Financial Bombshells: Greece and JPMorgan

By Bill Holter
July 02, 2015
Global Research

 

Not that almost any and all news today is enough to make you scratch your head, two pieces of news yesterday were bombshells!  I am talking about Greece’s stance of staying IN the Eurozone and the Zerohedge article regarding JPMorgan “cornering” the global commodity markets.

Let’s first start with Greece, who could have seen this one coming?  They are taking the stance “Greece and ONLY Greece” can decide if they leave the EU.  Greece Threatens ‘Unprecedented’ Injunction Against EU To Block Grexit  I believe this is correct, there is no law allowing the EU to kick someone out.  The only way an exit can occur is if a nation decides to leave.  This is incredibly interesting because Greece can default and put a moratorium on payments yet remain as a Euronation.  I guess you might call it “squatter’s rights”, they stay …but don’t pay.  Before going any further, I do understand Greece originally entered the EU “fraudulently” and with well cooked numbers.  As I understand it, “too bad so sad” it is water under the bridge, was not caught upon their entrance and cannot be used to negate their inclusion now.

What is extremely interesting is this: the Greek debt has already been largely offloaded onto the balance sheet of the ECB.  This was done to try to insulate private bank balance sheets from the risk of default and thus being underfunded.  But a fork in the road now exists, as I understand it, if Greece leaves then the debt goes back to the original banks who own the debt.  If Greece stays, the debt will stay on the ECB’s balance sheet.  Do you see the ramifications?  If Greece leaves, we have a banking failure through Europe ... but if they stay then the ECB eats the losses.  Thinking this through, if Greece stays they will effectively force a mass printing by the ECB to cover up the losses.  This will effectively dilute the euro and certainly hamper the ECB’s ability to function as they desire.

Call me crazy but I don’t think this is by any mistake at all.  This is a financial chess match where Mr. Tsipras/Varoufakis and Vladimir Putin are using great gamesmanship.  I believe it was decided Greece will stay, not pay ..and watch the ECB/Eurozone suffer with this.  Eventually Greece will leave but that will be AFTER the fire and AFTER the smoke clears.  I also believe a pipeline deal through Greece is a foregone conclusion and as this whole thing plays out, Europe will become “closer” to Russia, China, India and the BRICS  …which means what exactly?  They will be further away from the U.S.!!!  This is not rocket science, we are watching socialists who have legally hacked into one of the West’s “cars” … and have the ability to control it!  They can start it, stop it, make it go right, left or even just turn it off!  Maybe I am giving too much credit and this was just a coincidence, I highly doubt it!  To top this strategy off, I still believe we will be served a “truth bomb” by Mr. Putin which will effectively cut the dollar off at the knees!

The other head scratcher is the revelation JP Morgan has cornered the commodity markets

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-29/jpm-just-cornered-commodity-derivative-market-and-time-we-have-proof .

Before starting on this one, let me say there are many moving parts and unknowns (probably designed this way).  I have queried my mentor and spoken with Jim, I have spoken to several others whom I respect and value their opinions.  Though the takeaway was by no means unanimous, the following is my personal opinion.

To set the stage, it must be understood the U.S. is at WAR, a financial war where the survival of the dollar is at stake.  We watched late last year and early this year where huge pressure was put on the price of oil.  This I believe was done to pressure Russia as energy is their biggest export.  Oddly enough, Russia and our “ally” Saudi Arabia just signed six deals last week.  We do not even know what these deals were but a good speculation is Saudi Arabia is moving toward Russia and away from the U.S..  Remember, the Saudis are the cornerstone underlying the petrodollar.  Gold and silver have also been pressured at every turn over the last four years and in particular the last 12 months.

I assume JP Morgan and the Fed are one and the same.  There have been stories JPM has amassed 350 or more ounces of silver.  We also know China/Russia/India have been huge buyers of gold.  We now know JPM has increased their derivatives by over $3 trillion in just one quarter.  It is obvious to me, they are the ones sitting on the paper prices of gold and silver.  This would make sense for the Fed to attack the metals and thus support the dollar.  In fact, standard procedure in any war is to strengthen your currency while weakening your opponents.  I believe the neocons know the bottom of our “gold barrel” is close at hand, they have decided to go all in on price suppression knowing full well “contracts were made to be broken” (defaulted on).

 

Bill Holter

Holter-Sinclair collaboration

Comments welcome!  bholter@hotmail.com

The Complete History of Monsanto, “The World’s Most Evil Corporation”

By E Hanzai
Global Research, May 20, 2015
Waking Times 22 June 2014

 

Published by GR in June 2014

Of all the mega-corps running amok, Monsanto has consistently outperformed its rivals, earning the crown as “most evil corporation on Earth!” Not content to simply rest upon its throne of destruction, it remains focused on newer, more scientifically innovative ways to harm the planet and its people.

1901: The company is founded by John Francis Queeny, a member of the Knights of Malta, a thirty year pharmaceutical veteran married to Olga Mendez Monsanto, for which Monsanto Chemical Works is named. The company’s first product is chemical saccharin, sold to Coca-Cola as an artificial sweetener.

Even then, the government knew saccharin was poisonous and sued to stop its manufacture but lost in court, thus opening the Monsanto Pandora’s Box to begin poisoning the world through the soft drink.

1920s: Monsanto expands into industrial chemicals and drugs, becoming the world’s largest maker of  aspirin, acetylsalicyclic acid, (toxic of course). This is also the time when things began to go horribly wrong for the planet in a hurry with the introduction of  their polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

“PCBs were considered an industrial wonder chemical, an oil that wouldn’t burn, impervious to degradation and had almost limitless applications. Today PCBs are considered one of the gravest chemical threats on the planet. Widely used as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, cutting oils, waterproof coatings and liquid sealants, are potent carcinogens and have been implicated in reproductive, developmental and immune system disorders. The world’s center of PCB manufacturing was Monsanto’s plant on the outskirts of East St. Louis, Illinois, which has the highest rate of fetal death and immature births in the state.”(1)

Even though PCBs were eventually banned after fifty years for causing such devastation, it is still present in just about all animal and human blood and tissue cells across the globe. Documents introduced in court later showed Monsanto was fully aware of the deadly effects, but criminally hid them from the public to keep the PCB gravy-train going full speed!

1930s: Created its first hybrid seed corn and expands into detergents, soaps, industrial cleaning products, synthetic rubbers and plastics. Oh yes, all toxic of course!

1940s: They begin research on uranium to be used for the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb, which would later be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese, Korean and US Military servicemen and poisoning millions more.

The company continues its unabated killing spree by creating pesticides for agriculture containing deadly dioxin, which poisons the food and water supplies. It was later discovered Monsanto failed to disclose that dioxin was used in a wide range of their products because doing so would force them to acknowledge that it had created an environmental Hell on Earth.

1950s: Closely aligned with The Walt Disney Company, Monsanto creates several attractions at Disney’s Tomorrowland, espousing the glories of chemicals and plastics. Their “House of the Future” is constructed entirely of toxic plastic that is not biodegradable as they had asserted. What, Monsanto lied? I’m shocked!

“After attracting a total of 20 million visitors from 1957 to 1967, Disney finally tore the house down, but discovered it would not go down without a fight. According to Monsanto Magazine, wrecking balls literally bounced off the glass-fiber, reinforced polyester material. Torches, jackhammers, chain saws and shovels did not work. Finally, choker cables were used to squeeze off parts of the house bit by bit to be trucked away.”(2)

Monsanto’s Disneyfied vision of the future:

1960s: Monsanto, along with chemical partner-in-crime DOW Chemical, produces dioxin-laced Agent Orange for use in the U.S.’s Vietnam invasion. The results? Over 3 million people contaminated, a half-million Vietnamese civilians dead, a half-million Vietnamese babies born with birth defects and thousands of U.S. military veterans suffering or dying from its effects to this day!

 Monsanto is hauled into court again and internal memos show they knew the deadly effects of dioxin in Agent Orange when they sold it to the government. Outrageously though, Monsanto is allowed to present their own “research” that concluded dioxin was safe and posed no negative health concerns whatsoever. Satisfied, the bought and paid for courts side with Monsanto and throws the case out. Afterwards, it comes to light that Monsanto lied about the findings and their real research concluded that dioxin kills very effectively.

A later internal memo released in a 2002 trial admitted

“that the evidence proving the persistence of these compounds and their universal presence as residues in the environment is beyond question … the public and legal pressures to eliminate them to prevent global contamination are inevitable. The subject is snowballing. Where do we go from here? The alternatives: go out of business; sell the hell out of them as long as we can and do nothing else; try to stay in business; have alternative products.”(3)

Monsanto partners with I.G. Farben, makers of Bayer aspirin and the Third Reich’s go-to chemical manufacturer producing deadly Zyklon-B gas during World War II. Together, the companies use their collective expertise to introduce aspartame, another extremely deadly neurotoxin, into the food supply. When questions surface regarding the toxicity of saccharin, Monsanto exploits this opportunity to introduce yet another of its deadly poisons onto an unsuspecting public.

1970s: Monsanto partner, G.D. Searle, produces numerous internal studies which claim aspartame to be safe, while the FDA’s own scientific research clearly reveals that aspartame causes tumors and massive holes in the brains of rats, before killing them. The FDA initiates a grand jury investigation into G.D. Searle for “knowingly misrepresenting findings and concealing material facts and making false statements” in regard to aspartame safety.

During this time, Searle strategically taps prominent Washington insider Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Secretary of Defense during the Gerald Ford and George W. Bush  presidencies, to become CEO. The corporation’s primary goal is to have Rumsfeld utilize his political influence and vast experience in the killing business to grease the FDA to play ball with them.

A few months later, Samuel Skinner receives “an offer he can’t refuse,” withdraws from the investigation and resigns his post at the U.S. Attorney’s Office to go work for Searle’s law firm. This mob tactic stalls the case just long enough for the statute of limitation to run out and the grand jury investigation is abruptly and conveniently dropped.

1980s: Amid indisputable research that reveals the toxic effects of aspartame and as then FDA commissioner Dr. Jere Goyan was about to sign a petition into law keeping it off the market, Donald Rumsfeld calls Ronald Reagan for a favor the day after he takes office. Reagan fires the uncooperative Goyan and appoints Dr. Arthur Hayes Hull to head the FDA, who then quickly tips the scales in Searle’s favor and NutraSweet is approved for human consumption in dried products.This becomes sadly ironic since Reagan, a known jelly bean and candy enthusiast, later suffers from Alzheimers during his second term, one of the many horrific effects of aspartame consumption.

Searle’s real goal though was to have aspartame approved as a soft drink sweetener since exhaustive studies revealed that at temperatures exceeding 85 degrees Fahrenheit, it “breaks down into known toxins Diketopiperazines (DKP), methyl (wood) alcohol, and formaldehyde.”(4), becoming many times deadlier than its powdered form!

The National Soft Drink Association (NSDA) is initially in an uproar, fearing future lawsuits from consumers permanently injured or killed by drinking the poison. When Searle is able to show that liquid aspartame, though incredibly deadly, is much more addictive than crack cocaine, the NSDA is convinced that skyrocketing profits from the sale of soft drinks laced with aspartame would easily offset any future liability. With that, corporate greed wins and the unsuspecting soft drink consumers pay for it with damaged healths.

Coke leads the way once again (remember saccharin?) and begins poisoning Diet Coke drinkers with aspartame in 1983. As expected, sales skyrocket as millions become hopelessly addicted and sickened by the sweet poison served in a can. The rest of the soft drink industry likes what it sees and quickly follows suit, conveniently forgetting all about their initial reservations that aspartame is a deadly chemical. There’s money to be made, lots of it and that’s all that really matters to them anyway!

In 1985, undaunted by the swirl of corruption and multiple accusations of fraudulent research undertaken by Searle, Monsanto purchases the company and forms a new aspartame subsidiary called NutraSweet Company. When multitudes of independent scientists and researchers continue to warn about aspartame’s toxic effects, Monsanto goes on the offensive, bribing the National Cancer Institute and providing their own fraudulent papers to get the NCI to claim that formaldehyde does not cause cancer so that aspartame can stay on the market.

The known effects of aspartame ingestion are: “mania, rage, violence, blindness, joint-pain, fatigue, weight-gain, chest-pain, coma, insomnia, numbness, depression, tinnitus, weakness, spasms, irritability, nausea, deafness, memory-loss, rashes, dizziness, headaches, seizures, anxiety, palpitations, fainting, cramps, diarrhoea, panic, burning in the mouth. Diseases triggered/mimmicked include diabetes, MS, lupus, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, tumours, miscarriage, infertility, fibromyalgia, infant death, Alzheimer’s… Source : U.S. Food & Drug Administration.(5)

Further, 80% of complaints made to the FDA regarding food additives are about aspartame, which is now in over 5,000 products including diet and non-diet sodas and sports drinks, mints, chewing gum, frozen desserts, cookies, cakes, vitamins, pharmaceuticals, milk drinks, instant teas, coffees, yogurt, baby food and many, many more!(6) Read labels closely and do not buy anything that contains this horrific killer!

Amidst all the death and disease, FDA’s Arthur Hull resigns under a cloud of corruption and is immediately hired by Searle’s public relations firm as a senior scientific consultant. No, that’s not a joke! Monsanto, the FDA and many government health regulatory agencies have become one and the same! It seems the only prerequisite for becoming an FDA commissioner is that they spend time at either Monsanto or one of the pharmaceutical cartel’s organized crime corps.

1990s: Monsanto spends millions defeating state and federal legislation that disallows the corporation from continuing to dump dioxins, pesticides and other cancer-causing poisons into drinking water systems. Regardless, they are sued countless times for causing disease in their plant workers, the people in surrounding areas and birth defects in babies.

With their coffins full from the massive billions of profits, the $100 million dollar settlements are considered the low cost of doing business and thanks to the FDA, Congress and White House, business remains very good. So good that Monsanto is sued for giving radioactive iron to 829 pregnant women for a study to see what would happen to them.

In 1994, the FDA once again criminally approves Monsanto’s latest monstrosity, the Synthetic Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), produced from a genetically modified E. coli bacteria, despite obvious outrage from the scientific community of its dangers. Of course, Monsanto claims that diseased pus milk, full of antibiotics and hormones is not only safe, but actually good for you!

 Worse yet, dairy companies who refuse to use this toxic cow pus and label their products as“rBGH-free” are sued by Monsanto, claiming it gives them an unfair advantage over competitors that did. In essence, what Monsanto was saying is “yeah, we know rBGH makes people sick, but it’s not alright that you advertise it’s not in your products.”

 The following year, the diabolical company begins producing GMO crops that are tolerant to their toxic herbicide Roundup. Roundup-ready canola oil (rapeseed), soybeans, corn and BT cotton begin hitting the market, advertised as being safer, healthier alternatives to their organic non-GMO rivals. Apparently, the propaganda worked as today over 80% of canola on the market is their GMO variety.

A few things you definitely want to avoid in your diet are GMO soy, corn, wheat and canola oil, despite the fact that many “natural” health experts claim the latter to be a healthy oil. It’s not, but you’ll find it polluting many products on grocery store shelves.

 Because these GM crops have been engineered to ‘self-pollinate,’ they do not need  nature or bees to do that for them. There is a very dark side agenda to this and that is to wipe out the world’s bee population.

 Monsanto knows that birds and especially bees, throw a wrench into their monopoly due to their ability to pollinate plants, thus naturally creating foods outside of the company’s “full domination control agenda.” When bees attempt to pollinate a GM plant or flower, it gets poisoned and dies. In fact, the bee colony collapse was recognized and has been going on since GM crops were first introduced.

To counter the accusations that they deliberately caused this ongoing genocide of bees, Monsanto devilishly buys out Beeologics, the largest bee research firm that was dedicated to studying the colony collapse phenomenon and whose extensive research named the monster as the primary culprit! After that, it’s “bees, what bees? Everything’s just dandy!” Again, I did not make this up, but wish I had!

During the mid-90s, they decide to reinvent their evil company as one focused on controlling the world’s food supply through artificial, biotechnology means to preserve the Roundup cash-cow from losing market-share in the face of competing, less-toxic herbicides. You see, Roundup is so toxic that it wipes out non-GMO crops, insects, animals, human health and the environment at the same time. How very efficient!

 Because Roundup-ready crops are engineered to be toxic pesticides masquerading as food, they have been banned in the EU, but not in America! Is there any connection between that and the fact that Americans, despite the high cost and availability of healthcare, are collectively the sickest people in the world? Of course not!

 As was Monsanto’s plan from the beginning, all non-Monsanto crops would be destroyed, forcing farmers the world over to use only its toxic terminator seeds. And Monsanto made sure farmers who refused to come into the fold were driven out of business or sued when windblown terminator seeds poisoned organic farms.

This gave the company a virtual monopoly as terminator seed crops and Roundup worked hand in glove with each other as GMO crops could not survive in a non-chemical environment so farmers were forced to buy both.

Their next step was to spend billions globally buying up as many seed companies as possible and transitioning them into terminator seed companies in an effort to wipe out any rivals and eliminate organic foods off the face of the earth. In Monsanto’s view, all foods must be under their full control and genetically modified or they are not safe to eat!

 They pretend to be shocked that their critics in the scientific community question whether crops genetically modified with the genes of diseased pigs, cows, spiders, monkeys, fish, vaccines and viruses are healthy to eat. The answer to that question is obviously a very big “no way!”

You’d think the company would be so proud of their GMO foods that they’d serve them to their employees, but they don’t. In fact, Monsanto has banned GM foods from being served in their own employee cafeterias. Monsanto lamely responded “we believe in choice.” What they really means is “we don’t want to kill the help.”

It’s quite okay though to force-feed poor nations and Americans these modified monstrosities as a means to end starvation since dead people don’t need to eat! I’ll bet the thought on most peoples’ minds these days is that Monsanto is clearly focused on eugenics and genocide, as opposed to providing foods that will sustain the world. As in Monsanto partner Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the wicked witch gives the people the poisoned GMO apple that puts them to sleep forever!

2000s: By this time Monsanto controls the largest share of the global GMO market. In turn, the US gov’t spends hundreds of millions to fund aerial spraying of Roundup, causing massive environmental devastation. Fish and animals by the thousands die within days of spraying as respiratory ailments and cancer deaths in humans spike tremendously. But this is all considered an unusual coincidence so the spraying continues. If you thought Monsanto and the FDA were one and the same, well you can add the gov’t to that sorry list now.

The monster grows bigger: Monsanto merges with Pharmacia & Upjohn, then separates from its chemical business and rebrands itself as an agricultural company. Yes, that’s right, a chemical company whose products have devastated the environment, killed millions of people and wildlife over the years now wants us to believe they produce safe and nutritious foods that won’t kill people any longer. That’s an extremely hard-sell, which is why they continue to grow bigger through mergers and secret partnerships.

Because rival DuPont is too large a corporation to be allowed to merge with, they instead form a stealth partnership where each agrees to drop existing patent lawsuits against one another and begin sharing GMO technologies for mutual benefit. In layman’s terms, together they would be far too powerful and politically connected for anything to stop them from owning a virtual monopoly on agriculture; “control the food supply & you control the people!”

 Not all is rosy as the monster is repeatedly sued for $100s of millions for causing illness, infant deformities and death by illegally dumping all manner of PCBs into ground water, and continually lying about products safety – you know, business as usual.

The monster often perseveres and proves difficult to slay as it begins filing frivolous suits against farmers it claims infringe on their terminator seed patents. In virtually all cases, unwanted seeds are windblown onto farmers’ lands by neighboring terminator-seeded farms. Not only do these horrendous seeds destroy the organic farmers’ crops, the lawsuits drive them into bankruptcy, while the Supreme Court overturns lower court rulings and sides with Monsanto each time.

At the same time, the monster begins filing patents on breeding techniques for pigs, claiming animals bred any way remotely similar to their patent would grant them ownership. So loose was this patent filing that it became obvious they wanted to claim all pigs bred throughout the world would infringe upon their patent.

The global terrorism spreads to India as over 100,000 farmers who are bankrupted by GMO crop failure, commit suicide by drinking Roundup so their families will be eligible for death insurance payments. In response, the monster takes advantage of the situation by alerting the media to a new project to assist small Indian farmers by donating the very things that caused crop failures in the country in the first place! Forbes then names Monsanto “company of the year.” Sickening, but true.

 More troubling is that Whole Foods, the corporation that brands itself as organic, natural and eco-friendly is proven to be anything but. They refuse to support Proposition 37, California’s GMO-labeling measure that Monsanto and its GMO-brethren eventually helped to defeat.

Why? Because Whole Foods has been in bed with Monsanto for a long time, secretly stuffing its shelves with overpriced, fraudulently advertized “natural & organic” crap loaded with GMOs, pesticides, rBGH, hormones and antibiotics. So, of course they don’t want mandatory labelling as that would expose them as the Whole Frauds and Whore Foods that they really are!

 However, when over twenty biotech-friendly companies including WalMart, Pepsico and ConAgra recently met with FDA in favor of mandatory labelling laws, this after fighting tooth and nail to defeat Prop 37, Whole Foods sees an opportunity to save face and becomes the first grocery chain to announce mandatory labelling of their GMO products…in 2018! Uh, thanks for nothing, Whore.

 And if you think its peers have suddenly grown a conscience, think again. They are simply reacting to the public’s outcry over the defeat of Prop 37 by crafting deceptive GMO-labelling laws to circumvent any real change, thus keeping the status quo intact.

 To add insult to world injury, Monsanto and their partners in crime Archer Daniels Midland, Sodexo and Tyson Foods write and sponsor The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009: HR 875. This criminal “act” gives the corporate factory farms a virtual monopoly to police and control all foods grown anywhere, including one’s own backyard, and provides harsh penalties and jail sentences for those who do not use chemicals and fertilizers. President Obama decided this sounded reasonable and gave his approval.

 With this Act, Monsanto claims that only GM foods are safe and organic or homegrown foods potentially spread disease, therefore must be regulated out of existence for the safety of the world. If eating GM pesticide balls is their idea of safe food, I would like to think the rest of the world is smart enough to pass.

As further revelations have broken open regarding this evil giant’s true intentions, Monsanto crafted the ridiculous HR 933 Continuing Resolution, aka Monsanto Protection Act, which Obama robo-signed into law as well.This law states that no matter how harmful Monsanto’s GMO crops are and no matter how much devastation they wreak upon the country, U.S. federal courts cannot stop them from continuing to plant them anywhere they choose. Yes, Obama signed a provision that makes Monsanto above any laws and makes them more powerful than the government itself. We have to wonder who’s really in charge of the country because it’s certainly not him!

There comes a tipping point though when a corporation becomes too evil and the world pushes back…hard! Many countries continue to convict Monsanto of crimes against humanity and have banned them altogether, telling them to “get out and stay out!”

The world has begun to awaken to the fact that the corporate monster does not want control over the global production of food simply for profit’s sake. No, it’s become clear by over a century of death & destruction that the primary goal is to destroy human health and the environment, turning the world into a Mon-Satanic Hell on Earth!

 Research into the name itself reveals it to be latin, meaning “my saint,” which may explain why critics often refer to it as “Mon-Satan.” Even more conspiratorially interesting is that free masons and other esoteric societies assigned numbers to each letter in our latin-based alphabet system in a six system. Under that number system, what might Monsanto add up to? Why, of course 6-6-6!

 Know that all is not lost. Evil always loses in the end once it is widely exposed to the light of truth as is occurring now. The fact that the Monsanto-led government finds it necessary to enact desperate legislation to protect its true leader proves this point. Being evicted elsewhere, the United States is Monsanto’s last stand so to speak.

Yet, even here many have begun striking back by protesting against and rejecting GMO monstrosities, choosing to grow their own foods and shop at local farmers markets instead of the Monsanto-supported corporate grocery chains.

 The awakening people are also beginning to see they have been misled by corporate tricksters and federal government criminals poisoned by too much power, control and greed, which has resulted in the creation of the monstrous, out-of-control corporate beast.

 Notes

(1,3) http://bestmeal.info/monsanto/company-history.shtml
(2) http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Monsanto
(4,5) http://www.pfnh.org/article.php?id=65

Britain’s super-rich have doubled their wealth since 2009

By Robert Stevens
April 30, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

The annual Sunday Times Rich List reveals that the UK has more billionaires per head of population than any other country. There are now a record 117 billionaires among the country’s top 1,000 richest people.

The total wealth of just the billionaires on the list is a staggering £325.131 billion. Within the space of a year, the top 1,000, as a whole, have increased their total wealth by 5.4 percent to a record £547.126 billion. Last year, the figure stood at 104 billionaires and £519 billion—one third of the country’s GDP.

The Rich List, first published in 1989, but in its 18th year in its current form, is always an underestimation of the wealth of the super-rich as it includes land, property, assets, and significant shares but excludes cash in bank accounts.

This year’s list reveals the extent to which the global financial elite ensured that the world’s population has been forced to bear the entire burden of the 2008 financial crash. In the years since, the super-rich in the UK have more than doubled their wealth, which stood at £258 billion in 2009 (an increase of 112 percent). The number of billionaires has grown by 12 percent in the last year, by 172 percent since 2009, and, as the Sunday Times notes, they “are far wealthier than many of them dared to hope seven years ago”.

The list, writes the Times, “confirms that Britain is more attractive to the global super-rich than any country except America. There are so many billionaires based here now, they outnumber those in mainland China, whose economy is four times larger than ours.”

It notes, “Mainland China is home to 115 sterling billionaires, who are collectively worth £24bn less.”

It continues, “Although the United States has the highest overall number of sterling billionaires of any country at 384, Britain’s smaller population means it boasts more per head than any other country in the G20 group of the world’s biggest economies—one billionaire for every 547,000 Britons, compared with one for every 833,000 Americans. London, where most of Britain’s billionaires are based, has more than any other city—80—who enjoy a collective wealth of £258bn. The capital’s nearest European rival, Paris, has just 21.”

The Times ’ front page article on the Rich List began “Recession? What recession? Britain’s super-rich have powered through the economic crisis and are now more than twice as rich as they were in 2009 when the economy was on the rocks…”

In the same period workers, pensioners and young people have suffered the impact of brutal austerity, with tens of billions of pounds slashed from public spending. In comparison, the income of the super-rich only fell once during that period (in 2009 when it fell by 37 percent to £258 billion) and their wealth is now growing at a record rate. The Sunday Times notes, “The rise has been greatest in the past 12 months. You need £100m to get on the list this year. That is £45m more than in 2009 and £15m more than last year…”

Vast amounts of the wealth accumulated by the super-rich are the product of speculation and outright criminality, with London being one of the world’s leading centres of financial swindling. The Sunday Times notes, “Most of the billionaires based in London are from abroad, but choose to live or base their businesses in the capital. London is a magnet for the super-rich because of its low taxes (for now)… The rise in the wealth of the top 1,000 is so sharp this year thanks to booming stock markets. Both the FTSE 100 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average have hit record highs in the past 12 months.”

The rapid emergence of this layer is illustrated by the fact that the queen, who was listed as the richest individual in 1989, is now not even among the top 300. The Times notes that although her wealth increased by £10 million this year to £340 million, she represents “old money.”

The richest individual on the list is the Ukrainian-born and Harvard-trained Len Blavatnik, who has investments in industry, music, and media, and is worth £13.17 billion, up £3.17 billion on 2014. Among the firms Blavatnik has investments in is LyondellBasell, one of the oil refinery companies with which workers in the United States were recently involved in a bitter struggle.

In the case of individuals such as Blavatnik, who made his initial fortune by participating in the pillage of the nationalised state assets of the Soviet Union following its dissolution in 1991, the adage of Balzac that “behind every great fortune there is a great crime” was never more apt.

A Forbes article last year noted, “In the history of Wall Street there haven’t been too many moneymaking machines quite like LyondellBasell, which has seen its shares return 500 percent since it emerged from bankruptcy four years ago. And that’s been especially lucrative for Blavatnik, 57, who cobbled the company together, saw it fail and plunge into bankruptcy court, and then doubled down on the same assets, personally investing another $2.37 billion in LyondellBasell the second time around. His investment is now worth more than $10 billion, generating $8 billion in mostly unrealized personal profits.”

The World Socialist Web Site noted, “These vast sums have been made through the brutal exploitation of oil workers facilitated by the [United Steel Workers] and other unions in the global industry.”

Another oligarch, placed at number four on the list, is the Uzbekistan-born Alisher Usmanov, who owns a stake of almost 30 percent in the leading London Premier League team, Arsenal FC. Usmanov is worth £9.8 billion, even though the value of his mining and other interests fell by £850 million over the past year, partly because of the West’s sanctions against Russia and collapse of the rouble.

So rich is this miniscule layer of parasites that servicing their whims is a lucrative industry in itself. The Daily Telegraph commented on Ten Group, “which has two million high-net-worth members worldwide” and “has spent around £36.5m of its clients’ money in the past 12 months.”

Reading the media’s commentary, one is left with the distinct impression that they consider the existence of this fetid, anti-social layer to be so entrenched and “normal” that it is barely worth discussing anymore. The BBC’s article on the list totalled just 270 words.

In its front-page article, the Sunday Times itself refers to a “wealth gap” that “has become a chasm.” But the gap it refers to is the disparity between the number of billionaires in the “capital and the rest of the country”! It commented that “there are only 37 billionaires based outside London and their collective wealth is £67bn—£191bn less than the London total of £258bn.”

The grotesque levels of wealth recorded in the Rich List speak to the enormous gulf between the super-rich and everyone else. But that is no longer considered a subject of journalistic comment.

Planning Chaos in the Middle East: Destruction of Societies for Foreign Money Control

By Prof. John McMurtry
Global Research, April 27, 2015
Canadian Challenger

 

Scott Scottdale interviews Prof. John McMurtry for Canadian Challenger

John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and his work is published and translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author and editor of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his latest book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism/from Crisis to Cure.

SS/CC: You have said that “the trick of the endless US-led wars in the Middle East is to control both sides so as to ensure against sovereign states able to defend the common interests of their peoples”. Please explain.

JM: Whenever any nation has an independent government with fossil fuel, financial, agricultural or strategic resources not yet subjugated to transnational corporate control, there is a US-led campaign to destroy it. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Syria have all experienced this over many decades dating from the overthrow of the social-democratic president Mossadegh of Iran in 1953 to Syria’s still mildly independent social state being destroyed to the roots today. Lebanon was a civilized center of the Middle East before warred upon by Israel in 1982 and has been civil-war divided ever since. Iraq’s region-leading social state with universal health-care, free higher education, public water and electricity, local agricultural and food subsidies has been subjected to genocidal destruction and civil war imposition from 1990 to now, with Syria being destroyed by foreign-supported civil war from 2011. Once CIA-agent and coup leader Saddam Hussein could not destroy Iraq’s oil-worker-led society from within after his US-supplied war against Iran was over, Iraq was attacked on contrived pretexts – the constant excuse for non-stop war crimes in the Middle-East – and the state was irreversibly destroyed “because it was floating on a sea of oil” (Wolfowitz’s phrase).

Iraq is a model example of controlling both sides of the ever-shifting Middle-East wars to seize the assets of all, and so too the NATO bombing and jihadi overthrow of Gadhafi in Libya whose socialized oil state was even more developed than Iraq’s with public programs and infrastructures, including quasi-free homes for young couples. Libya’s long-time leader was first welcomed into the Western fold after 2000 and his opponents deported and reditioned by British M-15, then jihadis were joined by massive NATO ‘humanitarian bombing’ in 2011 to overthrow his social state, and Libya too is now in civil war chaos. Induced civil wars are the divide-and-rule policy across borders, and especially successful social states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya where their people are clearly better off than neighbouring peoples under US diktat. A better example of society is always prohibited even by war criminal attacks – as in Yugoslavia and Nicaragua in the 1980’s, and Ukraine today. All are orchestrated into sectarian insanity and internecine wars. At the same time vast new profits, resources, lands, price climbs, markets, agribusiness and – most of all – looting of public resources and finances by private foreign financiers and corporations proceeds more freely with stable social fabrics destroyed, not only in the victim societies but at home.

SS/CC: How does ISIL connect to all this?

JM: The historical background is that US-financed Islamic fundamentalism coupled with royal absolutism has come to rule inside and outside governments – Saudi Arabia being the prime example. When I travelled overland through the Middle East including North Africa decades ago, secular ‘Arab socialism’ was the rule led by Nasser and Egypt, and Islam was the background mass religion. Then a great US-led policy turn occurred in which fanatic jihadists were financed and armed across the region to ensure against “communism”, the Great Satan of the US. The massive funding and arming of jihadis as a war machine began with the US-orchestrated civil war in the then quasi-socialist secular state of Afghanistan to bleed the Soviet Union dry. Since the 9-11 construction, the US with local allies has increasingly sponsored jihadists of every kind to take down any remaining social state while also justifying their oil-for-weapons empires producing no life good but only death and destitution. Observe the connections today. Private armaments and military servicing corporations drain the public treasuries of the US and allied royal states trading oil for arms in the trillions, while financed jihadis provide justification for all the death machines and attack target states at the same time.

The civil war model of long-term society destruction to feely loot its resources has continued to the present day in a strategic arc of devastating civil wars from Pakistan to Iraq to Muslim Africa – not to mention now in Europe itself in Ukraine after the Chechnya civil war in Russia was ended. ISIL is a supremely atavistic instrument of the civil-war strategy. The US-Israel sponsored split of the originally secular-socialist PLO (Palestine Liberation Army) into warring factions, where the demonized Hamas was itself sponsored by Israel to divide it, is another example of the society-wrecking pattern at the sub-state level. ISIL today continues it at a more diabolical extreme – originally funded and armed by the very US-led forces now dropping bombs on it in Syria. Israel even gives ISIL terrorists hospital service on the Syrian border after Mossad and the CIA trained them as a largely ex-Saddam jihad army. All of this seems quite insanely contradictory. But all promotes civil wars and they render peoples helpless against foreign money control.

If one wonders how a desert-crawling line of Japanese open-back trucks gifted by the US filled with countless irregular fighters in plain view could ever have ever made it overnight to the point where Western military and political leaders are saying “the war against ISIL may be interminable”, one begins to see through the game. ISIL is a construction financed and trained by covert US and oil-king allies that ruins every place it enters, like Syria once the regime began to win the civil war. Al-Nusra/Al Qaeda was not enough. ISIL is a step up in the US-led control of the Middle East by terror, chaos and social devastation. “The Salvador option” was the first name for the post-war death squads in Iraq, but “Islamic State” stirs much more apocalyptic passions pro and con. Best of all, the ruling foreign war machines of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and NATO are now far better justified to “fight the barbaric terrorists”. Saudi Arabia with US support is now even projecting the “terrorist” and sectarian “Shiite” labels on the popular uprising of the poor in Yemen against a corrupt US-Saudi puppet government. One object alone is achieved. Peoples and resources of the region can be predated without sovereign social defences or unity of collective life purpose, the ultimate target of every US-led aggression. As long as all evils can be blamed on an ever-shifting Enemy, there is no overcoming recognition.

SS/CC: If someone were to say, this is “another conspiracy theory,” how would you reply?

JM: It is the very opposite of a conspiracy theory. Civil war chaos has been instituted across agents, places and times. The underlying pattern of destroying evolved societies and their collective control of life resources is far deeper. The only diagnostic model that fits all the hallmark characteristics is a runaway cancer system at the macro level with no social immune recognition. It is unflagged even as it keeps hollowing out more societies towards social collapse. Look for disconfirming evidence of the objective pattern – for example, a society made better rather than worse anywhere in the Middle East since 1991. The divide and rule reign of civil destruction is now deep into the US and Israel themselves, with civil war or its repression now pervasive in the Arab world. This was not originally gamed as the outcome. US geostrategic planners are social morons by the nature of their game model, as I have explained in my The Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the US Criminal State. But the invariable result of the civil wars they foment and manipulate still forces other societies’ resources open to private corporate control and exploitation without limit until they move onto the next. You do not even need corporate trade agreements to do it. Even if the US people themselves keep being bled dry with their common life bases and interests stripped out by military and financial claws in the trillions every year, not to mention agro-industry, the same private transnational corporations producing no life goods but destroying them keep money-profiting more. Plundering public purses and resources across continents is the unseen means.

As transnational private money sequences alone multiply, everything connects in social and environmental life depredation out of control. There are myriad masks of the disorder, but always the evolved collective life capital bases of societies and their ecological life hosts are devoured and torn apart. Now Kenya and Nigeria too join the jihadi-split nations to open a state of permanent war, looting and profit with no social organization to stop it. In Venezuela and Ukraine peoples fight back, but the same civil war method unfolds across continents with few connecting the dots. Twenty-five years after the dismantling of Yugoslavia into atavistic nationalisms steeped in the Nazi past, the same happens again in Ukraine. One outcome has become predictable across borders. Socially organized development is reversed for a private transnational feeding frenzy on collective financial, agricultural, natural and strategic resources of the victim societies. Only the rule of life-protective law with the force of law works across peoples. But Palestine even seeking protection of international law is openly threatened and its taxes seized by Israel with US support. When Palestine joins UNESCO by invitation, the US defunds UNESCO. This is not a conspiracy. It is a lawless rule of normalized terror, life destruction and tyrannical oppression.

SS/CC: How does Harper Canada fit into all this?

 Canada is very privileged with vast natural resources. It is not historically soaked in blood, and has evolved a civil culture without fanatic ‘isms’. Yet after Alberta Reform swallowed the Progressive Conservative Party with money from Big Oil and the retailer Eaton’s, PM Harper incarnates the divide-and-rule war method. His CEO rule strips Canada of its social life infrastructures and public tax funds in the name of the nation, while serving only private market powers to multiply and pillage across borders. This is his program, and there is no exception to it. Now Canada is aerial bombing in Arab lands from Libya to Syria – also funded by public money –even though the target ISIL beheaders now have been trained and financed by the allied states bombing them. Up North his regime now trains and supplies a violent-coup US-installed regime whose one-way aerial bombing of East-Ukraine civilians and infrastructures has driven two million people from their homes.

Whatever one’s own preferences, the morality in charge means only what serves the transnational corporate system. This is the market God which now dwarfs all world religions in power to dictate and destroy and capture imagination. Its cornerstone of defence for war crimes is to blame another enemy– as with the Nazis “terrorists” are those who block or resist its rule. The differences between Canada and Palestine or Syria are obvious at the level of conventionalized horror and life deprivation. But the underlying value system is the same in principle. The master driver is the solely ruling compulsion to turn private money demand into maximally more private money demand without limit, border or higher purpose at all. This is called “freedom”. No life coordinates ever enter the sequences and equations in this system in its deregulated mutations. Not even eco-genocide can be seen through its prism. Yet few dare recognize the blind war against life itself which spreads the more its fatal disorder is denied and rationalized away.

SS/CC: How does Islam fit into this destruction of societies by corporate globalization?

JM: The Prophet’s abomination of idolatry above all fits very well to the disorder. Turning money into more money for money controllers is the greatest idol worship of history, and no stationary idol of the past remotely approaches its direct ruin of one society after another – a consequence Mohammed chorally emphasizes in the Koran. No idol can make or breathe life, and here the idolatry goes far beyond anything ever before. It seeks to reduce all that exists into private money value, and devours ever more life and life means to multiply its global demand. Its world-consuming, flesh-eating code is even more deeply at work behind the Middle East holocaust of nations than the US which has become its creature.

Civilizing Islam long ago worked – as, for example, in architecture-rich Moorish Spain from the eighth century to 1492 when a rising European imperialism launched its genocidal seizures and destructions of other people’s life bases across continents. Degenerate versions of ‘Islam’ from absolutist oil-kings to jihadist death squads have followed, and whatever their pretences, they serve only the underlying agenda of corporate money-sequence globalization. They keep peoples superstitiously suggestible, and force obedience by violence and threats without understanding. Collective life-serving programs for all – as found in Iraq and Libya before the saturation bombings – have disappeared into the Arab past almost altogether. The corporate state now rules as pseudo-Muslim and suffocating. Even ‘austerity programs’ have been instituted across the Middle East, with life-serving social organization – public health and free higher education, social security of the person, ecological regulation – not funded or stripped out.

Islam confined to ritual repetitions and prohibitions without social life standards does not confront the corporate money-sequence idolatry. It allows submission to life-blind rules of oppression as ‘submission to God’s will’. Thus the transnational lootings of the people’s common wealth by oil dealing, weapons, finance, GMO agribusiness, and money-trough military services and reconstruction multiply to more corrupt and private oligarchical control and demand. Mass submission, resignation, obedience, faith without organization beyond faction parallels the dispossessed mass anomie of the West. The ‘Arab Spring’ itself – which never pronounced one public policy – seems to have been a construction without common life-ground dividing the people into even more helpless impotence of collective self-determination. People think “well at least they got rid of Mubarak.” Down the memory hole goes the fact that Mubarak was a marked man after he refused to commit Egypt to the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq which he prophetically declared “would open the gates of Hell”.

SS/CC: You emphasize the ‘ad adversarium fallacy’ as the dominant “track-switch of people’s thought” which always diverts their attention away from humanity’s underlying real problems.

JM: A simple example would be accusing me of being “a communist” or “an unbeliever” or “a conspiracy theorist” for what I say above. The topic is diverted to a familiar hate-object of the audience. Corporate mass media and politicians do this as their stock in trade. It gets attention and usually sells. This blame-the-enemy diversion dominates across cultures, but is almost never named. It runs so deep into the group psyche that not even logicians, psychologists and cognitive scientists define it.

Once diverted to the hate-object of the group – say “Saddam” or “Putin” or “state socialist” or “terrorist” – most people block out disproving facts so as to remain acceptable to the surrounding group. Challenge by evidence or reason is derailed onto blaming a known enemy of the audience. This is the underlying track-switch of thought upon which all mass-murderous wars and system oppressions depend, as well as most propaganda of daily life. It is the cornerstone of American ideology which has no common ground but animosity to the latest designated enemy. Yet not even academics will stand up to the accusation of “Putin-lover”, “9-11 conspiracy theorist”, “communist”, or whoever the shifting enemy may be. US Republicans and branch-plant Harperism now rely on this enemy-hate for every attack ad and proclamation.

This is why evidence, public statistics, knowledge of anything outside the game, is not now safe in corporate states. Public knowledge itself is the ultimate enemy of the whole game. That which sees, documents, shares, certifies, distributes, or organizes to prove and act for the public good is forbidden in a thousand ways even in Canada – the secret behind the Harper agenda of information control – from defunding and de-listing progressive NGO’s, to gags on government ministries and scientists, to allowing only his photographer’s pictures into the mass media.

In the Middle East, silencing is by drones, secret police, bombing, special forces, mind-stopping lies, and unending murder, mayhem and terror in imposed civil wars. Always the ultimate operation is to blame the enemy for all that goes wrong – – even if the enemy is the endless victim, as in Palestine. In the case of Israel, the imperialist nation with its boot in the face of the people is for the first time in history proclaimed as the victim, as bravely observed by Gideon Levy. “Who is denying whose right to exist?” is not a question asked. “Who is throwing stones at Goliath in Israel today?” is an unspeakable thought. Total reversal, blaming the oppressed for what you doing, endless diversions to the designated enemy is the ultimate lie of today’s human condition. But it today rules the Middle East by a more complex process of shifting wars and hates than ever before. /30 JM

Landscape of U.S. Failure: Financial Collapse Leads to War

By Dimitry Orlov
Global Research, March 17, 2015
Club Orlov

 

Scanning the headlines in the western mainstream press, and then peering behind the one-way mirror to compare that to the actual goings-on, one can’t but get the impression that America’s propagandists, and all those who follow in their wake, are struggling with all their might to concoct rationales for military action of one sort or another, be it supplying weapons to the largely defunct Ukrainian military, or staging parades of US military hardware and troops in the almost completely Russian town of Narva, in Estonia, a few hundred meters away from the Russian border, or putting US “advisers” in harm’s way in parts of Iraq mostly controlled by Islamic militants.

The strenuous efforts to whip up Cold War-like hysteria in the face of an otherwise preoccupied and essentially passive Russia seems out of all proportion to the actual military threat Russia poses. (Yes, volunteers and ammo do filter into Ukraine across the Russian border, but that’s about it.) Further south, the efforts to topple the government of Syria by aiding and arming Islamist radicals seem to be backfiring nicely. But that’s the pattern, isn’t it? What US military involvement in recent memory hasn’t resulted in a fiasco? Maybe failure is not just an option, but more of a requirement?

Let’s review. Afghanistan, after the longest military campaign in US history, is being handed back to the Taliban. Iraq no longer exists as a sovereign nation, but has fractured into three pieces, one of them controlled by radical Islamists. Egypt has been democratically reformed into a military dictatorship. Libya is a defunct state in the middle of a civil war. The Ukraine will soon be in a similar state; it has been reduced to pauper status in record time—less than a year. A recent government overthrow has caused Yemen to stop being US-friendly. Closer to home, things are going so well in the US-dominated Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that they have produced a flood of refugees, all trying to get into the US in the hopes of finding any sort of sanctuary.

Looking at this broad landscape of failure, there are two ways to interpret it. One is that the US officialdom is the most incompetent one imaginable, and can’t ever get anything right. But another is that they do not succeed for a distinctly different reason: they don’t succeed because results don’t matter. You see, if failure were a problem, then there would be some sort of pressure coming from somewhere or other within the establishment, and that pressure to succeed might sporadically give rise to improved performance, leading to at least a few instances of success. But if in fact failure is no problem at all, and if instead there was some sort of pressure to fail, then we would see exactly what we do see.

In fact, a point can be made that it is the limited scope of failure that is the problem. This would explain the recent saber-rattling in the direction of Russia, accusing it of imperial ambitions (Russia is not interested in territorial gains), demonizing Vladimir Putin (who is effective and popular) and behaving provocatively along Russia’s various borders (leaving Russia vaguely insulted but generally unconcerned). It can be argued that all the previous victims of US foreign policy—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, even the Ukraine—are too small to produce failure writ large enough to satisfy America’s appetite for failure. Russia, on the other hand, especially when incentivized by thinking that it is standing up to some sort of new, American-style fascism, has the ability to deliver to the US a foreign policy failure that will dwarf all the previous ones.

Analysts have proposed a variety of explanations for America’s hyperactive, oversized militarism. Here are the top three:

1. The US government has been captured by the military-industrial complex, which demands to be financed lavishly. Rationales are created artificially to achieve that result. But there does seem to be some sort of pressure to actually make weapons and field armies, because wouldn’t it be far more cost-effective to achieve full-spectrum failure simply by stealing all the money and skip building the weapons systems altogether? So something else must be going on.

2. The US military posture is designed to insure America’s full spectrum dominance over the entire planet. But “full-spectrum dominance” sounds a little bit like “success,” whereas what we see is full-spectrum failure. Again, this story doesn’t fit the facts.

3. The US acts militarily to defend the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. But the US dollar is slowly but surely losing its attractiveness as a reserve currency, as witnessed by China and Russia acting as swiftly as they can to unload their US dollar reserves, and to stockpile gold instead. Numerous other nations have entered into arrangements with each other to stop using the US dollar in international trade. The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t take a huge military to flush one’s national currency down the toilet, so, once again, something else must be going on.

There are many other explanations on offer as well, but none of them explain the fact that the goal of all this militarism seems to be to achieve failure.

Perhaps a simpler explanation would suffice? How about this one:

The US has surrendered its sovereignty to a clique of financial oligarchs. Having nobody at all to answer to, this American (and to some extent international) oligarchy has been ruining the financial condition of the country, running up staggering levels of debt, destroying savings and retirements, debasing the currency and so on. The inevitable end-game is that the Federal Reserve (along with the central banks of other “developed economies”) will end up buying up all the sovereign debt issuance with money they print for that purpose, and in the end this inevitably leads to hyperinflation and national bankruptcy. A very special set of conditions has prevented these two events from taking place thus far, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t, because that’s what always happens, sooner or later.

Now, let’s suppose a financial oligarchy has seized control of the country, and, since it can’t control its own appetites, is running it into the ground. Then it would make sense for it to have some sort of back-up plan for when the whole financial house of cards falls apart. Ideally, this plan would effectively put down any chance of revolt of the downtrodden masses, and allow the oligarchy to maintain security and hold onto its wealth. Peacetime is fine for as long as it can placate the populace with bread and circuses, but when a financial calamity causes the economy to crater and bread and circuses turn scarce, a handy fallback is war.

Any rationale for war will do, be it terrorists foreign and domestic, Big Bad Russia, or hallucinated space aliens. Military success is unimportant, because failure is even better than success for maintaining order because it makes it possible to force through various emergency security measures. Various training runs, such as the military occupation of Boston following the staged bombings at the Boston Marathon, have already taken place. The surveillance infrastructure and the partially privatized prison-industrial complex are already in place for locking up the undesirables. A really huge failure would provide the best rationale for putting the economy on a war footing, imposing martial law, suppressing dissent, outlawing “extremist” political activity and so on.

And so perhaps that is what we should expect. Financial collapse is already baked in, and it’s only a matter of time before it happens, and precipitates commercial collapse when global supply chains stop functioning. Political collapse will be resisted, and the way it will be resisted is by starting as many wars as possible, to produce a vast backdrop of failure to serve as a rationale for all sorts of “emergency measures,” all of which will have just one aim: to suppress rebellion and to keep the oligarchy in power. Outside the US, it will look like Americans blowing things up: countries, things, innocent bystanders, even themselves (because, you know, apparently that works too). From the outside looking into America’s hall of one-way mirrors, it will look like a country gone mad; but then it already looks that way. And inside the hall of one-way mirrors it will look like valiant defenders of liberty battling implacable foes around the world. Most people will remain docile and just wave their little flags.

But I would venture to guess that at some point failure will translate into meta-failure: America will fail even at failing. I hope that there is something we can do to help this meta-failure of failure happen sooner rather than later.

How ‘Free Markets’ Defame ‘Democracy’: US Foreign Policy in Ukraine and Venezuela

By Robert Parry
March 14, 2015
Consortium News March 12, 2015

 

The one common thread in modern U.S. foreign policy is an insistence on “free market” solutions to the world’s problems. That is, unless you’re lucky enough to live in a First World ally of the United States or your country is too big to bully.

So, if you’re in France or Canada or – for that matter – China, you can have generous health and educational services and build a modern infrastructure. But if you’re a Third World country or otherwise vulnerable – like, say, Ukraine or Venezuela – Official Washington insists that you shred your social safety net and give free reign to private investors.

If you’re good and accept this “free market” domination, you become, by the U.S. definition, a “democracy” – even if doing so goes against the wishes of most of your citizens. In other words, it doesn’t matter what most voters want; they must accept the “magic of the market” to be deemed a “democracy.”

Thus, in today’s U.S. parlance, “democracy” has come to mean almost the opposite of what it classically meant. Rather than rule by a majority of the people, you have rule by “the market,” which usually translates into rule by local oligarchs, rich foreigners and global banks.

Governments that don’t follow these rules – by instead shaping their societies to address the needs of average citizens – are deemed “not free,” thus making them targets of U.S.-funded “non-governmental organizations,” which train activists, pay journalists and coordinate business groups to organize an opposition to get rid of these “un-democratic” governments.

If a leader seeks to defend his or her nation’s sovereignty by such means as requiring these NGOs to register as “foreign agents,” the offending government is accused of violating “human rights” and becomes a candidate for more aggressive “regime change.”

Currently, one of the big U.S. complaints against Russia is that it requires foreign-funded NGOs that seek to influence policy decisions to register as “foreign agents.” The New York Times and other Western publications have cited this 2012 law as proof that Russia has become a dictatorship, while ignoring the fact that the Russians modeled their legislation after a U.S. law known as the “Foreign Agent Registration Act.”

So, it’s okay for the U.S. to label people who are paid by foreign entities to influence U.S. policies as “foreign agents” – and to imprison people who fail to register – but not for Russia to do the same. A number of these NGOs in Russia and elsewhere also are not “independent” entities but instead are financed by the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

There is even a circular element to this U.S. complaint. Leading the denunciation of Russia and other governments that restrain these U.S.-financed NGOs is Freedom House, which marks down countries on its “freedom index” when they balk at letting in this back-door U.S. influence. However, over the past three decades, Freedom House has become essentially a subsidiary of NED, a bought-and-paid-for NGO itself.

The Hidden CIA Hand

That takeover began in earnest in 1983 when CIA Director William Casey was focused on creating a funding mechanism to support Freedom House and other outside groups that would engage in propaganda and political action that the CIA had historically organized and financed covertly. Casey helped shape the plan for a congressionally funded entity that would serve as a conduit for this U.S. government money.

But Casey recognized the need to hide the CIA’s strings. “Obviously we here [at CIA] should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we appear to be a sponsor or advocate,” Casey said in one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III – as Casey urged creation of a “National Endowment.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “CIA’s Hidden Hand in ‘Democracy’ Groups.”]

Casey’s planning led to the 1983 creation of NED, which was put under the control of neoconservative Carl Gershman, who remains in charge to this day. Gershman’s NED now distributes more than $100 million a year, which included financing scores of activists, journalists and other groups inside Ukraine before last year’s coup and now pays for dozens of projects in Venezuela, the new emerging target for “regime change.”

But NED’s cash is only a part of how the U.S. government manipulates events in vulnerable countries. In Ukraine, prior to the February 2014 coup, neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations.”

Nuland then handpicked who would be the new leadership, telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt that “Yats is the guy,” referring to “free market” politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who not surprisingly emerged as the new prime minister after a violent coup ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014.

The coup also started a civil war that has claimed more than 6,000 lives, mostly ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who had supported Yanukovych and were targeted for a ruthless “anti-terrorist operation” spearheaded by neo-Nazi and other far-right militias dispatched by the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev. But Nuland blames everything on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Nuland’s Mastery of Ukraine Propaganda.”]

On top of Ukraine’s horrific death toll, the country’s economy has largely collapsed, but Nuland, Yatsenyuk and other free-marketeers have devised a solution, in line with the wishes of the Washington-based International Monetary Fund: Austerity for the average Ukrainian.

Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Nuland hailed “reforms” to turn Ukraine into a “free-market state,” including decisions “to reduce and cap pension benefits, increase work requirements and phase in a higher retirement age; … [and] cutting wasteful gas subsidies.”

In other words, these “reforms” are designed to make the hard lives of average Ukrainians even harder – by slashing pensions, removing work protections, forcing people to work into their old age and making them pay more for heat during the winter.

‘Sharing’ the Wealth

In exchange for those “reforms,” the IMF approved $17.5 billion in aid that will be handled by Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who until last December was a former U.S. diplomat responsible for a U.S. taxpayer-financed $150 million investment fund for Ukraine that was drained of money as she engaged in lucrative insider deals – deals that she has fought to keep secret. Now, Ms. Jaresko and her cronies will get a chance to be the caretakers of more than 100 times more money. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s Finance Minister’s American ‘Values.’”]

Other prominent Americans have been circling around Ukraine’s “democratic” opportunities. For instance, Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was named to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, a shadowy Cyprus-based company linked to Privat Bank.

Privat Bank is controlled by the thuggish billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who was appointed by the Kiev regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine. In this tribute to “democracy,” the U.S.-backed Ukrainian authorities gave an oligarch his own province to rule. Kolomoysky also has helped finance paramilitary forces killing ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

Burisma has been lining up well-connected American lobbyists, too, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.

As Time magazine reported,

“Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis.”]

So, it seems even this modern form of “democracy” has some “sharing the wealth” aspects.

Which brings us to the worsening crisis in Venezuela, a South American country which has been ruled over the past decade or so by leftist leaders who – with broad public support – have sought to spread the nation’s oil wealth around more broadly than ever before, including paying for ambitious social programs to address problems of illiteracy, disease and poverty.

While there were surely missteps and mistakes by the late President Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, the Chavista government has made progress in addressing some of Venezuela’s enduring social ills, which had been coolly ignored by previous U.S.-backed rulers, such as President Carlos Andres Perez, who collaborated with the CIA and hobnobbed with the great and powerful.

I was once told by an Andres Perez assistant that the Venezuelan president shared his villa outside Caracas with the likes of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, bringing in beauty pageant contestants for their entertainment.

Chavez and Maduro at least have tried to improve the lot of the average Venezuelan. However, facing a deepening economic crisis made worse by the drop in world oil prices, Maduro has found himself under increasing political pressure, some of it financed or inspired by Washington and supported by the rightist government in neighboring Colombia.

Allegations of a Coup

Maduro has reacted to these moves against his government by accusing some opponents of plotting a coup, a claim that is mocked by the U.S. State Department and by the U.S. mainstream media, which apparently doesn’t believe that the United States would ever think of staging a coup in Latin America.

This week, the White House declared that the evidence of any coup-plotting is either fabricated or implausible, as the New York Times reported. President Barack Obama then cited what he called “an extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States” from Venezuela and froze the American assets of seven Venezuelan police and military officials.

The fact that Obama can deliver that line with a straight face should make any future words out of his mouth not credible. Venezuela has done nothing to threaten the “national security of the United States” extraordinarily or otherwise. Whatever the truth about the coup-plotting, Venezuela has a much greater reason to fear for its national security at the hands of the United States.

But in this up-is-down world of Official Washington, bureaucrats and journalists nod in agreement at such absurdities.

A few weeks ago, I was having brunch with a longtime State Department official who was chortling about the pain that the drop in oil prices was inflicting on Venezuela and some other adversarial states, including Iran and Russia.

I asked why the U.S. government took such pleasure at watching people in these countries suffer. I suggested that it was perhaps more in U.S. interests for these countries and their people to be doing well with money in their pockets so they could shop and do business.

His response was that these countries had caused trouble for U.S. foreign policy in the past and now it was their turn to pay the price. He also called me a “Putin apologist” when I wouldn’t agree with the State Department’s line blaming Russia for all of Ukraine’s ills.

But the broader question is: Why does the United States insist on imposing “free market” rules on these struggling countries when Democrats and even some Republicans agree that an unrestrained “free market” has not worked well for the American people? It was “free market” extremism that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s and to the Great Recession of 2008, the effects of which are only now slowly receding.

Further, real democracy – i.e., the will of the majority to shape societies to serve the many rather than the few – has turned out also to be good economics. American society and economy were arguably strongest when government policy encouraged a growing middle class from the New Deal through the 1970s.

To be sure, there were faults and false starts during those decades, but experiments with an uncontrolled “free market” have proven catastrophic. Yet, that is what the U.S. government seems determined to foist on vulnerable countries whose majorities would prefer to make their societies more equitable, more fair.

And beyond the negative social impact of the “free market,” there is the danger that conflating policies that cause economic inequality with democracy will give democracy a very bad name.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Breaking Out of the Invisible Prison: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution

By Prof. John McMurtry
February 25, 2015
Socialist Project

 

As we enter 2015, the global corporate system deepens and spreads in its eco-genocidal effects. But the dots are not joined in their common cause across domains. Money-value coordinates like gross domestic product (GDP), commodity productivity and stock market indexes are still adopted as the measures of “economic performance” rather than life capital development which is systemically depredated.

More than any prior stage of history, we know not what we are doing at the macro level of life organization, nor why no uptick of American sales can remotely solve the problem of collapsing social and natural life support systems. Greece – the world’s emblem of the sacrifice of society to bank debt servicing – is now 45 per cent more in debt than it was before the “austerity” programs started. Global social and ecological collapse proceed in lock-step with predatory corporate and bank globalization, but the connection is taboo to examine.

Fatal mind blocks now rule that no economists see from within received models of understanding, and that no cognitive science lays bare. Unconnected spectacles of crisis are alone reported. Obviously, no recovery from the most wasteful and destructive economic disorder in history is possible so long as it is unseen. This is why we continue over the long cliff of catastrophe without an evident clue of what is happening at the macro level. As another new year opens with all degenerate trends deepening, a point-by-point resetting of our economic parameters to life reality is more than ever demanded. The fatally absurd economic box within which we have been conditioned to conform at a preconscious level remains life-blind at every step without knowledge of it.

Every one of the 10 points of re-framing the economy to life coherence is self-evident once seen. But every step is also revolutionary in paradigm shift from money-capital sequence to life-capital sequence as primary system decider. Once our thought is freed from the bars of the eco-genocidal disorder that now misrules, no step can be reasonably denied.

1. The One-Way Eco-Genocidal Trends

The evidence is now overwhelming that life on earth is in systematic decline toward collapse on all levels. But the meaning is nowhere recognized by any economic model. We have come to know that the climates destabilize to ever greater extremes, but do not connect this long denied reality to the deeper macro facts that the air, soil, forests and water sources are all cumulatively despoiled across the planet as the oceans themselves die back. Vertebrate species simultaneously become extinct at a spasm rate across cultures and continents, but no macro policy arrests their one-way collapse from song birds to coral reefs to pollinators to large animals all at once. Pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life systems at all levels, but no global system reduction has been made since the Ozone protocol over 25 years ago.

All the while, public sectors, services and regulators are defunded and dismantled to leave ever more tens of millions of people dispossessed, but tax evasion by the rich multiplies at the same time in one-way disastrous trend. The global food system produces more disabling and contaminated junk than it does food with nutritional value, while man-made non-contagious diseases from obesity to cancer escalate into the world’s biggest killer. Corporate state wars for the resources of the majority world never stop under false pretexts, while transnational corporate-rights treaties to the life capital (means of life that can produce more means of life without loss and cumulative gain) of all societies multiply at the same time. At the core of the system, the global financial system ceases to function for productive investment in life goods, while the future of the next generations collapses toward 25-50 per cent real unemployment, and a world where no birds sing. Yet nowhere is the common cause investigated or even conceived in the business press, education or high theory.

2. The Moral DNA of the Cancer Stage of Capitalism

In fact, the underlying value code driving every degenerate trend is never defined. It is, rather, assumed without question or examination and se

t into mathematical disconnect as the sole meaning of economic inquiry. Bertrand Russell’s warning here is apposite. “Mathematics may be defined as the subject where we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we say is true.” The co-author of Principia Mathemtica thus nailed “neo-classical economics” over a century ago. Yet no-one knew what it would come to mean. An academically coded corporate rule in a completely life-blind “Economics” was instituted with its assumption drivers hidden in symbols and closed to disconfirmation by facts. Behind all the self-referential hocus-pocus incapable of predicting its predictable disasters, a ruling value code crystallized to drive the world to ruin with no-one knowing why. This moral DNA of globalization regulates beneath consciousness by four absolute equations assumed in every moment of what is now still masked as “the neoliberal turn.”

Rationality = Self-Maximizing Choice
= Always More Money-Value for Self is Good
= Self-Multiplying Sequences of Ever More Money to the Top Under 1%
= the Ruling Growth System with No Committed Life Functions
= All Else is Disposable Means to this Multiplying Pathogenic Growth

One can test this ruling moral meta program on every degenerate trend. But because it is not seen, the greatest of all fatal confusions comes to be built into societies’ ruling meaning: that money-sequence growth = life value growth. No more malignant mutation of value and meaning has ever occurred. As on the micro level where the surrounding cell community does not recognise the multiplying gross cells eating the life-host alive, so too on the macro social level. Leading the mutant tides of hollowing-out dispossession and ruin of social and ecological life hosts is a private bank system creating tidal notes of bets, credit and debt without legal tender, and partnering with transnational corporations in predation of local economies across the world. It loots life and life bases as ‘necessary reforms’ everywhere it is allowed to move.

This is why there is not inflation while trillions of new dollars are printed for private banking operations with no life productive function. Endless slashing of life goods in wages, benefits, social security and environmental security take corresponding tides of money demand away from people’s lives and life support systems as money-demand powers multiply to the non-producing top. One can track back every step to the ruling value code at work that is taboo to see.

3. Contemporary Economics is a Pseudo-Science

None of this can be seen by ‘Economics’ because it is a pseudo-science. Its ruling categories are disconnected from reality with no life coordinates, and its defining postulates are unfalsifiable by any facts of the world. All organic, social and ecological life requirements are assumed away a-priori. Infinite demand on finite resources is presupposed as sustainable. Reversibility of all processes is taken for granted in a nineteenth-century liquid mechanics model. Consequences follow in the long run that are predictably fatal to human and planetary life organization.

Yet whatever does not fit this a-priori life-blind construction is heretical in graduate schools supplying economic advisers to governments and corporations, and taboo in the corporate press and media to the extent of its contradiction. It is not only a mechanical model, but is absurdly “freedom” and “well-being” at the same time. Whatever deviates from it, conversely, is “irrational” or “despotic.” At the system-wide level of ruling story, the plot is universal for all societies. Purely self-maximizing atomic selves in the market are believed to necessitate the best of possible worlds by an invisible hand of competition ensuring lowest money costs. Life costs do not compute, and “economic growth” is consistent with destroying all life support systems.

We find here, in fact, the underlying form of a fanatic religion. Supra-human laws dictate commands across peoples, and no deadly consequences diminish certitude in its production of the optimal state for all by the perfect design of the system. With the supreme conceit of a just-so story of dyadic market exchange producing the best of possible worlds multiplied to infinity with no possibility of being wrong, we find the inner logic of the global disorder. It rules as a totalitarian creed blind to all but its own growth free of any life value, standard or regulator.

4. Knowledge Wins in the End, but Not Until It is Known

Societies have thus been everywhere ‘restructured’ as subordinate functions to the inexorable transformation of humanity and the world into ever more private commodities and profits. This mutant value system is malignant to the marrow with no consciousness of its derangement or ill consequences. It is taboo to recognize what is everywhere confirmed – deregulated borderless money sequences multiplying themselves by life-blind models, treaties and wars through all that exists on earth whatever their destruction of human and ecological life systems.

Alarm at the growing deadly symptoms increases across thoughtful people, but without decoding connection. Top-down embargo on any other economic view or reality – including by NATO wars – suppresses alternative at every level. Policies of ‘solution’ only extend the pathogenic system further. Even as the reversal of life evolution on earth becomes undeniable under the global rule of private money-sequence multiplication, life-coherent restructuring is anathema and prohibited a-priori by the unexamined value system. It all seems hopeless, but knowledge wins in the end if not suffocated. Behind every step of degeneration lie failures of social knowledge:

(1) failure to diagnose the regulating value mechanism at work;

(2) failure to connect across the domains of life despoliation as predictable from the system’s blind money-demand multiplications;

(3) failure to define or demand any public policies against its despoiling and devouring life support systems with the public increasingly financing the out-of-control feeding cycles;

(4) failure to recognise any life-value principle or ground of the real economy itself.

5. Re-Grounding in Real Capital and Goods, True Supply and Demand

The failure to recognise the life ground and processes of “the economy” is built into the ruling paradigm in principle. As in the prior ruling religion, disconnection of categories and system from empirical reality and life needs rules out disbelief. But disconnect is in the name of “science” and “the invisible hand” rather than “God’s commands” and “divine design.” Adam Smith the founder of modern economics was a Deist, but doctrinal abdication of life ground and reality became totalized in so-called “neo-classical economics” which displaces the class divisions of classical economics and the possibility of any alternative social order.

Thus an absurd metaphysics comes to rule which cannot be decoded because its first principles and axioms are a-priori dictates not subject to critical examination. The first principle of this life-blind economics begins by disconnection from all life requirements, grounds and needs – thus mutating the economy’s provision of otherwise scarce material life goods into an opposite meaning where life goods and life capital do not exist. Capital is assumed as private money-sequences multiplying themselves with life capital blinkered out. Private commodities are assumed to be ‘goods’ although they are in fact increasingly bads for organic, social and ecological life hosts.

The ‘laws of supply and demand’ are simultaneously reduced to self-maximizing private money exchanges indifferent to the real economy of providing life goods otherwise in short supply. Demand is not need or necessity as in any real economy. It is money demand minted by private banks without the legal tender to back over 97 per cent of it: which is ever more unequally held by those serving no productive function, and which nowhere today stands for any life need whatever. The fatal metaphysic built into first principles does not end here. ‘Supply’ is not the life goods people need to survive and flourish, but increasingly the opposite – ever more priced commodities for profit now promoting ever more human and ecological ill-being across the world. Capital is not life wealth that can produce more life wealth without loss, but increasing transnational private money sequences hollowing out life capital on every plane.

6. Knowing Good from Bad as the Baseline of Life-Coherent Economics

At the normative level of this doctrine, a ludicrous and fatal doctrine of freedom rules the war and peace of nations beneath consciousness of it. Freedom = freedom for private money demand only = in proportion to the amount controlled = ever less freedom for those with less of it = no right to life for those without it.

Sane people, in contrast, recognise that life value matters more, the more coherently inclusive in self and world the better. But this ultimately self-evident value ground has been reversed without recognition. People called ‘pro-life’ usurp women’s choice of how they live. Nations assume that ‘standard of living’ is measured by private money spent. ‘Life sciences’ sacrifice billions of animal lives a year for the private money-sequence gains of big corporations. Animal rights theory itself has no criterion to tell the life value of a slug from a person. ‘New and better technology’ is the ruling panacea, but no life-value standard exists to decide better from worse.

What then are we to ground in as life value that the real economy must provide? The objective standard and measure can be stated in three incisive steps:

1. all value whatever is life value,
2. good versus bad equals the extent to which life is more coherently enabled versus disabled, by
3. greater/lesser ranges or capacities of thought, felt being and action through time.

This criterion of life value is no more a matter of opinion than people’s life necessities are. But what are these life needs that no economic paradigm – orthodox or revolutionary – defines? They are in every case that without which life capacities are reduced. Life capital, in turn, is that which produces and reproduces these life goods – from literacy and extending knowledge to the soil we grow in and air we breathe. The ruling value mechanism miscalled ‘the global economy’ is the opposite. It attacks life goods and capital everywhere as ‘externalities’ to its self-multiplying money-sequence and commodity cycles. But because such growth is assumed to be growing life value, the greatest value reversal in history is unseen.

7. Life Capital Base and Growth as the Real Economy Across Cultures

The moving line of the war of liberation begins with what we are able to control, our own lives. Here we can recognise that every value we enjoy, lose or gain has a bottom line – its life capital, that is, the life wealth that produces more life wealth without loss and with cumulative gain. We defend it by life goods to ensure our life capacities are not reduced but grow through time. Most are unpriced – the sun and air, the learning, the home environment, the delight in nature, the play, the love, the raising of children, the fellow arts, and so on. On the social level, the same holds and any well-governed society provides for them in many ways. All may recognise the principle of life capital in their own lives as self-evident, and that all which lasts through time that is worthwhile is life capital. But life capital does not exist as a concept in received economics. It is ruled out a-priori by money capital, the social instrument made the lord without life function.

Addictive internalization is how the system disorder grows on. Knowledge of life goods and bads is how it is rooted out, the unrecognised through-line of human evolution. That is why we find we live far better without corporate-ad television, regular private gas-vehicle use, any junk food or beverage, any throwaway item, any new fashion or commodity not more life enabling than the old, any business with big private banks. The organizing principle is as old as the good life, but is forgotten. The life-capital code is not stated, but becomes ever clearer in our time: minimize market demand that disables life capacities to enable life capital to grow and flourish. This principle is unthinkable within the ruling thought system, but defines transformation to true economy and life emancipation on earth. It liberates life wherever it moves.

The underlying turning point is as old as human evolution itself. Every human advance is by knowing what enables life through time from what does not.Collective life advance is transmitting this life-and-death knowledge across selves and generations. The life capital code holds across cultures. Life goods are always that without which life capacities decline and die. All real needs, all real demand, all real supply, and all real economics are known by this criterion. The lost line between good and evil is found in this principle, and so too human freedom and well-being.

We can define the meaning more concretely as follows Every human life suffers and degenerates toward disease and death without breathable and unpolluted air, clean water and waste cycles, nourishing food and drink, protective living space, supportive love, healthcare when needed, a life-coherent environment, symbolic interaction, and meaningful work to perform. All are measurable in sufficiency across cases. All are now degraded, polluted or perverted by the self-multiplying money-capital system defined above.

8. Collective Life Capital the Missing Link across Divisions

Collective life capital is the long-missing principle of the common interest and collective agency. The life capital code goes deeper than gender, culture or individual differences, and includes past as well as future generations by definition. It is objective, impartial, and universally applicable. It is the ultimate regulator of the economic principles of efficiency, productivity and development. It grounds political legitimacy and supersedes ruinous man-nature, economy-environment splits and individual-social conflicts of interest. By its regulation, freedom is made responsible to its own conditions of possibility. Life capital defines an inner logic of life value which cannot in principle go wrong within or beyond economics.

Collective life capital is the missing common ground and measure across the lines of death itself. It is the this-worldly bridging concept across the impasse of global culture wars, economy-versus – environment thinking, present-versus-future interests, male versus female conflicts, and all other warring dichotomies wrenching us from our shared life ground beneath property lines and the mors immortalis of reality on earth.

The difference from received ultimate principles of value across time and theories is in the objective precision of meaning and direction when value judgement and decision are governed by its laws of:

1. life value regulator from start to finish,
2. production of more life value capacity through generational time,
3. life-value measure to tell greater from lesser in any domain by margins of capacity loss or gain,
4. cumulative life gain as the organizing goal of the process throughout, and
5. the meta principle: the more coherently inclusive any decision or action is in enabling life capacities, the better it always is for the world.

9. The Life-and-Death War of the World

In fact, the global corporate commodity and money-sequence system usurps these life capital principles with impunity across continents, while captive corporate states increasingly subsidize, de-regulate, privatize and militarily enforce this life-blind rule over all ecological and human requirements and rights.But who sees the moving lines of the global life-and-death war?

Obviously a real economy would regulate for life capital conservation and advance with money sequences only as means – as is already is the case in a human way of life. Societies and individuals would transform to better lives if the paradigm revolution was enacted in their spheres of choice. Victory or loss in the war of the world lies as always in how we live. Knowledge of bads versus goods is always the inner logic of human evolution at individual and collective levels of action. It is the mark of being human, and begins in what we do not demand – for example, any new fashion or commodity not more life enabling than the old or the used.

The organizing principle of real economy is long anticipated by China’s Tao-te Ching and the West’s autarkia of human self-realization, and many prove it in their own lives. Minimal demand on short resources to enable maximum life capacities is the war of recovery on social as well as individual levels. While every corporate state now presses for ever more energy extraction and use with no limit of public and life costs at every imaginable level, the root of economic rationality – ration to need – is effectively taboo in official culture.

Once the life-capital system decider kicks in, the rules of selection for what compossibly enables rather than disables human and fellow life on earth become evident to reason and learning from mistakes – the ultimate incapacity of the now ruling global system. This is the transformation to true economy and life emancipation, and it can only proceed in accord with the life capital principle that holds across individual, social and environmental life hosts.

10. The Ultimate Choice Space of Humanity

Collective life capital is now fatally endangered on almost every plane across generational and ecological time. The common life interest has no meaning in the ruling global system because its sole law of growth is to multiply the very private commodities and money sequences without life function that mindlessly drive the end-game world disorder.

It follows that humanity’s very provision for the universal human life necessities that have evolved over millennia are blinkered out by the life-blind value measures of what is miscalled ‘the economy.’ Everything that makes a society civilized or liveable is excluded from view – life-protective laws including sufficient minimum wages and environmental regulations, common water and sewage systems for all, free movement pathways and life spaces without cost to use, non-profit healthcare and disease-prevention by public institution, public income security from disemployment, old age and disability, primary to higher education without multiplying debts, family housing, food and life means assistance for children without sufficient parental money, and public libraries and arts facilities with accessible books, films and works of art and art creation. This is more or less a complete index of the collective life capital bases modern society has evolved, but all are dismantled by the global corporate disorder to maximally profit from.

In truth, the organizing principles of common life interest and human agency cross the lines of death itself in the life capital code of value that steers any real economy in any place through generational time. It is the system-deciding choice all societies face without knowing it. History is the record of successes and failures at what still remains unconscious in economic thought. It is nowhere defined beyond slogan even in communism, and ‘the public interest’ has no life coordinates or ground in known modern politics across the spectrum. Yet life goods and life capital denote the only true economic necessity and growth – that without which human life capacities degrade and die. ‘The economy’ is not run by natural or divine laws, as the modern paradigm assumes. It is a social construction of binding rules which directs toward how we live better by what is not otherwise there.

The ruling value code fails more momentously in world waste and destruction than all other systems in history, but beneath recognition. Its built-in contempt for all life requirements and indifference to life ruin multiplies its demands across the planet in a fanaticism beyond ISIL in attacking life capital and goods with no committed life functions. Yet no economics yet allows the recognition of its predictably rising catastrophe through time as a global economic system.

The life capital economy is opposite in its regulating value logic. It grounds in common life capital and produces more of it by life measure as its goal and moral science. Its logic of value is not utopian, but the ultimate through-line of human development since language and cooperative provision of human means of life. It lives in all the civil commons we are made human by in the life security of a free humanity. It is invaded wherever its life capital and goods are turned into more private money demand, resource depletion and waste without limits – the moral cancer of the ruling system. The ultimate choice space of humanity and society lies in this unrecognised life and death meaning. •

John McMurtry is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and his work is published and translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author and editor of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his latest book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.

The New American Way: Work Harder for Less Pay

Federal Reserve Says Your Wages are Too High

By Pete Dolack
February 20, 2015
Counter Punch

 

The Federal Reserve has declared that the reason for ongoing economic weakness is because wages have not fallen enough. Wages have been stagnant for four decades while productivity has soared, but nonetheless orthodox economists believe the collapse of 2008 has been a missed opportunity.

A paper prepared by two senior researchers with the San Francisco branch of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank attempts to explain the lack of wage growth experienced as unemployment has fallen over the past couple of years this way:

“One explanation for this pattern is the hesitancy of employers to reduce wages and the reluctance of workers to accept wage cuts, even during recessions, a behavior known as downward nominal wage rigidity.”

The two Federal Reserve researchers, Mary Daly and Bart Hobijn, based their argument on the standard ideology of orthodox economists, writing:

“Downward rigidities prevent businesses from reducing wages as much as they would like following a negative shock to the economy. This keeps wages from falling, but it also further reduces the demand for workers, contributing to the rise in unemployment. Accordingly, the higher wages come with more unemployment than would occur if wages were flexible and could be fully reduced.”

The “problem” of wages stubbornly refusing to drop as much as corporate executives and financiers would like is referred to as the “sticky wages” problem in orthodox economics. Simply put, this “problem” is one that orthodox economists, themselves not necessarily subject to the market forces they wish to impose on others, have long struggled to “solve.” You perhaps will not be surprised to hear that “government” is the problem. Consider this remarkable passage published on the web site of the Mises Institute, an advocate of the Austrian school of economics:

“Much of the alleged ‘stickiness’ of wages is due to government policies. … [T]he trouble stems from workers not being willing to take pay cuts. When the demand from employers drops, at the old wage rate there is now surplus labor — a.k.a. unemployment. Only when market wages drop to a lower level, so that demand once again matches supply, will equilibrium be restored in the labor market.”

Collapsing wages in the Great Depression didn’t help

According to this author, Robert P. Murphy, an “associated scholar” of the Mises Institute, failing to drive down wages is such a big mistake that it caused the Great Depression. He writes:

“After the 1929 crash, Herbert Hoover gathered the nation’s leading businessmen for a conference in Washington and urged them to allow profits and dividends to take the hit, but to spare workers’ paychecks. Rather than cut wages, businesses were supposed to implement spread-the-work schemes where workers would cut back their hours. The rationale for Hoover’s high-wage policy was that the worker supposedly needed to be paid ‘enough to buy back the product.’ … The idea was that wage cuts would just cause workers to cut their spending, which would in turn lead to another round of wage cuts in a vicious downward spiral.”

Herbert Hoover was not vicious enough! Although it was Hoover’s Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, who advocated the government “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate” so as to “purge the rottenness out of the system,” and not Hoover himself, the president did take hard-line right-wing positions. Michael Parenti, in discussing Hoover in his book History as Mystery, wrote:

“Like so many conservatives then and now, Hoover preached the virtues of self-reliance, opposed the taxation of overseas corporate earnings, sought to reduce income taxes for the highest brackets, and was against a veterans’ bonus and aid to drought sufferers. He repeatedly warned that public assistance programs were the beginning of ‘state socialism.’ Toward business, however, he suffered from no such ‘inflexibility’ and could spend generously. He supported multimillion-dollar federal subsidies to shipping interests and agribusiness, and his Reconstruction Finance Corporation doled out about $2 billion to banks and corporations.” [page 261]

Hoover’s concern for working people was demonstrated when his troops fired on veterans demanding payments owed to them and burned their camps. His laissez-faire policies led to manufacturing wages falling 34 percent and unemployment rising to about 25 percent by 1933. That collapse in wages did not bring better times; only the massive government spending to wage World War II put an end to the Depression. Such wage declines, in the real world, actually make the economy worse, argues Keynesian economist Paul Krugman:

“[Y]ou could argue that a sufficiently large fall in wages could restore full employment now — but it would have to be a very large wage decline, and the positive effects would kick in only after deflation had first driven just about every debtor in the economy into bankruptcy.”

How many formulae can be written on the head of a pin?

Although orthodox economics is often nothing more than ideology in the service of capitalist elites, its practitioners like to believe themselves scientific because they base their theories on mathematical models. Unfortunately, these formulae are divorced from the real, physical world; the economy and the human behavior that animates it are not reducible to mathematics.

Robert Kuttner, a heterodox economist, explored these shortcomings in an article originally published in Atlantic Monthly. He wrote:

“The [prevailing] method of practicing economic science creates a professional ethic of studied myopia. Apprentice economists are relieved of the need to learn much about the complexities of human motivation, the messy universe of economic institutions, or the real dynamics of technological change. Those who have real empirical curiosity and insight about the workings of banks, corporations, production technologies, trade unions, economic history or individual behavior are dismissed as casual empiricists, literary historians or sociologists, and marginalized within the profession. In their place departments are graduating a generation of idiots savants, brilliant at esoteric mathematics yet innocent of  actual economic life.”

That was written in 1985; little if anything has changed since and arguably has gotten worse. Professor Kuttner points out that the very fact of persistent unemployment contradicts the basic theses of orthodox neoclassical economics. If the belief that markets automatically reach equilibrium were true, then wages would automatically fall until everybody had a job. Rather than acknowledge the real world, orthodox economists simply declare involuntary unemployment an “illusion,” or claim “government interference” with the market is the culprit. “Business cycles were around long before trade unions or big-spending governments were,” Professor Kuttner noted.

Wages are not as flexible as orthodox ideology suggests because within an enterprise preference is ordinarily given to existing workers to fill job openings, thereby buffering wages from external market forces, writes another heterodox economist, Herbert Gintis. In an essay originally appearing in Review of Radical Political Economics, he wrote:

“In particular, there is a tendency for the number of individuals qualified for a position to exceed the number of jobs available, in which case seniority and other administrative rules are used to determine promotion. Hardly do workers compete for the job by bidding down its wage.”

In almost all cases, employees do not even know what wages their co-workers are earning. This top-down secrecy facilitates the disparity in wages, whereby, for example, women earn less than men. If everybody earned what they were worth, there would no such wage disparity. The very fact of disparities between the genders or among races and ethnicities demonstrates the ideological basis of orthodox economics, which assumes that employees who do the work of production are in their jobs due to personal choice and wages are based only on individual achievement independent of race, gender and other differences.

You produce more but don’t earn more

Back in the real world, wages have significantly lagged productivity for four decades; thus, wages, examined against this benchmark, have significantly declined for those four decades. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, written by heterodox economist Elise Gould, reports:

“Between 1979 and 2013, productivity [in the U.S.] grew 64.9 percent, while hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers, who comprise over 80 percent of the private-sector workforce, grew just 8.0 percent. Productivity thus grew eight times faster than typical worker compensation.” [page 4]

Middle-class U.S. households earn $18,000 less than they would had wages kept pace with productivity, Dr. Gould calculates. Nor is that unique to the U.S.: Wages in Canada, Europe and Japan have also fallen well short of productivity gains. Canadian workers, for example, are paid at least $15,000 per year less than they would be had their wages kept pace.

To circle back to the San Francisco Federal Reserve paper that began this discussion, the authors claim that wage stagnation will persist until markets “return to normal.” They assert:

“[T]he accumulated stockpile of pent-up wage cuts remains and must be worked off to put the labor market back in balance. In response, businesses hold back wage increases and wait for inflation and productivity growth to bring wages closer to their desired level.”

But as we can plainly see, and as those of us living in the real world experience, wages cuts have been the norm for a long time. The caveat at the end of the paper that it does not necessarily reflect the views of the Fed board of governors should be noted, but the paper was issued as part of a regular series by the San Francisco Fed and the authors are senior members of it, so it is not likely to be at variance with opinions there. It certainly does reflect orthodox economic ideology. Similarly, the argument by the Austrian School’s Mises Institute, stripped of its academic-sounding veneer, is a call to eliminate the minimum wage.

Stagnation, declining wages and the ability of capitalists to shift production around the globe in a search for the lowest wages and lowest safety standards — completely ignored in the orthodox hunt for economic scapegoats — are the norm. Our need to sell our labor, the resulting reduction of human beings’ labor power to a commodity, and the endless competitive pressures on capitalists to boost profits underlie the present economic difficulties.

Collective bargaining through unions and the needs of capitalists to retain their employees can be brakes against the race to the bottom — what the orthodox economists at the Fed and elsewhere are arguing is that these remaining brakes be removed and wages driven down to starvation levels. That is what global capitalism has to offer.

Pete Dolack writes the Systemic Disorder blog. He has been an activist with several groups.

 

Post-Minsk EU Sanctions on Russia

By Stephen Lendman
February 18, 2015
Global Research

 

Imposing new sanctions shows Brussels wants confrontation, not conflict resolution.

Russia’s NATO representative, Alexander Grushko, calls relations with the Alliance “close to the freezing point.”

“(W)e…have (no) illusions regarding the dangers that might be caused by NATO,” he said. (It) found a new meaning of life. (It’s) play(ing) out against us, against Russia.”

On February 16, Brussels sanctioned 19 more Russian and Donbas officials. Its blacklist totals 151 individuals, as well as 37 Russian companies and other entities. Sanctions are war by other means.

Three top Russian military officials were added. Including Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov, First Deputy Defense Minister, General Arkady Bakhin, and General Staff Operation Directorate head Lt. General Andrey Kartapolov.

Two additional lower House State Duma members were sanctioned, as well as Moscow Communist Party head Valery Rashkin and singer Iosif Kobzon.

Fourteen others are Donbas government and military officials. Eight rebel self-defense battalions and the Novorossiya movement were sanctioned.

Measures imposed include freezing assets held in European Union countries an an EU-wide travel ban.

State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Aleksey Pushkov said new sanctions are “contrary to the (letter and spirit) of Minsk. (They) will not solve anything, but will complicate political dialogue.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said new sanctions defy common sense. Moscow vows an “appropriate” response. Brussels shamelessly accommodates Washington and Kiev’s “party of war.”

Moscow’s EU representative, Vladimir Chizhov, said extending sanctions and adding new ones “will not only give a signal to Russian public opinion and force Russia to return to our own sanctions list, but will dissuade both sides of the conflict from the active implementation of the provisions of the Minsk documents.”

It shows no matter what efforts Russia makes toward resolving Ukraine’s conflict, it will continue being targeted unfairly.

Energy giant Roseneft CEO Igor Sechin said “(i)n the longterm, sanctions against Russia endanger Europe’s security of supply.”

Losers on both sides are assured. Spain’s Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said “(s)anctions have had a heavy cost for us all.”

“The EU so far lost 21 billion euros. In Spain, we have been badly hit in terms of agriculture and tourism.

Czech President Milos Zeman called for lifting sanctions. Saying “I long for solid trade and economic relations between the Czech Republic and Russia, which shouldn’t be hampered by sanctions.”

“Esspecially if those sanctions are useless.” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras rhetorically opposes sanctions while approving their renewal. At the same time, he wants things resolved diplomatically, adding:

“The difficult way of talks is always favorable to the easy way of sanctions, which leads to a dead end.”

Dark forces in America, EU countries and Ukraine want war continued, not ended. Huge geopolitical issues are at stake.

Key is targeting Russia for regime change. Washington’s longstanding goal is eliminating a major rival, controlling its vast land mass, balkanizing it for easier control, plundering its resources and exploiting its people.

At the same time, war-profiteers are making fortunes. Russian State Duma Deputy Chairman Sergey Zheleznyak said Ukrainian generals are enriched by war.

Ending it cuts off their income stream. They have clear incentives to keep conflict going.

So do volunteer elements. They’re profiteering like others. As long as war enriches them they’ll keep fighting.

On Monday, Angela Merkel called things “extremely unstable.” Restoring peace remains “extremely difficult.”

“The situation is fragile. It was always clear that much remains to be done.”

“And I have always said that there are no guarantees that what we are trying to do succeeds. It will be an extremely difficult path.”

Impossible as long as Washington and war-profiteers want conflict continued.  It bears repeating what other articles stressed.

Obama didn’t initiate proxy war to quit. Chances for a durable, sustainable peace are virtually nil.

Low-intensity conflict continues. It’s just a matter of time before things heat up again full force. Will direct US/Russia confrontation follow?

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

 

 

America is Pushing for War. Encircling Russia. What Will be the “Financial Response”

By Bill Holter
February 13, 2015
Global Research

 

As you know, I am in the camp that the West, led by the U.S. is and has been pushing for war.  War to create more debt for the banks to skim from, and to retain/prolong the power of dollar hegemony.  I also believe China is not looking for a war and neither is Mr. Putin and Russia.  If they were, I believe there was enough provocation over one year ago with Syria and over the last year as sanction after sanction has been implemented.

In my opinion, Mr. Putin has been pushed just about as far as he will allow.  The arming of Ukraine by NATO will cross the line and the strategy of encircling Russia is not acceptable.  The data I have seen over the last 90 days leads me to believe something very big and very soon will come from Russia …and will not be “singular”, I believe what comes will be multi dimensional.  In no particular order, and you decide the importance, I believe the response”s” from Russia will be nearly simultaneous.

First, there will be a financial response.  This may include hacking our financial institutions, dumping Treasury bonds and dollars, purchasing and making calls on various commodity markets, buying and asking for delivery of both gold and silver amongst other disruptive strategies.  Russia could also announce a “gold ruble” to stabilize their currency and economy, this might likely be followed by some sort of Chinese announcement?  Geopolitically, we may hear of deals cut with the Germans and French.  There may be further deals between the Swiss and Chinese or even other Western nations, we may also watch as Greece is given a deal and falls Eastward.  Saudi Arabia will most likely also be of interest as they now have a new ruler.  Will they continue the petro dollar status, or have “new” deals already been arranged during talks late last year with both Russia and China?

Militarily we could see Russia invade Ukraine outright or worse.  Russia has had months to prepare and just last week mobilized over 100 mobile ICBM missile launchers.  Their actions are not those of a nation readying to stand down.  Please do not tell me that any of the above is impossible, with the financial backing of the Chinese, ANY and all of this is possible.  A goal of fracturing NATO is quite logical in my estimation.

Now for the “crazy” part, but I believe to be a necessary part.  We know that Edward Snowden has been a “guest” living in Russia for over one year.  Do you believe he has been given “free rent”?  Do you believe he has as “sensitive” information as we have been led to believe by Mr. Obama and others?  Personally, I do…and maybe then some.  If you take the above, financial, geopolitical and military pieces and put them together, only one piece is missing, “sentiment”.  Sentiment of the American people!  If Mr. Putin were somehow able to cut the populace’ natural patriotism out from under the current administration, there will be no “will” to fight.  How could this be accomplished?

Let me put several “sentiment” pieces together and you decide if any of this makes sense.  Do you remember back in December there was a blast of media attention given to “torture” at Gitmo and several names in the Bush administration came up?  Did you know Senator Nelson from Florida has been pushing for several months very hard to get the 28 missing pages from the 9-11 report made public?  These 28 pages allegedly name the Saudis as financiers of that sad day.  What if some of the information Mr. Snowden has to offer is bigger than currently thought?  Or separately, what if he has proof showing fraud of a massive nature?  It could be proof of financial fraud, military fraud or even false flag evidence?  What then?  How much is too much for the American people to swallow?

I do not want to argue the logistics.  What I do want to do is ask you what your thoughts are should any of these responses be undertaken by Mr. Putin?  What do you believe will happen to the dollar?  Take each one these retaliations, one by one.  Could we withstand an attack (supported by the Chinese) on our financial markets?  Can Europe, or NATO survive an exit of Greece?  Spain or Italy?  Were Russia to invade Ukraine, who would stop them?  And how?  Then add in “public opinion”, the sentiment of a population can steer official policy more than almost any other factor.  How would the current (or any) administration deal with a public that knows for a fact they’ve been deceived?  As Jim Sinclair says, the dollar is “the common stock” of the U.S., would any of this be good for the dollar or might it spur some serious and unending sales?

I believe we have pushed Russia just about as far as she will allow it.  ANY of the above reactions by Russia (and probably supported by China) will be enough to seriously damage, if not entirely blow up our financial system.  ALL of them simultaneously would be devastating!  We have made it extremely easy for any adversary to do serious damage with very little effort.  We have done so by leveraging our banking and financial systems beyond all reason.  We have used fraud and unfair practices at every turn to “better our position”.  In doing so, and for so many years, the vulnerability to our way of life has never been greater since 1776!   As a patriotic American I hope my analysis is all wet.  As a rational human being, I am afraid it is not.