we are facing a global food crisis generally. We haven't seen many headlines on this topic, but the world is sitting on the brink of a major food crisis. Emergency stockpiles are at low ebb, production levels are down, crop failures are up, etc. It's a very nasty picture. In this context, the net consequence of a major biofuel agenda comes down to intentional genocide. In order to provide marginally more fuel to the over-consuming industrialized nations, untold millions will starve in the third world, in addition to those untold millions that are already starving. The marginal energy gain is so small by comparison, that we must accept that the biofuels agenda is PRIMARILY about genocide. However when we begin reading about new famines breaking out, perhaps in Brazil where biofuels are now going into massive production, the headlines will blame it on droughts, or crop failures, or some other excuse, as they always do. We will meanwhile feel a 'green glow' every time we fill up our Prius with biofuels, unaware of what damage we are doing. And perhaps we'll donate to Oxfam, or adopt some third world child and send them letters. An Gore agenda is simply genocidal imperialism hiding under a new mask, a new show. Instead of killing off the Indians by killing their buffalo, it kills off populations by removing their access to food in other ways. Once again, 'they' must be sacrificed so that 'our' way of life can continue and expand. We might note here that more Iraqis died under Bill Clinton's sanctions that have been killed in the current Iraq war. In Bill Clinton's time the pattern was invisible genocide, rather than the more violent Bush variety. Apparently in Hillary Clinton's time we are to return to that earlier invisible pattern. Clearly the consequences of a Gore agenda are genocidal, but one might question whether that is a primary intended outcome. I've been suggesting that it is, and I think more elaboration is in order on that point. I haven't made the case very well yet, I've merely presented some of the evidence and suggested a pattern. In order to get a proper perspective on this issue, we need to step back a bit, and consider the bigger picture of the industrialized world vis a vis the third world, in the face of a broad range of mounting resource shortages. It seems very clear that the industrialized nations have no intention of changing the basic path they are on. More industrial growth, more energy consumption, continued use of energy-intensive agricultural methods, etc. The energy band-aids of a Gore agenda make no significant difference in this picture, they simply proclaim the intention to proceed with business as usual. The only way the industrialized North can continue on this path is by taking over more and more of the third world's resources for its own use. As the industrial appetite for resources continues to grow at a rapid rate, and as our global resources are increasingly stressed, we are going to see a very rapid expansion of third world hunger and starvation -- the globalization of African-scale famines. This is inevitable while the North stays on this basic path, whether we have Gore-like policies or some other set of policies is of little consequence. This 'inevitability' of mass die-offs in the third world is well known to those who run the industrial nations, the ones who give us alternate versions of Clinton and Bush to be our leaders and set our temporary agendas. From the perspective of the heights of power, the question becomes, "How can we manage these die-offs so that they cause the least disruption in the global economy, and so that they don't arouse too much public outcry?" Of course once you begin managing die-offs, then you are engaging in genocide, ie, arranging for particular populations to die in preference to others. The pattern for the management strategy has been made very clear in Sub-Saharan Africa, where all those civil wars, genocidal atrocities, droughts, and famines have been occurring. Not many people realize that these disasters have been systematically imposed on Africa, by means of IMF requirements, covert destabilization programs, the widespread distribution of modern weapons, the manipulations of international banks, the dedication of agricultural land to Northern consumption, and the list goes on. Not only is Africa being starved to death by market forces, but the process is being accelerated by covert genocidal interventions. In Africa we see a full-scale Holocaust, a massive genocide program in process, or should I say we see it not. For in the media it's nothing like that. We read that 'tribal conflicts have flared up', but we don't hear about the two CIA bombings that were each blamed on the 'other side', and which ignited the fracas, a fracas that could become a civil war. We read about a famine due to 'drought', and we aren't told that there would be plenty of water if it weren't for all the coffee-export plantations using up the local water. We don't see genocide, we see Africans befallen with unfortunate miseries, all due to the vagaries of Mother Nature. Thus the pattern of managing die-offs becomes clear. It has been tested satisfactorily in Africa, and we can expect the proven pattern to be employed in future. They pick a population that they consider 'redundant', they undertake a program of acquiring that population's resources, and then to speed up the process of removal they engage in various covert acts of genocide. In this way the world's population can be whittled down piecemeal, and manageably, as the North gradually requires the utilization of ALL the world's resources for its own exclusive use. Unfortunately for the North, even that won't be enough to enable industrial growth to continue. The South is being killed off only that the unsustainable North can continue as it is a wee bit longer. Meanwhile, the media in the North paints a picture in which only nature causes famines, and the role of the North is always to provide aid, to the extent it can. Concerned viewers are given convenient numbers to call, so they can dispel their concern with a simple donation that will 'save a child', or 'give a family a goat'. No genocide around here; we're the good guys. See no evil, feel just fine. By the way, too bad about those famines over there. The Gore-style policies are not just genocidal, they are formidably genocidal. When they start taking massive amounts of land out of food production, and bring about a substantial increases in global food prices, in the face of an already stressed world food situation, they could bring about in a very short time -- one harvest season -- famine on a scale we have never have seen before. How serious the outcome is depends entirely on how aggressively the new administration pursues the Gore-style agenda. They've got genocide down to a science, with tunable parameters. Apparently, having field tested Holocaust tactics in Sub-Saharan Africa, a decision has been made to go global with the program. For this purpose, the Gore-style policies have the potential to be the appropriate Weapon of Mass Destruction, the equivalent in the starvation game to nukes in the kill-by-fire game. This decision to go global was evidently made some time ago, no doubt just before Gore was asked to make "An Inconvenient Truth". The film was the first signal of which way the winds were going to blow, the first preview of the 'new show'. The primary mission of the Hillary administration, under the banners of 'doing something about climate change and peak oil', will evidently be to undertake a massive resource grab in the global South, leading to the selective and massive elimination of certain populations through starvation. In other words, the mission is to expand the starving-Africa model globally, a process that will presumably be helped along by the usual shadowy suspects in their usual destabilizing roles. My big fear with the Bush regime was the likely attack on Iran...or was it the unleashing of the Gestapo? It was a close race in those dark days. Now we are on the verge of a regime bent on genocide on a scale that would put the Nazis to shame. I suggest that we have escaped the kettle only to fall into the frying pan. I hope no one out there has any romantic notions about the new administration, and I hope everyone realizes that the political process can never be used to solve our problems; that system is in fact the heart of our problem. I also hope it is clear to everyone that global genocide is an inevitable consequence of the continuation of this insane capitalist system, whether you agree with most of my analysis or not. And in the end, capitalism can't last anyway. Only when you have reached that deep level of hopelessness, where you see no avenue of escape, can you clear your mind enough to begin to see where the real problem lies. The real problem lies, my friends, in the fact that you and I have nothing to say about how our societies are run. Any one of us has more sense than the people who are running things, and we certainly have our fellow beings more at heart. Our problem lies in our own powerlessness, leaving power in the hands of those who always abuse it, in one way or another, in one age after another. Our challenge as a sentient species, and our response if we seek to do anything about the growth-thru-genocide agenda, is to begin to empower ourselves, us ordinary people, without reference to the useless political process. How to pursue our empowerment must be the aim of our investigations, and pursuing that empowerment must be the point of our activism. happy new year, happy empowerment, rkm -- -------------------------------------------------------- Posting archives: http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/ Escaping the Matrix website: http://escapingthematrix.org/ cyberjournal website: http://cyberjournal.org How We the People can change the world: http://governourselves.blogspot.com/ Community Democracy Framework: http://cyberjournal.org/DemocracyFramework.html Film treatment: A Compelling Necessity http://rkmcdocs.blogspot.com/2007/08/film-treatment-compelling-necessity.html Moderator: •••@••.••• (comments welcome)
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