https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/01/31/the-single-stupidest-argument-in-the-entire-stupid-salad-of-russiagate/
The Single Stupidest Argument In The Entire Stupid Salad Of Russiagate
The other day Hawaii congresswoman and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard came out with what remains the strongest rejection of the Trump administration’s regime change interventionism in Venezuela out of anyone likely to run for the presidency in 2020.
“The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela,” Gabbard tweeted. “Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders–so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”
Boom. Unambiguous, unequivocal, and without any of the “Yeah Maduro is an evil monster, but” modifiers that other officials (including Bernie Sanders) have been prefacing their feeble objections to Trump’s campaign to topple the Venezuelan government with. Which of course outraged all the usual war pundits, including the Washington Post‘s most reliable military-industrial complex fluffer Josh Rogin.
“Again, @TulsiGabbard shares the same foreign policy position as Russia and the Assad regime,” Rogin tweeted in response to Gabbard’s statement. “It’s probably just a coincidence. #TusiAssad2020”
This man calls himself a journalist. He works for one of the most respected and influential news outlets in America.
Rogin’s post is obnoxious and idiotic for a whole host of reasons, among them the fact that Trump is consistently painted as a Kremlin stooge by pundits like Rogin, yet opposing Trump is somehow being depicted as Kremlin servitude. But the reason his tweet deserves an article of its own today is because the argument he is using is one you see recurring over and over again in the psychotic, pants-on-head, screaming-at-traffic stupid salad that is collectively referred to as Russiagate.
Another way to write Rogin’s tweet would be as follows:
“Hmmm, you think the US should refrain from destroying countries all around the world? You know who else thinks that? The Kremlin! Hmmm, it’s very interesting that you and the Kremlin share that same view all the time, hmmmm, hmmmmmmm, hmmmmmmmmmmm probably just a coincidence though!”
You see this obnoxious McCarthyite talking point regurgitated over and over and over again by people eager to paint anyone who objects to US interventionism and the political establishment responsible for it as Russian agents, and it’s about as moronic an argument as any you’ll ever see.
Last year I had a brief interaction with a popular Twitter account calling itself Conspirador Norteño, an anonymous user who spends their time promulgating conspiracy theories about Russian bots and Kremlin trolls using those weird “who’s tweeting about subject X” graphs that Russiagaters like to use as imaginary evidence. The account is often cited by the Atlantic Council’s NATO propaganda firm DFR Lab, and by its allied narrative control firms Bellingcat and PropOrNot, as well as mainstream media outlets like the BBC and Mother Jones.
Conspirador Norteño and his goon squad of counterintelligence-LARPing followers spent the entirety of our interaction attempting to argue that because a private British citizen named Ian Shilling sometimes shared Russian state media and often found himself in agreement with Russia on foreign policy, he could fairly be labeled a propagandist for the Russian Federation.
“If a Twitter account a) consistently parrots the views of the Kremlin over a period of several years and b) uses Russian state media as major primary sources, as @Ian56789 does, then it is reasonable to classify that account as propaganda,” the account insisted.
“You’re also ignoring the fact that his positions are in lockstep with the Kremlin’s; pushing the viewpoint and agenda of a government is propaganda, regardless of which government it is,” the account claimed.
The reason this popular McCarthyite argument is so face-meltingly stupid is simple: there are many, many reasons for someone to oppose the interventionism and foreign aggression of the US and its allies besides having loyalty to the Russian Federation. Russia opposes the interventionism of the US-centralized empire because it is a nation with its own allies and agendas, and because it is a longtime target for subversion and undermining by imperial government agencies since it refuses to be absorbed into the blob of the western power alliance. This does not mean that Russia’s reasons for opposing western interventionism are the only reasons to oppose western interventionism, and anyone who believes that it is is a slobbering idiot.
This is a non-satirical version of the “Hitler drank water” meme, which mocks this style of argumentation by pointing out the fact that both Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump drank water, implying they must therefore be aligned.
The argument that is advanced by all the Josh Rogins and Conspirador Norteños of the gibbering McCarthyite mad house holds that the only possible reason anyone could possibly oppose an establishment which is in an endless state of regime change interventionism, which is pushing us ever closer to the likelihood of nuclear armageddon by escalating tensions between nuclear superpowers, and which is shoving us toward extinction via climate chaos with a policy of unchecked ecocidal corporatism, is some form of Kremlin servitude. They claim there’s no acceptable reason anyone could be “in lockstep with the Kremlin” on foreign policy, despite the fact that a worldview which opposes western interventionism necessarily will be the same as the position of the Kremlin’s because Russia, like so many other sovereign nations, opposes western interventionism.
US-led interventionism is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful in modern times, and you don’t need to be aligned with Moscow or Damascus to see that. The power establishment which crushes any nation that refuses to bow to its demands is responsible for the deaths of untold millions of human beings, and wanting that power establishment to crumble is a very legitimate and reasonable thing. Every good and decent person in the world should want the same.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
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https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/01/30/two-roads-diverged-in-a-digital-wood/
Two Roads Diverged in a Digital Wood
By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.
– From the must read piece: ‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
A lot of my content over the past couple of years has focused on the momentous geopolitical changes I see on the horizon, and this macro perspective reaches two significant conclusions. First, that the planet is moving away from a unipolar world dominated almost entirely by the U.S. toward a more multi-polar world. Second, that this fundamental shift in geopolitical landscape, coupled with what appears to be a forthcoming reckoning with the largest global debt bubble in human history, will lead to a once in a generation reset of the world economy and the global financial system that keeps it functioning.
As has become increasingly clear in recent months, the two primary protagonists in this major historical shift are the U.S. and China. While I’ve speculated about how increased tensions between these two economic giants will likely usher in the end of globalization as we know it (and possibly a bifurcated global economy), I’ve spent less time talking about what the internal situations will look like within individual countries themselves. This is a major oversight because what really matters to Chinese and U.S. citizens ten years from now isn’t which nation has more military bases abroad, but what will everyday life be like for regular people?
In this regard, China and the U.S. both seem to be headed in similar and very dystopian directions when it comes to the freedom-destroying marriage of overbearing government and ubiquitous surveillance technology. I read a couple of excellent articles on this topic over the past week, which forced the issue to the top of my mind. In other words, does it really matter who wins the geopolitical game of risk if “we the people” end up being controlled, surveilled and completely subjugated by the very technology we so eagerly embraced and assumed would make the world a more liberated place just a few years ago?
Everyone reading this is probably aware of the mind-bogglingly creepy and terrifying social credit system being unveiled in China. The first paragraph of a recent must read Wired article, Is Big Tech Merging with Big Brother? Kinda Looks like It, puts the situation into stark terms:
A friend of mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work.
When he offered to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating, which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.
Most Americans will read this and think there’s no way this could happen here, but the truth is a lot more complicated, and in some respects we’re at least headed in a similar direction.
We live in a situation where we still have Constitutional protections like freedom of speech on paper, but with so much of the public discussion being dominated by a couple of tech giants who ban people arbitrarily, it’s being eroded in practice. As I noted in last year’s piece, Americans Need Social Media Guided by the Rights Enshrined in the U.S. Constitution:
I say in theory because in practice we’re learning how easily speech can be marginalized to the point of becoming erased from public discourse. We’ve allowed the digital public square to be dominated by corporations focused on profit maximization and whose policies quite explicitly do not reflect the law of the land and values that we supposedly hold dear.
If you’re like me and you think the civil liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution are fundamental to who we are as a people, it must necessarily be unacceptable that a handful of private technology corporations that do not adhere to these principles have dominated the rails of public communication to the point a handful of executives get to decide what acceptable speech is.
But it’s even worse than that. The tech giants are in bed with government or government-funded institutions in one way or the other, so to simply characterize them as private companies isn’t really accurate. Though it may come as a surprise, I think Amazon is the most pernicious and dangerous of them all. Worse than Google and even worse than Facebook.
The aforementioned Wired article touches on the Amazon problem. For example:
Last year, Amazon Web Services announced the opening of the new AWS Secret Region, the result of a 10-year, $600 million contract the company won from the CIA in 2014. This made Amazon the sole provider of cloud services across “the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret,” according to an Amazon corporate press release.
Once the CIA’s Amazon-administered self-contained servers were up and running, the NSA was quick to follow suit, announcing its own integrated big-data project. Last year the agency moved most of its data into a new classified computing environment known as the Intelligence Community GovCloud, an integrated “big data fusion environment,” as the news site NextGov described it, that allows government analysts to “connect the dots” across all available data sources, whether classified or not.
The creation of IC GovCloud should send a chill up the spine of anyone who understands how powerful these systems can be and how inherently resistant they are to traditional forms of oversight, whose own track record can be charitably described as poor.
Amazon’s IC GovCloud was quickly countered by Microsoft’s secure version of its Azure Government cloud service, tailored for the use of 17 US intelligence agencies. Amazon and Microsoft are both expected to be major bidders for the Pentagon’s secure cloud system, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative—JEDI—a winner-take-all contract that will likely be worth at least $10 billion.
With so many pots of gold waiting at the end of the Washington, DC, rainbow, it seems like a small matter for tech companies to turn over our personal data—which legally speaking, is actually their data—to the spy agencies that guarantee their profits. This is the threat that is now emerging in plain sight. It is something we should reckon with now, before it’s too late.
You can’t really read the above and simply refer to Amazon as a private company. The truth of the matter is Amazon at this stage is kinda part of the government, and it should be treated that way. It should be subject to far more transparency and oversight at the very least, if not broken up. This should be a consequence of being so intimately tied to U.S. intelligence agencies. Do you really trust a company making so much money from contracts with spooks to keep your information private and free from rampant surveillance? You shouldn’t, and nobody should.
Amazon, which both collects and analyzes consumer data and sells a wide range of consumer home devices with microphones and cameras in them, may present surveillance agencies with especially tempting opportunities to repurpose their existing microphones, cameras, and data.
While Amazon troubles me the most, all the tech giants are deeply problematic and present a real threat to freedom, privacy and human dignity. Yes, the situation is that serious.
Unbeknownst to many, these companies so dominate how the internet itself works, it’s virtually impossible to get away from them. For example, a Gizmodo journalist recently tried to stop interacting with Amazon for a week and found it was impossible. Essentially, if you want to use the internet at all, you can’t really avoid Amazon.
Ultimately, though, we found Amazon was too huge to conquer.
AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.
Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block…
Amazon has embedded itself so thoroughly into the infrastructure of modern life, and into the business models of so many companies, including its competitors, that it’s nearly impossible to avoid it.
The U.S. economy is becoming less and less of a free market every single day, and the tech giants are increasingly a big reason for this pernicious trend.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Facebook honorable mention for being the creepy, dishonest, surveillance corporation masquerading as a platform that it is. In just the last 24 hours, we learned the following…
As disturbing as all of this is, I’m convinced we can turn it around. Much of this Orwellian world of gigantic tech surveillance corporations, and the governments that work with them, was created in the background while much of the public had no real understanding how their business models worked and the terrifying real world implications that come with ubiquitous surveillance for profit and social control. We are only slowly waking up from a long slumber and while many think it’s too late to turn back the clock, I say it’s never too late. Even for China, you never know what can happen. You can only abuse people for so long before they snap.
The truth of the matter is we have little choice. Technology is just a tool which can be used for good, evil or any spectrum in between. Society is leaning hard and fast toward the maliciousness path with most governments happy to encourage and partner with it.
Either we turn this thing around or we’ll be reduced to little more than swiping, liking, manipulated serfs on an oligarch’s digital plantation. To leave such a legacy to our children and grandchildren is unconscionable.
I’d like to think we can do better than this.
Two Roads Diverged in a Digital Wood
By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.
– From the must read piece: ‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
A lot of my content over the past couple of years has focused on the momentous geopolitical changes I see on the horizon, and this macro perspective reaches two significant conclusions. First, that the planet is moving away from a unipolar world dominated almost entirely by the U.S. toward a more multi-polar world. Second, that this fundamental shift in geopolitical landscape, coupled with what appears to be a forthcoming reckoning with the largest global debt bubble in human history, will lead to a once in a generation reset of the world economy and the global financial system that keeps it functioning.
As has become increasingly clear in recent months, the two primary protagonists in this major historical shift are the U.S. and China. While I’ve speculated about how increased tensions between these two economic giants will likely usher in the end of globalization as we know it (and possibly a bifurcated global economy), I’ve spent less time talking about what the internal situations will look like within individual countries themselves. This is a major oversight because what really matters to Chinese and U.S. citizens ten years from now isn’t which nation has more military bases abroad, but what will everyday life be like for regular people?
In this regard, China and the U.S. both seem to be headed in similar and very dystopian directions when it comes to the freedom-destroying marriage of overbearing government and ubiquitous surveillance technology. I read a couple of excellent articles on this topic over the past week, which forced the issue to the top of my mind. In other words, does it really matter who wins the geopolitical game of risk if “we the people” end up being controlled, surveilled and completely subjugated by the very technology we so eagerly embraced and assumed would make the world a more liberated place just a few years ago?
Everyone reading this is probably aware of the mind-bogglingly creepy and terrifying social credit system being unveiled in China. The first paragraph of a recent must read Wired article, Is Big Tech Merging with Big Brother? Kinda Looks like It, puts the situation into stark terms:
A friend of mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work.
When he offered to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating, which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.
Most Americans will read this and think there’s no way this could happen here, but the truth is a lot more complicated, and in some respects we’re at least headed in a similar direction.
We live in a situation where we still have Constitutional protections like freedom of speech on paper, but with so much of the public discussion being dominated by a couple of tech giants who ban people arbitrarily, it’s being eroded in practice. As I noted in last year’s piece, Americans Need Social Media Guided by the Rights Enshrined in the U.S. Constitution:
I say in theory because in practice we’re learning how easily speech can be marginalized to the point of becoming erased from public discourse. We’ve allowed the digital public square to be dominated by corporations focused on profit maximization and whose policies quite explicitly do not reflect the law of the land and values that we supposedly hold dear.
If you’re like me and you think the civil liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution are fundamental to who we are as a people, it must necessarily be unacceptable that a handful of private technology corporations that do not adhere to these principles have dominated the rails of public communication to the point a handful of executives get to decide what acceptable speech is.
But it’s even worse than that. The tech giants are in bed with government or government-funded institutions in one way or the other, so to simply characterize them as private companies isn’t really accurate. Though it may come as a surprise, I think Amazon is the most pernicious and dangerous of them all. Worse than Google and even worse than Facebook.
The aforementioned Wired article touches on the Amazon problem. For example:
Last year, Amazon Web Services announced the opening of the new AWS Secret Region, the result of a 10-year, $600 million contract the company won from the CIA in 2014. This made Amazon the sole provider of cloud services across “the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret,” according to an Amazon corporate press release.
Once the CIA’s Amazon-administered self-contained servers were up and running, the NSA was quick to follow suit, announcing its own integrated big-data project. Last year the agency moved most of its data into a new classified computing environment known as the Intelligence Community GovCloud, an integrated “big data fusion environment,” as the news site NextGov described it, that allows government analysts to “connect the dots” across all available data sources, whether classified or not.
The creation of IC GovCloud should send a chill up the spine of anyone who understands how powerful these systems can be and how inherently resistant they are to traditional forms of oversight, whose own track record can be charitably described as poor.
Amazon’s IC GovCloud was quickly countered by Microsoft’s secure version of its Azure Government cloud service, tailored for the use of 17 US intelligence agencies. Amazon and Microsoft are both expected to be major bidders for the Pentagon’s secure cloud system, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative—JEDI—a winner-take-all contract that will likely be worth at least $10 billion.
With so many pots of gold waiting at the end of the Washington, DC, rainbow, it seems like a small matter for tech companies to turn over our personal data—which legally speaking, is actually their data—to the spy agencies that guarantee their profits. This is the threat that is now emerging in plain sight. It is something we should reckon with now, before it’s too late.
You can’t really read the above and simply refer to Amazon as a private company. The truth of the matter is Amazon at this stage is kinda part of the government, and it should be treated that way. It should be subject to far more transparency and oversight at the very least, if not broken up. This should be a consequence of being so intimately tied to U.S. intelligence agencies. Do you really trust a company making so much money from contracts with spooks to keep your information private and free from rampant surveillance? You shouldn’t, and nobody should.
Amazon, which both collects and analyzes consumer data and sells a wide range of consumer home devices with microphones and cameras in them, may present surveillance agencies with especially tempting opportunities to repurpose their existing microphones, cameras, and data.
While Amazon troubles me the most, all the tech giants are deeply problematic and present a real threat to freedom, privacy and human dignity. Yes, the situation is that serious.
Unbeknownst to many, these companies so dominate how the internet itself works, it’s virtually impossible to get away from them. For example, a Gizmodo journalist recently tried to stop interacting with Amazon for a week and found it was impossible. Essentially, if you want to use the internet at all, you can’t really avoid Amazon.
Ultimately, though, we found Amazon was too huge to conquer.
AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.
Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block…
Amazon has embedded itself so thoroughly into the infrastructure of modern life, and into the business models of so many companies, including its competitors, that it’s nearly impossible to avoid it.
The U.S. economy is becoming less and less of a free market every single day, and the tech giants are increasingly a big reason for this pernicious trend.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Facebook honorable mention for being the creepy, dishonest, surveillance corporation masquerading as a platform that it is. In just the last 24 hours, we learned the following…
As disturbing as all of this is, I’m convinced we can turn it around. Much of this Orwellian world of gigantic tech surveillance corporations, and the governments that work with them, was created in the background while much of the public had no real understanding how their business models worked and the terrifying real world implications that come with ubiquitous surveillance for profit and social control. We are only slowly waking up from a long slumber and while many think it’s too late to turn back the clock, I say it’s never too late. Even for China, you never know what can happen. You can only abuse people for so long before they snap.
The truth of the matter is we have little choice. Technology is just a tool which can be used for good, evil or any spectrum in between. Society is leaning hard and fast toward the maliciousness path with most governments happy to encourage and partner with it.
Either we turn this thing around or we’ll be reduced to little more than swiping, liking, manipulated serfs on an oligarch’s digital plantation. To leave such a legacy to our children and grandchildren is unconscionable.
I’d like to think we can do better than this.
Monday, January 28, 2019
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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-world-to-come/
The World to Come
The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of American power are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the plunging of over half the population into poverty will, they know, not be reversed. The self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on the efficiency of the administrative state. The failing roads, bridges and public transportation are making commerce and communications more difficult. The soaring government deficit, now almost a trillion dollars thanks to the Trump administration’s massive corporate tax cuts, cannot be eliminated. The seizure of the financial system by global speculators ensures, sooner rather than later, another financial meltdown. The dysfunction of democratic institutions, which vomit up con artists such as Donald Trump and hold as alternatives inept, corporate-indentured politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, is cementing into place a new authoritarianism. The hollowing out of the pillars of the state, including the diplomatic corps and regulatory agencies, leaves the blunt force of the military as the only response to foreign disputes and fuels endless and futile foreign wars.
Just as ominous as the visible rot is the internal decay. Among all social classes there is a loss of faith in the government, widespread frustration, a sense of stagnation and entrapment, bitterness over unfulfilled expectations and promises, and a merging of fact and fiction so that civil and political discourse is no longer rooted in reality. The nation’s isolation by its traditional allies and its inability, especially in the face of environmental catastrophe, to articulate rational and visionary policies have shattered the mystique that is vital to power. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” George Orwell wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Our elites have exhausted fraud. Force is all they have left.
The United States is a wounded beast, bellowing and thrashing in its death throes. It can inflict tremendous damage, but it cannot recover. These are the last, agonizing days of the American Empire. The death blow will come when the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency, a process already underway. The value of the dollar will plummet, setting off a severe depression and demanding instant contraction of the military overseas.
Seth A. Klarman, who runs the Baupost Group hedge fund, which manages about $27 billion, just sent a sobering 22-page letter to his investors. He pointed out that the nation’s ratio of government debt to gross domestic product from 2008 to 2017 exceeded 100 percent and is close to that in France, Canada, Britain and Spain. The debt crisis, he warned, could be the “seeds” of the next financial crisis. He decried the global unraveling of “social cohesion,” adding, “It can’t be business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating social tensions.”
“There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford,” he said in the letter. “By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order.”
The ruling elites, worried about impending financial collapse, are scrambling to cement into place harsh legal and physical forms of control to stymie what they fear could be widespread popular unrest, nascent forms of which can be seen in the strikes carried out by American teachers and the protests by the “yellow vests” in France.
The ruling ideology of neoliberalism, the ruling elites recognize, has been discredited across the political spectrum. This is forcing the elites to make unsavory alliances with neofascists, who in the United States are represented by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism is swiftly filling Trump’s ideological void. It is embodied in figures such as Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Brett Kavanaugh and Betsy DeVoss.
In its most virulent form, one that will be expressed once the economy goes into crisis, this Christian fascism will seek to purge the society of those branded as social deviants, including immigrants, Muslims, “secular humanist” artists and intellectuals, feminists, gays and lesbians, Native Americans and criminals—largely poor people of color—based on a perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Abortion will be illegal. The death penalty will be mandated for a variety of crimes. Education will be dominated by white supremacist views of history, indoctrination and the teaching of creationism or “intelligent design.” The pantheon of new America heroes will include Robert E. Lee, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The state will portray the white majority as victims.
This Christian fascism, like all forms of totalitarianism, wraps itself in a cloying piety, promising moral as well as physical renewal. The degradation of mass culture with its celebration of sexual sadism, graphic violence and personal dysfunction, its plagues of opioid addiction, suicide, gambling and alcoholism, along with social chaos and government dysfunction, will lend credibility to the Christian fascists’ promise of a return to a “Christian” purity. The cloak of this piety will be used to snuff out all civil liberties.
Central to any totalitarian ideology is a constant inquisition against supposedly clandestine and sinister groups held responsible for the country’s demise. Conspiracy theories, which already color Trump’s worldview, will proliferate. The ruling rhetoric will whipsaw the population, swinging from championing individualism and personal freedom to calling for abject subservience to those who claim to speak for the nation and God, from the sanctity of life to advocating the death penalty, unrestrained police violence and militarism, from love and compassion to the fear of being branded a heretic or traitor. A grotesque hypermasculinity will be celebrated. Violence will be held up as the mechanism to cleanse the society and the world of evil. Facts will be erased or altered. Lies will become true. Political language will be cognitive dissonance. The more the country declines, the more the paranoia and collective insanity will grow. All of these elements are present in varying forms within the culture and our failed democracy. They will become pronounced as the country unravels and the disease of totalitarianism spreads.
The ruling oligarchs, as in all failed states, will retreat into fortified compounds, many of which they are already preparing, where they will have access to basic services, health care, education, water, electricity and security largely denied to the wider population. The central government will be reduced to its most basic functions—internal and external security and collecting taxes. Severe poverty will cripple the lives of most citizens. Any essential service once provided by the state, from utilities to basic policing, will be privatized, expensive and inaccessible to those without resources. Trash will pile up in the streets. Crime will explode. The electrical grid and water systems—decrepit, poorly maintained and run by corporations—will repeatedly turn on and off.
The mass media will become nakedly Orwellian, chatting endlessly about a bright future and pretending America remains a great superpower. It will substitute political gossip for news—a corruption already far advanced—while insisting that the country is in an economic recovery or about to enter one. It will refuse to address ever-worsening social inequality, political and environmental deterioration and military debacles. Its primary role will be to peddle illusions so that an atomized public, fixated on its electronic screens, will be diverted from the collapse and see its plight as personal rather than collective. Dissent will become more difficult as critics are censored and attacked as responsible for the decline. Hate groups and hate crimes will proliferate and be tacitly empowered and condoned by the state. Mass shootings will be commonplace. The weak—especially children, women, the disabled, the sick and the elderly—will be exploited, abandoned or abused. The strong will be omnipotent.
There will still be money to be made. Corporations will sell anything for a profit—security, dwindling food supplies, fossil fuel, water, electricity, education, medical care, transportation—forcing citizens into debt peonage that will see their meager assets seized when they can’t make payments. The prison population, already the largest in the world, will expand along with the number of citizens forced to wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day. Big corporations will pay no income tax or at best a symbolic tax. They will be above the law, able to abuse and underpay workers and poison the environment without oversight or regulation.
As income inequality becomes more massive, financial titans such as Jeff Bezos, worth some $140 billion, will increasingly function as modern-day slaveholders. They will preside over financial empires where impoverished employees will live in run-down campers and trailer parks while toiling 12 hours a day in vast, poorly ventilated warehouses. These employees, paid subsistence wages, will be constantly recorded, tracked and monitored by digital devices. They will be fired when the punishing work conditions cripple their health. For many Amazon employees the future is now.
Work will be a form of serfdom for all but the upper elites and managers. Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book “Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It” quotes a survey in which 61 percent of employees said workplace stress had made them ill and 7 percent said they required hospitalization as a result. The stress of overwork, he writes, may cause 120,000 deaths annually in the United States. In China there are an estimated 1 million deaths a year from overwork.
This is the world the elites are preparing for by setting in place legal mechanisms and internal security forces to strip us of liberty.
We, too, must begin to prepare for this dystopia, not only to ensure our survival but to build mechanisms to blunt and attempt to overthrow the totalitarian power the elites expect to wield. Alexander Herzen, speaking to a group of anarchists a century ago about how to overthrow the Russian czar, reminded his listeners that it was their job not to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All efforts to reform the American system is capitulation. No progressive in the Democratic Party is going to rise up, take control of the party and save us. There is one ruling party. The corporate party. It may engage in petty, internecine warfare, as it did in the recent government shutdown. It may squabble over power and the spoils of power. It may come wrapped in more tolerant stances regarding women, LGBT rights and the dignity of people of color, but on the fundamental issues of war, internal security and corporate domination there is no divergence.
We must carry out organized civil disobedience and forms of non-cooperation to weaken corporate power. We must use, as in France, widespread and sustained social unrest to push back against the designs of our corporate masters. We must sever ourselves from reliance on corporations in order to build independent, sustainable communities and alternative forms of power. The less we need corporations the freer we will become. This will be true in every aspect of our lives, including food production, education, journalism, artistic expression and work. Life will have to be communal. No one, unless he or she is part of the ruling elite, will have the resources to survive alone.
The longer we pretend this dystopian world is not imminent, the more unprepared and disempowered we will be. The ruling elite’s goal is to keep us entertained, frightened and passive while they build draconian structures of oppression grounded in this dark reality. It is up to us to pit power against power. Ours against theirs. Even if we cannot alter the larger culture, we can at least create self-sustaining enclaves where we can approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers of a world based on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And this, given what lies in front of us, will be a victory.
The World to Come
The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of American power are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the plunging of over half the population into poverty will, they know, not be reversed. The self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on the efficiency of the administrative state. The failing roads, bridges and public transportation are making commerce and communications more difficult. The soaring government deficit, now almost a trillion dollars thanks to the Trump administration’s massive corporate tax cuts, cannot be eliminated. The seizure of the financial system by global speculators ensures, sooner rather than later, another financial meltdown. The dysfunction of democratic institutions, which vomit up con artists such as Donald Trump and hold as alternatives inept, corporate-indentured politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, is cementing into place a new authoritarianism. The hollowing out of the pillars of the state, including the diplomatic corps and regulatory agencies, leaves the blunt force of the military as the only response to foreign disputes and fuels endless and futile foreign wars.
Just as ominous as the visible rot is the internal decay. Among all social classes there is a loss of faith in the government, widespread frustration, a sense of stagnation and entrapment, bitterness over unfulfilled expectations and promises, and a merging of fact and fiction so that civil and political discourse is no longer rooted in reality. The nation’s isolation by its traditional allies and its inability, especially in the face of environmental catastrophe, to articulate rational and visionary policies have shattered the mystique that is vital to power. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” George Orwell wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Our elites have exhausted fraud. Force is all they have left.
The United States is a wounded beast, bellowing and thrashing in its death throes. It can inflict tremendous damage, but it cannot recover. These are the last, agonizing days of the American Empire. The death blow will come when the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency, a process already underway. The value of the dollar will plummet, setting off a severe depression and demanding instant contraction of the military overseas.
Seth A. Klarman, who runs the Baupost Group hedge fund, which manages about $27 billion, just sent a sobering 22-page letter to his investors. He pointed out that the nation’s ratio of government debt to gross domestic product from 2008 to 2017 exceeded 100 percent and is close to that in France, Canada, Britain and Spain. The debt crisis, he warned, could be the “seeds” of the next financial crisis. He decried the global unraveling of “social cohesion,” adding, “It can’t be business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating social tensions.”
“There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford,” he said in the letter. “By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order.”
The ruling elites, worried about impending financial collapse, are scrambling to cement into place harsh legal and physical forms of control to stymie what they fear could be widespread popular unrest, nascent forms of which can be seen in the strikes carried out by American teachers and the protests by the “yellow vests” in France.
The ruling ideology of neoliberalism, the ruling elites recognize, has been discredited across the political spectrum. This is forcing the elites to make unsavory alliances with neofascists, who in the United States are represented by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism is swiftly filling Trump’s ideological void. It is embodied in figures such as Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Brett Kavanaugh and Betsy DeVoss.
In its most virulent form, one that will be expressed once the economy goes into crisis, this Christian fascism will seek to purge the society of those branded as social deviants, including immigrants, Muslims, “secular humanist” artists and intellectuals, feminists, gays and lesbians, Native Americans and criminals—largely poor people of color—based on a perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Abortion will be illegal. The death penalty will be mandated for a variety of crimes. Education will be dominated by white supremacist views of history, indoctrination and the teaching of creationism or “intelligent design.” The pantheon of new America heroes will include Robert E. Lee, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The state will portray the white majority as victims.
This Christian fascism, like all forms of totalitarianism, wraps itself in a cloying piety, promising moral as well as physical renewal. The degradation of mass culture with its celebration of sexual sadism, graphic violence and personal dysfunction, its plagues of opioid addiction, suicide, gambling and alcoholism, along with social chaos and government dysfunction, will lend credibility to the Christian fascists’ promise of a return to a “Christian” purity. The cloak of this piety will be used to snuff out all civil liberties.
Central to any totalitarian ideology is a constant inquisition against supposedly clandestine and sinister groups held responsible for the country’s demise. Conspiracy theories, which already color Trump’s worldview, will proliferate. The ruling rhetoric will whipsaw the population, swinging from championing individualism and personal freedom to calling for abject subservience to those who claim to speak for the nation and God, from the sanctity of life to advocating the death penalty, unrestrained police violence and militarism, from love and compassion to the fear of being branded a heretic or traitor. A grotesque hypermasculinity will be celebrated. Violence will be held up as the mechanism to cleanse the society and the world of evil. Facts will be erased or altered. Lies will become true. Political language will be cognitive dissonance. The more the country declines, the more the paranoia and collective insanity will grow. All of these elements are present in varying forms within the culture and our failed democracy. They will become pronounced as the country unravels and the disease of totalitarianism spreads.
The ruling oligarchs, as in all failed states, will retreat into fortified compounds, many of which they are already preparing, where they will have access to basic services, health care, education, water, electricity and security largely denied to the wider population. The central government will be reduced to its most basic functions—internal and external security and collecting taxes. Severe poverty will cripple the lives of most citizens. Any essential service once provided by the state, from utilities to basic policing, will be privatized, expensive and inaccessible to those without resources. Trash will pile up in the streets. Crime will explode. The electrical grid and water systems—decrepit, poorly maintained and run by corporations—will repeatedly turn on and off.
The mass media will become nakedly Orwellian, chatting endlessly about a bright future and pretending America remains a great superpower. It will substitute political gossip for news—a corruption already far advanced—while insisting that the country is in an economic recovery or about to enter one. It will refuse to address ever-worsening social inequality, political and environmental deterioration and military debacles. Its primary role will be to peddle illusions so that an atomized public, fixated on its electronic screens, will be diverted from the collapse and see its plight as personal rather than collective. Dissent will become more difficult as critics are censored and attacked as responsible for the decline. Hate groups and hate crimes will proliferate and be tacitly empowered and condoned by the state. Mass shootings will be commonplace. The weak—especially children, women, the disabled, the sick and the elderly—will be exploited, abandoned or abused. The strong will be omnipotent.
There will still be money to be made. Corporations will sell anything for a profit—security, dwindling food supplies, fossil fuel, water, electricity, education, medical care, transportation—forcing citizens into debt peonage that will see their meager assets seized when they can’t make payments. The prison population, already the largest in the world, will expand along with the number of citizens forced to wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day. Big corporations will pay no income tax or at best a symbolic tax. They will be above the law, able to abuse and underpay workers and poison the environment without oversight or regulation.
As income inequality becomes more massive, financial titans such as Jeff Bezos, worth some $140 billion, will increasingly function as modern-day slaveholders. They will preside over financial empires where impoverished employees will live in run-down campers and trailer parks while toiling 12 hours a day in vast, poorly ventilated warehouses. These employees, paid subsistence wages, will be constantly recorded, tracked and monitored by digital devices. They will be fired when the punishing work conditions cripple their health. For many Amazon employees the future is now.
Work will be a form of serfdom for all but the upper elites and managers. Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book “Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It” quotes a survey in which 61 percent of employees said workplace stress had made them ill and 7 percent said they required hospitalization as a result. The stress of overwork, he writes, may cause 120,000 deaths annually in the United States. In China there are an estimated 1 million deaths a year from overwork.
This is the world the elites are preparing for by setting in place legal mechanisms and internal security forces to strip us of liberty.
We, too, must begin to prepare for this dystopia, not only to ensure our survival but to build mechanisms to blunt and attempt to overthrow the totalitarian power the elites expect to wield. Alexander Herzen, speaking to a group of anarchists a century ago about how to overthrow the Russian czar, reminded his listeners that it was their job not to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All efforts to reform the American system is capitulation. No progressive in the Democratic Party is going to rise up, take control of the party and save us. There is one ruling party. The corporate party. It may engage in petty, internecine warfare, as it did in the recent government shutdown. It may squabble over power and the spoils of power. It may come wrapped in more tolerant stances regarding women, LGBT rights and the dignity of people of color, but on the fundamental issues of war, internal security and corporate domination there is no divergence.
We must carry out organized civil disobedience and forms of non-cooperation to weaken corporate power. We must use, as in France, widespread and sustained social unrest to push back against the designs of our corporate masters. We must sever ourselves from reliance on corporations in order to build independent, sustainable communities and alternative forms of power. The less we need corporations the freer we will become. This will be true in every aspect of our lives, including food production, education, journalism, artistic expression and work. Life will have to be communal. No one, unless he or she is part of the ruling elite, will have the resources to survive alone.
The longer we pretend this dystopian world is not imminent, the more unprepared and disempowered we will be. The ruling elite’s goal is to keep us entertained, frightened and passive while they build draconian structures of oppression grounded in this dark reality. It is up to us to pit power against power. Ours against theirs. Even if we cannot alter the larger culture, we can at least create self-sustaining enclaves where we can approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers of a world based on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And this, given what lies in front of us, will be a victory.
Sunday, January 27, 2019
SC182-8
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/in-the-deep-mid-winter/
In the Deep Mid-Winter
Ill winds sweep across the fruited plain in the cruel heart of winter. America can resolve nothing. The state-of-the-union is a kind of hysterical nausea, and the nation hunkers into its crib of toxic diverse identities waiting for history to bitch-slap it back on its feet. History’s big sister, Reality, stands by, witnessing all. Spring… is… coming….
Things break up in spring. Nature unlocks what was frozen. The bodies emerge from the melting ice and ripen. The air is electric and thunderbolts frighten the gathering mobs in the public square, the Walmart parking lot, with rumors of war. The earth shakes and monuments fall. That’s how it’s shaping up for 2019.
Sometimes nations just lose their shit. The complex collapse of American life proceeds as the public and its leaders fail to comprehend the forces in play. What the Federal Reserve actually accomplished with its ten years of extend-and-pretend policy was not an economic “recovery,” but a degenerative disease of the social contract. If you look more closely, you can sense what will be unleashed when the ground thaws.
There will be a reckoning in the financial markets. Something ominous is rumbling over in bonds. No more high-yield for you! Among the victims of a credit freeze in “junk” (high-risk) lending: the shale oil industry. Watch it start to roll over this spring as money becomes unavailable for the exorbitant operations that comprise fracking. The swift collapse of the shale oil industry will shock the country, but it is really just the downside of its improbably rapid and acrobatic rise since 2005 on the false premise that profits don’t matter in a business venture. Only the fall will be even sharper than the rise: a few measly years. And, of course, the bond market represents the supreme untruth of the age: that debts can be racked up forever and never paid back.
Mr. Trump will be left holding a bag so large that observers may mistake him for a Bizarro Santa Claus. But the baggage within will not consist of sugarplums. It is actually stuffed with bankruptcy filings and pink slips. A year from now, there may be no such thing as a hedge fund left on the planet Earth. Or a job opening, unless you’re really good at weeding or picking fruit. Mr. Trump will attempt a rescue, but so did Herbert Hoover, who had a good three years to try this-and-that while the Depression stole over the land like a deadly fungus. The difference, of course, is that Mr. Hoover was acknowledged as a most brilliant mind of his era, and yet Reality had her wicked way with him, anyway.
The Democratic Party should have been tossed into the rubber room two years ago, but it’s still out there shrieking in its straight-jacket of bad faith. Kamala, Liz, and Kirsten will mud-wrestle for dominance, but so far, the only cards they can show are the race-and-gender jokers in the deck. Meanwhile, the government shutdown standoff may not be the “winner” move that Nancy Pelosi thought it would be. Why do you suppose she thought that the voters would only blame the Golden Golem of Greatness? She could be gone as Speaker when we’re back in shirtsleeve weather.
Also in the background: the likely shocking reversal of the long, dreary, RussiaGate affair as about twenty-odd former officials of the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA, State Department, and other dark corners of the Deep State answer charges of sedition in federal court. Many of them are connected, one way or another, to Hillary Clinton, who may be targeted herself. Robert Mueller is also liable to be smacked with a malicious prosecution charge in the matter of General Michael Flynn when he withdraws his guilty plea in March. A significant moment will be when Dean Baquet is fired as editor of The New York Times, after years of running the “newspaper of record” as an exercise in nonstop PMS.
Financial crack-up and RussiaGate reversal will leave both major parties gasping in the mud as the tide goes out. And just in time for the Yellow Vest movement to cross the ocean and bring out the street mobs to slug it out on the National Mall in lovely weather. Finally, a protest you can believe in! By June, it will be clear that the old order is being swept away. The fight over the new order struggling to be born will be even harsher and deadlier. But we may not be as confused about what’s at stake.
In the Deep Mid-Winter
Ill winds sweep across the fruited plain in the cruel heart of winter. America can resolve nothing. The state-of-the-union is a kind of hysterical nausea, and the nation hunkers into its crib of toxic diverse identities waiting for history to bitch-slap it back on its feet. History’s big sister, Reality, stands by, witnessing all. Spring… is… coming….
Things break up in spring. Nature unlocks what was frozen. The bodies emerge from the melting ice and ripen. The air is electric and thunderbolts frighten the gathering mobs in the public square, the Walmart parking lot, with rumors of war. The earth shakes and monuments fall. That’s how it’s shaping up for 2019.
Sometimes nations just lose their shit. The complex collapse of American life proceeds as the public and its leaders fail to comprehend the forces in play. What the Federal Reserve actually accomplished with its ten years of extend-and-pretend policy was not an economic “recovery,” but a degenerative disease of the social contract. If you look more closely, you can sense what will be unleashed when the ground thaws.
There will be a reckoning in the financial markets. Something ominous is rumbling over in bonds. No more high-yield for you! Among the victims of a credit freeze in “junk” (high-risk) lending: the shale oil industry. Watch it start to roll over this spring as money becomes unavailable for the exorbitant operations that comprise fracking. The swift collapse of the shale oil industry will shock the country, but it is really just the downside of its improbably rapid and acrobatic rise since 2005 on the false premise that profits don’t matter in a business venture. Only the fall will be even sharper than the rise: a few measly years. And, of course, the bond market represents the supreme untruth of the age: that debts can be racked up forever and never paid back.
Mr. Trump will be left holding a bag so large that observers may mistake him for a Bizarro Santa Claus. But the baggage within will not consist of sugarplums. It is actually stuffed with bankruptcy filings and pink slips. A year from now, there may be no such thing as a hedge fund left on the planet Earth. Or a job opening, unless you’re really good at weeding or picking fruit. Mr. Trump will attempt a rescue, but so did Herbert Hoover, who had a good three years to try this-and-that while the Depression stole over the land like a deadly fungus. The difference, of course, is that Mr. Hoover was acknowledged as a most brilliant mind of his era, and yet Reality had her wicked way with him, anyway.
The Democratic Party should have been tossed into the rubber room two years ago, but it’s still out there shrieking in its straight-jacket of bad faith. Kamala, Liz, and Kirsten will mud-wrestle for dominance, but so far, the only cards they can show are the race-and-gender jokers in the deck. Meanwhile, the government shutdown standoff may not be the “winner” move that Nancy Pelosi thought it would be. Why do you suppose she thought that the voters would only blame the Golden Golem of Greatness? She could be gone as Speaker when we’re back in shirtsleeve weather.
Also in the background: the likely shocking reversal of the long, dreary, RussiaGate affair as about twenty-odd former officials of the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA, State Department, and other dark corners of the Deep State answer charges of sedition in federal court. Many of them are connected, one way or another, to Hillary Clinton, who may be targeted herself. Robert Mueller is also liable to be smacked with a malicious prosecution charge in the matter of General Michael Flynn when he withdraws his guilty plea in March. A significant moment will be when Dean Baquet is fired as editor of The New York Times, after years of running the “newspaper of record” as an exercise in nonstop PMS.
Financial crack-up and RussiaGate reversal will leave both major parties gasping in the mud as the tide goes out. And just in time for the Yellow Vest movement to cross the ocean and bring out the street mobs to slug it out on the National Mall in lovely weather. Finally, a protest you can believe in! By June, it will be clear that the old order is being swept away. The fight over the new order struggling to be born will be even harsher and deadlier. But we may not be as confused about what’s at stake.
Saturday, January 26, 2019
SC182-7
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114741/collapse-already-here
Collapse Is Already Here
Many people are expecting some degree of approaching collapse -- be it economic, environmental and/or societal -- thinking that they’ll recognize the danger signs in time.
As if it will be completely obvious, like a Hollywood blockbuster. Complete with clear warnings from scientists, politicians and the media. And everyone can then get busy either panicking or becoming the plucky heroes.
That's not how collapse works.
Collapse is a process, not an event.
And it's already underway, all around us.
Collapse is already here.
However, unlike Hollywood's vision, the early stages of collapse cause people to cling even tighter to the status quo. Instead of panic in the streets, we simply see more of the same -- as those in power do all they can to remain so, while the majority of the public attempts to ignore the growing problems for as long as it possibly can.
For both the elite and the majority, their entire world view and their personal sense of self depends on things not crumbling all around them, so they remain willfully blind to any evidence to the contrary.
When faced with the predicaments we warn about here at PeakProsperity.com, getting an early start on prudently shifting your own personal situation is of vital strategic and tactical importance. Tens of thousands of our readers already have taken wise steps in their lives to position themselves resiliently.
But most of the majority won't get started until it’s entirely too late to make any difference at all. Which is sad but perhaps unavoidable, given human nature.
If everybody around you is saying “Everything is awesome!”, it can take a long time to determine for yourself that things in fact aren't:
Real collapse happens slowly, and often without any sort of acknowledgement by the so-called political and economic elites until its abrupt terminal end.
The degree of rot within the Soviet Union went undetected until its final implosion, catching pretty much everyone in the West (as well as in the former USSR!) by surprise.
Similarly, one day people woke up and passenger pigeons were extinct. They used to literally darken the skies for hours as they migrated past, numbering in the billions. Nobody planned on their demise and virtually nobody saw it coming. Sure, just as there always are, a few crackpots at the fringes noticed, but they were ignored until it was too late.
Our view is that collapse of our current way of life is happening right now. The signs are all around us. Our invitation is for you to notice them and inquire critically what the ramifications will be -- irrespective of whatever pablum our leaders and media are currently spewing.
While the monetary and financial elites strain to crank out one more day/week/month/year of “market stability”, the ecosystems we depend on for life are vanishing. It's as if the Rapture were happening, but it's the insects, plants and animals ascending to heaven instead of we humans.
Committing Ecocide
Be very skeptical when the cause of each new ecological nightmare is ascribed to “natural causes.”
While it’s entire possible for any one ecological mishap to be due to a natural cycle, it’s weak thinking to assign the same cause to dozens of troubling findings happening all over the globe.
As they say in the military: Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. But three times is enemy action.
Right now, Australia is in the middle of the summer season and being absolutely hammered by high heat. Sure it gets hot during an Australian summer, but not like this. The impact has been devastating:
Australia's Facing an Unprecedented Ecological Crisis, But No One's Paying Attention
Jan 9, 2019
It started in December, just before Christmas.
Hundreds of dead perch were discovered floating along the banks of the Darling River – victims of a "dirty, rotten green" algae bloom spreading in the still waters of the small country town of Menindee, Australia.
Things didn't get better. The dead hundreds became dead thousands, as the crisis expanded to claim the lives of 10,000 fish along a 40-kilometre (25-mile) stretch of the river. But the worst was still yet to come.
This week, the environmental disaster has exploded to a horrific new level – what one Twitter user called "Extinction level water degradation" – with reports suggesting up to a million fish have now been killed in a new instance of the toxic algae bloom conditions.
For their part, authorities in the state of New South Wales have only gone as far as confirming "hundreds of thousands" of fish have died in the event – but regardless of the exact toll, it's clear the deadly calamity is an unprecedented ecological disaster in the region's waterways.
"I've never seen two fish kills of this scale so close together in terms of time, especially in the same stretch of river," fisheries manager Iain Ellis from NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) explained to ABC News.
The DPI blames ongoing drought conditions for the algae bloom's devastating impact on local bream, cod, and perch species – with a combination of high temperature and chronic low water supply (along with high nutrient concentrations in the water) making for a toxic algal soup.
Watching the video above showing grown men crying over the loss of 100-year-old fish is heartbreaking. This fish kill is described as “unprecedented” and as an “extinction level event", meaning it left no survivors over a long stretch of waterway.
We can try to console oursleves that maybe this was just a singular event, a cluster of bad juju and worse waterway management that combined to give us this horror -- but it wasn’t.
It's part of a larger tapestry of heat-induced misery that Australia is facing:
How one heatwave killed 'a third' of a bat species in Australia
Jan 15, 2019
Over two days in November, record-breaking heat in Australia's north wiped out almost one-third of the nation's spectacled flying foxes, according to researchers.
The animals, also known as spectacled fruit bats, were unable to survive in temperatures which exceeded 42C.
"It was totally depressing," one rescuer, David White, told the BBC.
Flying foxes are no more sensitive to extreme heat than some other species, experts say. But because they often gather in urban areas in large numbers, their deaths can be more conspicuous, and easily documented.
"It raises concerns as to the fate of other creatures who have more secretive, secluded lifestyles," Dr Welbergen says.
He sees the bats as the "the canary in the coal mine for climate change".
A two-day heatwave last November (2018) was sufficient to kill up to a third of all Australia's known flying foxes, a vulnerable species that was already endangered. As those bats are well-studied and their deaths quite conspicuous to observers, it raises the important question: How many other less-scrutinized species are dying off at the same time?
And the death parade continues:
More than 90 wild horses die in Australia's heat wave (Jan 24, 2019)
Australia heatwave: Mass animal deaths and roads melting as temperatures reach record high (Jan 19, 2019)
Australia's Heatwave Responsible for Deaths of Horses, Camels (Jan 24)
Are these data points severe enough for you to recognize as signs of ongoing collapse?
Last summer was a time of extreme draught and heat for Australia, and this summer looks set to be even worse. This may be the country's 'new normal' for if the situation is due to climate change instead of just an ordinary (if punishing) hot cycle.
If so, these heat waves will likely intensify over time, completely collapsing the existing biological systems across Australia.
Meanwhile, nearby in New Zealand, similar species loss is underway:
'Like losing family': time may be running out for New Zealand's most sacred tree
July 2018
New Zealand’s oldest and most sacred tree stands 60 metres from death, as a fungal disease known as kauri dieback spreads unabated across the country.
Tāne Mahuta (Lord of the Forest) is a giant kauri tree located in the Waipoua forest in the north of the country, and is sacred to the Māori people, who regard it as a living ancestor.
The tree is believed to be around 2,500 years old, has a girth of 13.77m and is more than 50m tall.
Thousands of locals and tourists alike visit the tree every year to pay their respects, and take selfies beside the trunk.
Now, the survival of what is believed to be New Zealand’s oldest living tree is threatened by kauri dieback, with kauri trees a mere 60m from Tāne Mahuta confirmed to be infected.
Kauri dieback causes most infected trees to die, and is threatening to completely wipe out New Zealand’s most treasured native tree species, prized for its beauty, strength and use in boats, carvings and buildings.
“We don’t have any time to do the usual scientific trials anymore, we just have to start responding immediately in any way possible; it is not ideal but we have kind of run out of time,” Black says, adding that although there is no cure for kauri dieback there is a range of measures which could slow its progress.
People are rallying to try and save the kauri trees, although it’s unclear exactly how to stop the spread of the new fungal invader or why it's so pathogenic all of a sudden. It could be due to another natural sort of cycle (except the fungus was thought to have been introduced and spread by human activity) or it could be a another collapse indicator we need to finally hear and heed.
It turns out that New Zealand is not alone. Giant trees are dying all over the globe.
2,000-year-old baobab trees in Africa are suddenly and rather mysteriously giving up the ghost. These trees survived happily for 2,000 years and now all of a sudden they're dying. Are the deaths of our most ancient trees all across the globe some sort of natural process? Or is there a different culprit we need to recognize?
In Japan they're lamenting record low squid catches. Oh well, maybe it’s just overfishing? Or could it be another message we need to heed?
To all this we can add the numerous scientific articles now decrying the 'insect Apocalypse' unfolding across the northern hemisphere. The Guardian recently issued this warning: “Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’”. Researchers in Puerto Rico's forest preserves recorded a 98% decline in insect mass over 35 years. Does a 98% decline have a natural explanation? Or is something bigger going on?
Meanwhile, the butterfly die-off is unfolding with alarming speed. I rarely see them in the summer anymore, much to my great regret. Seeing one is now as exciting as seeing a meteor streak across the sky, and just as rare:
Monarch butterfly numbers plummet 86 percent in California
Jan 7, 2019
CAMARILLO, Calif. – The number of monarch butterflies turning up at California's overwintering sites has dropped by about 86 percent compared to only a year ago, according to the Xerces Society, which organizes a yearly count of the iconic creatures.
That’s bad news for a species whose numbers have already declined an estimated 97 percent since the 1980s.
Each year, monarchs in the western United States migrate from inland areas to California’s coastline to spend the winter, usually between September and February.
“It’s been the worst year we’ve ever seen,” said Emma Pelton, a conservation biologist with the Xerces Society who helps lead the annual Thanksgiving count. “We already know we’re dealing with a really small population, and now we have a really bad year and all of a sudden, we’re kind of in crisis mode where we have very, very few butterflies left.”
What’s causing the dramatic drop-off is somewhat of a mystery. Experts believe the decline is spurred by a confluence of unfortunate factors, including late rainy-season storms across California last March, the effects of the state’s years long drought and the seemingly relentless onslaught of wildfires that have burned acres upon acres of habitat and at times choked the air with toxic smoke.
Note the “explanation” given blames the decline on mostly natural processes: late storms, droughts and wildfires. I believe that's because the article appears in a US paper, so no mention was permitted of neonicotinoid pesticides or glyphosate. Both of these are highly effective decimators of insect life -- but they're highly profitable for Big Ag, so for now, any criticism is not allowed.
Sure a 97% decline since the 1980’s might be due to fires, droughts and rains. But that’s really not very likely. There have always been fires, droughts and rains. Something else has shifted since the 1980’s. And that “thing” is human activity, which has increased its willingness to destroy habitat and spray poisons everywhere in pursuit of cheaper food and easier profits.
The loss of insects, which we observe in the loss of the beautiful and iconic Monarch butterfly, is a gigantic warning flag that we desperately need to heed. If the bottom of our billion-year-old food web disintegrates, you can be certain that the repercussions to humans will be dramatic and terribly difficult to ‘fix.’ In scientific terms, it will be called a “bottom-up trophic cascade”.
In a trophic cascade, the loss of a single layer of the food pyramid crumbles the entire structure. Carefully-tuned food webs a billion years in the making are suddenly destabilized. Life cannot adapt quickly enough, and so entire species are quickly lost. Once enough species die off, the web cannot be rewoven, and life … simply ends.
What exactly would a “trophic cascade” look like in real life? Oh, perhaps something just like this:
Deadly deficiency at the heart of an environmental mystery
Oct 16, 2018
During spring and summer, busy colonies of a duck called the common eider (Somateria mollissima) and other wild birds are usually seen breeding on the rocky coasts around the Baltic Sea. Thousands of eager new parents vie for the best spots to build nests and catch food for their demanding young broods.
But Lennart Balk, an environmental biochemist at Stockholm University, witnessed a dramatically different scene when he visited Swedish coastal colonies during a 5-year period starting in 2004. Many birds couldn’t fly. Others were completely paralyzed. Birds also weren’t eating and had difficulty breathing. Thousands of birds were suffering and dying from this paralytic disease, says Balk. “We went into the bird colonies, and we were shocked. You could see something was really wrong. It was a scary situation for this time of year,” he says.
Based on his past work documenting a similar crisis in several Baltic Sea fish species, Balk suspected that the birds’ disease was caused by a thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. Thiamine is required for critical metabolic processes, such as energy production and proper functioning of the nervous system.
This essential micronutrient is produced mainly by plants, including phytoplankton, bacteria, and fungi; people and animals must acquire it through their food.
“We found that thiamine deficiency is much more widespread and severe than previously thought,” Balk says. Given its scope, he suggests that a pervasive thiamine deficiency could be at least partly responsible for global wildlife population declines. Over a 60-year period up to 2010, for example, worldwide seabird populations declined by approximately 70%, and globally, species are being lost 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction (9, 10). “He has seen a thiamine deficiency in several differ phyla now,” says Fitzsimons of Balk. “One wonders what is going on. It’s a larger issue than we first suspected.”
This is beyond disturbing. It should have been on the front pages of every newspaper and TV show across the globe. We should be discussing it in urgent, worried tones and devoting a huge amount of money to studying and fixing it. At a minimum, we should stop hauling more tiny fish and krill from the sea in an effort to at least stabilize the food pyramid while we sort things out.
If you recall, we’ve also recently reported on the findings showing that phytoplankton levels are down 50% (these are a prime source for thiamine, by the way). Again, here's a possible “trophic cascade” in progress:
Fewer phytoplankton means less thiamine being produced. That means less thiamine is available to pass up the food chain. Next thing you know, there’s a 70% decline in seabird populations.
This is something I’ve noticed directly and commented n during my annual pilgrimages to the northern Maine coast over the past 30 years, where seagulls used to be extremely common and are now practically gone. Seagulls!
Next thing you know, some other major food chain will be wiped out and we'll get oceans full of jellyfish instead of actual fish. Or perhaps some once-benign mold grows unchecked because the former complex food web holding it in balance has collapsed, suddenyl transforming Big Ag's "green revolution" into grayish-brown spore-ridden dust.
To add to the terrifying mix of ecological news has been the sudden and rapid loss of amphibian species all over the world. A possible source for the culprit has been found, if that’s any consolation; though that discovery does not yet identify a solution to this saddening development.
Ground Zero of Amphibian 'Apocalypse' Finally Found
May 10, 2018
MANY OF THE world's amphibians are staring down an existential threat: an ancient skin-eating fungus that can wipe out entire forests' worth of frogs in a flash.
This ecological super-villain, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has driven more than 200 amphibian species to extinction or near-extinction—radically rewiring ecosystems all over Earth.
“This is the worst pathogen in the history of the world, as far as we can tell, in terms of its impacts on biodiversity,” says Mat Fisher, an Imperial College London mycologist who studies the fungus.
Now, a global team of 58 researchers has uncovered the creature's origin story. A groundbreaking study published in Science on Thursday reveals where and when the fungus most likely emerged: the Korean peninsula, sometime during the 1950s.
From there, scientists theorize that human activities inadvertently spread it far and wide—leading to amphibian die-offs across the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Australia.
Frogs, toads and salamanders were absolutely critical parts of my childhood and I delighted in their presence. I cannot imagine a world without them. But effectively, that’s what we’ve got now with so many on the endangered species list.
This parade of awful ecological news is both endless and worsening. And there is no real prospect for us to fix things in time to avoid substantial ecological pain. None.
After all, we can’t even manage our watersheds properly. And those are dead simple by comparison. Water falls from the sky in (Mostly) predictable volume and you then distribute somewhat less than that total each year. Linear and simple in comparison to trying to unravel the many factors underlying a specie's collapse.
But challenges like this are popping up all over the globe:
Fear And Grieving In Las Vegas: Colorado River Managers Struggle With Water Scarcity
Dec 14th, 2018
On stage in a conference room at Las Vegas's Caesars Palace, Keith Moses said coming to terms with the limits of the Colorado River is like losing a loved one.
"It reminds me of the seven stages of grief," Moses said. "Because I think we've been in denial for a long time."
Moses is vice chairman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, a group of four tribes near Parker, Arizona. He was speaking at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association meeting.
The denial turned to pain and guilt as it became clear just how big the supply and demand gaps were on the river that delivers water to 40 million people in the southwest.
For the last six months Arizona's water leaders have been experiencing the third stage of grief: anger and bargaining.
Of the seven U.S. states that rely on the Colorado River, Arizona has had the hardest time figuring out how to rein in water use and avoid seeing the river's largest reservoirs — Lakes Mead and Powell — drop to extremely low levels.
Kathryn Sorenson, director of Phoenix's water utility, characterized the process this way: "Interesting. Complicated. Some might say difficult."
One of the loudest voices in the debate has been coming from a small group of farmers in rural Pinal County, Arizona, south of Phoenix.
Under the current rules those farmers could see their Colorado River supplies zeroed out within two years.
The county's biggest grower of cotton and alfalfa, Brian Rhodes, is trying to make sure that doesn't happen. The soil in his fields is powder-like, bursting into tiny brown clouds with each step.
"We're going to have to take large cuts," Rhodes said. "We all understand that."
Oh my goodness. If we’re having trouble realizing that wasting precious water from the Colorado River to grow cotton is a bad idea, then there’s just no hope at all that we'll successfully rally to address the loss of ocean phytoplankton.
That’s about the easiest connection of dots that could ever be made. As Sam Kinison, the 1980’s comedian might have yelled – IT’S A DESERT!! YOU’RE TRYING TO GROW WATER-INTENSIVE CROPS IN THE FREAKING DESERT! CAN’T YOU SEE ALL THE SAND AROUND YOU?!? THAT MEANS "DON’T GROW COTTON HERE!!"
A World On The Brink
The bottom line is this: We are destroying the natural world. And that means that we are destroying ourselves.
I know that the mainstream news has relegated this conversation to the back pages (when they covered it at all) and so it's not “front and center” for most people. But it should be.
Everything we hold dear is a subset of the ecosphere. If that goes, so does everything else. Nothing else matters in the slightest if we actively destroy the Earth’s carrying capacity.
At the same time, we're in the grips of an extremely dangerous delusion that has placed money, finance and the economy at the top spot on our temple of daily worship.
Any idea of slowing down or stopping economic growth is “bad for business” and dismissed out of hand as “not practical”, "undesirable" or "unwise". It’s always a bad time to discuss the end of economic growth, apparently.
But as today's young people are increasingly discovering, if "conducting business" is just a lame rationale for failed stewardship of our lands and oceans, then it’s a broken idea. One not worth preserving in its current form.
The parade of terrible ecological breakdowns provided above is there for all willing to see it. Are you willing? Each failing ecosystem is screaming at us in urgent, strident tones that we’ve gone too far in our quest for "more".
We might be able to explain away each failure individually. But taken as a whole? The pattern is clear: We’ve got enemy action at work. These are not random coincidences.
Nature is warning us loudly that it's past time to change our ways. That our "endless growth" model is no longer valid. In fact, it's now becoming an existential threat
The collapse is underway. It’s just not being televised (yet).
Davos As Destiny
And don't expect the cavalry to arrive.
Our leadership is absolutely not up to the task. If the Davos conference currently underway in Switzerland is a sign of anything at all, it’s that we’re doomed.
The world has been taken over by bankers and financiers too smitten by their love of money to notice much else or be of any practical service to the world.
By way of illustrative example, here’s the big techno-feel-good idea unveiled on the second day of the conference. The crowds there loved it:
Yes, folks, this is what the world most desperately needs at this time! /sarc
While I’m sure drone-delivered books is a heartwarming story, it’s completely diversionary and utterly meaningless in the face of collapsing oceanic and terrestrial food webs.
Sadly, this is exactly the sort of inane distraction most admired by the Davos set in large part because it helps them feel a tiny bit better about their ill-gotten wealth. "Look! We're supporting good thngs!" The ugly truth is that big wealth's main pursuit is to distort political processes and rules to assure they get to keep it and even amass more.
Drones carrying books to Indonesian children provides the same sort of dopamine rush to a Davos attendee as Facebook 'like' gives to a 14-year-old. Temporary, cheap, superficial and ultimately meaningless.
The same is true of their other feel-good theme of the day. “Scientists” have discovered an enzyme that eats plastics:
That’s swell, but you know what would be even better? Not using the bottles in the first place. Which could be accomplished by providing access to safe, potable water as a basic human right and using re-usable containers. Of course, that would offer less chances for private wealth accumulation so instead the Davos crowd is fixated on the profitable solution vs. doing the right thing.
In viritually every instance, the Davos crowd wants to preserve industry and our consumer culture as it is, using technology and gimmicks in attempt to remedy the ills that result. There’s money to be made on both ends of that story.
The only thing that approach lacks is a future. Because it’s not-so-subtly based on continued "growth". Infinite exponential growth. The exact same growth that is killing ancient trees, sea birds, insects, amphibians, and phytoplankton.
Who wants more of that? Insane people.
In other words, don’t hold out any hope that the Davos set representing the so-called “elite” from every prominent nation on earth are going to somehow bravely offer up real insights on our massive predicaments and solutions to our looming problems. They're too consumed with their own egos and busy preening for prominence to notice the danger or care.
As they pointlessly fritter away another expensive gathering, the ecological world is unraveling all around them. The oceans are becoming a barren wasteland. The ancient trees are dying. Heatwaves are melting tar and killing life. The web of life is snapping strand by strand and nobody can predict what happens next.
In other words, if you held out any hope that “they” would somehow rally to the cause you’d best set that completely aside. It's no wonder social anger against tone-deaf and plundering elites is breaking out right now....
Collapse Is Already Here
Many people are expecting some degree of approaching collapse -- be it economic, environmental and/or societal -- thinking that they’ll recognize the danger signs in time.
As if it will be completely obvious, like a Hollywood blockbuster. Complete with clear warnings from scientists, politicians and the media. And everyone can then get busy either panicking or becoming the plucky heroes.
That's not how collapse works.
Collapse is a process, not an event.
And it's already underway, all around us.
Collapse is already here.
However, unlike Hollywood's vision, the early stages of collapse cause people to cling even tighter to the status quo. Instead of panic in the streets, we simply see more of the same -- as those in power do all they can to remain so, while the majority of the public attempts to ignore the growing problems for as long as it possibly can.
For both the elite and the majority, their entire world view and their personal sense of self depends on things not crumbling all around them, so they remain willfully blind to any evidence to the contrary.
When faced with the predicaments we warn about here at PeakProsperity.com, getting an early start on prudently shifting your own personal situation is of vital strategic and tactical importance. Tens of thousands of our readers already have taken wise steps in their lives to position themselves resiliently.
But most of the majority won't get started until it’s entirely too late to make any difference at all. Which is sad but perhaps unavoidable, given human nature.
If everybody around you is saying “Everything is awesome!”, it can take a long time to determine for yourself that things in fact aren't:
Real collapse happens slowly, and often without any sort of acknowledgement by the so-called political and economic elites until its abrupt terminal end.
The degree of rot within the Soviet Union went undetected until its final implosion, catching pretty much everyone in the West (as well as in the former USSR!) by surprise.
Similarly, one day people woke up and passenger pigeons were extinct. They used to literally darken the skies for hours as they migrated past, numbering in the billions. Nobody planned on their demise and virtually nobody saw it coming. Sure, just as there always are, a few crackpots at the fringes noticed, but they were ignored until it was too late.
Our view is that collapse of our current way of life is happening right now. The signs are all around us. Our invitation is for you to notice them and inquire critically what the ramifications will be -- irrespective of whatever pablum our leaders and media are currently spewing.
While the monetary and financial elites strain to crank out one more day/week/month/year of “market stability”, the ecosystems we depend on for life are vanishing. It's as if the Rapture were happening, but it's the insects, plants and animals ascending to heaven instead of we humans.
Committing Ecocide
Be very skeptical when the cause of each new ecological nightmare is ascribed to “natural causes.”
While it’s entire possible for any one ecological mishap to be due to a natural cycle, it’s weak thinking to assign the same cause to dozens of troubling findings happening all over the globe.
As they say in the military: Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. But three times is enemy action.
Right now, Australia is in the middle of the summer season and being absolutely hammered by high heat. Sure it gets hot during an Australian summer, but not like this. The impact has been devastating:
Australia's Facing an Unprecedented Ecological Crisis, But No One's Paying Attention
Jan 9, 2019
It started in December, just before Christmas.
Hundreds of dead perch were discovered floating along the banks of the Darling River – victims of a "dirty, rotten green" algae bloom spreading in the still waters of the small country town of Menindee, Australia.
Things didn't get better. The dead hundreds became dead thousands, as the crisis expanded to claim the lives of 10,000 fish along a 40-kilometre (25-mile) stretch of the river. But the worst was still yet to come.
This week, the environmental disaster has exploded to a horrific new level – what one Twitter user called "Extinction level water degradation" – with reports suggesting up to a million fish have now been killed in a new instance of the toxic algae bloom conditions.
For their part, authorities in the state of New South Wales have only gone as far as confirming "hundreds of thousands" of fish have died in the event – but regardless of the exact toll, it's clear the deadly calamity is an unprecedented ecological disaster in the region's waterways.
"I've never seen two fish kills of this scale so close together in terms of time, especially in the same stretch of river," fisheries manager Iain Ellis from NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) explained to ABC News.
The DPI blames ongoing drought conditions for the algae bloom's devastating impact on local bream, cod, and perch species – with a combination of high temperature and chronic low water supply (along with high nutrient concentrations in the water) making for a toxic algal soup.
Watching the video above showing grown men crying over the loss of 100-year-old fish is heartbreaking. This fish kill is described as “unprecedented” and as an “extinction level event", meaning it left no survivors over a long stretch of waterway.
We can try to console oursleves that maybe this was just a singular event, a cluster of bad juju and worse waterway management that combined to give us this horror -- but it wasn’t.
It's part of a larger tapestry of heat-induced misery that Australia is facing:
How one heatwave killed 'a third' of a bat species in Australia
Jan 15, 2019
Over two days in November, record-breaking heat in Australia's north wiped out almost one-third of the nation's spectacled flying foxes, according to researchers.
The animals, also known as spectacled fruit bats, were unable to survive in temperatures which exceeded 42C.
"It was totally depressing," one rescuer, David White, told the BBC.
Flying foxes are no more sensitive to extreme heat than some other species, experts say. But because they often gather in urban areas in large numbers, their deaths can be more conspicuous, and easily documented.
"It raises concerns as to the fate of other creatures who have more secretive, secluded lifestyles," Dr Welbergen says.
He sees the bats as the "the canary in the coal mine for climate change".
A two-day heatwave last November (2018) was sufficient to kill up to a third of all Australia's known flying foxes, a vulnerable species that was already endangered. As those bats are well-studied and their deaths quite conspicuous to observers, it raises the important question: How many other less-scrutinized species are dying off at the same time?
And the death parade continues:
More than 90 wild horses die in Australia's heat wave (Jan 24, 2019)
Australia heatwave: Mass animal deaths and roads melting as temperatures reach record high (Jan 19, 2019)
Australia's Heatwave Responsible for Deaths of Horses, Camels (Jan 24)
Are these data points severe enough for you to recognize as signs of ongoing collapse?
Last summer was a time of extreme draught and heat for Australia, and this summer looks set to be even worse. This may be the country's 'new normal' for if the situation is due to climate change instead of just an ordinary (if punishing) hot cycle.
If so, these heat waves will likely intensify over time, completely collapsing the existing biological systems across Australia.
Meanwhile, nearby in New Zealand, similar species loss is underway:
'Like losing family': time may be running out for New Zealand's most sacred tree
July 2018
New Zealand’s oldest and most sacred tree stands 60 metres from death, as a fungal disease known as kauri dieback spreads unabated across the country.
Tāne Mahuta (Lord of the Forest) is a giant kauri tree located in the Waipoua forest in the north of the country, and is sacred to the Māori people, who regard it as a living ancestor.
The tree is believed to be around 2,500 years old, has a girth of 13.77m and is more than 50m tall.
Thousands of locals and tourists alike visit the tree every year to pay their respects, and take selfies beside the trunk.
Now, the survival of what is believed to be New Zealand’s oldest living tree is threatened by kauri dieback, with kauri trees a mere 60m from Tāne Mahuta confirmed to be infected.
Kauri dieback causes most infected trees to die, and is threatening to completely wipe out New Zealand’s most treasured native tree species, prized for its beauty, strength and use in boats, carvings and buildings.
“We don’t have any time to do the usual scientific trials anymore, we just have to start responding immediately in any way possible; it is not ideal but we have kind of run out of time,” Black says, adding that although there is no cure for kauri dieback there is a range of measures which could slow its progress.
People are rallying to try and save the kauri trees, although it’s unclear exactly how to stop the spread of the new fungal invader or why it's so pathogenic all of a sudden. It could be due to another natural sort of cycle (except the fungus was thought to have been introduced and spread by human activity) or it could be a another collapse indicator we need to finally hear and heed.
It turns out that New Zealand is not alone. Giant trees are dying all over the globe.
2,000-year-old baobab trees in Africa are suddenly and rather mysteriously giving up the ghost. These trees survived happily for 2,000 years and now all of a sudden they're dying. Are the deaths of our most ancient trees all across the globe some sort of natural process? Or is there a different culprit we need to recognize?
In Japan they're lamenting record low squid catches. Oh well, maybe it’s just overfishing? Or could it be another message we need to heed?
To all this we can add the numerous scientific articles now decrying the 'insect Apocalypse' unfolding across the northern hemisphere. The Guardian recently issued this warning: “Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’”. Researchers in Puerto Rico's forest preserves recorded a 98% decline in insect mass over 35 years. Does a 98% decline have a natural explanation? Or is something bigger going on?
Meanwhile, the butterfly die-off is unfolding with alarming speed. I rarely see them in the summer anymore, much to my great regret. Seeing one is now as exciting as seeing a meteor streak across the sky, and just as rare:
Monarch butterfly numbers plummet 86 percent in California
Jan 7, 2019
CAMARILLO, Calif. – The number of monarch butterflies turning up at California's overwintering sites has dropped by about 86 percent compared to only a year ago, according to the Xerces Society, which organizes a yearly count of the iconic creatures.
That’s bad news for a species whose numbers have already declined an estimated 97 percent since the 1980s.
Each year, monarchs in the western United States migrate from inland areas to California’s coastline to spend the winter, usually between September and February.
“It’s been the worst year we’ve ever seen,” said Emma Pelton, a conservation biologist with the Xerces Society who helps lead the annual Thanksgiving count. “We already know we’re dealing with a really small population, and now we have a really bad year and all of a sudden, we’re kind of in crisis mode where we have very, very few butterflies left.”
What’s causing the dramatic drop-off is somewhat of a mystery. Experts believe the decline is spurred by a confluence of unfortunate factors, including late rainy-season storms across California last March, the effects of the state’s years long drought and the seemingly relentless onslaught of wildfires that have burned acres upon acres of habitat and at times choked the air with toxic smoke.
Note the “explanation” given blames the decline on mostly natural processes: late storms, droughts and wildfires. I believe that's because the article appears in a US paper, so no mention was permitted of neonicotinoid pesticides or glyphosate. Both of these are highly effective decimators of insect life -- but they're highly profitable for Big Ag, so for now, any criticism is not allowed.
Sure a 97% decline since the 1980’s might be due to fires, droughts and rains. But that’s really not very likely. There have always been fires, droughts and rains. Something else has shifted since the 1980’s. And that “thing” is human activity, which has increased its willingness to destroy habitat and spray poisons everywhere in pursuit of cheaper food and easier profits.
The loss of insects, which we observe in the loss of the beautiful and iconic Monarch butterfly, is a gigantic warning flag that we desperately need to heed. If the bottom of our billion-year-old food web disintegrates, you can be certain that the repercussions to humans will be dramatic and terribly difficult to ‘fix.’ In scientific terms, it will be called a “bottom-up trophic cascade”.
In a trophic cascade, the loss of a single layer of the food pyramid crumbles the entire structure. Carefully-tuned food webs a billion years in the making are suddenly destabilized. Life cannot adapt quickly enough, and so entire species are quickly lost. Once enough species die off, the web cannot be rewoven, and life … simply ends.
What exactly would a “trophic cascade” look like in real life? Oh, perhaps something just like this:
Deadly deficiency at the heart of an environmental mystery
Oct 16, 2018
During spring and summer, busy colonies of a duck called the common eider (Somateria mollissima) and other wild birds are usually seen breeding on the rocky coasts around the Baltic Sea. Thousands of eager new parents vie for the best spots to build nests and catch food for their demanding young broods.
But Lennart Balk, an environmental biochemist at Stockholm University, witnessed a dramatically different scene when he visited Swedish coastal colonies during a 5-year period starting in 2004. Many birds couldn’t fly. Others were completely paralyzed. Birds also weren’t eating and had difficulty breathing. Thousands of birds were suffering and dying from this paralytic disease, says Balk. “We went into the bird colonies, and we were shocked. You could see something was really wrong. It was a scary situation for this time of year,” he says.
Based on his past work documenting a similar crisis in several Baltic Sea fish species, Balk suspected that the birds’ disease was caused by a thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. Thiamine is required for critical metabolic processes, such as energy production and proper functioning of the nervous system.
This essential micronutrient is produced mainly by plants, including phytoplankton, bacteria, and fungi; people and animals must acquire it through their food.
“We found that thiamine deficiency is much more widespread and severe than previously thought,” Balk says. Given its scope, he suggests that a pervasive thiamine deficiency could be at least partly responsible for global wildlife population declines. Over a 60-year period up to 2010, for example, worldwide seabird populations declined by approximately 70%, and globally, species are being lost 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction (9, 10). “He has seen a thiamine deficiency in several differ phyla now,” says Fitzsimons of Balk. “One wonders what is going on. It’s a larger issue than we first suspected.”
This is beyond disturbing. It should have been on the front pages of every newspaper and TV show across the globe. We should be discussing it in urgent, worried tones and devoting a huge amount of money to studying and fixing it. At a minimum, we should stop hauling more tiny fish and krill from the sea in an effort to at least stabilize the food pyramid while we sort things out.
If you recall, we’ve also recently reported on the findings showing that phytoplankton levels are down 50% (these are a prime source for thiamine, by the way). Again, here's a possible “trophic cascade” in progress:
Fewer phytoplankton means less thiamine being produced. That means less thiamine is available to pass up the food chain. Next thing you know, there’s a 70% decline in seabird populations.
This is something I’ve noticed directly and commented n during my annual pilgrimages to the northern Maine coast over the past 30 years, where seagulls used to be extremely common and are now practically gone. Seagulls!
Next thing you know, some other major food chain will be wiped out and we'll get oceans full of jellyfish instead of actual fish. Or perhaps some once-benign mold grows unchecked because the former complex food web holding it in balance has collapsed, suddenyl transforming Big Ag's "green revolution" into grayish-brown spore-ridden dust.
To add to the terrifying mix of ecological news has been the sudden and rapid loss of amphibian species all over the world. A possible source for the culprit has been found, if that’s any consolation; though that discovery does not yet identify a solution to this saddening development.
Ground Zero of Amphibian 'Apocalypse' Finally Found
May 10, 2018
MANY OF THE world's amphibians are staring down an existential threat: an ancient skin-eating fungus that can wipe out entire forests' worth of frogs in a flash.
This ecological super-villain, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has driven more than 200 amphibian species to extinction or near-extinction—radically rewiring ecosystems all over Earth.
“This is the worst pathogen in the history of the world, as far as we can tell, in terms of its impacts on biodiversity,” says Mat Fisher, an Imperial College London mycologist who studies the fungus.
Now, a global team of 58 researchers has uncovered the creature's origin story. A groundbreaking study published in Science on Thursday reveals where and when the fungus most likely emerged: the Korean peninsula, sometime during the 1950s.
From there, scientists theorize that human activities inadvertently spread it far and wide—leading to amphibian die-offs across the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Australia.
Frogs, toads and salamanders were absolutely critical parts of my childhood and I delighted in their presence. I cannot imagine a world without them. But effectively, that’s what we’ve got now with so many on the endangered species list.
This parade of awful ecological news is both endless and worsening. And there is no real prospect for us to fix things in time to avoid substantial ecological pain. None.
After all, we can’t even manage our watersheds properly. And those are dead simple by comparison. Water falls from the sky in (Mostly) predictable volume and you then distribute somewhat less than that total each year. Linear and simple in comparison to trying to unravel the many factors underlying a specie's collapse.
But challenges like this are popping up all over the globe:
Fear And Grieving In Las Vegas: Colorado River Managers Struggle With Water Scarcity
Dec 14th, 2018
On stage in a conference room at Las Vegas's Caesars Palace, Keith Moses said coming to terms with the limits of the Colorado River is like losing a loved one.
"It reminds me of the seven stages of grief," Moses said. "Because I think we've been in denial for a long time."
Moses is vice chairman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, a group of four tribes near Parker, Arizona. He was speaking at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association meeting.
The denial turned to pain and guilt as it became clear just how big the supply and demand gaps were on the river that delivers water to 40 million people in the southwest.
For the last six months Arizona's water leaders have been experiencing the third stage of grief: anger and bargaining.
Of the seven U.S. states that rely on the Colorado River, Arizona has had the hardest time figuring out how to rein in water use and avoid seeing the river's largest reservoirs — Lakes Mead and Powell — drop to extremely low levels.
Kathryn Sorenson, director of Phoenix's water utility, characterized the process this way: "Interesting. Complicated. Some might say difficult."
One of the loudest voices in the debate has been coming from a small group of farmers in rural Pinal County, Arizona, south of Phoenix.
Under the current rules those farmers could see their Colorado River supplies zeroed out within two years.
The county's biggest grower of cotton and alfalfa, Brian Rhodes, is trying to make sure that doesn't happen. The soil in his fields is powder-like, bursting into tiny brown clouds with each step.
"We're going to have to take large cuts," Rhodes said. "We all understand that."
Oh my goodness. If we’re having trouble realizing that wasting precious water from the Colorado River to grow cotton is a bad idea, then there’s just no hope at all that we'll successfully rally to address the loss of ocean phytoplankton.
That’s about the easiest connection of dots that could ever be made. As Sam Kinison, the 1980’s comedian might have yelled – IT’S A DESERT!! YOU’RE TRYING TO GROW WATER-INTENSIVE CROPS IN THE FREAKING DESERT! CAN’T YOU SEE ALL THE SAND AROUND YOU?!? THAT MEANS "DON’T GROW COTTON HERE!!"
A World On The Brink
The bottom line is this: We are destroying the natural world. And that means that we are destroying ourselves.
I know that the mainstream news has relegated this conversation to the back pages (when they covered it at all) and so it's not “front and center” for most people. But it should be.
Everything we hold dear is a subset of the ecosphere. If that goes, so does everything else. Nothing else matters in the slightest if we actively destroy the Earth’s carrying capacity.
At the same time, we're in the grips of an extremely dangerous delusion that has placed money, finance and the economy at the top spot on our temple of daily worship.
Any idea of slowing down or stopping economic growth is “bad for business” and dismissed out of hand as “not practical”, "undesirable" or "unwise". It’s always a bad time to discuss the end of economic growth, apparently.
But as today's young people are increasingly discovering, if "conducting business" is just a lame rationale for failed stewardship of our lands and oceans, then it’s a broken idea. One not worth preserving in its current form.
The parade of terrible ecological breakdowns provided above is there for all willing to see it. Are you willing? Each failing ecosystem is screaming at us in urgent, strident tones that we’ve gone too far in our quest for "more".
We might be able to explain away each failure individually. But taken as a whole? The pattern is clear: We’ve got enemy action at work. These are not random coincidences.
Nature is warning us loudly that it's past time to change our ways. That our "endless growth" model is no longer valid. In fact, it's now becoming an existential threat
The collapse is underway. It’s just not being televised (yet).
Davos As Destiny
And don't expect the cavalry to arrive.
Our leadership is absolutely not up to the task. If the Davos conference currently underway in Switzerland is a sign of anything at all, it’s that we’re doomed.
The world has been taken over by bankers and financiers too smitten by their love of money to notice much else or be of any practical service to the world.
By way of illustrative example, here’s the big techno-feel-good idea unveiled on the second day of the conference. The crowds there loved it:
Yes, folks, this is what the world most desperately needs at this time! /sarc
While I’m sure drone-delivered books is a heartwarming story, it’s completely diversionary and utterly meaningless in the face of collapsing oceanic and terrestrial food webs.
Sadly, this is exactly the sort of inane distraction most admired by the Davos set in large part because it helps them feel a tiny bit better about their ill-gotten wealth. "Look! We're supporting good thngs!" The ugly truth is that big wealth's main pursuit is to distort political processes and rules to assure they get to keep it and even amass more.
Drones carrying books to Indonesian children provides the same sort of dopamine rush to a Davos attendee as Facebook 'like' gives to a 14-year-old. Temporary, cheap, superficial and ultimately meaningless.
The same is true of their other feel-good theme of the day. “Scientists” have discovered an enzyme that eats plastics:
That’s swell, but you know what would be even better? Not using the bottles in the first place. Which could be accomplished by providing access to safe, potable water as a basic human right and using re-usable containers. Of course, that would offer less chances for private wealth accumulation so instead the Davos crowd is fixated on the profitable solution vs. doing the right thing.
In viritually every instance, the Davos crowd wants to preserve industry and our consumer culture as it is, using technology and gimmicks in attempt to remedy the ills that result. There’s money to be made on both ends of that story.
The only thing that approach lacks is a future. Because it’s not-so-subtly based on continued "growth". Infinite exponential growth. The exact same growth that is killing ancient trees, sea birds, insects, amphibians, and phytoplankton.
Who wants more of that? Insane people.
In other words, don’t hold out any hope that the Davos set representing the so-called “elite” from every prominent nation on earth are going to somehow bravely offer up real insights on our massive predicaments and solutions to our looming problems. They're too consumed with their own egos and busy preening for prominence to notice the danger or care.
As they pointlessly fritter away another expensive gathering, the ecological world is unraveling all around them. The oceans are becoming a barren wasteland. The ancient trees are dying. Heatwaves are melting tar and killing life. The web of life is snapping strand by strand and nobody can predict what happens next.
In other words, if you held out any hope that “they” would somehow rally to the cause you’d best set that completely aside. It's no wonder social anger against tone-deaf and plundering elites is breaking out right now....
Friday, January 25, 2019
SC182-6
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan19/2025-crisis1-19.html
The Crisis of 2025
While many fear a war between the nuclear powers or the breakdown of civil order, I tend to think the Crisis of 2023-26 is more likely to be financial in nature.
War and civil breakdown are certainly common enough in history, global/nuclear war has been avoided in recent history, largely because wars are typically launched by those who reckon they can win the war. Launching a nuclear strike against a nation with the ability to launch a counterstrike (from submarines, for example, and missiles that survived the first strike) guarantees the destruction of whatever concentrations of population and assets the attacker may have.
The breakdown of civil order has not occurred in developed-world nations for quite some time, as central states can marshal military forces to restore order and issue / borrow money to buy the compliance of the restive populace.
Financial crises, in contrast, remain a constant feature of the modern era, and developed-world nations are perhaps even more vulnerable to financial disorder than developing nations.
As I've often noted, systems tend to follow an S-Curve of rapid expansion followed by slower growth during maturity and culminating in stagnation, decline or collapse.
Successful economies generate a double-bind once they reach the stagnation-decline phase: the populace (and capital) both expect strong permanent growth as a birthright, and they see the previous boost-phase and maturity phase as evidence that the economy "should" continue delivering outsized returns on capital and widespread prosperity essentially forever.
They are willing to accept a temporary slowdown/decline as part of the process of prosperity, but their patience quickly runs out if outsized returns and general prosperity aren't forthcoming.
The stagnation phase has many causes: a reduction in resources or depletion of soil/water resources; a sustained shortage of energy or a sharp rise in the cost of energy; stagnating productivity, and the rise of parasitic elites, insiders who feather their nests at the expense of the many.
All of these factors act as friction in the system, and eventually the system is unable to sustain the parasitic elites, high returns on capital and general prosperity.
Any political elite that delivers the bad news that prosperity is over risks being overthrown or voted out of office, and so the ruling elites seek to extend high returns on capital and general prosperity by any means available.
Since they are the parasitic elites, eliminating that source of friction is off the table. Restoring depleted soil/water/energy resources is not possible, and wresting control of others' resources to exploit is problematic: using force might trigger a wider war, so buying others'resources is the safer answer.
Modern states create new currency by either digital "printing" or borrowing the money into existence. There is little political resistance to creating new money to buy others' resources, generate high returns on capital and deliver direct transfers of cash to the populace via "make work" employment, social welfare, Universal Basic Income, etc.
You see the double-bind: the ruling class must deliver outsized returns on capital and general prosperity, and the only way they can do so is to create new money rather than new wealth, something that is beyond their power.
Depending on the wealth and productivity of the existing economy, the world may accept this new money as having value for a time. But as the need for more currency increases, ruling elites start to "print" or borrow new currency in excess of what the economy actually generates in income and value.
Eventually the world catches on to the stealth devaluation of the money, and trust in the value of the currency drops, slowly at first and then precipitously.
In developed economies, the ruling elites protect their own incomes and power, and those of capital, as the owners of capital are part of the ruling elite. The net result of this is rising income/wealth inequality as the few increase their share at the expense of the many. (Thomas Piketty characterized this process as a higher rate of return on capital than on labor.)
The political "solution" to stagnation and inequality is QE for the People: increased infrastructure and social welfare spending, benefits that are now costly being subsidized by the state (healthcare, higher education) and Universal Basic Income.
Proponents rarely (if ever) question the bloated cost structure of these protected industries, which benefit entrenched elites (i.e. parasitic elites) at the expense of the overall economy.
Proponents of QE for the People have convinced themselves that essentially unlimited sums of new money can be created and distributed without generating inflation, since all the newly created trillions will be boosting "aggregate demand," i.e. more consumer demand for more of everything, including resources that are depleted/scarce.
This belief that creating and distributing trillions in new money isn't inflationary is necessary to suppress the common-sense view that inflation is inevitable once money-creation (and broad distribution of the new money) kicks into high gear.
Since the ruling elites have no other choice, they will embrace QE for the People and generate new money with abandon.
I am guessing the political movement demanding QE for the People will come to power by 2021. The money creation will begin in earnest and a few years later, inflation will start rising, much to the surprise of proponents of QE for the People.
At that point the proponents and the ruling elites will be trapped: they won't be able to withdraw all the benefits ("free money") of QE for the People, nor can they reverse runaway inflation without drastically reducing the creation of currency.
Various politically expedient policies will be tried--wealth taxes, the issuance of a new currency, perhaps even a state cryptocurrency--but none of these can reverse the underlying dynamic.
The currency devalues and then collapses, along with the "wealth" that it represented.
This is the predictable path because it's the only one that's politically expedient and doesn't cause much financial pain until it's too late to stave off collapse.
The Crisis of 2025
While many fear a war between the nuclear powers or the breakdown of civil order, I tend to think the Crisis of 2023-26 is more likely to be financial in nature.
War and civil breakdown are certainly common enough in history, global/nuclear war has been avoided in recent history, largely because wars are typically launched by those who reckon they can win the war. Launching a nuclear strike against a nation with the ability to launch a counterstrike (from submarines, for example, and missiles that survived the first strike) guarantees the destruction of whatever concentrations of population and assets the attacker may have.
The breakdown of civil order has not occurred in developed-world nations for quite some time, as central states can marshal military forces to restore order and issue / borrow money to buy the compliance of the restive populace.
Financial crises, in contrast, remain a constant feature of the modern era, and developed-world nations are perhaps even more vulnerable to financial disorder than developing nations.
As I've often noted, systems tend to follow an S-Curve of rapid expansion followed by slower growth during maturity and culminating in stagnation, decline or collapse.
Successful economies generate a double-bind once they reach the stagnation-decline phase: the populace (and capital) both expect strong permanent growth as a birthright, and they see the previous boost-phase and maturity phase as evidence that the economy "should" continue delivering outsized returns on capital and widespread prosperity essentially forever.
They are willing to accept a temporary slowdown/decline as part of the process of prosperity, but their patience quickly runs out if outsized returns and general prosperity aren't forthcoming.
The stagnation phase has many causes: a reduction in resources or depletion of soil/water resources; a sustained shortage of energy or a sharp rise in the cost of energy; stagnating productivity, and the rise of parasitic elites, insiders who feather their nests at the expense of the many.
All of these factors act as friction in the system, and eventually the system is unable to sustain the parasitic elites, high returns on capital and general prosperity.
Any political elite that delivers the bad news that prosperity is over risks being overthrown or voted out of office, and so the ruling elites seek to extend high returns on capital and general prosperity by any means available.
Since they are the parasitic elites, eliminating that source of friction is off the table. Restoring depleted soil/water/energy resources is not possible, and wresting control of others' resources to exploit is problematic: using force might trigger a wider war, so buying others'resources is the safer answer.
Modern states create new currency by either digital "printing" or borrowing the money into existence. There is little political resistance to creating new money to buy others' resources, generate high returns on capital and deliver direct transfers of cash to the populace via "make work" employment, social welfare, Universal Basic Income, etc.
You see the double-bind: the ruling class must deliver outsized returns on capital and general prosperity, and the only way they can do so is to create new money rather than new wealth, something that is beyond their power.
Depending on the wealth and productivity of the existing economy, the world may accept this new money as having value for a time. But as the need for more currency increases, ruling elites start to "print" or borrow new currency in excess of what the economy actually generates in income and value.
Eventually the world catches on to the stealth devaluation of the money, and trust in the value of the currency drops, slowly at first and then precipitously.
In developed economies, the ruling elites protect their own incomes and power, and those of capital, as the owners of capital are part of the ruling elite. The net result of this is rising income/wealth inequality as the few increase their share at the expense of the many. (Thomas Piketty characterized this process as a higher rate of return on capital than on labor.)
The political "solution" to stagnation and inequality is QE for the People: increased infrastructure and social welfare spending, benefits that are now costly being subsidized by the state (healthcare, higher education) and Universal Basic Income.
Proponents rarely (if ever) question the bloated cost structure of these protected industries, which benefit entrenched elites (i.e. parasitic elites) at the expense of the overall economy.
Proponents of QE for the People have convinced themselves that essentially unlimited sums of new money can be created and distributed without generating inflation, since all the newly created trillions will be boosting "aggregate demand," i.e. more consumer demand for more of everything, including resources that are depleted/scarce.
This belief that creating and distributing trillions in new money isn't inflationary is necessary to suppress the common-sense view that inflation is inevitable once money-creation (and broad distribution of the new money) kicks into high gear.
Since the ruling elites have no other choice, they will embrace QE for the People and generate new money with abandon.
I am guessing the political movement demanding QE for the People will come to power by 2021. The money creation will begin in earnest and a few years later, inflation will start rising, much to the surprise of proponents of QE for the People.
At that point the proponents and the ruling elites will be trapped: they won't be able to withdraw all the benefits ("free money") of QE for the People, nor can they reverse runaway inflation without drastically reducing the creation of currency.
Various politically expedient policies will be tried--wealth taxes, the issuance of a new currency, perhaps even a state cryptocurrency--but none of these can reverse the underlying dynamic.
The currency devalues and then collapses, along with the "wealth" that it represented.
This is the predictable path because it's the only one that's politically expedient and doesn't cause much financial pain until it's too late to stave off collapse.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
SC182-5
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50958.htm
Washington Orchestrates Coup in Venezuela, Incites Civil War, in Name of ‘Democracy’
The dramatic events in Venezuela have “US-orchestrated coup d’état” written all over them. Washington is also giving itself license for military intervention which could spark a proxy war involving Russia.
The sequencing leaves no doubt the US has upped the ante for regime change in the South American country.
This week, Vice President Mike Pence issued a call to arms with a deft video address to the “people of Venezuela” to take to the streets against the elected government. Pence also urged the country’s security forces to back the protests, adding, “we [the US] are with you.”
Next day, the opposition figure Juan Guaido holds a major rally in the capital Caracas and declares himself “interim president of Venezuela” while denouncing incumbent Nicolas Maduro as “a usurper.”
Within minutes, US President Trump announces he is recognizing Guaido as the legitimate authority in Venezuela. Trump’s imprimatur is swiftly followed by Canada and several right-wing South American governments allied with Washington. French President Emmanuel Macron says he supports “the restoration of democracy” in Venezuela and salutes “the courage of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans marching for their freedom”.
President Maduro responds by cutting off diplomatic ties with the US and orders American diplomats to leave within 72 hours.
Then, following the script, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warns – with classic Alice-in-Wonderland logic – that since Maduro is no longer the legitimate president he has no authority to sever diplomatic ties with Washington.
More sinisterly, Trump and Pompeo make the time-dishonored threat that “all options are on the table” – meaning military action – “if US personnel are endangered.”
That means the Maduro government is forbidden from sanctioning US diplomatic properties and officials. Any move to expel American personnel could be construed as “endangering” their safety, which in Washington’s logic means a license to “respond” militarily.
Washington’s self-declared license to protect its interests in Venezuela extends to the anti-Maduro opposition groups. Trump warned he would hold Maduro responsible for any acts of violence against protesters.
This amounts to incitement for more violence on the streets of Caracas.
Venezuela’s armed forces – who so far remain loyal to Maduro – have also been accused of using excessive lethal force.
The situation is therefore primed by Washington for escalation into a civil war.
Russia has condemned the interference by the US in Venezuela’s internal affairs, saying that President Maduro is the legitimate head of state. Moscow has also warned the US not to deploy military force to the country which Russia describes as “our ally.”
Right-wing governments in the region such as Colombia and the newly elected Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, as well as Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Peru, have backed Washington’s stance on delegitimizing Maduro’s administration. Colombia and Brazil have also shown preparedness to support US military intervention.
In addition to Russia’s condemnation of US interference, China, Bolivia, Cuba, Turkey and Iran, among others, have given their support for the Maduro government, denouncing Washington’s policy of regime change.
Thus, the Trump administration is not only igniting a firestorm within Venezuela, it is setting the stage for an international proxy war, not unlike the war which Washington and its allies engineered in Syria.
An American-induced war in Venezuela has been a long time in the making. Ever since the South American oil giant opted for a socialist government more than 20 years ago – first under Hugo Chavez then under his successor Nicolas Maduro – Venezuela has been in Washington’s cross-hairs for regime.
The GW Bush administration triggered a coup in 2002 against Chavez, which failed. Then Obama tightened the screws with economic sanctions on Venezuela’s vital oil industry which precipitated the country’s current social crisis and discontent. Several waves of streets protests have occurred all with the signs that Washington has been a crucial instigating player.
At the end of last year, the Trump administration slated the Maduro government as a national security threat, and hinted it was considering military action against Venezuela. There were even White House claims that Caracas was agitating the regime caravans through Central America, which have become a bane of Trump’s fears about immigrants “invading” the US.
But what triggered the latest push from Washington may have been Russia’s more open alliance with Caracas. Last month, President Maduro was hosted in Moscow by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, when the two countries signed multi-billion-dollar partnerships for oil exploration, mining, agricultural and other trade ties.
Within days of Maduro’s visit to the Kremlin, the “strategic alliance” was given a decisive military underpinning when two Russian Tupolev Tu-160 nuclear-capable bombers flew 10,000 kilometers to Venezuela in an apparent show of Moscow’s support for the beleaguered country.
Washington’s reaction to the Russian bombers landing in Caracas was apoplectic.
Maduro was elected for the second time back in May 2018 with nearly 67 per cent of the vote. Admittedly, the turnout for the election was low at around 46 per cent. The large abstention was partly due to the ongoing economic crisis and unrest in the country, which Washington’s sanctions have played a large part in fomenting.
Nevertheless, more than 9 million Venezuelans voted for Maduro and his socialist policies. The elections were documented as free and fair by international observers. They were also verified by Venezuela’s National Electoral Commission.
Earlier this month, on January 10, Maduro was officially inaugurated for a second term that runs until 2025.
Given his consolidation of authority and the important alliance with Russia taking on international prominence, it seems that Washington decided to renew its efforts for regime change in Caracas.
Vice President Mike Pence reportedly held phone calls with opposition figure Juan Guaido. Evidently, with Pence’s follow-up public comments backing the overthrow of Maduro, the coup was set in motion.
What happens next is a high-wire act. Washington could ramp up the economic blockade of Venezuela by freezing financial assets of the country’s oil company in the US. The US could even impose a naval blockade. And if the violence escalates in Venezuela, Washington has already set the precedent for military intervention.
How Russia and Venezuela’s regional allies respond to that is a potential detonator of wider conflict.
What’s all the more inflammatory is the flagrant illegality of Washington’s actions. The opposition figure whom the White House has anointed as “acting president” and the minor congressional body he controls have been declared in contempt of the constitution by Venezuela’s supreme court.
Juan Guaido therefore has no mandate or legitimacy to appoint himself as the country’s leader. His “authority” is decreed by Washington.
The absurd irony of Trump and Macron, among others, backing an unconstitutional, self-declared president in Venezuela is staggering. Half the population of the US and France despise their supposed leaders. Trump is barred by opposition lawmakers from making the annual State of the Union speech for the first time in US history, while Macron is beset by nationwide protests and requires heavy police protection wherever he goes.
And yet here we have Trump, Trudeau and other discredited Western figures, declaring who should rule Venezuela.
Washington Orchestrates Coup in Venezuela, Incites Civil War, in Name of ‘Democracy’
The dramatic events in Venezuela have “US-orchestrated coup d’état” written all over them. Washington is also giving itself license for military intervention which could spark a proxy war involving Russia.
The sequencing leaves no doubt the US has upped the ante for regime change in the South American country.
This week, Vice President Mike Pence issued a call to arms with a deft video address to the “people of Venezuela” to take to the streets against the elected government. Pence also urged the country’s security forces to back the protests, adding, “we [the US] are with you.”
Next day, the opposition figure Juan Guaido holds a major rally in the capital Caracas and declares himself “interim president of Venezuela” while denouncing incumbent Nicolas Maduro as “a usurper.”
Within minutes, US President Trump announces he is recognizing Guaido as the legitimate authority in Venezuela. Trump’s imprimatur is swiftly followed by Canada and several right-wing South American governments allied with Washington. French President Emmanuel Macron says he supports “the restoration of democracy” in Venezuela and salutes “the courage of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans marching for their freedom”.
President Maduro responds by cutting off diplomatic ties with the US and orders American diplomats to leave within 72 hours.
Then, following the script, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warns – with classic Alice-in-Wonderland logic – that since Maduro is no longer the legitimate president he has no authority to sever diplomatic ties with Washington.
More sinisterly, Trump and Pompeo make the time-dishonored threat that “all options are on the table” – meaning military action – “if US personnel are endangered.”
That means the Maduro government is forbidden from sanctioning US diplomatic properties and officials. Any move to expel American personnel could be construed as “endangering” their safety, which in Washington’s logic means a license to “respond” militarily.
Washington’s self-declared license to protect its interests in Venezuela extends to the anti-Maduro opposition groups. Trump warned he would hold Maduro responsible for any acts of violence against protesters.
This amounts to incitement for more violence on the streets of Caracas.
Venezuela’s armed forces – who so far remain loyal to Maduro – have also been accused of using excessive lethal force.
The situation is therefore primed by Washington for escalation into a civil war.
Russia has condemned the interference by the US in Venezuela’s internal affairs, saying that President Maduro is the legitimate head of state. Moscow has also warned the US not to deploy military force to the country which Russia describes as “our ally.”
Right-wing governments in the region such as Colombia and the newly elected Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, as well as Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Peru, have backed Washington’s stance on delegitimizing Maduro’s administration. Colombia and Brazil have also shown preparedness to support US military intervention.
In addition to Russia’s condemnation of US interference, China, Bolivia, Cuba, Turkey and Iran, among others, have given their support for the Maduro government, denouncing Washington’s policy of regime change.
Thus, the Trump administration is not only igniting a firestorm within Venezuela, it is setting the stage for an international proxy war, not unlike the war which Washington and its allies engineered in Syria.
An American-induced war in Venezuela has been a long time in the making. Ever since the South American oil giant opted for a socialist government more than 20 years ago – first under Hugo Chavez then under his successor Nicolas Maduro – Venezuela has been in Washington’s cross-hairs for regime.
The GW Bush administration triggered a coup in 2002 against Chavez, which failed. Then Obama tightened the screws with economic sanctions on Venezuela’s vital oil industry which precipitated the country’s current social crisis and discontent. Several waves of streets protests have occurred all with the signs that Washington has been a crucial instigating player.
At the end of last year, the Trump administration slated the Maduro government as a national security threat, and hinted it was considering military action against Venezuela. There were even White House claims that Caracas was agitating the regime caravans through Central America, which have become a bane of Trump’s fears about immigrants “invading” the US.
But what triggered the latest push from Washington may have been Russia’s more open alliance with Caracas. Last month, President Maduro was hosted in Moscow by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, when the two countries signed multi-billion-dollar partnerships for oil exploration, mining, agricultural and other trade ties.
Within days of Maduro’s visit to the Kremlin, the “strategic alliance” was given a decisive military underpinning when two Russian Tupolev Tu-160 nuclear-capable bombers flew 10,000 kilometers to Venezuela in an apparent show of Moscow’s support for the beleaguered country.
Washington’s reaction to the Russian bombers landing in Caracas was apoplectic.
Maduro was elected for the second time back in May 2018 with nearly 67 per cent of the vote. Admittedly, the turnout for the election was low at around 46 per cent. The large abstention was partly due to the ongoing economic crisis and unrest in the country, which Washington’s sanctions have played a large part in fomenting.
Nevertheless, more than 9 million Venezuelans voted for Maduro and his socialist policies. The elections were documented as free and fair by international observers. They were also verified by Venezuela’s National Electoral Commission.
Earlier this month, on January 10, Maduro was officially inaugurated for a second term that runs until 2025.
Given his consolidation of authority and the important alliance with Russia taking on international prominence, it seems that Washington decided to renew its efforts for regime change in Caracas.
Vice President Mike Pence reportedly held phone calls with opposition figure Juan Guaido. Evidently, with Pence’s follow-up public comments backing the overthrow of Maduro, the coup was set in motion.
What happens next is a high-wire act. Washington could ramp up the economic blockade of Venezuela by freezing financial assets of the country’s oil company in the US. The US could even impose a naval blockade. And if the violence escalates in Venezuela, Washington has already set the precedent for military intervention.
How Russia and Venezuela’s regional allies respond to that is a potential detonator of wider conflict.
What’s all the more inflammatory is the flagrant illegality of Washington’s actions. The opposition figure whom the White House has anointed as “acting president” and the minor congressional body he controls have been declared in contempt of the constitution by Venezuela’s supreme court.
Juan Guaido therefore has no mandate or legitimacy to appoint himself as the country’s leader. His “authority” is decreed by Washington.
The absurd irony of Trump and Macron, among others, backing an unconstitutional, self-declared president in Venezuela is staggering. Half the population of the US and France despise their supposed leaders. Trump is barred by opposition lawmakers from making the annual State of the Union speech for the first time in US history, while Macron is beset by nationwide protests and requires heavy police protection wherever he goes.
And yet here we have Trump, Trudeau and other discredited Western figures, declaring who should rule Venezuela.
SC182-4
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/01/25/antiwar-hero-medea-benjamin-disrupts-venezuela-coup-circle-jerk/
Antiwar Hero Medea Benjamin Disrupts Venezuela Coup Circle Jerk
Before they launch missiles, they launch narratives. Before they drop bombs, they drop talking points. Before they implement crushing starvation sanctions, they demonize and condemn. Before they invade, they propagandize. Before the killing starts, manipulation paves the way.
For this reason, the front line of any antiwar movement is a fight against the establishment narratives about disobedient nations that are aggressively promulgated by the political/media class. And right now one of the very most adept Americans at doing that is an activist named Medea Benjamin.
Benjamin once again displayed her knack for getting her message seen in high-profile spaces in a way that grabs attention and punches through cleanly and concisely as she crashed the warmongering bloviations of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a meeting of the Organization for American States (OAS) in Washington, DC.
Following a speech in which Pompeo regurgitated already established Trump talking points referring to Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro as the “former president”, accusing him of being “economically incompetent”, “profoundly corrupt” and “undemocratic to the core,” Benjamin cut off his applause by standing at the end of the council room with a sign reading “OAS: DON’T SUPPORT A COUP IN VENEZUELA” and decrying the Trump administration’s attempts to topple the Venezuelan government.
“Don’t support the coup!” Benjamin shouted. “A coup is not a democratic transition! Do not listen to Secretary Pompeo! Do not support the coup! Do no support the coup in Venezuela!”
“We call on the OAS to support the democratically elected leader and work for a negotiated solution,” Medea continued to yell as security staff cajoled her out of the room. “Coups only bring more violence, war and destruction!”
And of course Medea Benjamin is correct. This US-led coup is not different from all the other US-led coups in South America and in oil-rich nations around the world; it is designed to be profitable for the already wealthy and strategically advantageous for the already powerful, with none of the interest in humanitarianism and democracy that it always pretends to have.
For those of you who haven’t been following this story, here’s a quick breakdown:
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves of any nation on the planet, and if that one fact right there doesn’t raise your suspicions, you’ve got a lot to learn about US interventionism. US foreign interventions often boil down to resource control, so if a resource-rich nation refuses to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance it’s a safe bet that you’ll eventually hear the US State Department saying that the people in that nation are in bad need of some Freedom and Democracy (read: starvation sanctions and CIA coups). Venezuela has been no exception, and the economic strangulations which have been heaped upon the nation under both the previous administration and the current one have effectively made it nearly impossible for its economy to get its head above water. Add in the fact that the CIA Director all but admitted in 2017 that the agency was working to topple the Venezuelan government, and it’s not surprising that we’re seeing civil unrest there today.
Anyway, on Wednesday some guy named Juan declared that he was the real president of Venezuela and not Nicolas Maduro, who was democratically elected by an overwhelming majority in May of last year in an election which was found to have been perfectly legitimate by the international Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America. Juan Guaido did not win any election to this position, nor indeed has he ever campaigned for it. The basis for the claim of Maduro’s illegitimacy, a congressional interpretation of Article 233 of Venezuela’s Constitution, was struck down by the nation’s highest court as fraudulent. Nevertheless, on Wednesday the Trump administration announced that it would no longer be recognizing Venezuela’s elected government and would only be recognizing the office of Juan the guy. This move was copied by Canada and a host of South American US allies.
This is of course a huge move by the United States. The only thing that holds governments in place is people’s recognition of them, and on an international level that means their being recognized by other governments. If China ceased recognizing America’s current government and instead conducted all its diplomacy through some guy named Steve who works at the Home Depot in Newark, New Jersey, all diplomatic relations between the two nations would instantly crumble. In light of this brazen act, Maduro said all US diplomats have 72 hours to leave the nation, to which the Trump administration replied that it has no intention of doing since the order came from Maduro and not the rando named Juan (who as noted by Moon of Alabama is very keen on changing Venezuela’s oil policies to America’s advantage).
So now the US is, as WikiLeaks observed, effectively conducting “a small occupation” of Venezuela by keeping its diplomats in the nation illegally. If the Venezuelan government (the actual one, not the imaginary one) were to make a move to throw them out, things could get really ugly.
“And so the confrontation begins, as I anticipated just hours ago,” tweeted Venezuelan-American attorney and journalist Eva Golinger when this news broke. “Maduro expels US diplomats, they refuse to leave. If he tries to force them out, US will respond, with ‘all options on the table’ (military intervention). This is a total reality show, invent a reason to invade.”
And the Trump administration has indeed made it clear that it considers “all options on the table” up to and including a full-scale military invasion of Venezuela.
“All options are on the table for the United States in regards to actions to be taken,” a senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday, adding, “When we say ‘all options are on the table’ that means all options are on the table.”
So this is a full-fledged coup attempt, being pushed along by starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, and copious amounts of propaganda, and it has become a tinder box that could erupt into a US-funded “civil” war or direct US military involvement at the drop of a hat. The mass media is as usual moving almost exclusively in the direction of unquestioning support for this trajectory. The time to protest is not when the bombs start falling, but when the war propaganda gets rolled out, as is happening right now.
Medea Benjamin is showing the way for anyone who’s sick of standing by feeling helpless while the US steamrolls another nation beneath the treads of its insatiable war machine. If you’re looking for ideas on how to disrupt the narratives of war, she’s setting a very good example for everyone.
Antiwar Hero Medea Benjamin Disrupts Venezuela Coup Circle Jerk
Before they launch missiles, they launch narratives. Before they drop bombs, they drop talking points. Before they implement crushing starvation sanctions, they demonize and condemn. Before they invade, they propagandize. Before the killing starts, manipulation paves the way.
For this reason, the front line of any antiwar movement is a fight against the establishment narratives about disobedient nations that are aggressively promulgated by the political/media class. And right now one of the very most adept Americans at doing that is an activist named Medea Benjamin.
Benjamin once again displayed her knack for getting her message seen in high-profile spaces in a way that grabs attention and punches through cleanly and concisely as she crashed the warmongering bloviations of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a meeting of the Organization for American States (OAS) in Washington, DC.
Following a speech in which Pompeo regurgitated already established Trump talking points referring to Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro as the “former president”, accusing him of being “economically incompetent”, “profoundly corrupt” and “undemocratic to the core,” Benjamin cut off his applause by standing at the end of the council room with a sign reading “OAS: DON’T SUPPORT A COUP IN VENEZUELA” and decrying the Trump administration’s attempts to topple the Venezuelan government.
“Don’t support the coup!” Benjamin shouted. “A coup is not a democratic transition! Do not listen to Secretary Pompeo! Do not support the coup! Do no support the coup in Venezuela!”
“We call on the OAS to support the democratically elected leader and work for a negotiated solution,” Medea continued to yell as security staff cajoled her out of the room. “Coups only bring more violence, war and destruction!”
And of course Medea Benjamin is correct. This US-led coup is not different from all the other US-led coups in South America and in oil-rich nations around the world; it is designed to be profitable for the already wealthy and strategically advantageous for the already powerful, with none of the interest in humanitarianism and democracy that it always pretends to have.
For those of you who haven’t been following this story, here’s a quick breakdown:
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves of any nation on the planet, and if that one fact right there doesn’t raise your suspicions, you’ve got a lot to learn about US interventionism. US foreign interventions often boil down to resource control, so if a resource-rich nation refuses to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance it’s a safe bet that you’ll eventually hear the US State Department saying that the people in that nation are in bad need of some Freedom and Democracy (read: starvation sanctions and CIA coups). Venezuela has been no exception, and the economic strangulations which have been heaped upon the nation under both the previous administration and the current one have effectively made it nearly impossible for its economy to get its head above water. Add in the fact that the CIA Director all but admitted in 2017 that the agency was working to topple the Venezuelan government, and it’s not surprising that we’re seeing civil unrest there today.
Anyway, on Wednesday some guy named Juan declared that he was the real president of Venezuela and not Nicolas Maduro, who was democratically elected by an overwhelming majority in May of last year in an election which was found to have been perfectly legitimate by the international Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America. Juan Guaido did not win any election to this position, nor indeed has he ever campaigned for it. The basis for the claim of Maduro’s illegitimacy, a congressional interpretation of Article 233 of Venezuela’s Constitution, was struck down by the nation’s highest court as fraudulent. Nevertheless, on Wednesday the Trump administration announced that it would no longer be recognizing Venezuela’s elected government and would only be recognizing the office of Juan the guy. This move was copied by Canada and a host of South American US allies.
This is of course a huge move by the United States. The only thing that holds governments in place is people’s recognition of them, and on an international level that means their being recognized by other governments. If China ceased recognizing America’s current government and instead conducted all its diplomacy through some guy named Steve who works at the Home Depot in Newark, New Jersey, all diplomatic relations between the two nations would instantly crumble. In light of this brazen act, Maduro said all US diplomats have 72 hours to leave the nation, to which the Trump administration replied that it has no intention of doing since the order came from Maduro and not the rando named Juan (who as noted by Moon of Alabama is very keen on changing Venezuela’s oil policies to America’s advantage).
So now the US is, as WikiLeaks observed, effectively conducting “a small occupation” of Venezuela by keeping its diplomats in the nation illegally. If the Venezuelan government (the actual one, not the imaginary one) were to make a move to throw them out, things could get really ugly.
“And so the confrontation begins, as I anticipated just hours ago,” tweeted Venezuelan-American attorney and journalist Eva Golinger when this news broke. “Maduro expels US diplomats, they refuse to leave. If he tries to force them out, US will respond, with ‘all options on the table’ (military intervention). This is a total reality show, invent a reason to invade.”
And the Trump administration has indeed made it clear that it considers “all options on the table” up to and including a full-scale military invasion of Venezuela.
“All options are on the table for the United States in regards to actions to be taken,” a senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday, adding, “When we say ‘all options are on the table’ that means all options are on the table.”
So this is a full-fledged coup attempt, being pushed along by starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, and copious amounts of propaganda, and it has become a tinder box that could erupt into a US-funded “civil” war or direct US military involvement at the drop of a hat. The mass media is as usual moving almost exclusively in the direction of unquestioning support for this trajectory. The time to protest is not when the bombs start falling, but when the war propaganda gets rolled out, as is happening right now.
Medea Benjamin is showing the way for anyone who’s sick of standing by feeling helpless while the US steamrolls another nation beneath the treads of its insatiable war machine. If you’re looking for ideas on how to disrupt the narratives of war, she’s setting a very good example for everyone.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
SC182-3
https://www.globalresearch.ca/europe-brink-collapse/5665679
Europe on the Brink of Collapse?
The Empire’s European castle of vassals is crumbling. Right in front of our eyes. But Nobody seems to see it. The European Union (EU), the conglomerate of vassals – Trump calls them irrelevant, and he doesn’t care what they think about him, they deserve to be collapsing. They, the ‘vassalic’ EU, a group of 28 countries, some 500 million people, with a combined economy of a projected 19 trillion US-dollar equivalent, about the same as the US, have submitted themselves to the dictate of Washington in just about every important aspect of life.
The EU has accepted on orders by Washington to sanction Russia, Venezuela, Iran – and a myriad of countries that have never done any harm to any of the 28 EU member states. The EU has accepted the humiliation of military impositions by NATO – threatening Russia and China with ever more and ever more advancing military basis towards Moscow and Beijing, to the point that Brussels’ foreign policy is basically led by NATO.
It was clear from the very get-go that the US sanctions regime imposed on Russia and all the countries refusing to submit to the whims and rules of Washington, directly and via the EU, was hurting the EU economically far more than Russia. This is specifically true for some of the southern European countries, whose economy depended more on trading with Russia and Eurasia than it did for other EU countries.
The ‘sanctions’ disaster really hit the fan, when Trump unilaterally decided to abrogate the “Nuclear Deal” with Iran and reimpose heavy sanctions on Iran and on “everybody who would do business with Iran”. European hydrocarbon giants started losing business. That’s when Brussels, led by Germany started mumbling that they would not follow the US and – even – that they would back European corporations, mainly hydrocarbon giants, sticking to their contractual arrangements they had with Iran.
Too late. European business had lost all confidence in Brussels EU Administration’s feeble and generally untrustworthy words. Many breached their longstanding and, after the Nuclear Deal, renewed contracts with Iran, out of fear of punishment by Washington and lack of trust in Brussel’s protection. Case in point is the French-British petrol giant, Total, which shifted its supply source from Iran to Russia – no, not to the US, as was of course, Washington’s intent. The damage is done. The vassals are committing slow suicide.
The people have had it. More than half of the European population wants to get out of the fangs from Brussels. But nobody asks them, nor listens to them – and that in the so-called heartland of ‘democracy’ (sic). That’s why people are now up in arms and protesting everywhere – in one way or another in Germany, France, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Poland – the list is almost endless. And it can be called generically the ‘Yellow Vests”, after the new French revolution.
The latest in a series of the US attacking Germany and German business – and German integrity, for that matter – are the US Ambassador’s, Richard Grenell, recent threats to German corporations with sanctions if they work on Nord Stream 2, the 1,200 km pipeline bringing Russian gas to Europe, to be completed by the end of 2019. It will virtually double the capacity of Russian gas supply to Europe. Instead, Washington wants Europe to buy US shale gas and oil, and especially keeping Europe economically and financially in the US orbit, avoiding in any way a detachment from Washington and preventing the obvious and logical – an alliance with Russia. This attempt will fail bitterly, as various German Ministers, including Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, have loudly and with determination protested against such US hegemonic advances. Well, friends, you have bent over backwards to please your Washington Masters for too long. It’s high time to step out of this lock-step of obedience.
In France, this past weekend of 12 / 13 January, the Yellow Vests went into round 9 of protests against dictator Macron, his austerity program and – not least – his abject arrogance vis-à- vis the working class. A recent public statement of Macron’s is testimony of this below-the-belt arrogance: “Trop de français n’ont pas le sens de l’effort, ce qui explique en partie les ’troubles’ que connait le pays“ – Translated:
“Too many French don’t know the meaning of ‘effort’ which explains at least partially the trouble this country is in.”
The Yellow Vests and a majority of the French population want nothing less than Macron’s resignation. Protesters are consistently and largely under-reported by Christophe Castaner, the French Interior Minister. This past weekend the official figure was 50,000 demonstrators, countrywide, when in reality the figure was at least three times higher. The official French version would like the public at large, inside and outside of France, to believe that the Yellow Vest’s movement is diminishing. It is not. To the contrary, they are demonstrating all over France, and that despite the Macron regime’s increasing violent repression.
RT reports, on Macron’s orders the police are becoming more violent, using military suppression to control protesting French civilians. Thousands have been arrested, and hundreds injured by police brutality. Nevertheless, the movement is gaining massive public support and the ‘Yellow Vests” idea is spreading throughout Europe. This spread is, of course, hardly reported by the mainstream media.
In fact, 80% of the French back the Yellow Vests and their idea of a Citizen Initiated Referendum (RIC for “Référendum d’initiative citoyenne”), under which citizens could propose their own laws that would then be voted on by the general public. The RIC could effectively bypass the French Parliament, and would be enshrined in the French Constitution. A similar law exists since 1848 in Switzerland and is regularly applied by Swiss citizens. It is a way of Direct Democracy that any country calling itself a “democracy” should incorporate in its Constitution.
The UKis in shambles. Thousands are taking to the streets of London, organized by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity”, calling for general elections to replace the failing Tory Government. They are joined by the French Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), out of solidarity. Many of the UK protesters are also wearing high-visibility yellow vests.
This is in direct correlation with the ever-growing louder debacle over BREXIT – yes, or no and how. At this point nobody knows what Britain’s future is going to be. Propaganda and counter-propaganda is destined to further confuse the people and confused people usually want to stick to the ‘status quo’. There is even a movement of pro “remain” propaganda, organized by some members of the European Parliament. Imagine! – Talking about sovereignty, if Brussels cannot even leave the Brits alone decide whether they want to continue under their dictate or not.
David Cameron – In or Out of Europe – Victory or Farce?
Hélas, the Brits are largely divided, but also past the stage of being swayed by foreign propaganda, especially in this delicate question of leaving the EU – which a majority of Brits clearly decided in June 2016. Prime Minister, Theresa May, has screwed-up the BREXIT process royally, to the point where many Brits feel that what she negotiated is worse than “no deal”. This has likely happened in close connivance with the unelected EU ‘leadership’ which does not want the UK to leave and under strict orders from Washington which needs the UK in its crucial role as a US mole in the European Union.
On 15 January 2019, the UK Parliament will vote on whether they accept the negotiated BREXIT conditions, or whether they prefer a ‘no deal’ BREXIT, or will request an extension for further negotiations under Article 50 of the “Treaty of Lisbon” (which was imposed by the heads of state of the 28 members, without any public vote, and is a false stand-in for a EU Constitution). Other options include a general election – and let the new leadership decide; or a second referendum which after two years is legally possible. The latter would likely cause severe public unrest, followed by atrocious police oppression – as already often witnessed in the UK – in which case, let’s just hope civil war can be avoided.
For weeks, the Yellow Vest movement has spread to Belgium and The Netherlands. For similar reasons – public discontent over austerity, EU dictatorship over Belgian and Dutch sovereignty. Last Friday, one of the Belgian Yellow Vests was overrun by a truck and killed. Authorities reported it as an accident.
Greece– The MS-media report all is ‘donkey-dory’, Greece is recovering, has for the first time in many years a positive growth rate and is able to refinance herself on the open capital market. Greece is no longer dependent on the irate and infamous troika (European Central Bank – ECB, European Commission and IMF). Reality is completely different, as about two thirds of the Greek population are still hovering around or below the survival level – no access to public health care, affordable medication, public schools – umpteen times reduced pensions, most public assets and services privatized for a pittance. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the last years, at least not for the better and for the majority of the people. The troika has allowed the Greek to go to the private capital markets – to boost falsely their, the Greek’s, image among the international public at large, basically telling the brainwashed populace, “It worked, we, the troika, did a good job”.
Nothing worked. People are unhappy; more than unhappy, they are indignant. They demonstrated against Angela Merkel’s recent visit to Athens, and their protests were violently oppressed by police forces. What do you expect – this is what has become of Europe, a highly repressive state of spineless vassals.
On Wednesday, 16 January, the Greek Parliament may hold a Vote of Confidence against or for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. The official and make-believe reason is supposedly the controversy over the name of Macedonia, which in fact has long been settled. The real reason is the public’s discontent about the continuous and increasing blood-letting by never-ending austerity, sucking the last pennies from the poor. According to Lancet, the renowned British health journal, the Greek suicide rate is soaring. Nobody talks about it. – Will Tsipras survive a possible Vote of Confidence? -If not – early elections? – Who will follow Tsipras? – Don’t be fooled by the term ‘democracy’. – The elite from within and without Greece will not allow any policy changes. That’s when people à la Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) may come in. Civil unrest. Enough is enough.
In Italythe coalition of the 5-Star Movement and the small right-wing brother, Lega Norte, is pulled to the far right by Lega’s Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister. Mr. Salvini is clearly calling the shots – and his alliance is firing strongly against Brussels and with good reason, as Brussels is attempting to impose rules on Italy’s budget, while the same rules do not apply equally to all EU member states. For example, Macron, France’s Rothschild implant, has special privileges, as far as budget overrun margins are concerned. Mr. Salvini’s anti-Brussels, anti-EU stance is no secret, and he has a lot of Italians behind him. An Italian Yellow Vest movement cannot be excluded.
The empire’s vassal castle is crumbling – and not even silently.
Then there are the former Soviet satellites, Hungary and Poland, turned right wing – don’t appreciate Brussels meddling with Hungary’s anti-immigration policy and in Poland over a controversial overhaul of the Judiciary system. Never mind whether you agree or not with individual country actions, both cases are clear interference in these nations’ sovereignty. Though upon the European Court of Justice’s strong warning, Poland indeed blinked and reinstated the judges fired in the judiciary reform process. Poland’s love for NATO, and Brussels use of the NATO leverage, may have played a role in Poland’s reversal of decision. Nevertheless, discontent in Poland as in Hungary among the public at large remains strong. Migration and the Judiciary are just the visible pretexts. The legendary tip of the iceberg. Reality is on a deeper level, much deeper. These countries are both reminded of what they considered the Soviet Union’s handcuffs. “Freedom” is not being dictated by Brussels.
*
The triad of systematic and willful destabilization and destruction of what we know as the Greater Middle East and western world is what we have to be aware of. The east, mostly Russia and China, is a challenge being tackled simultaneously, impressively for the brainwashed westerner, but rather meekly for those who are informed about Russia’s and China’s military might and intelligence capacity.
This drive of destabilization cum destruction comes in three phases. It started with the Middle East which for the most part has become a hopeless hell-hole, a source of indiscriminate killing by the western allies, say, the emperor’s puppets and mercenaries, resulting in millions killed and in an endless flood of refugees destabilizing Europe – which is the second phase of the triad. It’s in full swing. It happens right in front of our eyes – but we don’t see it.
It’s the Yellow Vests, austerity, increasing inequality, unemployment, social sector’s being milked to zilch by the financial system, popular uprisings’ oppression by police and military forces; it’s reflected by the dismal powerlessness of the people – that leads to “enough is enough” in the streets. That’s the way it’s all wanted. The more chaos the better. People in chaos are easily controlled.
Now comes phase three of the triad – Latin America. It has already started three or four years back. Countries that have struggled for decades to eventually break loose with some form of ‘democracy’ from the fangs of empire, are gradually being subdued with fake elections and ‘internal’ parliamentary coups, back into the emperor’s backyard. The Southern Cone – Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay – is ‘gone’, except for Bolivia. Peru, Colombia, Ecuador all the way to Guyana are governed by neoliberal, even neonazi-shaded Lords of Washington. But there is still Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and now also Mexico that have not caved in and will not cave in.
In an extraordinary analysis, Thierry Meyssan describes in “The Terrible Forthcoming Destruction of the Caribbean Basin” – see this, how the Pentagon is still pursuing the implementation of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski plan. This time, aiming at the destruction of the “Caribbean Basin” States. There is no consideration for friends or political enemies, Thierry Meyssan observes. He goes on predicting that after the period of economic destabilization and that of military preparation, the actual operation should begin in the years to come by an attack on Venezuela by Brazil (supported by Israel), Colombia (an ally of the United States) and Guyana (in other words, the United Kingdom). It will be followed by others, beginning with Cuba and Nicaragua, the ‘troika of tyranny’, as per John Bolton.
Only the future will say to what extent this plan will be implemented. At the outset, its ambitions exceed the crumbling empire’s actual capacity.
*
When it comes all down to one single denominator, it’s the current western financial system that must go. It is private banking gone berserk. We are living in a financial system that has gone wild and running havoc, uncontrolled – a train of endless greed that is loosely speeding ahead and doesn’t know when it will hit an unyielding steel-enforced brick wall – but hit it will. It is a mere question of time. People are sick and tired of being milked no end by a fraudulent pyramid system – constructed by the US and her dollar hegemony and maintained by globalized private banking.
We are living in a private banking system that has nothing to do with economic development, but everything with a greed-driven domination of us, consumers, sold on debt and on money that we don’t control, despite the fact that we earned it with our hard labor; despite the fact that it is our added value to what we call the economy. No – this system is totally disrespectful of the individual, it is even ready to steal our money, if it needs to survive – our banking system. It takes the liberty of “administering” it and basically appropriating it. Once our money is in a private bank, we have lost control over it. And mind you and get it into your brains, private banks do not work for you and me, but for their shareholders. But through hundreds of years of indoctrination, we have become so used to it, that being charged interest for borrowing our own money, through an intermediary who does nothing, absolutely nothing but wait for profit to fall into its lap – has become the ‘normality’.
It isn’t. This system has to be abolished, the faster the better. Private banking needs to be eradicated and replaced by local public banking that works with local currencies, based on local economic output, way removed from globalized concepts that help steel resources, empty local social safety nets – all under the guise of austerity for progress. We should know better by now. There is no austerity for progress – has never been. This fraudulent IMF-World Bank concept has never worked, anywhere.
We have to de-dollarize our money, de-digitize our money and pool it through a public banking system for the purpose of people’s growth, hence a society’s or nation’s growth. There is currently one good example, the Bank of North Dakota. The BND has helped the US State of North Dakota through the 2008 and following years crisis, with economic growth instead of economic decline, with almost full employment, versus skyrocketing unemployment in the rest of the US and the western world. We need to build our common wealth with sovereign money, backed by our sovereign economies.
As the empire and its vassals are crumbling badly, they are shaking in their foundations, it is time to rethink what we have been taking for granted and for ‘normal’ – a fraudulent and deceptive monetary system, backed by nothing, no economy, not even gold – we are living on sheer fiat money, made by private banking by a mouse-click – and by letting us be enslaved by debt.
Enough is enough. The Yellow Vests have understood. They want to get rid of their “Macron” who keeps propagating the fraud. It is time to rethink and restart, as the crumbling is getting louder and louder. Empire’s European vassal state is falling apart and will pull Washington and its hegemonic war and money machine along into the abyss.
Europe on the Brink of Collapse?
The Empire’s European castle of vassals is crumbling. Right in front of our eyes. But Nobody seems to see it. The European Union (EU), the conglomerate of vassals – Trump calls them irrelevant, and he doesn’t care what they think about him, they deserve to be collapsing. They, the ‘vassalic’ EU, a group of 28 countries, some 500 million people, with a combined economy of a projected 19 trillion US-dollar equivalent, about the same as the US, have submitted themselves to the dictate of Washington in just about every important aspect of life.
The EU has accepted on orders by Washington to sanction Russia, Venezuela, Iran – and a myriad of countries that have never done any harm to any of the 28 EU member states. The EU has accepted the humiliation of military impositions by NATO – threatening Russia and China with ever more and ever more advancing military basis towards Moscow and Beijing, to the point that Brussels’ foreign policy is basically led by NATO.
It was clear from the very get-go that the US sanctions regime imposed on Russia and all the countries refusing to submit to the whims and rules of Washington, directly and via the EU, was hurting the EU economically far more than Russia. This is specifically true for some of the southern European countries, whose economy depended more on trading with Russia and Eurasia than it did for other EU countries.
The ‘sanctions’ disaster really hit the fan, when Trump unilaterally decided to abrogate the “Nuclear Deal” with Iran and reimpose heavy sanctions on Iran and on “everybody who would do business with Iran”. European hydrocarbon giants started losing business. That’s when Brussels, led by Germany started mumbling that they would not follow the US and – even – that they would back European corporations, mainly hydrocarbon giants, sticking to their contractual arrangements they had with Iran.
Too late. European business had lost all confidence in Brussels EU Administration’s feeble and generally untrustworthy words. Many breached their longstanding and, after the Nuclear Deal, renewed contracts with Iran, out of fear of punishment by Washington and lack of trust in Brussel’s protection. Case in point is the French-British petrol giant, Total, which shifted its supply source from Iran to Russia – no, not to the US, as was of course, Washington’s intent. The damage is done. The vassals are committing slow suicide.
The people have had it. More than half of the European population wants to get out of the fangs from Brussels. But nobody asks them, nor listens to them – and that in the so-called heartland of ‘democracy’ (sic). That’s why people are now up in arms and protesting everywhere – in one way or another in Germany, France, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Poland – the list is almost endless. And it can be called generically the ‘Yellow Vests”, after the new French revolution.
The latest in a series of the US attacking Germany and German business – and German integrity, for that matter – are the US Ambassador’s, Richard Grenell, recent threats to German corporations with sanctions if they work on Nord Stream 2, the 1,200 km pipeline bringing Russian gas to Europe, to be completed by the end of 2019. It will virtually double the capacity of Russian gas supply to Europe. Instead, Washington wants Europe to buy US shale gas and oil, and especially keeping Europe economically and financially in the US orbit, avoiding in any way a detachment from Washington and preventing the obvious and logical – an alliance with Russia. This attempt will fail bitterly, as various German Ministers, including Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, have loudly and with determination protested against such US hegemonic advances. Well, friends, you have bent over backwards to please your Washington Masters for too long. It’s high time to step out of this lock-step of obedience.
In France, this past weekend of 12 / 13 January, the Yellow Vests went into round 9 of protests against dictator Macron, his austerity program and – not least – his abject arrogance vis-à- vis the working class. A recent public statement of Macron’s is testimony of this below-the-belt arrogance: “Trop de français n’ont pas le sens de l’effort, ce qui explique en partie les ’troubles’ que connait le pays“ – Translated:
“Too many French don’t know the meaning of ‘effort’ which explains at least partially the trouble this country is in.”
The Yellow Vests and a majority of the French population want nothing less than Macron’s resignation. Protesters are consistently and largely under-reported by Christophe Castaner, the French Interior Minister. This past weekend the official figure was 50,000 demonstrators, countrywide, when in reality the figure was at least three times higher. The official French version would like the public at large, inside and outside of France, to believe that the Yellow Vest’s movement is diminishing. It is not. To the contrary, they are demonstrating all over France, and that despite the Macron regime’s increasing violent repression.
RT reports, on Macron’s orders the police are becoming more violent, using military suppression to control protesting French civilians. Thousands have been arrested, and hundreds injured by police brutality. Nevertheless, the movement is gaining massive public support and the ‘Yellow Vests” idea is spreading throughout Europe. This spread is, of course, hardly reported by the mainstream media.
In fact, 80% of the French back the Yellow Vests and their idea of a Citizen Initiated Referendum (RIC for “Référendum d’initiative citoyenne”), under which citizens could propose their own laws that would then be voted on by the general public. The RIC could effectively bypass the French Parliament, and would be enshrined in the French Constitution. A similar law exists since 1848 in Switzerland and is regularly applied by Swiss citizens. It is a way of Direct Democracy that any country calling itself a “democracy” should incorporate in its Constitution.
The UKis in shambles. Thousands are taking to the streets of London, organized by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity”, calling for general elections to replace the failing Tory Government. They are joined by the French Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), out of solidarity. Many of the UK protesters are also wearing high-visibility yellow vests.
This is in direct correlation with the ever-growing louder debacle over BREXIT – yes, or no and how. At this point nobody knows what Britain’s future is going to be. Propaganda and counter-propaganda is destined to further confuse the people and confused people usually want to stick to the ‘status quo’. There is even a movement of pro “remain” propaganda, organized by some members of the European Parliament. Imagine! – Talking about sovereignty, if Brussels cannot even leave the Brits alone decide whether they want to continue under their dictate or not.
David Cameron – In or Out of Europe – Victory or Farce?
Hélas, the Brits are largely divided, but also past the stage of being swayed by foreign propaganda, especially in this delicate question of leaving the EU – which a majority of Brits clearly decided in June 2016. Prime Minister, Theresa May, has screwed-up the BREXIT process royally, to the point where many Brits feel that what she negotiated is worse than “no deal”. This has likely happened in close connivance with the unelected EU ‘leadership’ which does not want the UK to leave and under strict orders from Washington which needs the UK in its crucial role as a US mole in the European Union.
On 15 January 2019, the UK Parliament will vote on whether they accept the negotiated BREXIT conditions, or whether they prefer a ‘no deal’ BREXIT, or will request an extension for further negotiations under Article 50 of the “Treaty of Lisbon” (which was imposed by the heads of state of the 28 members, without any public vote, and is a false stand-in for a EU Constitution). Other options include a general election – and let the new leadership decide; or a second referendum which after two years is legally possible. The latter would likely cause severe public unrest, followed by atrocious police oppression – as already often witnessed in the UK – in which case, let’s just hope civil war can be avoided.
For weeks, the Yellow Vest movement has spread to Belgium and The Netherlands. For similar reasons – public discontent over austerity, EU dictatorship over Belgian and Dutch sovereignty. Last Friday, one of the Belgian Yellow Vests was overrun by a truck and killed. Authorities reported it as an accident.
Greece– The MS-media report all is ‘donkey-dory’, Greece is recovering, has for the first time in many years a positive growth rate and is able to refinance herself on the open capital market. Greece is no longer dependent on the irate and infamous troika (European Central Bank – ECB, European Commission and IMF). Reality is completely different, as about two thirds of the Greek population are still hovering around or below the survival level – no access to public health care, affordable medication, public schools – umpteen times reduced pensions, most public assets and services privatized for a pittance. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the last years, at least not for the better and for the majority of the people. The troika has allowed the Greek to go to the private capital markets – to boost falsely their, the Greek’s, image among the international public at large, basically telling the brainwashed populace, “It worked, we, the troika, did a good job”.
Nothing worked. People are unhappy; more than unhappy, they are indignant. They demonstrated against Angela Merkel’s recent visit to Athens, and their protests were violently oppressed by police forces. What do you expect – this is what has become of Europe, a highly repressive state of spineless vassals.
On Wednesday, 16 January, the Greek Parliament may hold a Vote of Confidence against or for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. The official and make-believe reason is supposedly the controversy over the name of Macedonia, which in fact has long been settled. The real reason is the public’s discontent about the continuous and increasing blood-letting by never-ending austerity, sucking the last pennies from the poor. According to Lancet, the renowned British health journal, the Greek suicide rate is soaring. Nobody talks about it. – Will Tsipras survive a possible Vote of Confidence? -If not – early elections? – Who will follow Tsipras? – Don’t be fooled by the term ‘democracy’. – The elite from within and without Greece will not allow any policy changes. That’s when people à la Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) may come in. Civil unrest. Enough is enough.
In Italythe coalition of the 5-Star Movement and the small right-wing brother, Lega Norte, is pulled to the far right by Lega’s Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister. Mr. Salvini is clearly calling the shots – and his alliance is firing strongly against Brussels and with good reason, as Brussels is attempting to impose rules on Italy’s budget, while the same rules do not apply equally to all EU member states. For example, Macron, France’s Rothschild implant, has special privileges, as far as budget overrun margins are concerned. Mr. Salvini’s anti-Brussels, anti-EU stance is no secret, and he has a lot of Italians behind him. An Italian Yellow Vest movement cannot be excluded.
The empire’s vassal castle is crumbling – and not even silently.
Then there are the former Soviet satellites, Hungary and Poland, turned right wing – don’t appreciate Brussels meddling with Hungary’s anti-immigration policy and in Poland over a controversial overhaul of the Judiciary system. Never mind whether you agree or not with individual country actions, both cases are clear interference in these nations’ sovereignty. Though upon the European Court of Justice’s strong warning, Poland indeed blinked and reinstated the judges fired in the judiciary reform process. Poland’s love for NATO, and Brussels use of the NATO leverage, may have played a role in Poland’s reversal of decision. Nevertheless, discontent in Poland as in Hungary among the public at large remains strong. Migration and the Judiciary are just the visible pretexts. The legendary tip of the iceberg. Reality is on a deeper level, much deeper. These countries are both reminded of what they considered the Soviet Union’s handcuffs. “Freedom” is not being dictated by Brussels.
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The triad of systematic and willful destabilization and destruction of what we know as the Greater Middle East and western world is what we have to be aware of. The east, mostly Russia and China, is a challenge being tackled simultaneously, impressively for the brainwashed westerner, but rather meekly for those who are informed about Russia’s and China’s military might and intelligence capacity.
This drive of destabilization cum destruction comes in three phases. It started with the Middle East which for the most part has become a hopeless hell-hole, a source of indiscriminate killing by the western allies, say, the emperor’s puppets and mercenaries, resulting in millions killed and in an endless flood of refugees destabilizing Europe – which is the second phase of the triad. It’s in full swing. It happens right in front of our eyes – but we don’t see it.
It’s the Yellow Vests, austerity, increasing inequality, unemployment, social sector’s being milked to zilch by the financial system, popular uprisings’ oppression by police and military forces; it’s reflected by the dismal powerlessness of the people – that leads to “enough is enough” in the streets. That’s the way it’s all wanted. The more chaos the better. People in chaos are easily controlled.
Now comes phase three of the triad – Latin America. It has already started three or four years back. Countries that have struggled for decades to eventually break loose with some form of ‘democracy’ from the fangs of empire, are gradually being subdued with fake elections and ‘internal’ parliamentary coups, back into the emperor’s backyard. The Southern Cone – Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay – is ‘gone’, except for Bolivia. Peru, Colombia, Ecuador all the way to Guyana are governed by neoliberal, even neonazi-shaded Lords of Washington. But there is still Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and now also Mexico that have not caved in and will not cave in.
In an extraordinary analysis, Thierry Meyssan describes in “The Terrible Forthcoming Destruction of the Caribbean Basin” – see this, how the Pentagon is still pursuing the implementation of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski plan. This time, aiming at the destruction of the “Caribbean Basin” States. There is no consideration for friends or political enemies, Thierry Meyssan observes. He goes on predicting that after the period of economic destabilization and that of military preparation, the actual operation should begin in the years to come by an attack on Venezuela by Brazil (supported by Israel), Colombia (an ally of the United States) and Guyana (in other words, the United Kingdom). It will be followed by others, beginning with Cuba and Nicaragua, the ‘troika of tyranny’, as per John Bolton.
Only the future will say to what extent this plan will be implemented. At the outset, its ambitions exceed the crumbling empire’s actual capacity.
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When it comes all down to one single denominator, it’s the current western financial system that must go. It is private banking gone berserk. We are living in a financial system that has gone wild and running havoc, uncontrolled – a train of endless greed that is loosely speeding ahead and doesn’t know when it will hit an unyielding steel-enforced brick wall – but hit it will. It is a mere question of time. People are sick and tired of being milked no end by a fraudulent pyramid system – constructed by the US and her dollar hegemony and maintained by globalized private banking.
We are living in a private banking system that has nothing to do with economic development, but everything with a greed-driven domination of us, consumers, sold on debt and on money that we don’t control, despite the fact that we earned it with our hard labor; despite the fact that it is our added value to what we call the economy. No – this system is totally disrespectful of the individual, it is even ready to steal our money, if it needs to survive – our banking system. It takes the liberty of “administering” it and basically appropriating it. Once our money is in a private bank, we have lost control over it. And mind you and get it into your brains, private banks do not work for you and me, but for their shareholders. But through hundreds of years of indoctrination, we have become so used to it, that being charged interest for borrowing our own money, through an intermediary who does nothing, absolutely nothing but wait for profit to fall into its lap – has become the ‘normality’.
It isn’t. This system has to be abolished, the faster the better. Private banking needs to be eradicated and replaced by local public banking that works with local currencies, based on local economic output, way removed from globalized concepts that help steel resources, empty local social safety nets – all under the guise of austerity for progress. We should know better by now. There is no austerity for progress – has never been. This fraudulent IMF-World Bank concept has never worked, anywhere.
We have to de-dollarize our money, de-digitize our money and pool it through a public banking system for the purpose of people’s growth, hence a society’s or nation’s growth. There is currently one good example, the Bank of North Dakota. The BND has helped the US State of North Dakota through the 2008 and following years crisis, with economic growth instead of economic decline, with almost full employment, versus skyrocketing unemployment in the rest of the US and the western world. We need to build our common wealth with sovereign money, backed by our sovereign economies.
As the empire and its vassals are crumbling badly, they are shaking in their foundations, it is time to rethink what we have been taking for granted and for ‘normal’ – a fraudulent and deceptive monetary system, backed by nothing, no economy, not even gold – we are living on sheer fiat money, made by private banking by a mouse-click – and by letting us be enslaved by debt.
Enough is enough. The Yellow Vests have understood. They want to get rid of their “Macron” who keeps propagating the fraud. It is time to rethink and restart, as the crumbling is getting louder and louder. Empire’s European vassal state is falling apart and will pull Washington and its hegemonic war and money machine along into the abyss.
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