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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/25/hardly-anyone-is-thinking-logically-about-the-risk-of-nuclear-war/

Hardly Anyone Is Thinking Logically About The Risk Of Nuclear War

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been set since its founding after the second world war. Chief among their reasons for doing so is the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.

A statement authored by the Bulletin’s editor John Mecklin is as biased against Russia as any mainstream western punditry today and makes no mention of the US empire’s role in provoking, prolonging and benefiting from this conflict, yet it still provides a fairly reasonable appraisal of the magnitude of the threat we’re staring down the barrel of at this point in history:

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.

And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.

Mecklin encourages dialogue between Russia, Ukraine and NATO powers in order to de-escalate tensions in “this time of unprecedented global danger.” He quotes UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned last August that the world has entered “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”

We came a hair’s breadth from nuclear annihilation during the chaotic and unpredictable brinkmanship at the height of the last cold war, and in fact had numerous close calls that could have easily wound up going another way. As former Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, humanity survived the Cuban Missile Crisis by “plain dumb luck”.

There’s no logical basis for the belief that we’ll get lucky again. Believing nuclear war won’t happen because it didn’t happen last time is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias; it’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.

But that’s the kind of sloppy thinking you’ll run into when you try to discuss this subject in public; I’m always encountering arguments that there’s no risk of nuclear war because we’ve gone all this time without disaster. One of the reasons I engage so much on social media is that I find it’s a good way of keeping tabs on the dominant propaganda narratives in our civilization and understanding what people are thinking and believing about things, and nowhere have I been met with more fuzzbrained comments than the times I’ve written about the need to prevent an entirely preventable nuclear holocaust.

The most common response I get is something along the lines of “Well if there is a nuclear war it will be Putin’s fault,” as though whose “fault” it is will matter to us while we’re watching the world end, along with the related “Well Russia shouldn’t have invaded then” and “Well Russia should stop threatening to use nukes then.” People genuinely don’t seem to understand that in the event of a full-scale nuclear war, it will really be the end of everyone. They still kind of imagine everyone still being there and shaking their fists at Russia afterward, and themselves sitting there feeling self-righteous and vindicated for correctly saying what a bad, bad man Vladimir Putin is.

They don’t understand that there will be no pundits discussing the nuclear armageddon on Fox and MSNBC, arguing about whose fault it was and which political party is to blame. They don’t get that there won’t be any war crimes tribunals in the radioactive ashes as the biosphere starves to death in nuclear winter. They don’t understand that once the nukes start flying, nobody’s shoulds or shouldn’ts about it will matter at all, and neither will your political opinions about Putin. All that will matter is that it happened, and that it can’t be taken back.

Another common response when I talk about the looming threat of nuclear war is, “Oh so you just don’t care about Ukrainians and you want them all to die.” The other day some lady responded to a Twitter thread I made about the need to avoid nuclear armageddon by saying that I must love rape and war crimes. People sincerely believe that’s a valid response to a discussion about the need to prevent the single worst thing that could possibly happen from happening. It really doesn’t seem to occur to them that they’re not actually engaging the subject at hand in any real way.

Slightly more perceptive interlocutors will argue that if we back down to tyrants just because they have nuclear weapons then everyone will try to get nukes and those who have them will become more belligerent, which will end up making nuclear war more likely in the long run. This response is a straw man fallacy because it misrepresents the argument as “just back down” rather than a call to engage in diplomacy and dialogue to de-escalate and begin sincerely negotiating toward detente, none of which is happening to any meaningful extent in this conflict. More importantly, it pretends that Russia is just invading its neighbor out of the blue instead of the well-documented reality that it is in fact responding to provocations by the US empire. The US has a moral obligation to de-escalate a conflict it knowingly provoked to advance its own interests, especially when that conflict could kill everyone in the world.

The whole “We can’t just back down to bullies like Putin” line of argumentation is further invalidated by the fact that it’s one thing to draw a line in the sand that must never be crossed — even if in the face of armageddon — but it’s quite another to say that line should be over something as small as who governs Crimea. This planet is populated with eight billion humans and countless other sentient creatures, very few of whom care one way or another who governs Crimea and almost none of whom would be willing to watch their loved ones die over it. Wanting to draw the line there is obnoxious, arrogant, and absurd.

And that’s just the shoddy brainwork of the rank-and-file public; the thinking of those who actually got us into this situation is surely just as dogshit. From what I can tell standing on this side of the thick veils of government secrecy which separate us from the truth, it appears to arise predominantly from a combination of immense hubris and zealous groupthink; hubris to think they can control all possible outcomes in a game of brinkmanship with so many small, unpredictable moving parts, and zealous groupthink in mindlessly adhering to the imperial doctrine that US unipolar planetary hegemony must be secured at all cost. They’re playing games with the life of every creature on this planet, and anyone who thinks that’s smart or wise should be as far from such decisions as possible.

The logical faceplants I’m describing here seem to arise partly from the fact that our civilization is completely inundated with empire propaganda about this conflict, and partly from the fact that people just haven’t thought terribly hard about nuclear war and what it would mean. The latter is probably because the prospect of everyone dying horrifically is such a huge, heavy, uncomfortable subject to sit down and deeply grapple with to the extent that it demands. For most people it’s just this vague, blurry mass in the periphery of their awareness, because they’ve been doing all these weird mental gymnastics to squirm and compartmentalize away from this thing rather than facing it.

But if ever there was a time to start doing some rigorous independent thinking and stop trusting the authorities to sort things out, it would be now. They’re showing us every sign that they’re just going to keep ramping up these games of nuclear chicken until they either fill their bottomless need for more complete global control or get us all killed trying. People need to start waking up to what’s going on and start making things uncomfortable for the people who are driving our world toward total destruction.

It does not need to be this way. Peace talks are possible. Diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are possible. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. We need to start building some public pressure to end this madness, because if the mushroom clouds ever show up, there is not one person alive who in that moment will believe that it was worth it.

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https://alt-market.us/a-dollar-collapse-is-now-in-motion-saudi-arabia-signals-the-end-of-petro-status/

A Dollar Collapse Is Now In Motion – Saudi Arabia Signals The End Of Petro Status

The decline of a currency’s world reserve status is often a long process rife with denials. There are numerous economic “experts” out there that have been dismissing any and all warnings of dollar collapse for years. They just don’t get it, or they don’t want to get it. The idea that the US currency could ever be dethroned as the defacto global trade mechanism is impossible in their minds.

One of the key pillars keeping the dollar in place as the world reserve is its petro-status, and this factor is often held up as the reason why the Greenback cannot fail. The other argument is that the dollar is backed by the full force of the US military, and the US military is backed by the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve – In other words, the dollar is backed by…the dollar; it’s a very circular and naive position.

These sentiments are not only pervasive among mainstream economists, they are also all over the place within the alternative media. I suspect the main hang-up for liberty movement analysts is the notion that the globalist establishment would ever allow the dollar or the US economy to fail. Isn’t the dollar system their “golden goose”?

The answer is no, it is NOT their golden goose. The dollar is just another stepping stone towards their goal of a one-world economy and a one-world currency. They have killed the world reserve status of other currencies in the past, why wouldn’t they do the same to the dollar?

Globalist white papers and essays specifically outline the need for a diminished role for the US currency as well as a decline in the American economy in order to make way for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and a new global currency system controlled by the IMF. I warned about this years go, and my position has always been that the derailment of the dollar would likely start with the end of its petro status.

In 2017 I published an article titled ‘Saudi Coup Signals War And The New World Order Reset’. I noted at the time that the sudden power shift over to crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman indicated a change in Saudi Arabia’s relationship to the US. I stated that:

“To understand how drastic this coup has been, consider this — for decades Saudi Kings maintained political balance by doling out vital power positions to separate, carefully chosen successors. Positions such as Defense Minister, the Interior Ministry and the head of the National Guard. Today, Mohammed Bin Salman controls all three positions. Foreign policy, defense matters, oil and economic decisions and social changes are now all in the hands of one man.”

The rise of MBS was backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), a fund comprised of trillions of dollars supplied by globalists within Carlyle Group (Bush family, etc.), Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Blackrock. MBS garnered the favor of the globalists for one specific reason – He openly supported their “Vision For 2030”, a plan for the dismantling of “fossil fuel” based energy and the implementation of carbon controls. Yes, that’s right, the head of Saudi Arabia is backing the eventual end of oil based energy, and part of that includes the end of the dollar as the petro currency.  

In exchange for their cooperation, the Saudis are being given access to ESG-like funding as well as access to AI advancements and the so-called “digital economy.”  It sounds crazy, but there is much talk of AI developments to cure numerous health problems and extend lifespan.  With those kinds of promises, it’s not surprising that Saudi elites would be willing to dump the dollar and even oil.

In 2017 I noted that:

“I believe the next phase of the global economic reset will begin in part with the breaking of petrodollar dominance. An important element of my analysis on the strategic shift away from the petrodollar has been the symbiosis between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been the single most important key to the dollar remaining as the petrocurrency from the very beginning.”

I believed that the threat to petro status would ultimately be spurred on by a proxy war between East and West:

“World economic war is the real name of the game here, as the globalists play puppeteers to East and West. It is a geopolitical crisis they will have created to engineer public support for a solution they predetermined.”

Back then I thought that such a proxy war would be initiated in the Middle East, possibly in Iran. However, it’s clear that Ukraine is the powderkeg the globalists have chosen, at least for now, with Taiwan being the next shoe to drop.

In the years since I made these predictions the relationship between Saudi Arabia, Russia and China has grown very close. Arms deals and energy deals are becoming a mainstay of trade and this has led to a quiet but steady distancing of the Saudis from the dollar. This past week, the dominoes were set in motion for dollar collapse when Saudi Arabia announced at Davos that they are now willing to trade oil in alternative currencies.

In response, Xi Jinping pledged to ramp up efforts to promote the use of the Chinese yuan in energy deals. This falls in line with another article I wrote in 2017 titled ‘The Economic End Game Continues,’ in which I described how conflict with Eastern nations (China and Russia) would be exploited to create a catalyst for the end of the dollar’s petro status.

The importance of the Saudi announcement cannot be overstated; this is the beginning of the end of the dollar. The dollar’s world reserve status is largely dependent on its petro-status. Without one, you cannot have the other. This is almost the exact same dynamic that led to the implosion of the British Sterling decades ago as the global petro currency which resulted in the rise of the dollar to take its place.

This time, though, it will not be a single foreign currency that takes on the role of world reserve, it will be a basket currency system controlled by the IMF called Special Drawing Rights, along with a single global digital currency that is yet to be named but is now under development.

The consequences of the loss of reserve status will be devastating to the US economy. It is the only glue holding our system together – The ability to defer inflation by exporting it overseas is a superpower only the US enjoys. The Fed can print money perpetually if it wants to in order to fund the government or prop up US markets, as long as foreign central banks and corporate banks are willing to absorb dollars as a tool for global trade. If the dollar is no longer the primary international trade mechanism, the trillions upon trillions of dollars the Fed has created from thin air over the years will all come flooding back to the US through various avenues, and hyperinflation (or hyperstagflation) will be the result.

This dynamic is already in play, as foreign holders of US debt and dollars have been dumping them at record pace since 2017. The process continues at a time when the Federal Reserve is cutting it’s balance sheet and raising interest rates, which means there is no longer a buyer of last resort.

This may be why multiple foreign central banks have renewed their purchases of gold reserves and are once again stockpiling precious metals. They seem to be well aware of what is about to happen to the dollar, while the American public is kept in the dark.

The effects of the decline of the dollar may not be immediately felt, or become obvious for another year or two. What will happen is consistent inflation on top of the high prices we are already dealing with. Meaning, the Federal Reserve will continue to hold interest rates higher and prices will barely budge or they may climb in spite of monetary tightening. Even in the face of a major recessionary contraction, which I predict will be triggered starting in April, prices will STILL remain higher.

All the while the mainstream media and government economists will say they have “no idea” why inflation is so persistent, and that “nobody could have seen this coming.” Some of us saw it coming, but only because we accept the reality that the dollar’s days are numbered.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/24/chinese-aggression-sure-looks-an-awful-lot-like-us-aggression/

“Chinese Aggression” Sure Looks An Awful Lot Like US Aggression

Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which will be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.

China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi’s visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi’s trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it’s an almost-daily occurrence.

Beijing views the US House speaker visiting Taiwan as an affront to the one-China policy and the understanding the US and China reached in 1979, when Washington severed formal relations with Taipei.

US-led provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the US itself and from its imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the western political/media class, the urgent threat of our day is “Chinese aggression”.

After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China — a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the US government to ramp up the new cold war — the committee’s chairman Mike Gallagher put out a statement saying that it is “time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in bipartisan fashion.”

Gallagher is a particularly noxious warmonger who says urgent efforts must be made to stop China from “destroying the capitalist system led by the United States in order to make way for the triumph of world socialism with Chinese characteristics.” He advocates the “selective decoupling” from specific sectors of the Chinese economy and says the US is in “the early stages of a new cold war” against China. He advocates pouring weapons into Taiwan in much the same way the US did in the lead-up to its proxy war in Ukraine, and asserts that the US needs to be preparing for a direct hot war with China in the near future.

Gallagher’s hawkishness on China is quickly becoming the mainstream consensus position in the western political/media class as the US-centralized empire ramps up aggressions while continually complaining about Chinese aggression.

The US empire has been increasingly positioning its war machinery around China since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” in ways that would have led to an immediate third world war if the roles were reversed, and its aggressions have escalated with each subsequent administration. Just in the last couple of months we’ve had news that the US is planning on returning to its Subic Bay base in the Philippines as part of its encirclement campaign against China, and also intends to station missile-armed marines along Japan’s Okinawa islands. The US is also reportedly working on building a network of missile systems on a chain of islands near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the goal of countering China. The US and its allies have dramatically increased their naval presence in disputed waters near China, viewed as acts of aggression by Beijing.

None of this would be tolerated by the United States if China were openly moving its war machinery into adjacent areas with the stated goal of “countering the US”. If China were doing this, it would be a near-unanimous consensus throughout the western world that China was engaged in hostile provocations and was clearly the aggressor. Nobody would listen to China if it claimed it was militarily encircling the US for defensive purposes.

But that’s exactly what happens with US aggressions against China. It’s just taken as matter of fact when the US says it’s moving more and more war machinery into the waters around China as a defensive precaution to deter Chinese aggression. Because the narrative is coming from the most effective propaganda machine ever devised, we hear “No bro, the US is militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival on the other side of the planet defensively. Because like what if China tries to do something aggressive?”

In a surprisingly decent Foreign Affairs article titled “The Problem With Primacy,” Van Jackson argues that the US is behaving in such a transparently aggressive manner toward China that it can’t possibly claim to be acting in the interests of preserving peace and stability in the region.

“This is not the rationale of a country that is simply balancing Chinese power or trying to stop Beijing from creating a sphere of influence,” writes Jackson of the recent US semiconductor export ban against China. “It is not the strategy of a state trying to decouple from the Chinese economy. It is containment in all but name.”

“The Pentagon has promised that 2023 will be ‘the most transformative year in US force posture in the region in a generation,’ a line likely meant to be reassuring but that comes off as ominous,” Jackson writes. “The Department of Defense is making good on this promise by modernizing its large traditional presence in Northeast Asia while increasing its footprint in the Pacific Islands and Australia—areas that the Chinese military cannot seriously contest.”

Jackson argues that Washington’s efforts to halt China’s rise will likely achieve nothing besides provoking China into militarizing against it, saying, “There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal or selling submarines to Australia will cause China to do anything but continue arming itself as quickly as possible.”

This aligns with the warnings of an anonymous US official cited in a November article by Bloomberg, who said that “the hawkish tone in DC has contributed to a cycle where the US makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further.”

It’s the US making the first move every time.

Taiwan is an odd case because empire apologists will openly tell you that Beijing must never control the island as it’s a geostrategically crucial location with essential semiconductor manufacturing, and then turn around and still try to tell you that Washington’s interest in Taiwan is because it wants to protect freedom and democracy. It’s even more transparent than when they were pretending to yearn for the liberation of nations that just so happened to sit on a lot of oil.

I don’t know if Beijing will ever launch an attack on Taiwan or some other future flashpoint, but if it does it seems a safe bet that it will be because the US empire kept ramping up aggressions and provocations until it got to the point that China felt it was losing more from inaction than it would from action. And then empire apologists will spend all day shrieking at anyone who tries to talk about those provocations.

Because that’s the rule now, if you weren’t aware. As of February 2022 we’re all meant to pretend that the concept of provocation is not a commonplace idea that everyone understands and learns about as children, but that “provocation” is rather a nonsensical propaganda word that was invented by Vladimir Putin last year. It is now no longer permissible for you to talk about the aggressions that led up to a nation going to war; we must all pretend that history began the day their troops crossed the border.

History is being re-written with Ukraine, and if war erupts over Taiwan it will probably be re-written there as well. But note to the future: the road to war was paved by mountains of US aggression.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/21/when-the-people-have-nothing-more-to-eat-they-will-eat-the-rich/

When the People Have Nothing More to Eat, They Will Eat the Rich

On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian flag descended on the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and vandalised public property. The attack, carried out by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, came as no surprise, since the rioters had been planning ‘weekend demonstrations’ on social media for days. When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) was formally sworn in as Brazil’s new president one week prior, on 1 January, there was no such melee; it appears that the vandals were waiting until the city was quiet and Lula was out of town. For all its bluster, the attack was an act of extreme cowardice.

Meanwhile, the defeated Bolsonaro was nowhere near Brasília. He fled Brazil prior to the inauguration – presumably to escape prosecution – and sought haven in Orlando, Florida (in the United States). Even though Bolsonaro was not in Brasília, the Bolsonaristas, as his supporters are known, left their mark throughout the city. Even before Bolsonaro lost the election to Lula this past October, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil suggested that Brazil was going to experience ‘Bolsonarism without Bolsonaro’. This prediction is supported by the fact that the far-right Liberal Party, which served as Bolsonaro’s political vehicle during his presidency, holds the largest bloc in the country’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate, while the toxic influence of the right wing persists both in Brazil’s elected bodies and political climate, especially on social media.

The two men responsible for public safety in Brasília – Anderson Torres (the secretary of public security of the Federal District) and Ibaneis Rocha (the governor of the Federal District) – are close to Bolsonaro. Torres served as the minister of justice and public security in Bolsonaro’s government, while Rocha formally supported Bolsonaro during the election. As the Bolsonaristas prepared their assault on the capital, both men appeared to have abdicated their responsibilities: Torres was on holiday in Orlando, while Rocha took the afternoon off on the last working day before the coup attempt. For this complicity in the violence, Torres has been dismissed from his post and faces charges, and Rocha has been suspended. The federal government has taken charge of security and arrested over a thousand of these ‘fanatic Nazis’, as Lula called them. There is a good case to be made that these ‘fanatic Nazis’ do not deserve amnesty.

The slogans and signs that pervaded Brasília on 8 January were less about Bolsonaro and more about the rioters’ hatred for Lula and the potential of his pro-people government. This sentiment is shared by big business sectors – mainly agribusiness – which are furious about the reforms proposed by Lula. The attack was partly the result of the built-up frustration felt by people who have been led, by intentional misinformation campaigns and the use of the judicial system to unseat the Lula’s party, the Workers’ Party (PT), through ‘lawfare’, to believe that Lula is a criminal – even though the courts have ruled this to be false. It was also a warning from Brazil’s elites. The unruly nature of the attack on Brasília resembles the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former US President Donald Trump. In both cases, far-right illusions, whether about the dangers of the ‘socialism’ of US President Joe Biden or the ‘communism’ of Lula, symbolise the hostile opposition of the elites to even the mildest rollback of neoliberal austerity.

The attacks on government offices in the United States (2021) and Brazil (2023), as well as the recent coup in Peru (2022), are not random events; beneath them is a pattern that requires examination. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been engaged in this study since our founding five years ago. In our first publication, In the Ruins of the Present (March 2018), we offered a preliminary analysis of this pattern, which I will develop further below.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Third World Project withered as a result of the debt crisis, the US-driven agenda of neoliberal globalisation prevailed. This programme was characterised by the state’s withdrawal from the regulation of capital and by the erosion of social welfare policies. The neoliberal framework had two major consequences: first, a rapid increase in social inequality, with the growth of billionaires at one pole and the growth of poverty at the other, along with an exacerbation of inequality along North-South lines; and second, the consolidation of a ‘centrist’ political force that pretended that history, and therefore politics, had ended, leaving only administration (which in Brazil is well-named as centrão, or the ‘centre’) remaining. Most countries around the world fell victim to both the neoliberal austerity agenda and this ‘end of politics’ ideology, which became increasingly anti-democratic, making the case for technocrats to be in charge. However, these austerity policies, cutting close to the bone of humanity, created their own new politics on the streets, a trend that was foreshadowed by the IMF riots and bread riots of the 1980s and later coalesced into the ‘anti-globalisation’ protests. The US-driven globalisation agenda produced new contradictions that belied the argument that politics had ended.

The Great Recession that set in with the global financial crisis of 2007–08 increasingly invalidated the political credentials of the ‘centrists’ who had managed the austerity regime. The World Inequality Report 2022 is an indictment of neoliberalism’s legacy. Today, wealth inequality is as bad as it was in the early years of the twentieth century: on average, the poorest half of the world’s population owns just $4,100 per adult (in purchasing power parity), while the richest 10 percent owns $771,300 – roughly 190 times as much wealth. Income inequality is equally harsh, with the richest 10 percent absorbing 52 percent of world income, leaving the poorest 50 percent with merely 8.5 percent of world income. It gets worse if you look at the ultra-rich. Between 1995 and 2021, the wealth of the top one percent grew astronomically, capturing 38 percent of global wealth while the bottom 50 percent only ‘captured a frightening two percent’, the authors of the report write. During the same period, the share of global wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent rose from 7 percent to 11 percent. This obscene wealth – largely untaxed – provides this tiny fraction of the world’s population with a disproportionate amount of power over political life and information and increasingly squeezes the ability of the poor to survive.

The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report (January 2023) forecasts that, at the end of 2024, gross domestic product (GDP) in 92 of the world’s poorer countries will be 6 percent below the level expected on the eve of the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, these countries are projected to suffer a cumulative loss in GDP equal to roughly 30 percent of their 2019 GDP. As central banks in the richest countries tighten their monetary policies, capital for investment in the poorer nations is drying up and the cost of debts already held has increased. Total debt in these poorer countries, the World Bank notes, ‘is at a 50-year high’. Roughly one in five of these countries are ‘effectively locked out of global debt markets’, up from one in fifteen in 2019. All of these countries – excluding China – ‘suffered an especially sharp investment contraction of more than 8 percent’ during the pandemic, ‘a deeper decline than in 2009’, in the throes of the Great Recession. The report estimates that aggregate investment in these countries will be 8 percent lower in 2024 than had been expected in 2020. Faced with this reality, the World Bank offers the following prognosis: ‘Sluggish investment weakens the rate of growth of potential output, reducing the capacity of economies to increase median incomes, promote shared prosperity, and repay debts’. In other words, the poorer nations will slide deeper into a debt crisis and into a permanent condition of social distress.

The World Bank has sounded the alarm, but the forces of ‘centrism’ – beholden to the billionaire class and the politics of austerity – simply refuse to pivot away from the neoliberal catastrophe. If a leader of the centre-left or left tries to wrench their country out of persistent social inequality and polarised wealth distribution, they face the wrath of not merely the ‘centrists’, but the wealthy bondholders in the North, the International Monetary Fund, and the Western states. When Pedro Castillo won the presidency in Peru in July 2021, he was not permitted to pursue even a Scandinavian form of social democracy; the coup machinations against him began before he was inaugurated. The civilised politics that would end hunger and illiteracy are simply not permitted by the billionaire class, who spend vast amounts of money on think tanks and media to undermine any project of decency and fund the dangerous forces of the far right, who shift the blame for social chaos away from the tax-free ultra-rich and the capitalist system and onto the poor and marginalised.

The hallucinatory insurrection in Brasília emerged from the same dynamic that produced the coup in Peru: a process in which ‘centrist’ political forces are funded and brought to power in the Global South to ensure that their own citizens remain at the rear of the queue, while the wealthy tax-free bondholders of the Global North remain at the front.

On the barricades of Paris on 14 October 1793, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the president of the Paris Commune who himself fell to the guillotine to which he sent many others, quoted these fine words from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/22/lets-nuke-the-world-over-who-governs-crimea-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

Let’s Nuke The World Over Who Governs Crimea: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Critics of the US empire have spent months compiling mountains of evidence showing that the empire knowingly provoked the war in Ukraine. Supporters of the US empire have spent months posting dog memes and accusing strangers of being paid by Putin. It’s clear who’s in the right.

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So does everyone else in the world get a vote on whether their lives should be risked in an offensive to control who governs Crimea? Or will the Biden administration just be making that call on behalf of all living creatures?

It’s so crazy how the fate of everyone alive and everyone who could potentially be born in the future is riding on the way two governments choose to navigate a conflict in Ukraine, just because those two governments have most of the world’s nuclear weapons. It’s like two people in a bar getting into a brawl that kills everyone in their city. Nobody else in the world gets a vote on the decisions being made that could kill everyone alive and end humanity forever; just a few people within those two governments and their militaries.

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The US empire is telling Moscow “I’m the craziest motherfucker around, I’ll keep ramping up the brinkmanship looking you right in the eye and daring you to use nukes,” while telling the rest of the world “I am the voice of sanity that you should all look to for leadership.”

One of the empire’s faces is the virtuous upholder of freedom and democracy, while the other face puts on an intimidating show of viciousness like a prisoner biting off someone’s cheek in the prison yard. At least one of those faces is necessarily lying.

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Literally the only reason mainstream westerners are fine with the US empire’s nuclear brinkmanship with Russia is because most don’t understand it, and those who do understand it don’t think very hard about it. They avoid contemplating what nuclear war is and what it would mean.

Whenever I touch on this subject I get a bunch of replies like “Yeehaw! That’s right bitch, we’re standing up to Putin!” They’re not approaching the subject with anything like the gravity they would if they understood what’s happening and had seriously thought about what could be. They don’t understand how horrifyingly dangerous it is that the empire is considering backing a Crimea offensive, and they haven’t sincerely contemplated what it would be like for every living creature to die horribly and for no one else to ever be born again for all of time.

Whatever position you have on this whole conflict, you should be approaching the possibility of nuclear annihilation with the most profound solemnity imaginable, because it is without exaggeration the single worst thing that could possibly happen. Take it seriously, or be silent.

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If a nuclear war between Russia and NATO erupts, the answer to the question “Was it worth it?” will be a decisive “No.” Not just for people like me, but for everyone, no matter how sympathetic they are to the western power structure and no matter how much they hate Russia. If their answer isn’t “no” immediately, it will be their answer in a matter of hours. If people don’t immediately understand the horror that’s been unleashed upon our world and how nothing could possibly have been worth it, they will understand it in short order.

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The term Mutually Assured Destruction was first coined by Hudson Institute’s Donald Brennan in 1962, but he used it ironically, spelling out the acronym “MAD” in order to argue that it’s insane to hold weapons that can cause armageddon. These games of nuclear chicken are insane.

The argument for nukes is that the threat of their use wards off the large-scale conventional wars we saw in WWI and WWII, but that only works if the fear of their use deters conventional attacks. The US empire is getting more and more brazen with its proxy warfare against Russia.

It used to be undisputed conventional wisdom that hot warfare against Russia must be avoided at all costs because they’re a nuclear superpower. Now the idea of backing full-scale offensives to carve off pieces of the Russian Federation is gaining widespread mainstream traction. This disintegrates the uneasy stability that MAD is theoretically supposed to create, because MAD assumes the other side won’t be crazy enough to launch conventional offensives against a nuclear superpower due to fear of rapidly spiraling escalation into full-scale nuclear war.

If you’ve got two people pointing pistols at each other, an exchange of gunfire might be avoided for fear of retaliation. But if one of the gunmen breaks the standoff by walking toward the other holding a knife in his other hand, odds are the other guy pulls the trigger.

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I hate it when I get people saying “I hope we do nuke ourselves off the map, we’re horrible.” It’s not okay for a few idiots to be playing games with every life on this planet. Just because you’re unhappy with life here doesn’t mean all the innocents around the world are, doesn’t mean the animals are, the bugs, the trees. Your disaffected feelings are not a valid reason not to fight this thing tooth and claw. Keep your omnicidal ideations to yourself.

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Westerners frame the idea of nations like Russia and China “attacking their neighbors” as though that’s somehow less moral than the US attacking nations on the other side of the planet who cannot possibly pose any threat to US national security. At least Russia can make an argument that its invasion of Ukraine was in its national security interests due to US/NATO militarization there, and China could make similar arguments if it ever attacks Taiwan. US wars are done solely to defend US planetary domination, not the US.

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Liberals are all about examining privilege except when it comes to western privilege. Then they’re more than happy to blow up everything and everyone for their belief in their inherent ideological superiority and their right to rule over every single country on earth.

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Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer designating the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment as a “dangerous organization.” To be clear, nothing has actually changed about the Azov Regiment. It’s still the same people with the same ideology. All that changed is the Official Narrative.

For years and years, up until just last year, the mass media had no problem acknowledging that Ukraine has a Nazi problem and calling Azov neo-Nazis what they are. All that changed is we moved into an information ecosystem of aggressive war propaganda.

No amount of PR rebranding will magically transform Azov neo-Nazis into wholesome moderates. You can change Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC, but it’s still the same stuff in the bucket.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-end-of-consensus-reality-disorder/

The End of Reality Consensus Disorder

“We’ve quite literally outsourced the definition of reality to a small group of technocrats in nondescript offices whose names we’ll never know and who self-selected for issue advocacy and whose interests likely diverge severely from those of we the people.”

The big annual World Economic Forum meet-up concluded last week with a mighty “So, What?” as the world struggled with some success to get its mind right after years of relentless WEF-inspired psy-ops. Own nothing… eat bugs…  great re-set… yeah, right. These days, fewer sovereign individuals believe der Schwabenklaus bullshit about the necessity of becoming menials for the “fittest 0.1 percent” of mankind who comprise the WEF’s cabal of elite “strategic partners.” News reports pegged the attendance in Davos this year at a shocking mere half of invitees. Did the absentees quail at the risk of all being together in the same auditorium (what with all those drones and missiles available on the black market)? Or could they not find enough unvaccinated pilots to fly their private jets?

      By no strange coincidence, one of the WEF’s most sadistic leadership implants, PM Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, dropped out of office the same week, declaring she had “no gas left in the tank.” Old George Orwell had a pretty keen eye for the arc of history, but it never occurred to him that Big Brother would turn out to be Big Sister. Ms. Ardern was the one who said of her regime, “We will continue to be your single source of truth… Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth.” Polls indicated her party would get thrashed in this year’s parliamentary election. Next door in equally vaxxed-to-the-max Australia, the government had to confess last week that the country had more Covid-19 deaths in the first half of January this new year than in all of 2021.

     Europe is starting to emerge from its Covid coma, France especially, where disgruntled masses marched in the streets last week, evincing growing disgust with WEF poodle Emmanuel Macron. Germany, not so much. Is it possible they really haven’t learned anything from what went on 1933-1945? Great Britain, a basket-case of Woke double-think and economic tribulation, is crumbling over excess all-causes mortality and a public health officialdom addicted to lying. British doctors are in revolt against the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, the UK equivalent of the FDA.

      A wake-up is underway in these sore-beset United States. It was no small thing, for instance, that former “vaccine” cheerleader, Scott Adams, the podcaster of the Dilbert comic strip fame, admitted pretty forthrightly that he was wrong about all that. “The thing that [the unvaxxed] don’t have to worry about is what I have to worry about: what happens with this vaccination five years from now? All my fancy analytics took me to a bad place.”

Elon Musk shocked the Twitterverse (and beyond) by confessing that he only took the vaxxes because international travel for business required it, and his second shot was a near-death experience (while his cousin developed myocarditis from it). Meanwhile, the UN issued a warning to him through a WEF mouthpiece, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency, Vera Jourova: comply and regulate speech on the platform, or else….

We have the rules which must be complied with and otherwise there will be sanctions. I think that the confidence has been weakened, and I had quite a high level of confidence when it comes to Twitter. I have to say that we worked with knowledgeable people, with layers, with sociologists, who understood that they have to behave in some decent way. Not to cause really big harm to society…” she said.

      Something tells me that Mr. Musk will invite these busybodies to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. As the Tweeter @BlackFlagExpat explained: “Musk can simply set up the server capacity outside of EU jurisdiction (UK, Andorra, Switz, Russia?) and move all data to those physical and virtual servers. Then lay off all European employees and stop paying rent on all leases.” Nice!

      That old rats-from-a-sinking-ship feeling emanates from the hazy region where “Joe Biden” dwells. Chief of staff Ron Klain is handing over his duties to former Covid-19 “czar” Jeff Zients — who did such a swell job keeping Americans mis-and-disinformed through the heart of the “vaccine” campaign (January 2021 to April 2022). Every thread of the Covid-19 narrative promulgated by this ass, and the sachems of the CDC and FDA, are shredded, proved to be not only lies, but deadly lies. Every angle of Covid policy was wrong, and treasonously wrong. This is who will soon be, ostensibly, leading the country — since you can be sure that “JB” is not. Nobody will believe a word that Jeff Zients utters. The mainstream media is even turning against this coterie of evil nincompoops.

      The sociopathic Political Left and its international managers have lost control of the ball in this game. They can insist on any sort of absurdity, but the people have stopped buying it. Resentment over all this is breaking out. Nobody wants any more boosters. The running dogs of official propaganda, such as Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, await their career executions. The years of Reality Consensus Disorder draw to a close. The counter-revolution finally begins.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/wef-calls-destruction-america-middle-class/5805454

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Calls for Destruction of America’s Middle Class

I have said this for a long time. The global elite hate you, they want to destroy your standard of living, and reduce you to a serf, a powerless and dispensable carbon emitter.

Freeland is safe behind a podium at the WEF. There are thousands of Swiss soldiers outside making sure outraged plebs don’t storm the castle.

This “honorable” woman (government sociopaths are always honorable), a fixture of the state, is on her tenth careerist term as deputy prime minister of Canada and “serves” as the minister of finance.

As minister of finance, there is no doubt she understands what a “pay cut” will do to the middle class.

Freeland obviously considers the American middle class useless and non-productive (unlike the factory slaves in China). Sure, their grandparents built America and toiled in factories and offices. However, Freeland and the neoliberal cartel believe it is high time to dismantle America and starve out those left in the wake of offshoring and the financial swindles that have further enriched the billionaire caste, a massive transfer (theft) of wealth that is slowly destroying the middle class.

Klaus Schwab, a student of war criminal Henry Kissinger, is a mentor to power-hungry and narcissistic sociopaths. The WEF “Great Reset” is designed to turn the world into an impoverished social concentration camp, where destitute serfs “own nothing” and this, in true Orwellian fashion, will set them free.

It’s not mentioned that the Schwab control freak system will shut down any opposition to unelected WEF apparatchiks. If you rent everything—your home, car, food, computer, etc.—that rental “privilege” can be taken away.

I challenge people to investigate the WEF’s Global Redesign Initiative. According to the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands, this “initiative” proposes

a transition away from intergovernmental decision-making towards a system of multi-stakeholder governance.   In other words, by stealth, they are marginalising a recognised model where we vote in governments who then negotiate treaties which are then ratified by our elected representatives with a model where a self-selected group of ‘stakeholders’ make decisions on our behalf. (Emphasis added.)

In other words, large transnational corporate “stakeholders” will be deciding where you live, what you eat (insects and weeds), how you reproduce (or not reproduce; children produce carbon emissions), and what you can “rent” from them, or not be allowed to rent if you complain about an unelected globalist “economic” cartel driving humanity into serfdom, worldwide poverty, and depopulation.

Chrystia Freeland is an enemy of humanity. She is a globalist misanthrope. In the above video, she revealed her utter contempt for the average man and woman. She is advocating harm, even death.

There is no other way to describe such a despicable misanthrope. No doubt her response would be entirely different if enraged serfs managed to overwhelm the Swiss military outside the luxury ski resort at Davos and rounded up the self-entitled WEF grandees and arranged a tribunal for economic crimes against humanity.

It won’t happen anytime soon.

Americans, Canadians, and Europeans are far too passive,  distracted, dumbed down, and willing to believe fictional narratives. If covid demonstrated anything, it is that indoctrinated people, fearful of death, will do whatever the government demands of them. It’s a template that will be repeated.

Well, at least the French retain some spunk. Macron wants to neoliberalize France’s pension system. This was the response to his proposal to negate a promise:

It really is too bad a million or more people are not marching up Landwasserstrasse to Davos to demonstrate opposition to the WEF cartel and its misanthropic global agenda.

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https://edwardcurtin.com/the-new-york-times-is-orwells-ministry-of-truth/

The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1974 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me.

Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.”  It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing.  Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war.  So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality.  This angered me.

The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad.  “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.”  Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.

On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley.  To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue.  When you support a U.S. war, as has always been The Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners.  So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted.  Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion?  They too must never have  existed since they are not mentioned.

But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.”  No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.”  U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”

Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.  It just didn’t happen.  Never happened.  Magic by omission.  The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times.  (Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)

All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”

Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Rumania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc.  In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would not respond forcefully.

This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.

The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident.  The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:

• Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
• “Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
• That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
• Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
• Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
• Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
• Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
• Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
• During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
• The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”

This is expert opinion for dummies.  A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address.  The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.

It is a fight they will lose in the days to come.  Russia was, is, and will triumph

Everything in the editorial is disingenuous.  Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys.  Putin another Hitler.  The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t).  History is repeating itself.

Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1974 was appropriate.  As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world.  It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial.  It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that The New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth.  It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.

Let Harold Pinter have the last words:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/duplicitous-eu-bureaucrats-demand-war-crimes-tribunal/5805002

“Punishing Vladimir Putin”: Duplicitous EU Bureaucrats Demand War Crimes Tribunal

Hypocrisy abounds, yet few seem to notice.

German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock is nursing a fantasy. She believes one day Vladimir Putin will be hauled into The Hague and tried for war crimes. Her dream is to punish Putin for fumigating Nazis in Ukraine.

But there is a problem. Russia and Ukraine are not parties to the Rome statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC), thus the court does not have jurisdiction in those two countries. Ukraine tried to circumvent this by accepting ICC jurisdiction.

Russia removed itself from the ICC after the court declared the referendum-backed liberation of Crimea to be an occupation. The peninsula, for centuries part of Russia, was rife with Nazi psychopaths determined to find and kill ethnic Russians.

In Odesa along the coast of the Black Sea, Stepan Bandera worshippers burned people alive and beat others to death with metal pipes for the crime of their heritage and language spoken. No investigation or prosecution of the perpetrators followed.

Anna Baerbock would like to see this barbarism and sadistic mistreatment of largely defenseless civilians continue. She proposed a “new format” for the court, that is she would have the ICC set up a court in Ukraine and “derive its jurisdiction from Ukrainian criminal law.”

In short, the ICC would be working with ultranats and Nazis. Baerbock apparently does not see a contradiction.

“That would be different to tribunals under international law, such as those for the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia,” the AFP notes. “And while tribunals for Cambodia and Kosovo have used local laws, they were not able to try aggression between one state and another.”

Baerbock’s proposal is likely to hit a brick wall. The other option is to take the case to the United Nations, but that is also a dead end. Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council, will undoubtedly veto any such move.

According to Baerbock’s fantasy,

A special tribunal would target Russia’s civilian and military leadership for ordering and overseeing the invasion of Ukraine, Baerbock said.

While the ICC could charge Russian soldiers and commanders on the ground, Baerbock said it was “important that the Russian leadership cannot claim immunity.”

Aggression was the “original crime that enabled all the other terrible crimes”.

Hypocrisy abounds, yet few seem to notice. Baerbock’s Germany was deeply involved in the effort to kill Afghans for the crime of attempting to end the occupation of their country. The Bundeswehr was told they didn’t have a combat mission in Afghanistan, but that was nothing more than a flimsy cover.

“US troops as well as the Bundeswehr and other allies not only supported war criminals on the ground, they also committed serious crimes themselves. None of the perpetrators was ever convicted in court for this,” Fabian Scheidler wrote for the Orinoco Tribune.

Germans under NATO command “bombed a mainly civilian trek… with over one hundred dead or seriously injured, including children. The proceedings against those primarily responsible, Colonel Georg Klein and Defense Minister Jung (CDU), ended with acquittals.”

The ICC is apparently fond of European and USG war criminals. Recall the USG shelling the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz.

“The attack, which was clearly a war crime according to different human rights organizations including the United Nations, killed at least 42 civilians, mostly medical staff members and patients,” teleSUR reported in 2016. “ The ‘punishments’ are largely administrative, such as letters of reprimand and no further promotion.”

Gregor Link writes for WSWS,

Back in 2009, WikiLeaks published an internal Bundeswehr (German army) field report on a massacre in the Afghan province of Kunduz, which resulted in the deaths of up to 142 people, including “children and adolescents.” The bombardment of two fuel trucks was the bloodiest military action by the modern Bundeswehr, and marked a turning point in German post-war history.

As we know, Julian Assange is now locked up in Belmarsh prison for the crime of revealing USG and European war crimes.

The German “leadership” was eager to enter the war against the CIA-created Taliban. The German political elite wanted to show they are back in the game of killing officially designated (and created) enemies. Peter Schwarz writes,

Hypocrites and Psychopaths: EU’s Russia War Crimes Tribunal

German imperialism did not want to be left out of this war for the re-division of the world. On 11 October 2001, four days after the start of American hostilities in Afghanistan, Chancellor Schröder announced a fundamental reorientation of German foreign policy to the Bundestag (federal parliament).

Amnesty International is more focused on Taliban war crimes and abuses than those committed by USG, UK, Australian, and NATO troops over the course of twenty years of war and occupation.

This is quite natural and to be expected, considering where Amnesty’s funding comes from: the UK Department for International Development, the USG State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation (funded by the CIA).

Anna Baerbock is not alone. In December, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested the creation of a special court to prosecute the New Satan, Vladimir Putin. Politico reported the following on von der Leyen’s statement,

“Russia must pay for its horrific crimes, including for its crime of aggression against a sovereign state… This is why, while continuing to support the International Criminal Court, we are proposing to set up a specialized court, backed by the United Nations, to investigate and prosecute Russia’s crime of aggression.”

It should be noted, to put this in its proper perspective, von der Leyen lied about the number of dead, saying (minus evidence, of course) “more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed so far.” The claim was later removed from the official statement.

The ICC didn’t approve of von der Leyen’s proposal. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, attempted to defend his turf. He said the ICC is capable of dealing with war crimes on its own, the Associated Press reported in early December.

The ICC will not prosecute USG, British, Australian, and German war crimes, but it will, minus the legal ability to do so, attempt to prosecute Putin and selected Russian officials. This is, of course, nothing if not an exercise in futility.

Do Anna Baerbock and Ursula von der Leyen actually believe Vladimir Putin, General Sergey Surovikin, Colonel General Andrei Serdyukov, Major General Yevgeny Nikiforov, Lieutenant General Sergei Yudin, and other military officers of the Russian military command will get on a plane and fly to the Netherlands to be prosecuted?

USG, NATO: Long Record of War Crimes

The NATO and USG use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Basra, Samara, Baghdad, and Mosul is apparently not considered a war crime by the ICC. Habib Siddiqui writes,

The use of firebombs puts the US in breach of the 1980 Convention on Certain Chemical Weapons (CCW) and is a violation of the Geneva Protocol against the use of white phosphorous, “since its use causes indiscriminate and extreme injuries especially when deployed in an urban area.”

The US and NATO ignored the 1980 Protocol on Incendiary Weapons and the Chemical Weapons Convention when they used white phosphorus in the attack on Fallujah, Iraq. New Zealand Brig. Gen. Hugh McAslan admitted to using phosphorus munitions against Iraqis in Mosul.

For well over a century, the USG has avoided responsibility for a large number of war crimes.

The genocide of “Indians” in America by the USG in the 1800s was an act of fumigation to open the West for unfettered exploitation. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” declared Colonel James W. Forsyth during the Wounded Knee massacre.

During the 1899 USG invasion of the Philippines, the order was given by General Jacob H. Smith to “kill everyone over ten.” American history books drastically undercounted the number of Filipinos killed during the invasion, occupation, and subsequent colonial rule. The actual number of dead was over 3 million.

No Gun Ri, Korea, 1950. The USG 7th Calvary massacred Korean refugees attempting to escape the war. The refugees

were machine-gunned, mass-executed, and strafed by planes. Children, the elderly, and the disabled were all killed by the Americans. Survivors were forced to hide under corpses. It’s thought over 400 refugees died at No Gun Ri alone… When the Army’s subsequent cover-up was finally revealed by the Associated Press in 1999, the Pentagon refused to accept any responsibility.

The USG occupation of Haiti. “In addition to executions and violence against unarmed combatants, the US Army and its Haitian auxiliaries (the gendarmerie) allegedly committed massive killings and acts of violence against the civilian population… These included summary executions, rapes, setting houses on fire after gathering their inhabitants inside them, lynchings, and torching civilians alive.”

In 1945, 2 million German Wehrmacht POWs were held in 19 camps, known as Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps). The camps were in violation of the Geneva Conventions. “Prisoners mostly slept without shelter, exposed to the elements. Rations were generally between 1000 and 1550 calories per day. There was often little or no access to clean drinking water. Thousands died,” writes Colin Fraser for War History Online.

Eisenhower decided to circumvent the Conventions by classifying the captured Germans not as POWs, but rather as “disarmed enemy forces.” The Red Cross was prevented from visiting the camps.

Henry Kissinger, grotesquely characterized as an “elder statesman,” presided over the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia (600,000 civilians killed). This destabilized the Lon Nol government and made way for the massive atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The campaign of indiscriminate violence during the Vietnam War also resulted in the murder of 350,000 civilians in neighboring Laos.

Did China ever target a USG embassy? Not to my knowledge. However, the USG, in its violent effort to break up Yugoslavia (resulting in the states of Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro), bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists and injuring 20 staff. It used its notorious JDAMs to accomplish this war crime.

“NATO claimed it was acting on information that the embassy was actually the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement,” the National Interest reported in 2017.

This is an outright lie. Recall Clinton’s Secretary of State, William Cohen, declaring NATO and the USG had used “the most precise application of airpower in history.” NATO said targets were “carefully selected,” thus we should have no doubt the Chinese embassy was deliberately targeted.

The above is a small sample of the manifest war crimes and violations of international and humanitarian law committed by the USG and its NATO attack dog. The crimes are largely ignored and never cited when the propaganda media “objectively” discusses the unverified war crimes of Russia in Ukraine.

Of course, the double standard blather of German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will predictably come to naught.

In response to calls for a war crimes tribunal in the EU, Russia may hold war crimes tribunals of its own and showcase the disgusting crimes of Ukrainian ultranats and neo-Nazis, guilty of torturing, murdering, and attempting to ethnically cleanse any person daring to speak Russian, celebrate Russian cultural events, object to the war, establish an opposition party, or attend the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Russians have commenced an International Public Tribunal on Ukraine, initiated in April. The objective of the tribunal is to “collect data and prove the commission of war crimes by the Kiev regime, discrimination against its own citizens, persecution on linguistic, national and ideological grounds,” according to a report posted by the Center for Information Resilience.

In order to understand the goal of this organization, consider that it has “partnered” with the Institute for War & Peace, and in turn consider the Institute works with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, doing what the CIA formerly did), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. These are described as “strategic partners” and sponsors of “soft power,” working for regime change behind the scenes.

The corporate propaganda media will continue to omit the crimes committed by the USG and NATO while pointing out Russian war crimes that have little evidentiary standing.

As I said in a previous post, all warring parties commit war crimes, either intentionally or “collaterally.” However, the war crimes of the USG, going back more than a century, cast a large shadow over the finger-pointing of German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Unfortunately, that shadow will remain invisible to those indoctrinated by revisionist history and the deliberate omission of the manifest crimes committed by the USG and its NATO attack dog.

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https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/what-is-the-future-of-food

What is the Future of Food

If "you are what you eat," as the old adage has it, then what does that make us?

As consumers of heavily processed, chemically treated, GMO-infested gunk, we in the modern, developed world have "solved" the problem of hunger that plagued our forebears since time immemorial by handing our food sovereignty over to a handful of corporate conglomerates. The result of this handover has been the creation of a factory farming system in which genetically engineered crops are doused in glyphosate and livestock are herded into tiny pens where they live their entire lives in fetid squalor, pumped up with antibiotics and growth hormones until they are slaughtered and shipped off to the supermarkets and fast food chains.

There have been any number of documentaries and exposés produced in recent decades detailing the dangers of this industrial farming system that we find ourselves beholden to, any number of activists ringing the alarm about these problems, any number of campaigns and marches organized to raise awareness about these issues. Yet still, nation after nation gets fatter and sicker as traditional diets based on fresh produce sourced from local farmers are displaced by the fast food pink slime sourced from the industrial farms of the Big Food oligopoly.

But as bad as things may be, they're about to get even worse. As crisis after crisis disrupts the food supply, the "solution" to these problems has already been prepared. New technologies are coming online that threaten to upend our understanding of food altogether. Technologies that could, ultimately, begin altering the human species itself.

This is an exploration of The Future of Food.

Food As A Weapon

So what is food, anyway?

To a normal human being whose head is screwed on straight, that sounds like a dumb question. Food is fuel for the body, obviously.

Oh, sure, we could get fancy about it. Scientists might talk about the caloric content of different foods, or measure their macronutrient levels. Sociologists might point to food as the basis of human community, drawing people together into families, tribes and communities to break bread and engage in social relations. Theologians may even discuss the transubstantiation of bread and wine and the communion with God that such sacred acts of consumption make possible. . . .

. . . But then there are the psychopathic would-be world controllers. These Machiavellian schemers would define food in a very different manner. To them, food is a weapon.

There are no end of examples of food (or the lack thereof) being used as a method to manipulate and control populations throughout history.

For millennia, attacking armies have known that a city can be conquered by blockading it. Eventually, the besieged city's inhabitants will run out of food and will either starve to death or surrender.

The English knew that food was a powerful tool of control. They created the conditions that led to the Irish Potato Famine and then stood idly by as millions died or were displaced, because—in the memorable words of Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the British government's response—"the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated." But the Irish were neither the first nor the last to feel the brunt of the British Empire's indifference to their hunger; just ask the Bengals about their own famine.

The 20th-century example of this "food as a weapon" mindset that immediately springs to mind is the Holodomor, a brazen act of genocide perpetrated by Josef Stalin's Soviets against the Ukrainians in order to squelch their budding independence movement. The ensuing famine resulted in the deaths of four million Ukrainians.

But the Holodomor is certainly not the only time that food was weaponized in the previous century. Even the official whitewash of American president Herbert Hoover by his namesake institution admits that Hoover weaponized food in pursuit of his geopolitical objectives—first by providing food to German-occupied Belgium and northern France during the First World War and then by his efforts to provide food aid to the Bolsheviks after the war. (Readers of Docherty and Macgregor's Prolonging the Agony: How International Bankers and their Political Partners Deliberately Extended WW1, however, will know that there is a much deeper and darker story behind these efforts . . . but that is a story for another day.)

And who can forget arch-globalist Henry Kissinger's National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests? This now-infamous document—drafted by Kissinger in December of 1974 and adopted as official policy by President Ford in 1975—argues that since "[g]rowing populations will have a serious impact on the need for food," food aid to the developing world may need to be tied to mandatory sterilization programs or population reduction quotas, prompting even the coolly calculating Kissinger to wonder whether such a scheme would turn food into "an instrument of national power."

But that was then. This is now! Surely this "food as a weapon" idea has been retired, hasn't it?

Lest there be any doubt that food is still being weaponized against us in the 21st century, one only has to turn to the latest news headlines to see that this idea is far from a relic of the past.

The COVID lockdowns demonstrated the fragility of the global industrial food supply chain, with closures and layoffs causing massive disruptions at meat processors and food distributors in countries around the world, from Canada to the UK to China to Japan. These closures caused havoc for supplies of  milk, produce, rice and wheat everywhere. And this food supply pandemonium in turn caused headaches for farmers, truckers, supermarkets and restaurants and led to stampedes in Kenya and protests in Bangladesh and looting in Colombia and clashes in South Africa (not to mention supermarket freak-outs and shopping brawls in the US and Australia and the UK).

Then the Russian invasion of Ukraine kicked off a fresh round of global food insecurity. Ukraine harvested 19 million tonnes of wheat in 2022, down more than 40% from the previous year, and the smaller harvest means that cash-strapped Ukrainian farmers have fewer resources to invest in vital inputs like fertilizers, meaning that there is likely to be an even smaller harvest in 2023. This affects not only the countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh that rely on Ukraine for their wheat imports, but also poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa, whose flour derives from Ukrainian wheat processed in Turkey. It also drives up grain prices around the world, contributing to instability and food insecurity for millions.

All told, the shocks to the global food supply chain have contributed to a doubling in the number of people facing acute food insecurity since the start of the scamdemic.

Given this vivid demonstration of just how fragile the global food supply is and just how much economic and societal chaos can result from any shock to this system, it would be unthinkable that governments would now be deliberately attempting to undermine that supply chain further, wouldn't it?

Well, think again. From the Netherlands to Ireland to Poland to Italy to Canada to Argentina to Sri Lanka, governments are cracking down on farmers, forcing them to cull herds, lower production, dump milk and comply with onerous new operating restrictions in the name of reducing pollution.

These governments are not stupid. Like the British, the Soviets, the Americans and other repressive regimes throughout history, they know that these measures, if played out to their conclusion, will result in widespread hunger and unrest. In fact, we've already seen massive protests against these restrictions in numerous countries, from Germany to Italy to Poland to Spain to Panama to Argentina to Canada. Dutch farmers made headlines for their dramatic protests last year, and Sri Lanka descended into chaos last summer, with protesters storming the capitol and causing the President to flee the country when it became obious that the Sri Lankan government's own green policies and farming restrictions had contributed to the collapse of the nation's economy.

But if this food crisis is being knowingly engineered, the question is why? What purpose would governments have for creating food shortages for their own people?

The answer is simple. We are witnessing a controlled demolition of the food supply chain, one that is intended to result in the destruction of the current industrial farming system as we know it. But this changeover is not intended to return us to truly sustainable farming practices, with local, organic farmers producing crops in accordance with age-old agricultural wisdom. Far from it.

As it turns out, the "solution" to this food crisis being proffered by the billionaires of the corporate-pharmaceutical-medical-industrial-philanthrocapital-military complex is being engineered in laboratories and sold to the public via a bought-and-paid-for mainstream media.

One thing is for certain: the future of food will look very different from anything that we have seen in human history.

The Future of (Weaponized) Food

Anyone who has been paying attention in recent years will already know the direction that the food industry is heading.

Yes, by now we all know the Eat Ze Bugs agenda being pushed by Klaus Schwaub and his Davos minions. I guarantee that wherever you are, in whatever corner of the world you are reading this editorial, you will have seen (or could easily find) a local news story about high school students "spontaneously requesting" cricket powder dumplings in their school lunch or a puff piece about how valiant scientists are working to save the world with worm burgers.

And we all know about the GMO problem: genetically modified organisms making their way into our food supply. We know about the multiple health studies that have proven time and time again the deleterious health effects of GMO consumption. We know about the insane lengths that the GMO giants have gone to to suppress bad news about their products and the insane lengths that the press has gone to to assist them in this cover-up. And we know about the additional harms that this technology causes, ruining farmer's lives, contaminating the genome of the planet and causing associated products like glyphosate to further contaminate the food supply and further endanger our health.

But do we know about the next evolution in culinary technology? Now that scientists are playing around with the fundamental building blocks of life, reengineering organisms at the cellular level, an entire field of biotechnology is opening up that is threatening to fundamentally transform what we think of as food itself.

Moving beyond the simple insertion of foreign genes into an organism, scientists are now working on creating foodstuffs from designer microbes, engineering organisms into "bioreactors" that can be used to grow proteins and other materials for food production, growing meat-like products from cells in the laboratory and dozens of other zany ideas.

After a near-decade-long PR campaign, you've probably heard of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, companies that employ the latest techniques in chemical engineering to create plant-based meat substitutes. But there are many more technologies around the corner that threaten to transform our food supply in even more bewildering ways.

Scientists are bioengineering spores that can be inserted into crops and livestock, allowing companies to identify and track food products all the way through the food system, from farm to factory to fork.

DARPA is doling out multi-million-dollar contracts for researchers to find ways "to turn military plastic waste into protein powder" for human consumption.

A company called Amai Proteins is using genetically engineered microbes to create peptides that taste like sugar but are digested like proteins. And the best (read: worst) part is that, "[a]lthough these microbes are technically genetically engineered, the desired products can be purified and legally sold as non-GMO"!

And then there's Indigo Ag, a Boston-based agricultural technology company that is ushering in The New Normal Of Agriculture by—as its thinly-disguised corporate PR masquerading as "investment news" likes to boast—"utilizing advanced AI and machine learning techniques to create a revolutionary agronomics platform that boosts farmland sustainability and productivity through next-gen microbiome treatments, digital regenerative content, time-series satellite imagery, advanced crop monitoring and data analysis, and grain quality testing" . . . whatever the hell that means.

Of course, these technologies will be sold to the public as a way to remarkably improve upon the boring old "food" that humanity has relied on for untold millennia. This isn't food after all, this is Food 2.0!

Molecular gastronomy will allow for the creation of all sorts of zany and unimaginable dishes, from spherified juices to deep-fried hollandaise to lollipopified octopus!

In the nutrigenomical kitchen of the future, the AI systems that plan our meals and assemble our food will be able to precisely tailor our diet to our individual genome, calculating the exact portions of foodstuffs (or lab-grown food substitutes) we need to consume to meet our desired health goals!

And who needs a chef? In the future, we'll bring the Star Trekkian idea of the replicator into reality by 3D printing all our food right in our own kitchen!

To get an idea of how this agenda is being sold to the middle managers of the global governmental class, look at this recent document from Policy Horizons Canada. Titled "Biodigital Today and Tomorrow," it is a follow-up to their now-infamous 2020 document on Biodigital Convergence. This report aims to expand on that earlier paper by exploring  "the potential impact of biodigital convergence on sectors such as health, food and agriculture, the environment, manufacturing, and security."

When it comes to food, the folks at Policy Horizons Canada are positively ecstatic about the possibility for these new "biodigital" technologies (i.e., technologies blurring the line between biological life and digital machines) to reshape our food supply.

"Traditional agriculture relies on land, water, and a suitable climate," the authors of the report lament before noting that "[i]n the future, foods could be manufactured anywhere in labs and indoor vertical farms."

After discussing lab-grown foods, nutrigenomics and "smart" farming, the paper gushes about the incredible benefits of this technology. It will enable us to grow anything, any time, anywhere! It will allow countries to pursue food self-sufficiency by manufacturing those foods and ingredients that they can't grow or raise themselves! It will allow us to reimagine our diet as a form of preventive healthcare! And, of course, it will save us from the deadly scourge of climate change!

The propaganda that is being rolled out to sell the public on this transformation of our food supply sounds like the sales pitch of a used car salesman. This should not be surprising. For those who know the players who are pushing this "Food 2.0" agenda and their real intentions, it is obvious that the enormous and unbelievably hubristic effort to replace natural food with laboratory-made food substitutes is not about helping the poor and starving to achieve food security, but rather to deprive them of the earth's natural abundance. The end result will be a population dependent on the laboratory-produced food substitutes produced by a handful of oligopolistic corporations and a population at the mercy of the scientists these corporations employ. These molecular magicians will, after all, be able to insert all manner of exotic agents into the food supply at any time.

But to really understand where this agenda is heading and how quickly we are likely to get there if it is not opposed, we need look no further than the story of Future Fields. This company and its product has managed to combine the Unholy Trinity of fake food: GMOs, bugs and biotech.

Future Fields, a biotech company in (where else?) Canada, has notified the Canadian government of its intention to commercialize "EntoEngine," a type of fruit fly that "has been genetically engineered to express a growth factor isolated from cows." This growth factor, it turns out, is an important component of the lab-grown meat recipe, which has so far required the use of "fetal bovine serum" (FBS)—a substance extracted from unborn cattle—to grow the meat cells. But now that the "EntoEngine" has been created, Future Fields is excited to use these flying "bioreactors" to produce the growth factor faster and more cheaply than before.

Yes, bugs are being genetically modified to produce growth factor that is then used to grow meat cells in a lab. This is the future of food if the mad scientists and their billionaire funders get their way.

What Can We Do About This?

Thankfully, we are not passive spectators of this unfolding agenda; we are active participants, influencing the course of these events by the decisions that we make and the actions that we take.

Without understanding who is behind this agenda, however, or how it is being pushed, we can never hope to truly derail this Frankenfood nightmare.

To that end, next week we will explore the players who are pushing this agenda and the ways they are working behind the scenes to bring about their dietary dystopia.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/18/there-are-no-innocent-americans-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

There Are No Innocent Americans: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

If the logic that “there are no innocent Russians” because the Russian people have a moral obligation to overthrow their warmongering government were evenly applied, it would also apply to Americans. Even more so, really, since their government is vastly more warlike than Moscow.

Per the “there are no innocent Russians” argument, Americans should be banned from participating in international events. Americans should be kicked out of foreign universities. Cinemas should stop playing Hollywood movies. Hemingway should be banned from schools.

Putin would have to work very, very hard to catch up to the staggering body count of the US empire just in the 21st century. If Russians have a moral obligation to overthrow their government, then so do Americans. They have an obligation to topple the US empire, tear down the military-industrial complex, get rid of the false two-party system whose “two” parties support every war the empire architects call for, and create a peaceful country.

Either apply the logic of “there are no innocent Russians” equally to governments who do the exact same thing on a far greater scale, or admit that you’re just spewing imperialist regime change propaganda.

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Most of the major international conflicts of our day involve the collision between the establishment doctrine of permanent US planetary hegemony and the reality that US planetary hegemony is on its way out.

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Westerners are so brainwashed by propaganda that more and more of them are starting to believe that China wants to invade them. Why would Beijing want to rule over a bunch of white foreigners, idiots? Do you think China has a desperate shortage of cheese knives and mayonnaise?

Oh no the Chinese are going to invade and conquer us. They need ranch dressing and Michael Bublé CDs. They’re gonna force us to teach them square dancing and make Harry Potter Asian.

Westerners should stop projecting their colonialist values systems on everyone else. Our ancestors sailed out to conquer and colonize. Their ancestors built a wall.

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Our civilization is rife with problems despite its great wealth because our civilization has prioritized generating wealth over solving problems. It doesn’t make anyone rich to address the root causes of crime, sickness, war, poverty or ecocide, so those problems go unaddressed.

In a civilization which prioritizes the generation of wealth over the solving of problems, the option which generates wealth will always win out over the option which solves the problem. War profiteers, prison profiteers, big pharma, ecocidal industrialists — they all know this.

Under the current status quo, military aggression will always win out over peace whenever military aggression is more profitable. Keeping people sick to provide ongoing treatment will always win out over curing or preventing sickness wherever doing so is more profitable. Keeping a technological innovation secret until it can be maximally profited from will always win out over making it public and sharing the information for the advancement of science and the common good. Workers will be exploited to the furthest extent possible to maximize profit.

Old growth forests and whale populations were wiped out because leaving them alone generated no profit. Insect populations are plummeting because industrial pesticides are profitable and wild habitats are not. Our oceans are choking on plastic because it’s profitable not to prevent this from happening.

Nobody’s going to become a billionaire by ending homelessness or making sure the elderly and the handicapped get everything they need. Nobody’s going to become a billionaire by making sure mothers get everything they need to raise physically and psychologically healthy children.

A status quo system wherein large-scale human behavior is driven by profit-seeking cannot and will not ever have any good answers for problems like poverty, crime, sickness, war, ecocide, injustice and exploitation, because solving those problems will never be profitable. When solving those problems is never profitable, but causing or exacerbating them frequently is, those problems will necessarily live on. Not until this dynamic is reversed can we be free of them.

Not until we dispense with status quo systems which ensure large-scale human behavior is driven by profit will we be able to move toward a healthy and harmonious world. Until then we will remain plagued by serious problems, and by false promises that our current systems can solve them.