In the mid-to-late 1970s, the world was a very unstable place, much like today. Not only did the American economy experience during this period inflation and even stagflation, but fear of international communism pulled at the shoulders of nearly everyone. Bunker Hunt believed that silver was undervalued and could only rise in price. In the middle of the 1970s the Hunt brothers owned nearly 10% of all silver
stock and, from then on into the 1980s, they put increasing pressure on the market and caused the price of silver to rise from $2 per ounce to $6 per ounce.

All of their capital was invested into silver. Further, they were salesmen of the stock, doing what they could to convince others to do the same as them. Eventually, they partnered with a group of Arabian investors who were in such a position to purchase voluminous amounts of silver. The Hunts and these Arabs, over time, gained increasing influence over the silver market, allowing them the means to loan more money and buy more silver, creating a feedback loop of manipulated price discovery.

By 1979 the price of silver was $35 per ounce. By then, other investors started looking to silver as a viable investment opportunity, thus giving the price an even larger boost. In the 1980s, the Hunt Brothers had made a market. Inside of one decade they had inflated the price from $2 per ounce to $50 per ounce at the beginning of the 80’s. Some believed that silver would rise to $200/$300.

But, in the early 80’s, the prices of silver started to stall and fall. The market had grown so inflated that the Hunt brothers could not find paper enough to purchase enough silver to keep the market rising. Investors began investing money into bank certificates for higher interest rates. Moreover, the Brothers had taken on massive loans to fund their silver scheme but could not repay the debts. The brokers, who had made the loans, such as Bache, A.G. Edwards, Merrill Lynch and
others, began to protect themselves from a market crash by shorting the price.

The Federal Reserve then changed the rules on speculative silver investments, and the price plunged. A broker demanded a $100 million dollar payment. The Hunts defaulted. Out of desperation, the Hunt brothers tried to counterfeit paper obligations backed by their 200 million ounces of silver. Essentially, they tried to create a new international currency backed by silver. By then, however, silver was linked in the public mind with the unstable situation of the Hunts. On
Blood Thursday — March 27, 1980 — the price hit an all time low. Many of these banks were bailed out by taxpayer money, and investigations found that the Hunts owned considerable stake in Bache.

The banks involved in this silver play had gained insight into the silver market. What they had gained was the ability to suppress the price of silver whenever it began to go up. The price of silver became divorced from supply and demand.

Today, upward pressure on silver stems from somewhat similar circumstances to what the U.S. was experiencing in the mid 1970’s: a lack of confidence in the US economy and therefore the dollar. Not only do such global circumstances and fears of currency devaluation cause the public and institutional buyers—such as central banks—to run to commodities, like gold and silver and agriculture, but increasing
transparency regarding manipulation in the silver market by big players such as JPMorgan and HSBC put the precious metals market in the headlines—and with negative sentiment towards Wall Street right now, silver offers people an exciting way of not only preserving purchasing power, but also exposing big banks to risk.

In short, JPMorgan, HSBC and other international financial institutions have over the long-term bet on the price of silver to fall. The capital expended to ensure the price did act in such a way has “artificially depressed the price of silver dramatically downward.” Thus, class-action lawsuits have been filed against the banks.

The CFTC began investigating the manipulation through its Enforcement Division three years ago after issuing letters in 2004 and 2008. As yet, no findings have been made public. Backed by taxpayer money, as it is, one can imagine it has been a rather expensive investigation.

Western economies are bankrupt. Silver and gold will not meet demand in the coming years, which is why platinum and palladium—historically, for the most part, viewed as only industrial metals—will play large roles as monetary hedges. Today, central banks and other large institutions are net buyers of gold, and many are even scooping up large positions in platinum. They were late to the gold game, entering in a meaningful way in 2007 and 2008, more than five years after the start of the
extraordinary bull market. Tomorrow, these same institutions will be net buyers of silver in a big way. Again, they will be late. Either way, this will cause the price of silver to snowball in a manner similar to what has been seen in gold over the last fifty years.

The US mint has seen periods this year where they sold just as many dollars in silver as gold, despite that gold is priced in dollars around 40 times the price of silver at any given time. In the Spring, world markets bore witness to a rise in silver of near $50, before heavy manipulation — that is, large sell-offs — took advantage of a quiet market on a Sunday night and early Monday morning, when few trades were being made.

Silver works at times as a sort of schizophrenic precious metals. It has moments where the underlying demand for it as a monetary hedge causes the price to run north quickly. Other times, dismal industrial outlook causes it to follow the coattails of platinum and fall. But, as many young people — and not to mention wealthy folks and institutions — are looking to silver as an investment, a hedge or a savings account, demand for the metal as a monetary instrument is sure to drive price discovery.

Silver prices are poised to rise, thus putting pressure on the JPMorgan stock price. As the JPMorgan stock price and the silver price conflate, investors will concern themselves, in regards to the bank’s stock price and derivatives holdings, with their risky short position in silver. Usually a firm will short a stock 8-1, whilst JPMorgan holds a short of about 40-1.

For every ounce of silver sold on the COMEX, JPMorgan sells between twenty to fifty ounces of silver, similar to fractional reserve banking. This is called naked short selling; that is, they sell silver that does not exist. In fact, it is estimated that the bank has sold between one billion and three billion ounces of non-existent silver. They have sold more silver than exists above ground. In terms of derivatives, JPMorgan has about $1.5 trillion in exposure, much of which are silver shorts. Knowing this, large hedge funds can purchase large quantities of silver, and eventually force JPMorgan to go long.

Silver has a myriad of uses today. Not only is it an investment or a hedge, but for many it is a savings account. It also has industrial purposes and, for some, is representative of a political movement to expose too-big-to-fail banks to risk. It is also the jewelry metal of choice among the youth in the US and Europe, for it is more affordable than gold. Many simply like the color.

Just as the gold cartel eventually lost its control over gold in the late sixties, causing its price to begin running upwards from $35 an ounce, the silver cartel sees its days numbered. Today gold is a de facto world reserve currency, and everyday more people catch onto this reality. Silver has historically traded in tandem with the yellow metal. Many analysts see $10,000 an ounce as a given for yellow. At the very feasible 20-1 ratio, that lands silver at roughly $500 an ounce.

During this period, what arose was a romanticism for nature (hence, perhaps, the popularity of evolutionary theory at that time), and the belief that, if only man could be freed of the corruption of society and its contrived conventions—of the state, of the clergy and, for some, of matrimony and of private property—then man, therefore, would be poised to achieve heights undreamed of hitherto.

It was these conditions which gave rise to the French Revolution, which, ironically, came to depend on the keystone mechanism of the State—violence—and gave way to a period during which France conquered swathes of Western Civilization. Still, from 1770 until 1914, many have argued that a culture of staunch self-reliance generally attitudinized Western Civilization, sometimes summarized by the concept of laissez-faire.

Much of this self-reliance held that, if society is evil, then the State—which is merely the organized vertical force of society—is doubly evil. If man is innately good, then he ought to be completely freed from this coercive power of the State. Indeed, nineteenth century Liberalism believed man should be freed from all coercive power, among which might be included the church, army and other institutions. Society, in this case, would have little power other than the power required to restrain the strong from oppressing the weak.

The idea of a “community of interests” was also very strong during this period. This “community of interests” was a realm in which what was good for one was good for all. Somewhere, according to this belief, there did exist a reality where everybody would be secure, free, and prosperous, and that this pattern could be achieved over time. In it, each person could fall into that place in society best suited to his abilities. Implicit in this belief was that human ability is innate and can only be suppressed or altered by social discipline and that each individual is the best judge of his own self-interest.

In 1880, the belief that the current generation, and indeed all generations, was the culmination of a long process of history. Oftentimes, this long process is referred to as progress, a phenomenon that had lasted millennia and would continue forevermore. This belief ran so deep that progress, by many, was seen as inevitable and automatic.

These nineteenth century epistemes have, in the twentieth century, been considerably modified—or so it would seem at first glance. Wherefore such a change? Four traumatic decades at the onset of the twentieth century, and five decades of intense militarism by two premier Empires, led to a perceivable sea change in the disposition of men. Included in these shattering experiences are the First World War, world depression, world financial crisis, and the Second World War. These were then followed by the Cold War.

On the byway of these traumas, major adjustments were made in the western brain. Men now had viable reason to doubt their entrenched belief in the innate goodness of man. Evil was no longer merely the absence of good.

In the course of these events, millions were killed and billions of dollars wasted. Impossible to comprehend for most, such a blow altered man’s disposition on their own species. The First World War was seen as an aberration—and one from which they must quickly move on and forget.

For ten years a façade was created, a lie. In 1929, the stock market crashed. World depression ensued, and was followed by financial crisis. In the late thirties, sabers rattled as rearmament and aggression.

After 1945, a new world was evident. Opposed with the nineteenth century view of man as innately good and society as corrupting, increasingly the belief that man had a seemingly infinite capacity for untold evil insinuated itself into the minds of men. Without a society—that is, large institutions designed to quell man’s beastly desires, to nudge them towards desired beliefs and behaviors—man would certainly destroy himself. Efforts hinting at such a belief can be seen in the attempted erection of the League of Nations after the First World War, and the establishment of the United Nations (UN) after the Second World War.

The former western belief that human philosophies and abilities are innate and should be free from social duress in order to display individuality was replaced by the idea that the personality is a result of social repetition and training and must be coerced to socially acceptable ends. The laissez-faire economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to be replaced by social discipline and central planning.

The “community of interests” of the free market would take backseat to the welfare community, which must be organized by wise-men. An intellectual environment would arise friendly to assertions of some sort of “de-evolution” or social retrogression or human extinction. Democracy would now be replaced by authoritarianism, and the laissez-faire Capitalism by State Enterprise or command-and-control.

Now, here in the twenty-first century, it has grown clearer that progress is not a steady force with inevitable outcomes. Rather, man’s social development can be seen as a more anarchic, spontaneous process, no matter how much rulers attempt to ensure things remain predictable. These same notions are increasingly amending Darwin’s theory of evolution, or progress, towards more perfect forms.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century were schizophrenic times, as has been so much of human history. Nationalistic tendencies undermined royal empires, and out of this flux came a vibrant forum of idea sharing. Thoughts of a laissez-faire lifestyle wherein individuals were freed from the European caste system led to the mythology of the New World, even if the New World only reflected such a lifestyle pre-Constitution, and scantily so.

A way of understanding that was promoted, if too often implicitly and not explicitly, by eighteenth and nineteenth century sentiments, holds that the natural ought to be esteemed before the political. Even today, too often do our philosophies on how life should be grow politicized, thereby undermining their original power. Humans are not political beings. They are natural beings. The questions of how we should live our lives are unanswerable by politics, for politics is merely a means of ordering life by way of the state or government. The questions of how we should live our lives are answerable only by naturalism; that is, by recognizing that which makes us humans.

Our consciousness blossoms as a beautiful aberration from other life in the natural world as we know it. The cognitive niche, inherited from nature, that we inhabit gives us an axiom from which our understanding of the world stems. This can be easily interrupted and distorted by the data and information we are fed. Whether it be outright war, depression or manipulative fiction on television or in the movies, we are all easily victimized by the campaigning of pathological behavior by the trendsetters; that is, the ruling class—and our peers who follow. They have adopted the cynicism passed down by a century marred by two Great Wars, a deep depression, and a long standoff between two nuclear powers.

The cynicism bequeathed unto us by a violent twentieth century has led us to the belief that we need centralized governments and rulers to keep us from doing violence to one another. But what we see are large institutions, instead of keeping people in-line, projecting violence down civilization’s ladder, and turning individuals against themselves, thus creating the precise environment people hoped they would prevent. Indeed, they were all along the impetuses of the bloodletting and carnage people were attempting to escape.

For ages, however, this old tale has served as a metaphor for rulers, who, with their instinct of self-preservation intact, have used symbols along specific lines to lead individuals and the collective-mind, according to their self-declared jurisdiction and oft dark desires. Just as the latter frog might have only cooked because the process was incremental, those who make global policies rule by a philosophy of control that can be termed “incrementalism”; in other words, they are ever-so-patient in getting their way.

The capstone income-earners, the rulers–that is, those to whom the mass of wealth and power, in a contrived, yet natural manner, flows–direct investments, actions and reactions so as to unendingly consolidate, secure and promote their unswerving pre-eminence on earth. As monopoly men, they steer economic society in such a way that they increase their profit share. With goods and services on a centralizing course, those at the core of an economic system manage to perpetuate this arrangement. After all, that is how they view it: as managing the planet.

That such behavior is maintained, even when it is only those at the core of the system who benefit, at the fatal expense of a great many, speaks to the psychopathic nature of those who, in their minds, have successfully worked towards becoming CEO’s of the planet. In the captain’s helm of the neo-politburo, which guides the command-and-control economy of Western Civilization in its current stage, conscience is composed of an entirely different arrangement of matter as down below in the gallows, “where the men hang on for their dear lives.”

In incrementalism, the rulers persuade people to follow the path which, in their minds, will most likely result in the preservation of power for themselves. There is too, of course, a pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-religious aspect to this power, as the abuse of it, and the masochistic wielding of it, satiates their sick yearnings, perceived to be of luciferan origin by some of the players. Preserving the power, to be sure, is merely a means to an end, and this is where incrementalism comes in.

Totally authoritarian rule, complete domination and subordination, are the makings of a well-organized and orderly system in which rule is guaranteed to those who have previously wielded it. According to their logic, why they deserve to rule is quite simple: because they have previously ruled, and so therefore it is natural.

However, it is far from easy to implement such measures of control. Historically, in order to do so, ruling classes have, without fail, resorted to bringing in such systems slowly, so that, just as the frog won’t jump from slowly boiled water, people won’t notice and, therefore, act. In incrementalism, there are naturally stages through which society passes, and, as each stage comes into view, the paradigm of society shifts, although the general trajectory is logical in light of its predecessor.

There is no incrementalism in resistance. In a civilization scientifically dissected by/ for the capstone class, opposition to the dominant culture and its overseers would be futile were it to be bit-by-bit; that is, slow motion resistance can never re-create such a civilization towards less nihilistic and grotesque movements. Therefore, our civilization cannot incrementally be reoriented, not when “full spectrum dominance”, the literal construction of an omnipotent God as the system, is the never-ending agenda.

For these reasons, it is crucial for those who seek to help to become self-sustainable. This is done by learning skills such as acquiring even small plots of land, gardening for food, learning weapons skills, investing and securing wealth through gold and silver, seeking a network of reliable friends and family, and educating oneself and others in the techniques of control, consistently utilized by rulers, to protect the cognitive fabric of man.

Whilst most of the literature on the topic of globalization argues that, as fewer and fewer trans-national corporations compete to expand market share, once diverse cultures have fallen victim to a homogenization process, some research sees the reality differently. By arguing the case for blowback or resistance to trends of global cultural standardization, these analysts seemingly borrow from laws of physics that state for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This reaction from below is newfangled nationalisms in nations that perceive a whittling away of their national sovereignty by the vector of global governance, business, and sociality as anti-republican traditions, totally devoid of respect for common law.

In his essay, “Learning to be local in Belize,”¹ Richard Wilk puts his hand on this transpiration in Belize, where a mere two decades ago, at a time when foreign cultural influence was scarcely so pervasive as now, most Belizeans denied that such a thing as ‘Belizean culture’ existed at all. They did, after all, live where the United States considered backyard. For example, in the realm of cuisine, the honored guest from the north, Wilk, was usually treated to something from a can. Such observations by Wilk turn his paper not into further proffering of the “progressive penetration of global commodities into every crevice of daily life,” but, instead, as an account of local diversification amid global standardization.

To be sure, the global standardization remains, but there is community blossoming and counter-trends taking part that is very much important to the makeup of the dominant culture. In other words, Belizean absorption into international markets and contests has resulted in the people of the country flexing their distinctiveness and diversity apart from other nations. This process represents their entering into, what Wilk terms, the “structure of common difference.”

This Belizean expression of difference positions itself contrary to the ideologies of nonpareil professional marketing managers, who attempt to invoke a transformation in consciousness, in terms of consumer behavior, from an episteme that holds for truth the existence of a universal rationality based on the western model. Put succinctly, a basic premise of their marketing techniques holds that consumers, markets and competitors around the world will behave the same; that, when put in environments more similar than different, the differences in people will tend to blur, to fade with time.

This managerial rationality is an “undisputed instrument of knowledge.” For instance, the field of neuro-marketing helps to make a science of predicting — more to the point, dictating — global consumer habits. The foundational study that gave rise to this field analyzed how, in test subjects shown products with which they identified and, therefore, enjoyed, blood rushed to a small location at the front of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for self-identification and the formation of personality. Such knowledge of human behavior can help to globalize a certain type of commoditization, a professional marketing manager might reason. ²

For some, globalization is an ideology, a fact of life. It certainly is a reality in every person on the plants life. Moreover, its process is a political one. As George Orwell told, everything is politics. Policies of deregulation and philosophies of free trade — a euphemism for corporate expansion — abet globalization and justify not just the macro-economic axiom of comparative advantage, but, also, the micro-economic foundations of neuro-economics in the neo-classical economic model — including therein basic assumptions of inherent maximizing inclination of Homo economicus in an environment of scarcity. For historically powerful global elite financiers, internationalists and their national bureaucrats, globalization serves as a rationale for the recent history’s restructuring of states and economies; “a historically specific project of global economic management.” It is, for such entrenched power interests, “a view of ordering the world.”

Managers and experts of trans-national corporations are particularly strong advocates of globalization because they view it as offering opportunities of boundless proportions; the concept by which to judge quality, mere efficiency. For them, globalization represents the possibility of doing business without restriction; that, de facto, supply and demand does not do autonomous market making and eradication, they can and do. And will continue doing so, in their “view of ordering the world.” They ensure this progression persists.

Such a worldview stands in contraposition to the free market capitalist ideology, by its mainstream definition. The vision of TNC managers, consultants and management academics is a global one. In fact, they are referred to by many as “globalist” with “globalist” occasionally being prefaced with the qualifier “demise-of-the-state,” meaning, essentially, they hold no allegiances to any nation-state or its culture. TNC marketers built a worldview upon the maxim of globalization, thereby forming theories about consumers and competitive strategies. Although a complex abstraction, globalization daily becomes increasingly the true superstructure of our daily lives. ³

1. Wilk, Richard. (1995) “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Difference.” Development: A Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Susanne Schech and Jane Haggis, Blackwell.
2. Frank, Lone. “How the Brain Reveals Why we Buy.” Scientific American, 2 November 2009.
3. Applbaum, Kalman. (May 2000). Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing, American Ethnologist.

Or what if you warned of an incoming brave new world? Would your claim be greeted with consternation or contentment? With a “this is f’d up” or by a coffee shop subscriber to the Democratic Party claiming: “Oh, a brave new world would be so peaceful and harmonious. Mmm, yes  — I’m so liberal,” while sipping on cappuccino and glancing at the New York Times, just for effect.

Well, in this century of change you can rest easy, for you might not scare off your friends so easily by fearing that 1984 or a brave new world seems to have shown up in the last two years of the first decade of the 21st century. In fact, they might indeed share many of your concerns. Whether or not they have the capacity to care is a different discussion.

Some of the most astute western authors of satire over the 20th century have, for many, turned out in today’s climate as just that: naive. This, to be sure, is hardly a result of their own imaginative shortcomings, but more-so the awesome totality by which three dimensional renderings of their dystopic and fantastic settings, arguably on a much grander scale, have been translated into reality. 

I’m not writing on the way in which the blue screen life, where, from nine months old, images on television and in the movies transpose loaded symbols and ideas on us, has out done past forms entertainment and media handed us by the consciousness industries. Instead, I am calling George Orwell, Aldus Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut out for their naiveté! I mean, when do we start up the debate about what “post-Orwellian” looks like?

Yes, Hollywood has captured the imagination and directed the cognitive orientation of a great many people. And, in fact, the general attitude of recent Hollywood films has been quite catastrophic and pessimistic. Maybe the violent flux in the markets has taken the studios for a fatal roller coaster ride, on which those who end up holding on the longest might inherit a radical oligopoly or, what’s more, a monopoly in the consciousness industry. At the same time as studio collective output seems certain to fall by one-third, its biggest films feature extraordinarily austere dreamscapes.¹

The film District 9 centers on an alien race stranded above Johannesburg, South Africa. Eventually, the humans get to talking and they decide (I don’t recall a vote) to board the ship.  The aliens inside are a pitiable lot, suffering from sickness and malnourishment. The humans label the aliens Prawns (perhaps an extraterrestrial version of Orwell’s Proles) and forcibly relocate them to the overcrowded and militarized District 9. The area is policed by Multi-Nation United (MNU), a private military industrial corporation.

The man in charge of the re-location operation, der Merwen, is exposed to an alien engineered substance which begins changing him into an alien. He is taken to a hospital where it is revealed that one of his arms has transformed into an alien arm. They take him to a MNU laboratory, where unethical scientific experiments are conducted on Prawns, and force him through torture in order to test fire alien weapons. Through the years of testing, MNU discovers that the alien weaponry is bio-engineered so that only beings with correct DNA are capable of using the weapons. Because der Merwen matches such DNA criteria, the multi-national decides to harvest his body for organs while he is alive as a means of reproducing his DNA structure and developing a method of bio-engineering other humans so as to be able to use the alien weapons.

Before he is dissected, der Merwen escapes. His body, however, has become an important asset to MNU. As a part of the manhunt, the corporate controlled media uses incessantly a portrait of his face, claiming that he has acquired a sexually transmitted disease that they say resulted from intercourse he had with an alien.

Whether or not the alien was consenting is not revealed. It is safe to say, that it would be hard to catch an alien and then have intercourse with it.

Additionally, 3-D films took the box office by storm early in 2010. These films, which seem innocent enough, bring audiences literally into the film’s setting. Instead of peering in on a two-dimensional world, from which there exists a specific disconnect and therefore a comparatively scant blending of reality and fiction, audiences exist within the 3-D film. In the future, expect audiences to go see three dimensional renderings of war and other forms of extreme violence, which will be happening all around them, not just in front of them, thereby normalizing the carnage. Similarly invasive, one marketing device used for the District 9 was advertisements on city benches, stating “Bus bench for humans only.” In this day-and-age, media transcends the screen and takes its seat in our daily lives.

Even if Hollywood has outdone the books of the 20th century to portray the world crumbling, nobody has done a better job than that of the policy planners themselves — known as technocrats — who turn the screws above politics.

To give these classic authors due credit, many of these social engineering technocrats admire, or admired, their work. Early last year, for example, the Queen of England gifted Felipe Calderon, President of Mexico, a first edition of George Orwell’s classic, 1984.²

The next year, Barack Obama tipped his hat to George Orwell while giving his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. President Obama, it turns out, is multilingual, with quite the proficiency in Doublespeak:

The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” that “all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace,” and that imperialist troops should be honored “not as makers of war, but as wagers of peace.³

Remember: down is the new up.

Orwell despised totalitarian governments. In Animal Farm, he attacked collectivism and Stalinism. In 1984, he helped us to imagine the definitive totalitarian bureaucracy stooped in force and force only. Any orthodoxy, he believed, could be taken to an extreme version of itself, and give rise to a despotic world system. He warned us of the future: “If you ever want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face…forever.”

But, it seems, the Queen might have interpreted the work a bit differently than most, and President Obama incorporated the morals into his own life a bit too literally. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut was on to something when he stated: “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.” 

The Queen and a coterie of like-minded global elites — President Obama included —have seemed to see the book more as a template from which to borrow than a warning about a historical movement hell-bent on centralization and domination. For them, Orwell’s novel is a blueprint by which to mold the future.  Her country has been dubbed the closed-circuit TV camera capital of the world, with more than 5 million cameras recording the everyday lives of the average Brit.⁴ Recently, the government announced plans to install 20,000 of these cameras inside private homes so as to make sure kids are doing their homework, getting to bed early and eating their vegetables. The British “nanny state” seems to be growing bitter and crockety in her old age.⁵

From 1984:

Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crimes that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.

In this age of social networking, private daily diaries have been replaced by online profiles. On Facebook, where people’s daily actions, thoughts and relationships are catalogued — sometimes on a daily basis — the CIA and FBI use ads, tailored to individual users, to recruit. To think they also aren’t using social networking sites for intelligence gathering purposes would — you know, considering the twentieth century — be really stupid.

One big difference between Orwell’s dystopia and the present reality is the abundance of worthy news mediums on the internet. While the corporate-controlled media sees its ratings tank, alternative news programs and websites celebrate a ballooning in their audiences. Steps towards dubbing bloggers as terrorists, however, have many worried that internet freedom is under a sustained attack.⁶

The US already data mines blogs as a means of finding terrorists in order to prevent a terrorists attack. They have developed massive computer systems, capable of collective stupefying amounts of data, to help them in this endeavor. American internet providers have indeed helped foreign countries to jail bloggers for posting undesired content on their blogs. Just a couple of examples: Microsoft shut down the website of a dissident Chinese blogger, and Yahoo provided Beijing the name of a dissident Chinese journalist, who received ten years in jail for his web postings.⁷

In the United Kingdom and European Union, efforts to regulate the internet focus on persons who use the internet to spread propaganda. A rather dubious concept, the word propaganda, itself, could mean, well, just about anything. You are, after all, being propagandized this very second, aren’t you?

Although brain scanners have yet to be rolled out on a large scale, they do seem to be a natural progression from body scanners, which represent virtual strip searches for everybody who wishes to board a plane. Not to mention a nice shot of radiation, certainly a danger to frequent travelers. By the way, the brain scanners, known as the Malintent system, have been designed and are in their test phase.⁸

In Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World, mass use of the drug soma is used to ensure a “stable” citizenry, who conform readily to societal norms. From Brave New World:

“Stability,” said the Controller, “stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.”

In 2007, according to Medco’s Health Solutions Inc., 51% of American children and adults were using one or more prescription drugs for a chronic condition, most of which are taken daily. Medication use for chronic problems was seen in all demographics: Almost two-thirds of women 20 and older; one in four children and teenagers; 52% of adult men; three out of four people 65 or older.

Further, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has apparently uncovered a new sort of disease: Oppositional Defiant Disorder — known by parents and children everywhere as temper tantrum and/or growing up. Symptoms include:

• Frequent temper tantrums
• Excessive arguing with adults
• Often questioning rules
• Active defiance and refusal to comply with adult requests and rules
• Deliberate attempts to annoy or upset people
• Blaming others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
• Often being touchy or easily annoyed by others
• Frequent anger and resentment
• Mean and hateful talking when upset
• Spiteful attitude and revenge seeking⁹

The academy cites medication as a possible solution for this new and vexing problem. “Because I told you so,” might actually start working on your children! Now, that’s stability.

In Brave New World, “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Citizens of the brave new world are conditioned to be sexually promiscuous: everyone is expendable. Although, in the real world, many young people celebrate the joys of sexual liberation, Huxley outlined the way in which sexual promiscuity cheapens love. Sex appeal in advertising, a ubiquitous marketing tool, promotes a non-romantic and promiscuous sort of love: screw like rabbits, don’t settle down with a partner for life. Also, don’t have children, because babies are carbon monsters and the world is over-populated.

Double-think

Well, maybe not — just get an abortion. That will take care of the so-called “carbon problem.” Take that, carbon based life!

In 2008, More magazine polled 2,000 young women about their sex lives. The magazine found that one in four young, British women has slept with more than 10 people, whereas only one in five men have matched that “impressive” tally. Half of those questioned revealed that they had been unfaithful.¹⁰

The editor of More, Lisa Smosarski, said: “Our results show that after decades of lying back and thinking of England, today’s twenty-something women are taking control of their sex lives and getting what they want in bed.”

The majority of young women are losing their virginity at 16. Seven out of 10 said they had had a one-night stand, and 60 percent said they would “kiss-and-tell” or sell their account of a one-night stand with a famous person for 20,000 pounds. You see, people are expendable.

According to the study, young women are taking large risks with their health. 38 percent do not use a condom with a new partner and 16 percent have contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

But, are these young women really “getting what they want in bed,” as Ms. Smosarski claimed. The respondents said they are not having as much sex as they would like, with 13 percent claiming their love life is “disappointing.”

Cheap jokes about male ineptitudes in the sack aside, it seems that “sexually liberated” attitudes might not be fulfilling people as some persons would like to think they might. If sex with multiple partners — on average three times a week, says the survey — is not fulfilling these young women, then why do they prefer to do it five times a week? Is sex being used as a means to escape? Is screwing serving as much as a distraction as Must See Television? Plus, once you get bored, you can always just change the channel for some new and instant gratification.

From Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano,
                                                   

Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner’s study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker’s gray pinstripes, all separated here.

Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn’t — no matter when, no matter what.Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner’s study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker’s gray pinstripes, all separated here. Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn’t  —  no matter when, no matter what.

While there are valuable truths to arguments both for and against the “them vs. us” view of the world, those days do come in history when we have to choose between a well-defined right and wrong.

Today in the United States, more than 23,000 persons from private industry work also with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. This rapidly growing group, InfraGard, receive secret warnings regarding terrorists threats before the public, and sometimes even before elected officials. All they have to do is provide information to the government. InfraGard members also have permission to “shoot to kill” in case of martial law.¹¹

Maybe it is a good idea to hold off on those cubicle decorations you were saving up for, and get it bullet-proofed first

1. Pilkington, Ed. “Hollywood film output likely to fall by a third.” Guardian, 18 October 2009.
2. “Mexico’s president given George Orwell’s 1984 by the Queen.” Telegraph, 20 March 2009.
3. Obama Nobel Prize Speech.
4. O’Neill Brendan. “Watching you watching me.” New Statesman, 02 October 2006.
5. “Britain: CCTV Surveillance into Thousands of British Homes.” Global Research, 31 July 2009.
6. Pareene Alex. “Government Declares Bloggers Potential Terrorists!” Gawker.
7. “Bush Tags Bloggers as Terrorists.” Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse via Daily Kos, 12 February 2006.
8. Elsworth, Catherine. “New airport screening ‘could read minds.’” Telegraph, 23 September 2008.
9. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, June 2009.
10. Beckford, Martin. “Young women ‘have more sexual partners’ than men.” Telegraph, 08 December 2008.
11. Rothschild, Mathew. “Will NorthCom Takeover in Swine Flu Outbreak?” The Progressive, 29 April 2009.

By tracking the key relationships of politicians, business leaders, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated institutions, LittleSis brings transparency to government and private power centers, while attempting to answer such questions as:

• Who do the wealthiest Americans donate their money to?
• Where did White House officials work before they were appointed?
• Which lobbyists are married to politicians, and who do they lobby for?

LittleSis brings already public information together in one place. The website gathers data from government filings, news articles, and other legitimate sources. Some data sets are updated automatically, but most is filled in by the site’s user community.

Who are the personalities behind the bailouts, government contracts and new policies?

In partnership with Alternet, the site is home to a number of investigations, among the newest being composed of “bubble barons.” Over 250 citizen journalists have teamed up to research information on approximately 67 bubble barons. In under a week, the researchers made more than 500 edits to the LittleSis database from family ties to investments and donations of the Barons.

How does one become a bubble baron? Co-founder Kevin Connor used three main criteria when making this particular list. According to LittleSis:

1. Billions (plural). The bubble barons are all worth $2 billion or more (they are multi-billionaires), according to Forbes’ estimates. These estimates can’t be counted on as 100% accurate, but they are the best source for US wealth rankings. It’s pretty simple: like the robber barons before them, the bubble barons are wealthier than everyone else.

2. Big bubble gains. The bubble barons all saw substantial increases in wealth from the height of the last bubble (the dot com bubble) in 2000 to 2009, according to Forbes data. If an individual made billions during the housing bubble and lost it all by the end, they didn’t make the list. Similarly, tech billionaires whose gains were flat since the dot-com peak did not make the list.

3. FIRE. The bubble barons are all active in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate industry – an approximation for the bundle of industries that benefited most from the Wall Street-fueled housing boom.

Over time, will LittleSis evolve to catalogue of the world’s most powerful, all-encompassing of their entire social network—that is, the email, home address, and sensitive details of their friends, and therefore, their friend’s friends in an immense interlinked web? What if, like Facebook, it went on to archive all of their personal preferences regarding everything from books to movies to music, including political views, club associations, previous jobs, educational background, and who they’re dating?

How would these profiles read? Here are a couple possible examples:

Peter Thiel

Status: I think the only way that the world can become unified in some sense is through technology: Technology is driving us towards a single, seamless humanity.” Updated: 2-24-2004

Occupation: founder of Paypal, former columnist for the Wall Street Journal

School: Graduate Stanford University

Author of The Diversity Myth

Donated $21,200 to Arnold Schwarzenegger campaign for governor

Political Views: Neocon/Globalist

and

John Holdren

Status: “Such laws constitutionally could be very broad. Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.” Updated: 1977

Occupation: Science and Technology Advisor to Obama, Ecoscience author, Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard University

School: MIT/Stanford

Author of Ecoscience

Acquaintances: Bush Science and Technology Advisor John P. Holdren

Political Views: eco-fascism /Globalist

For those of us who are not used to thinking of social networking sites as political tools, the concepts behind LittleSis might be foreign. But, the value of sites like Facebook, Myspace and online dating sites, where users feature themselves on detail rich, personal pages, is clear in scope. Science has taught us about the predictability of individuals.

Although American Online writes that physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi work “shouldn’t be cause for alarm so much as existential distress,” his ability to predict a persons location at any time, based on enough data, 93 percent of the time implies a strange social paradigm in which the movements of homebodies and movers and shakers alike follow patterns.¹

The data used was from 50,000 anonymous cell phone users to study human mobility; that is, where we are and when.

“The surprise was that we couldn’t find unpredictable people,” Barabasi says. “We are all boring.”

The study, most certainly, could result in beneficial and hazardous results, depending on the policies pursued. For example, the study of mass human mobility could lead to improved urban planning and traffic engineering while also enabling scientists to predict the spread of viruses and disease all the way at the micro level. That Barabasi interprets the study as proving we are all boring, is merely a symptom of his objectivity heavy education in science.

This objectivity, all too often, leads to a cold-science in which the feelings and thoughts of human beings are not taken into consideration; rather, a dedication to social engineering towards managerial efficiency greases the wheels of applied science and technology. Landscapes high on public nature parks are sacrificed for an affluent sort of Stalinism, with individuals concentrated in major regions or agglomerations.

Once Barabási and his group applied data-mining algorithms and advanced mathematicians to a large set of people, provided by an undisclosed European mobile phone carrier, “the people the study tracked [were] effectively like particles in a gas that move and interact.”

The scientists found that most people stay close to home, and that the workweek was as random as the weekends.

With individuals so predictable, then so too must be the macro pageant of history. One must then conclude that, as Mark Twain might put it, the future use of innovation, technology, and invisible services will rhyme with the past. A complex of cameras will chart our transportation, auto and otherwise, not merely to identify where we are, but to confirm oft accurate predictions. Through Facebook, our on-display philosophies allow a personalized and narrow world of advertising content to be built up around us, separating us from those around us—our friends, family and acquaintances.

LittleSis flips that paradigm on its heads; the surest way to incite the prior paradigm’s fall. At LittleSis, the online community rallies around an activist cause: identifying and investigating those who cause them harm.

Although the powers-that-be might not happily divulge their information, as the general public does through Facebook—some of whom update their profile everyday with their most recent personal details—the public criminality of robber baron work does expose them to widespread and, quite possibly, fruitful inquiries. (fruitful: see below)

Although LittleSis is a relatively new site—coming online in January 2009—it is a quickly growing interactive community, with a number of features.

Among a list of associations featured at LittleSis are the United States, all members of congress since 1981, Obama Administration officials, and both Bush Administration officials. Even Goldman Sachs, the multinational banking investment and securities firm, has a couple of lists dedicated solely to it. What can one find out about this financial institution through LittleSis?

Maybe one day, the LittleSis community will introduce a way in which to hang the profiled-powers-that-be for their terrorist crimes; those especially of the last year-and-a-half. Somewhat similar to Facebook’s Farmville, where users woolgather about non-existent storages of wealth they’ve saved online, we can—as so many have suggested doing—march up the steps of the capital, pitchforks in-hand, for the age-old tradition of beheading. Maybe virtual-reality, just as it has helped to quell (or foster) our primal instincts through violent video games, will help to satiate the public’s innate yearning for justice and a good-ole’ hanging.

In the “Orgs with Common People” feature on the website, the Goldman Sachs list illuminates: Former Goldman Sachs associates Robert E Rubin, Marti Thomas, Mark Patterson, Robert K Steel, Henry Deranged Fish-Eyes Paulson Jr., Robert Zoellick, Gary Gensler, Neel Kashkari, and Karthik Ramanathan, at one time, worked for the Treasury Department; Robert E Rubin, James A Johnson, Stephen Friedman, Robert J Hurst, Diana Farrell, Bob Hormats compose Goldman Sachs associates at the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the most powerful policy-dictating think tanks in the world; and Robert Zoellick, Bob Hormats, Reuben Jeffery III, John Whitehead, Pete Coneway worked for the Department of State.

Delving further, some of the most influential Goldman Sachs associates attended some of the most prestigious schools in the country, such as Lord Lloyd “Doing God’s Work” Blankfein—a Harvard Graduate—whose wife balks at waiting in shopping lines with “people who spend less money than me.” Stanford, Yale, and University of Chicago all educated alumni working for Goldman Sachs. By the way, that’s the start of two more profiles on the country’s elite.²

Not to be found at LittleSis, but certainly implicit of the company’s allegiances, is Goldman Sachs’s public contribution to the 2008 Obama campaign of $994,795, making Goldman Obama’s second largest campaign contributor behind the University of California.

The website, moreover, helped to break the story that Goldman Sachs helped the Greek Government understate hugely that country’s deficit, resulting in the austerity measures and the subsequent social dislocations, protests and riots.

Connor posed the question of just what Goldman Sachs was up to in Greece. More specifically, was Goldman Sachs not only helping to understate the country’s deficit, but also speculating against Greek debt? What tipped Connor off were articles in the Greek press of John Paulson operating in Greece, along with a team of 20-30 traders working on the Greek situation. The Financial Times reported that during a visit to Greece, Goldman Sachs worked as the Paulson’s tour guide. Paulson was the hedge fund manager who made massive bets against the sub-prime market, making millions. Basically, Paulson and Goldman conspired in order to devise securities designed to fail.

The New York Times reported that banks, including Goldman Sachs, backed a company which set up an index in September, that helped financial institutions bet on the likelihood of Greek debt default. The company, Market, set up a similar index on sub-prime trades in 2005 and 2006.

If Goldman Sachs, clearly a clouted organization, follows such extreme policies, waging economic warfare on the populations of many countries across the board, then their influence on the domestic security state must be comparable. In fact, that CIA agents are moonlighting in the corporate world might lead us somewhere: the firm, Business Intelligence Advisors, has among its clients, indeed, Goldman Sachs.³

On Russia Today’s The Keiser Report, LittleSis co-founder Connor explained how the website helped:

The fact that there is this revolving door between political institutions and financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and other powerful corporate institutions… also a sort of ethos in the media where rather than o the hardwork of digging through data and trusting critical instincts, there is a certain respect given to powerful people and wealthy people who are supposedly very savvy, as our president recently called them, rather than a critical understanding of how these players operate; how they come to their wealth and power and its really something that we need to focus more attention on…[building] critical narratives rather than ones that worship the wealth of people like John Paulson… these people own our media institutions and our media narratives.⁴

1. Gregory Mone. “Study Makes it Official: People are so Predictable.” AOL News, February 18, 2010.
2. “Goldman Sachs Wifes Hate to Wait.” New York Post, August 5, 2009.
3. Eamon Javers. CIA moonlights in corporate world. Politico, February 2, 2010.
4. Keiser Report, Episode 21.

(From Wikipedia): Full spectrum dominance refers to an open Pentagon policy, whereby a joint military complex strives to control all elements of the battle space using land, air, maritime and space based assets. Full-spectrum dominance encompasses air, surface and sub-surface, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum and information space. Control implies the subordination of all opposition forces, rendering their ability to confront the Pentagon and its allies wholly inhibited.

Harold Pinter referred to the policy as he accepted the 2005 Nobel Prize award:

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

“The demilitarization of Europe—where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it—has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st century,” Gates told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, a graduate school, financed by the Defense Department, for military officers and diplomats.

Gates argued that perceived European weakness could lead to aggression by hostile powers.

“Right now,” Mr. Gates said, “the alliances face very serious, long-term, systemic problems.”

Three days before Mr. Gates’s comments, the coalition government of the Netherlands collapsed over the keeping of Dutch troops in Afghanistan. It is now likely that most of the 2,000 Dutch troops there will be withdrawn this year. Polls show that the Afghanistan war has become increasingly unpopular in nearly every European country.

In Germany, a recent poll suggested that 76 percent did not believe the NATO exercise would succeed, while 65 percent opposed sending any more troops.²

“We have a clear strategy,” said Ulrich Wilhelm, the government spokesman. On Friday, Germany’s plan of reinforcing its 4,500 troops in Afghanistan by 500, with a further 350 available for temporary deployment, will be up for vote in the Bundestag.

To be sure, public opinion in Germany is more negative than in the Netherlands. The government strategy, nevertheless, is backed by the opposition Social Democrats, who were responsible for first sending German troops to Afghanistan.

Top figures in the SPD have stated that there will be no “blank cheque” for further reinforcements.

President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, still refuses to send more troops to Afghanistan and it seems the Dutch decision will not change that. France currently has 3,250 soldiers in Afghanistan and 150 gendarmes.

Mr. Sarkozy’s refusal to send troop reinforcements has been due to a combination of hostile public opinion, as polls continually show most French want their troops out, as well as impending local elections.

In Spain, a December poll showed 48 percent thought a government decision to send an extra 500 troops was either “bad” or “very bad,” while just 22 percent were in favor.

The U.S. Defense Secretary highlighted that NATO shortfalls, such as a lack of finances for needed helicopters and cargo aircraft, were “directly impacting operations.”

Alliance members, he warned, are far from reaching their spending commitments, as only 5 of 28 members have reached the established target of 2 percent of GDP towards defense. The United States spends more than 4 percent of GDP on military.

“Whether this is a conscious statement to sound a real sharp warning, there’s no question that the frustration among the American military establishment is palpable regarding coalition operations in Afghanistan,” Dana Allin, a senior fellow with the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, said.

Mr. Gates noted, however, that NATO troops in Afghanistan were, in fact, scheduled to increase to 50,000 this year, up from 30,000 last year.

“By any measure,” he said, “that is an extraordinary feat.”

Only a mere two months into the year, nevertheless, NATO was short hundreds of millions of euros: “a natural consequence of having underinvested in collective defense for over a decade,” Gates pointed out.

NATO has been under increasing pressure since 9/11 to expand its mandate beyond European borders, and its current problems demand “serious, far-reaching and immediate reforms,” Mr. Gates said.

Just last month, the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, turned unexpectedly to Russia to request helicopters for use in Afghanistan, citing the benefits of reduced terrorism threats and drug trade on a border of the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Rasmussen echoed Mr. Gates’s sentiments, saying that NATO’s members needed to better coordinate their weapons purchases. The European Union and NATO should coordinate on weapons purchases so as to avoid “spending double money.”

What Gates did fail to note, however, is the lack of support for the war, not only among Europeans, but also among those he supposedly represents:

An August 2009 poll in the Washington Post reported that a majority of Americans do not believe the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting, while just a quarter believe more U.S. troops should be sent to the country. This was before the troop escalation, approved by President Obama, which corresponded with his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance.³

U.S. citizens demonstrate an overall mistrust of government.

According to a recent CBS News-New York Times poll, only eight percent of U.S. citizens want the members of congress re-elected. 80 percent, moreover, said members of Congress are more interested in serving special interests than the people they “represent.” 75% disapprove of the job Congress is doing. President Obama, whose approval rating has dropped precipitously in recent months, has an approval rating of just 46 percent.⁴

Most astoundingly, perhaps, 75% of citizens are in favor of having the Federal Reserve, the nation’s privately-held—historically secretive—banking system, audited and investigated.⁵

Establishment policies, generally, have had a tough go at it recently. The Copenhagen meetings fell apart due, in part, to the Climategate scandal, whereby leaked documents by leading climate scientists revealed that much of the data regarding Global “Warming” was unscientific and contrived.

In a short excerpt in the Wall Street Journal called “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel,” the journal exposed the scandal on its front page:

The IPCC has faced withering criticism. Emails hacked from a U.K. climate lab and posted online late last year appear to show scientists trying to squelch researchers who disagreed with their conclusion that humans are largely responsible for climate change. And last month, the IPCC admitted its celebrated 2007 report contained an error: a false claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The IPCC report got the date from a World Wildlife Fund report.

Even some who agree with the IPCC conclusion that humans are significantly contributing to climate change say the IPCC has morphed from a scientific analyst to a political actor. “It’s very much an advocacy organization that’s couched in the role of advice,” says Roger Pielke, a University of Colorado political scientist. He says many IPCC participants want “to compel action” instead of “just summarizing science.”

To restore its credibility, the IPCC will focus on enforcing rules already on the books, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri and other officials said in interviews. Scientific claims must be checked with several experts before being published. IPCC reports must reflect disagreements when consensus can’t be reached. And people who write reports must refrain from advocating specific environmental actions—a political line the IPCC isn’t supposed to cross.

An accompanying poll showed that 82% of the readership awarded the IPCC an F for the work they had been doing. Despite this, climate change legislation, such as cap-and-trade and other forms of regulation, will continue to be implemented against popular sentiment.⁶

A majority of citizens across Western nations refused H1N1 inoculation this past winter and spring. Well-documented are the health concerns, such as the ingredients mercury and squalene—to name but a few issues surrounding the vaccines—found in the shots.⁷

These actions, concepts and policies, from military strategy to public health initiatives, do arguably fall under the America’s grand strategy of Full Spectrum Dominance, first revealed in the 1998 U.S. Space Command document Vision for 2020, and released once more in 2002 as the DoD Joint Vision 2020. Dominance over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems, including the ability to overwhelmingly win global wars against any adversary—including the use of nuclear weapons preemptively—is forged by way of propaganda, the wealth and unaccountability of NGOs, Color Revolutions for regime change, expanding NATO eastward, and “a vast array of psychological and economic warfare techniques.”⁸

1. Brian Knowlton. “Gates Calls European Mood A Danger to Peace.” 2/23/10, New York Times.
2. Quentin Peel in Berlin. “European nations unite over Dutch withdrawal.” 2/23/2010, Financial Times.
3. Jennifer Agiesta and Jon Cohen. “Public Opinion in U.S. Turns Against Afghan War.” 8/20/2009, Washington Post.
4. Jonathon D. Salant. Few Want Members of Congress Re-elected, Poll finds. Bloomberg, 2/12/2010.
5. Rasmussen Reports.
6. Jeffrey Ball and Keith Johnson. “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel.” 2/26/2010, Wall Street Journal.
7. Some statistics can be found here.
8. Stephen Lendman. “Reviewing F. William Engdahl’s “Full Spectrum Dominance: Part I.” 6/22/2009.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

– Ayn Rand¹

Industrial civilization has been a dirty affair. While it helped give rise to the wealth we see in the Industrialized core nations—typically associated with the United States and Europe—it has also led to an unprecedented centralization of power and left the people of the world dependent on its industrial infrastructure; and so for example, 75% of humans today live in the city, away from farms and the soil. To be sure, the city has allowed us much opportunity, not among the least of which is a tight knit framework in which to trade ideas, materials and useful stuff. All of this stuff, though, had to come from somewhere, and to meet that need importation from ghostly elsewheres has kept cities the world over running. And now, monumental problems face all of us as individuals and communities today, and the challenges and associated tasks ahead threaten the fairness strived for and achieved by concerned ancestors similar to ourselves. The gains of these people’s are encapsulated in such documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and Bill of Rights. A history of arts, also, reminds of our sometimes vibrant past. However, plans by political, financial and industrial elites to forge new institutions unaccountable to the people represent new monopolies on force and favors which threaten the very social fabric of civilization.

In an article published by the Wall Street Journal, Janet Albrechtsen covers what she describes U.N. plans for a new government “scary.” She states:

We can only hope that world leaders will do nothing more than enjoy a pleasant bicycle ride around the charming streets of Copenhagen come December. For if they actually manage to wring out an agreement based on the current draft text of the Copenhagen climate-change treaty, the world is in for some nasty surprises. Draft text, you say? If you haven’t heard about it, that’s because none of our otherwise talkative political leaders have bothered to tell us what the drafters have already cobbled together for leaders to consider. And neither have the media.

The article cites for the most part the words of Lord Chris Monckton, the former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, who, at an address at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota in November, blew the whistle and exposed the new governmental entity. He exposed the 181 page draft text, which entails United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, planned to be signed in December.

The ultimate aim of the treaty, as Monckton and myriads others are warning, is to erect a transnational government.

There is a provision under the Convention calling for a “government” which will have the power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty.

And so institutions which need not answer to the public are taking it upon themselves to solve environmental problems, but what do we do when their solutions are astoundingly wrongheaded?

The treaty requires developed countries to pay what is termed an “adaptation debt” to developing countries under the guise of supporting climate change mitigation. But the premise that the nation-state is the keystone institution in our social system is a misnomer, for the corporation fills that role. The largest associations and bodies are corporations and, as we will see, it is, to use a phrase made popular in the past year, the too-big-to-fail corporation which owes the rest of a massive “adaptation debt.” Moreover, many of the developing countries are servicing crippling IMF debts. It is therefore unlikely representatives of the West, especially Britain and the US, are interested in repaying the developing nations; unless, of course, much of these credits go towards fueling speculative economies in which those who sit on enough capital can line their bulging pockets.

Politically concerning are the number of “alternatives” and “options” featured in the treaty which officially undermine the democratic and republican bases of the modern Democratic Republics and give plenipotentiaries and policy makers room to do as they please.

In an interview with Alan Jones on Sydney radio Monday, Lord Monckton said, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen any transnational treaty referring to a new body to be set up under that treaty as a ‘government.’ But it’s the powers that are going to be given to this entirely unelected government that are so frightening…. The sheer ambition of this new world government is enormous right from the start—that’s even before it starts accreting powers to itself in the way that these entities inevitably always do.”

So, the power grab initiated last year with the collapse of Lehman Brothers—what actually was an assassination by other oligopolists—continues.

In his talk at St. Paul Monckton told attendees: “in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your President will sign for freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever.”²

Ron Paul echoed Lord’s sentiments, stating November 9, 2009 on the Alex Jones show:

If it works it will work for a little while and companies like Goldman Sachs and a few others will rip us off and get even more wealth. But it cannot help the economy; it has to hurt the economy. And it can’t possibly help the environment because they are totally off track on that. It might turn out to be one of the biggest hoaxes of all history this whole global warming terrorism that they’ve been using.

Paul is referring to the siren song of global warming, which is being touted by many of the well-connected as the sole reason for a revolutionary reorganization of human life on our planet. In fact, in books published by the Club of Rome, a premiere think tank, climate change is touted as a mean by which the global order based on the nation-state ought to be reconstructed; the think tank champions the politically useful reasons for this as opposed to concerning themselves with the environment—of which we the people are a part—at hand. When the threat is global warming, the Club of Rome has stated:

The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself…. The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation…. Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.³

A who’s who of popular political figures and CEO’s has echoed the sentiments of that of the Club of Rome.

I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.

– Al Gore, Climate Change activist

I believe that the mere mass of industrial civilization poses a threat to the biodiversity of the planet: the building blocks which are responsible for us, for our ideas and emotions, inventions and systems. But, it is increasingly lucid that the framework by which climate-change and environmental degradation is framed by social engineers through political enunciations and the corporate media leaves much to be desired. For brevity’s sake, I will only mention that there is an intimate connection between plant life and carbon dioxide. So, why have we determined carbon dioxide is the main threat? We exhale it! Should we continue playing our roles, hanging on the false realities created by the leaders?

Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced — a catastrophe of our own making.

– Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

This is rather alarming rhetoric for someone who, in the same breath, claims to have the near-ubiquitous support of the scientific community in his corner. He admits himself though that he is a pathological liar? Jokes on us if we let him cash in on our apathy and ignorance. By the way, when politicians and the propagandists refer to the “scientific community” they usually mean scientists who are members of corporate or governmental funded associations. Independent thinkers need not apply.

Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?

– Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme

Ok, so bringing down industrial civilization sounds pretty damn cool: Can we keep The Clash and Kurt Vonnegut? Hmm, I guess I could get a beer with this Maurice Strong fellow. Thing is, we probably have different ideas about ways, means and outcomes. Rule of thumb: During crises, the rich have almost always outsurvived poor, in many cases benefitting. For instance, the founder of the Krupp fortune, a wealthy burgher during the time of the Black Death of 1349, bought up the properties left vacant by families eradicated by the plague for pennies on the dollar. His descendants greatly prospered. I highly suspect Strong has an idea of this.⁴

In the US a Cap-and-Trade bill has been proposed, but as of yet not passed. While arguing the bill would leave to capital flight from the US, Ron Paul stated:

The Cap and Trade Bill HR 2454 was voted on last Friday. Proponents claim this bill will help the environment, but what it really does is put another nail in the economy’s coffin. The idea is to establish a national level of carbon dioxide emissions, and sell pollution permits to industry as the Catholic Church used to sell indulgences to sinners. HR 2454 also gives federal bureaucrats new power to regulate a wide variety of household appliances, such as light bulbs and refrigerators, and further distorts the market by providing more of your tax money to auto companies.

Spain legislated such progressive energy policy by massively diverting capital from the private sector into politically favored environmental projects for nearly ten years. Their economy currently has a 20 percent unemployment rate, and for each green job created, 2.2 normal jobs are eliminated.

The legislation in the US will cement more governmental regulations, taxes, fees and bureaucracy dissuading companies from doing business in the US, as well as how many employees they can afford to hire. This added governmental red tape will cause capital flight and job losses. Jobs, therefore, are increasingly likely to go overseas.

Over the summer, approximately 30,000 scientists signed a petition disputing the claim that global warming is an anthropogenic phenomenon.⁴ What’s more, the US Department of Defense is the largest polluter in the world, producing more hazardous wastes than the five largest US chemical companies together. Hazardous wastes employed by the military include, among others, pesticides and defoliants, like Agent Orange, many solvents, petroleum, perchlorate, lead mercury and depleted uranium.⁵

Health problems associated with these toxins include miscarriages, low birth weight, birth defects, kidney disease and cancer. Most affected are those on whom such weapons are used, those in the military, and those who live near a military site. In the US one out of every ten persons lives within ten miles of a military site listed as a priority cleanup site. Many corporations are right up there with the DoD. So, then, why are their fellow conspirators the ones wording such legislation? The best argument in favor of the environment, I conclude, is also an argument against war. Therefore any true and honest environmental movement has, at its core, an argument against war!

Depleted Uranium (DU) has been a hot topic since the war began, similar to Agent Orange use in Vietnam. As a radioactive and chemically toxic heavy metal, it remains wherever it is lodged, in the body on the ground or in rivers, for decades. In the human body particles of depleted uranium are a source of alpha particles. Much research suggests that DU is linked to serious damage to the human body.

In Iraq alone hundreds of tons of Depleted Uranium have been fired and exploded in high populated areas such as Basrah, Baghdad, Nasriya, Dewania, Samawa, and other cities. Exploration programs have found Depleted Uranium related contamination over most Iraqi territories.⁶

Iraq’s Minister of Environment said in July of 2007 in Cairo that “at least 350 sites in Iraq are contaminated with Depleted Uranium.” She also said that Iraq is facing an unprecedented number of cancer cases and called on the international community to help Iraq alleviate this problem. I will spare you the photos, but encourage you to look.⁶

On domestic turf, the United States Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management sell trees from public forests—that is trees owned, I mean shared, by all of us—to big timber corporations at reduced prices; in short, we subsidizes the destruction of the biodiversity which gave rise to ourselves. In the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska, four-hundred-year-old hemlock, spruce and cedar are sold to timber corporations for less money than a cheeseburger. Taxpayers funded, also, are the construction of the logging roads. The Forest Service—the public—loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year on timber-sale programs. Now we are being told we have to pay taxes in order to preserve our collective land base.

In the continental United States just five percent of native forest still stands. 440,000 miles of logging roads run through National Forests, despite that the Forest Service maintains there are 383,000 miles. The National Forest Service, exactly like the major financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Well Fargo, cook the books and routinely lie.⁷

The logic behind the new global authority is flawed. It targets nations funded by taxpayer’s—us. But damage caused by human households is nowhere near as criminal as the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals consume ten percent of the nation’s water. The other 90 percent is guzzled by agriculture and industry. Individual consumptions of energy, furthermore, accounts for about one-fourth of all energy consumption. The other 75 percent is consumed corporations. Municipal waste represents three percent of total waste production in the US.⁸

So we now see that we the people are unjustly carrying the burden of climate-change. Further, there are strong indicators that a current push for power accumulation employs climate-change and environmental degradation as its smoke and mirrors.

Many analysts are insisting the only in which to rebalance and harmonize the global human community is by revolution, and many of them contend violent revolution is inevitable. I don’t necessarily think “violent” need be so; but, it has to be global. We have to aim for the fences and raise consciousness all over the globe.

The push for global government and the New World Order must be slowed by us and our environmental communities—our land base, families and friends—protected.

1. Quote featured in the 7 November edition of Bob Chapman’s The International Forecaster.
2. Janet Albrechtsen. “Has Anyone Read the Copenhagen Agreement?” Wall Street Journal, 10-28-2009.
3. The Green Agenda and the First Global Revolution
4. Howard Bloom. 2000. Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To The 21st Century. John Wiley and Sons: New York.
5. Ron Paul. “Cap and Trade Another Nail in the Economy’s Coffin,” June 29, 2009.
6. Lucinda Marshall. “Military Pollution: The Quintessential Universal Soldier.” Dissident Voice, March 29 2005.
7. Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi. “The Responsibility of the US in Contaminating Iraq with Depleted Uranium.” Global Research, Nov. 9, 2009.
8. Derrick Jensen and George Draffan. Excerpt from Strangely Like War.

Gross inequalities exist in the U.S.:

Top 1% own 38.1%
Top 96-99% own 21.3%
Top 90-95% own 11.5%
Bottom 40% of population has 0.2% of all wealth.

In the language of the founding fathers, citizens “owned” property, which implies one was not indebted to a creditor.¹ But, such stark inequality, which effectively undermines the ability of markets to function at equilibrium, has to a great extent been normalized in the minds of many — a system in which modern indentured servitude is seen as the path to prosperity, despite that over the past thirty years, as Americans have had to take out loans to make up the difference for falling wages, the standard of living in the US has fallen dramatically. The distribution of wealth represents a system in which rent is owed by the people to finance capital. Recently, a Goldman Sachs International adviser argued in favor of the finance industry’s extravagant compensation and his company’s plans for a near-record year in pay. He argues the spending will boost the economy.

“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” said Brian Griffiths, formerly a special adviser to then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at a panel discussion in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Discussed was the question, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., based in New York, put aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, an increase of 46 percent when compared with a year earlier. This total is enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period in question. In many states, the nation is suffering from Depression level unemployment, whilst government figures drastically understate true levels by half. 100,000 teachers, also, have been laid off, and class sizes have exploded to more than 40 students per class. Over one million US students are homeless. Foreclosures are at a record high.²

The bailout programs were designed in such a way, that the destination of the money cannot be accounted for, according to Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who oversaw the bailout for Congress. Instead of taking the saner approach of the taxpayer purchase of all major US banks, since total market capitalization of all major US banks was less than $300 billion or less than a tenth of the amount given away, we’ve insured the major financial institutions at the cost of stability for the taxpayer. Now, should there be any future volatility in the markets, the taxpayer owns shares in the companies.

Instead of a corporate bailout, the banks should have been forced to write-down the value of the mortgages they, according to the FBI, illegally filed, and negotiated a new loan at a lesser price for the homeowners. The power of monetary policy ought to be shifted to the Treasury for the payment of public goods and services and the cost of credit for people should be minimized.

The federal budget deficit is $1.4 trillion, and the federal debt $12 trillion with annual interest rate payments of $450 billion each year. No coherent debate about how to alleviate these problems has been brought to the public. The US debt altogether is $70 trillion.

Since last October the taxpayer has bore witness to the largest transfer of wealth in, perhaps, the history of man, with potentially $23.7 trillion going to banks and financial institutions after the socialization of their risk on illegal sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps. The FBI concluded that 80% of all sub-prime criminal fraud began with the lenders.³ There is an old proverb: “The creditor becomes the lenders slave.”

Carrol Quigley, a mentor of former President Bill Clinton, had this to say about finance-capital’s motives:

The Power of financial capitalism [has a] far reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.

This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.

The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks, which were themselves private corporations.

Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world.⁴

In short, the motives of these firms were and are to expand market share and make profits for the shareholders.

Due to the breakdown in trade, pointedly demonstrated by a ghost fleet larger than the US and British fleets combined anchored east of Singapore, also the largest group of ships in the history of maritime travel without crew, no cargo and no destination, the concept of deglobalization has been floated around. Whereas the definition offered by Quigley points towards a collection of impotent localities unable to exercise sovereignty, other more positive definitions exist, such as that offered by Walden Bello.⁵

He envisages deglobalization as a process that enables production for domestic markets to become central to the economy rather than production where labor is cheap for export markets. Subsidies should be encouraged for projects at the level of the city-state, state and at the national level if this can be done at a reasonable economic and environmental cost with an agenda of preserving community and creating abundant, inelastic resources. Trade policy including quotas and tariffs should protect local economies from predatory corporate-subsidized commodities and their artificially low prices. Equitable income distribution and urban land reform creating a vibrant internal market would kickstart parts of the economy and make available capital for local financial resources for investment. Investment should emphasize not growth, but, rather the quality of life. Environmentally congenial technology in both agriculture and industry would be a massive, New Deal style endeavor, and funds for such projects should be diffused equitably, as opposed only to the energy cartel. Economic decision-making ought not be left to technocrats, but instead to Congress and the Treasury — in other words, those agencies accountable to the public. Questions include what industries to develop or phase out, what proportion of the government budget to devote to agriculture, etc. Markets should refer to a mixed economy of community cooperatives, private enterprise, state enterprise, and no transnational corporations. To replace the transnational corporation, networks of free associations with demarcations or firewalls between local associations may develop.

Despite an unresponsive Washington, overextended budget and rampant corruption which seems hopeless, there are still ways in which our economic problems can be stabilized indefinitely. During the Civil War, for example, English bankers exercised an astonishing amount of influence over Lincoln’s government, just as Wall Street determines Congresses policies today. The North needed money to fund the war, and the bankers lent them money at impossible-to-repay interest rates of 24 to 26 percent. Lincoln noted that this would bankrupt the North and requested that Colonel Dick Taylor of Illinois search for a solution. Taylor informed the President that under the Constitution the US had the power to solve its financing problem by printing its money as a sovereign government. Taylor said:

Just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes … and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also. If you make them full legal tender … they will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution.⁶

And so Lincoln funded the war by printing paper notes supported by the credit of the government. These legal-tender U.S. Notes, otherwise known as “Greenbacks,” represented receipts for labor and goods sold to the United States. Soldiers and suppliers received them as pay and they were tradable for goods and services of a value equivalent to their service to the community. The period of the Greenback was also one of large-scale economic expansion. During this period, the steel industry was launched and the continental railroad system was initiated; farm machinery and cheap tools were bankrolled, free higher education was offered, government support was provided to the sciences, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent.

The Greenback was not the lone currency used to bankroll these projects, but it was key to the process. Such growth, moreover, would not have been achieved by money borrowed at the rates London was demanding.

Lincoln’s presidency represents an era in which the government recognized its power to issue a national currency, despite being opposed by powerful special interests. Believed to have been published in the London Times in 1865, the following report sums of the establishment spirit of times in regard to the monetary issue:

If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.

Eventually a private institution was put in charge of the technocratic printing of money within the country. The Federal Reserve is a privately-owned central bank bequeathed the power in 1913 to print Federal Reserve Notes or dollar bills and lend them to the government. Since that date, the government has suffered an increase in debt which today stands at $11 trillion.

About this system, Henry Ford noted: “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

California’s current economic woes portend a fate that awaits the rest of the country. The Golden State is currently attempting to solve its $26 billion budget deficit through massive cuts in public funding. California’s residents, making up the world’s eighth largest economy, have refused further tax hikes, and Democratic leaders have refused further cuts in services or auctioning of public assets. California should not pay for the crisis with increased taxes or decreased services or public parks.⁷

In the meanwhile, the state has begun paying the State’s bills with IOU’s.

Such was the idea, in fact, that helped the colonies emerge from under a pile of British debt back in the 18th century, a time during which they lacked the silver and gold used in the Old World for conducting trade. The Massachusetts Assembly then proposed a different kind of paper money, a “bill of credit” representing the government’s “bond”; in other words, an IOU. The new fiat currency was backed by no more than “full faith and credit” of the government.

Following such a model, the Federal Reserve’s current Quantitative Easing Program could potentially represent the correct monetary policy in a time of high unemployment and threat of inflation or deflation. Historically, Quantitative Easing has resulted in hyperinflation and currency devaluation, but this does not necessarily need to lead to a doomsday scenario. According to Paul Krugman, a weaker dollar might serve as benefit for the U.S.:

Although there has been a lot of doom saying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere. But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead. And that’s a particularly bad thing to do at a time when the world economy remains deeply depressed due to inadequate overall demand.⁸

One reason why China has yet to let their currency rise against a weakening dollar is due to their being more concerned about sustaining consistent demand than weaknesses with the greenback.

According to the Economist:

The simplest explanation for the currency’s decline is based on risk aversion. On the days when risky assets fall, the dollar tends to go up. When risky assets rise, the dollar falls. The dollar has fallen fairly steadily since March, a period which has seen stockmarkets enjoy a phenomenal rally. Domestic American investors may be driving the relationship, repatriating funds in 2008 when they were nervous about the state of financial markets and sending the money abroad again this summer because of a perception that the global economy is reviving.⁹

Many concern themselves with record deficits, creating headwinds for more stimulus, which might be useful were it printed through Congress or another public entity within the government concerned with the well-being of citizens. Japan, however, has deficits twice the size of GDP and bond yields hovering below 2 percent. The Japanese are staving off deflation. On the other hand, US deficits represent 12 percent of GDP. The dollar does not need to be crushed by deficits even much greater than this. Nonetheless, as soon as the government stops spending money and running up the deficit, unemployment will soar, banks and business already tottering on the brink will default, foreclosures will go up, and the economy will slip further into Depression. Important to note, is that the US economy, unlike Japan, is nearly 50 percent based in the financial and service sector. It also boasts the world’s reserve currency.¹⁰

Currently, to be sure, consumer credit is decreasing at a year-over-year rate of 5 percent, whilst savings are up and spending is down. Unemployment sits at U6 20 percent. The nation is suffering record foreclosures, delinquencies, bankruptcies, and defaults are sucking credit from the system. Should the Federal Reserve terminate Quantitative Easing, there would be no way to increase jobs or spending.

This line of reasoning suggests that the debate about the fall of the dollar is misdirected, and that the jugular of the issue lies in wage growth and full employment. One way in which these two issues can be resolved is by printing up the two trillion in another stimulus, which, regrettably, would amount to another bailout, unless, of course, the public money creation model was followed.

The nation’s only state-owned bank, the Bank of North Carolina, was created 90 years ago, in 1919, as a result of a populist movement across the northern plains. The movement, led by the Nonpartisan league, created an industrial program, out of which both the Bank of North Dakota and a state-owned mill were created. The funding and deposit model is what truly makes the bank unique, for the bank functions as the depository for all state collections and fees, has a captive deposit base, and pays a competitive rate to the state treasurer. From those funds the banks then pays those deposits back to North Dakota as loans. Therefore, it invests back into the state in economic development type of activities.

The bank employs certain programs designed to spur growth in certain sectors of the economy, be it agricultural or economic development programs useful in the state or energy, as well as education in the form of student loan financing. Certain loan programs with low interest rates promote activity along certain lines. The bank even promotes the movement of cash to disaster loan programs meant to aid businesses, enabling the state to act quickly should it need.

The bank all on its own, however, is not the sole reason the state has avoided such the hardships of other states. Rather, the bank’s choice to stay away from subprime lending and inability to get into the derivatives markets and put on swaps and callers and caps and credit default swaps. The bank also provides a dividend back to the state: approximately half of what it makes goes to the state general fund. Over the last 12 years, the bank has contributed a third of a billion dollars to this general fund to alleviate taxes or to aid in funding public sector type of needs. This in a state of 650,000 people.

And how has the current crisis affected the state of North Dakota? According to bank president Eric Hardmeyer:

“The State of North Dakota does not have any funding issues at all. We in fact are dealing with the largest surplus we’ve ever had. So our concern is how do we spend it wisely and make sure we save it for the future.”¹¹

Corruption in New York City and Washington DC amounts to a collusion between the political and corporate centers of power; in a word, corporatism. Representatives of finance capital are funded in elections, and quite often money talks to get certain cronies elected. When the numbers are considered, this is surely the case in the last presidential election. The expansion of Bush’s militarist and economic policies on the part of Obama is an argument in favor of the idea that the US political system is composed of one party with two factions, whose policies overlap on issues important for the aforementioned top 1-10 percent. There is very little debate carried out in the public forum and a general trajectory of centralized power continues.

The Federal Reserve enables money to be printed at near-zero interest. Along with the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve controls the purse strings of the US. Taxation and Debt have reached such crippling levels that the majority of citizens are dispirited, hopeless, and exhausted. We should all take a breather: debts that can’t be repaid, won’t. The system of taxation and debt is an old one and has been effective in keeping people in line.

The world’s economic and financial superstructure is, at present, very weak. Policies in Washington and the movement of volume for volatility on behalf of the major financial institutions hint that this is desired by the movers of money. Thankfully, through the internet many more people today are aware that crises, more often than not, do not arise by mysterious and trans-human social forces, but from insatiable greed.

HR1207 and SB604, bills in Congress to audit and investigate the Federal Reserve, have helped to further inform people of the heretofore secretive nature of policy making in these two institutions. In democratic and open societies, nothing less than total transparency are deserved by the people. The job of monetary policy belongs to the Treasury under the Constitution. A firewall between Wall Street and Washington is the next step.

The credit crisis and the breakdown of our economic and financial institutional infrastructure began two years ago. The system of so much fraud and corruption has been kept functioning through cheap money and interest rates, as well as bailouts and stimulus packages. A majority of citizens in the US do not comprehend the problems we all face. The Uberclass, as Griffith’s comment at the top of this article reflects, exist outside the realm of traditional morals and laws and maintain a malfunctioning system or status quo.

Meanwhile, the US is held captive by its creditors, while the state, due to deindustrialization and financialization, stark inequality, a minor tax revolt, and lavish spending will experience inability to pay its debts to foreign creditors and respond to future crises at home or abroad.

But some of the solutions above remind us that there is still a world of hope out there.

What is desirable is a centrifugal system in which the exchange of goods and services follows a decentralizing or peripheral trajectory. Under the current system, centripetal forces attract goods, services and therefore wealth and power to the center, in this case not Marx’s industry, but instead creditors’s industry.

1. U.S. Wealth Distribution: 10% of US Citizens own 70.9% of all US Assets. Daily Paul, October 18.
2. Caroline Binham. Goldman Sachs’s Griffiths Say Inequality Helps All, October 21. Bloomberg.
3. Carl Herman. 2009 US Economy: largest transfer of wealth to financial/political elite in global history, October 20. Examiner.
4. Carrol Quigley. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time. The Macmillan Company.
5. Waldon Bello. The Virtues of Deglobalization. Global Research, October 25.
6. Ellen Brown. Revive Lincoln’s Monetary Policy: An Open Letter to President Obama. April 8, 2009.
7. Ellen Brown. California Dreamin’: How the State Can Beat It’s Budget Woes, July 8 2009.
8. Paul Krugman, “The Chinese Disconnect,” New York Times.
9. “Down with the Dollar,” The Economist, Oct, 2009.
10. Mike Whitney, Dollar Collapse Update: “Obama Demands Pay in Euros.” Global Research, October 25.
11. Josh Harkinson. How the Nation’s Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street. Mother Jones, March 27.

The demand for oil is categorized as “demand inelastic,” considering there are no ready substitutes available for oil, the implications being consumers have few opportunities to switch to other fuels for the myriad activities which oil enables. Strict supply conditions and a growing demand for oil give rise to an economic environment in which, as a rule of thumb, each 10% increase in the price of oil restricts U.S. GDP growth by up to 0.1 percentage points. Proceeding the Joint Economic Committee in April 2002, Alan Greenspan observed, “all economic downturns in the United States since 1973… have been preceded by sharp increases in the price of oil.”

U.S. oil consumption habits are quite extraordinary: for, due to a monumental privilege made possible by the U.S. dollars current status as reserve currency, the U.S. accounts for more than 25% of global daily demand, despite composing only 4% of the human population. Transportation accounts for 67% of U.S. oil consumption, and 97% of transportation in the U.S. is fueled by oil, with virtually no substitutes. An overwhelming amount of this movement of goods and services is on behalf of the major industries, featuring at center the military-industrial complex.

Over the past three years, gasoline prices in the U.S. and western world have fluctuated dramatically. In the summer of 2008, for instance, they rose to over $4/gallon but subsequently settled; decades of price inflation aside. Many analysts cite the reality of Peak Oil as the main reason for the inflationary and wild oil prices, however others argue that the price of crude oil today is not determined by the relation of supply to demand, but, rather, the control of oil through speculation by four major Anglo-American companies and their associates. This highly deferential pyramid in regards to the number of sellers in the oil market, in and of itself, results in higher prices. More sellers, on the other hand, would lead to more supply, leading to a more competitive environment with lower prices and higher quantity. Many maintain that Peak Oil not an ecological phenomenom, but, rather a political one, such as the prolific researcher and author William Engdahl.

At least 60% of the $128 per barrel price of crude oil in the summer of 2008 was, indeed, the outcome of unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds. While some of the spike has to do with summer’s status as driving season, other factors, such as the paper markets, play a significant role. U.S. rules as stated in Commodity Futures Trading Commission enable speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the NyMex, having only to pay 6% of the value of the contract. So, a futures trader in the Summer 2008 was required to pay approximately 8$ for every barrel, borrowing the other $120. This 16 to 1 hyper-leveraging of oil futures abated the high prices and ameliorated bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters by expenses suffered by the population.²

The selling of oil futures and derivatives contracts have major implications for where oil prices sit at any given time, for the number of buyers and expected prices shifts demand. Further, the process of fixing these prices is so open-ended, only few insiders, such as major oil trading banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, know who is buying the oil futures and derivatives contracts; that is, “paper oil.”

This perceived anticipation for the future affects our present demand, and when a multitude of investors bet on a bullish oil market, the price will increase. Similarly, cash for clunkers, for instance, increased consumer demand due to the tax write-off and deflated price of the cars featured in the program, shifting demand from the future to the present. In the future, profits of the auto industry and price of automobiles should fall due to depressed demand exacerbated, in part, by this program.

The appearance of unregulated international derivatives trading in oil futures over the past 15-20 years has made possible the present speculative bubble in oil prices. The advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts has landed control of oil prices not with OPEC, but with Wall Street.

In June of 2006. a U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report entitled “The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices,” observed “…substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.” The ability for certain firms to influence prices by way of speculation is one symptom of a decades long process of deregulation in the marketplace and the following explosion in derivatives trading.

The report noted, also, that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulation of financial futures, had been mandated by Congress to ensure the laws of supply and demand were reflected in the prices on the futures market. The U.S. Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future deliver… causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue an unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” The CEA, moreover, instructs the CFTC to implement trading limits, “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission, a financial futures regulator, had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery … causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.”

Therefore, the world’s keystone commodity market, oil, is unregulated and highly manipulated. The global economy runs, so to speak, on oil. The U.S. dollar, since 1971 under Nixon, has been a purely fiat currency, as are the majority of global currencies and all speculative instruments; in other words, it’s intrinsic value has been, since 1971, based solely on arbitrary pronouncement and maintained through responsible fiscal policies and management. No longer backed by gold or silver, paper and digital dollars were effectively backed by the world’s oil, especially when one considers that, in order to buy crude oil, virtually each nation had to first purchase US dollars. This dynamic is what Valery Giscard d’Estaing termed an “exorbitant privilege,” in reference to the benefit the U.S. enjoyed in the U.S. dollar being the international reserve currency: one outcome being, that the U.S. would not face a balance of payments crisis, because it purchased imports in its own currency.

The aforementioned US Senate Report further acknowledged:

Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called “futures look-alikes.”

The only practical difference between futures look-alike contracts and futures contracts is that the look-alikes are traded in unregulated markets whereas futures are traded on regulated exchanges. The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from CFTC oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 in the waning hours of the 106th Congress.

The impact on market oversight has been substantial. NYMEX traders, for example, are required to keep records of all trades and report large trades to the CFTC. These Large Trader Reports, together with daily trading data providing price and volume information, are the CFTC’s primary tools to gauge the extent of speculation in the markets and to detect, prevent, and prosecute price manipulation. CFTC Chairman Reuben Jeffrey recently stated: “The Commission’s Large Trader information system is one of the cornerstones of our surveillance program and enables detection of concentrated and coordinated positions that might be used by one or more traders to attempt manipulation.”

In contrast to trades conducted on the NYMEX, traders on unregulated OTC electronic exchanges are not required to keep records or file Large Trader Reports with the CFTC, and these trades are exempt from routine CFTC oversight. In contrast to trades conducted on regulated futures exchanges, there is no limit on the number of contracts a speculator may hold on an unregulated OTC electronic exchange, no monitoring of trading by the exchange itself, and no reporting of the amount of outstanding contracts (“open interest”) at the end of each day.

David Kelly of J.P Morgan Funds, the Chief market strategist for one of the world´s leading oil industry banks, recently told the Washington Post: “One of the things I think is very important to realize is that the growth in the world oil consumption is not that strong.” The story is floated around, and generally accepted for that matter, that China´s oil imports are exploding, meaning grave implications for the supply-demand equilibrium, and subsequently reason for the spike in prices. David Kelly´s enunciation, in contraposition, negates that hypothesis.³

OPEC, furthermore, left its 2008 global oil demand forecast unchanged, citing slowing economic growth in the industrialized world and slight growth in the emerging markets. OPEC predicted oil demand in 2008 to be, for the most part, unchanged from its previous estimate. Demand from China, the Middle East, India, and Latin America will rise, offset by lower demand in the EU and North America.

Big oil conglomerations profit enormously from high oil prices. Advocates of Peak Oil argue that, in the near future, Absolute Peak Oil was the coming end to cheap oil. One premise of Peak Oil holds fossil fuel to be the leftovers of fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, and so therefore characterized by finite supply. Alternatively, a theory of oil formation, arrived at in the Soviet Union of the 1950′s, criticizes the assumptions of western biologists to be unproveable, citing the fact that western geologists have warned an end to oil for more than century, thereafter discovering more supplies.

For the USSR, in the Cold War of the 1950′s, a domestic supply of oil was a geopolitical necessity, and a considerable boost to security. In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev and a team of other scientists concluded: “Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.” They termed this new theory “a-biotic,” or, in other words, non-biological.⁴

Implications of such a theory being that earth’s oil supply is limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon materials present deep in the earth at the time of earth’s formation, as well as the technology available to drill uber-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. The scientists argued that oil comes from deep in the earth, and from conditions of high temperatures and very high pressure. Porfir’yev: “Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth.”

The theory of Peak Oil originated in a 1956 paper by Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist employed by Shell Oil. Oil from wells is extracted, he argued, in a bell curve nature, and once a “peak” was reached, what he termed “Hubbert’s Curve,” decline ensued. By 1970, he argued, oil production in the United States would peak and the oil crises of the seventies are oft cited as evidence of the legitimacy of his theory. Free trade agreements world wide have taught us, on the other hand, that it is more likely the flooding of the US market with tariff free and dirt cheap Middle East imports by Shell, Mobil, Texaco, and the other Saudi Aramco made it impossible for California and many Texas producers to compete.

Exacerbating theories that political posturing promotes the illusion of limited oil supplies, the suppression of alternative modes of transportation is well-documented; from electro-magnetism to water powered cars. Why does the combustible engine reign supreme in an age of moon exploration, globalization and other seemingly sky-high technologies?

How do few companies get to the point of wielding so much influence?

By the 1870′s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the United States, as well as various foreign countries. The King of Holland, in 1890, supported the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company for the purpose of refining and selling kerosene from Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. In the same year, a British company founded to ship oil, the Shell Transport Trading Company, “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and “the two companies merged to become Royal Dutch Shell.”⁵

In 2008, it was widely reported that the U.S. government secretly led dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts. Andrew Kramer, for the New York Times, uncovered the story that the world’s oil giants, “Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP… along with Chevron and a number of smaller companies” were present at “talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.”

According to the Times, “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies…”

There is much evidence that the Bush administration, foreign firms and Iraq’s Oil Ministry had conspired during the most important periods of the Iraq War. There are deep financial ties between the military occupation in Iraq and the aforementioned oil giants; for instance, the oil giants Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron often make appearances on the Pentagon’s payroll. In 2007, these five firms earned more than $4.1 billion from the Pentagon, with Royal Dutch Shell at the forefront with $2.1 billion.

The government of Iraq and Royal Dutch Shell eventually signed a $4 billion deal to “to establish a joint venture with [Iraq's] South Gas Company in the Basra district of of southern Iraq to process and market natural gas.” The Times reported that Shell “established an office in Baghdad.” A “Green Zone” was guaranteed, and Shell was handed a $338 million contract for aviation fuel by the Pentagon. Therefore, the U.S. government was heavily involved in dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry, and the U.S. military regularly pays Shell billions of dollars each year.⁶

These subsidies should drive the price of oil down, as, from the businesses´ perspective, subsidies lower costs and make firms willing to offer more at a given price.

In an October 6 Business Week article, Robert Fisk elaborates upon the coming demise of the dollar. The phenomenon will see Gulf Arabs, along with China, Russia, Japan and France end dollar dealings for oil. The break from the post World War II Bretton Woods world order will be an in-between period as the aforementioned nations shift to a bread basket of currencies; among which will be the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a fledgling, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.⁷

It is possible that such plans partially explain the dramatic rise in the price of gold over the last few weeks. Certainly, they portend the end of the Dollar System as we have known it since the end of the Second World War. Further, these questions center on the strategic importance of Middle Eastern oil to both the rising giant of China and the waning United States. The deadline for the currency transition is 2018. Adding to the drama, Iran recently announced that its foreign currency reserves would from now on be held in euros as opposed to dollars. Many analysts recall what transpired after the last Middle East oil producer decided to sell its oil in euros than dollars. After the decision by Saddam Hussein, the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq.

Others hold that the timeline for revaluation is much shorter. The decline in consumer spending, which makes up 70% of the U.S. economy, and unemployment rates, which, though their rise has slowed continue on an upward trajectory, are indicators of this. A revaluation of the US dollar, if even only by one-third, would seriously compromise the U.S.’s ability to import commodities, such as oil.

In September, U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs stated that oil price could potentially peak at $85 a barrel by the end of 2009, and average approximately $90 in 2010. Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, recently raised their prediction $10, but it still lands at $65 a barrel. This is after they predicted in 2008 $150 oil by 2010.⁸

1. Securing America’s Future Energy. Fundamentals of the Global Oil Market.
2. F W Engdahl. ‘Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price is Pure Speculation‘. Global Research, 2 May 2008.
3. F W Engdahl. More On the Real Reason Behind High Oil Prices, Global Research, 21 May 2008.
4. F W Engdahl. War and Peak Oil. Global Research, 26 September 2007.
5. Andrew Gavin Marshall. Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order. Global Research, 28 July 2009.
6. Nick Turse. Pentagon Hands Iraq Oil Deal to Shell. Global Research, 4 October 2008.
7. Robert Fisk. Oil Not Priced in Dollars by 2018? The Independent, 6 October, 2009.
8. Deutsche Bank raises 2010 oil price forecast. Boiler Juice, 6 October 2009.

In the article, Paul argues “Prosperity can never be achieved by cheap credit… If that were so, no one would have to work for a living. Inflated prices only deceive one into believing that real wealth has been created.”

“The economic crisis has changed everything,” Congressman Paul contends.

His book critiques the inequities of a highly managed economy. Further, his house resolution 1204, Audit the Fed or the Fed Transparency Act, politicizes the issue of monetary policy, which has, since 1913, fallen under the category of technocracy, whereby policy makers decide interest rates, printing practices, etc.

It’s as if we believe that money can be grown on trees, and we don’t stop to realize that if it did grow on trees, it would take on the value of leaves in the fall, to be either mulched or bagged and put in a landfill. That is to say, it would be worthless… When we unplug the Fed, the dollar will stop its long depreciating trend, international currency values will stop fluctuating wildly, banking will no longer be a dice game, and financial power will cease to gravitate toward a small circle of government connected insiders.¹

Paul is correct in asserting that cheap credit and low interest rates have exacerbated the current crisis, however, used for democratically oriented projects such as production, cheap credit can be a publicly run social utility. In the context of crony-capitalism, it does lower the banks cost of funds and increase their profits. Since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, banks have evolved into high-risk investment houses that trade financial instruments like interest rate derivatives and mortgage-backed securities, to name but two of many. These virtually free and abundant funds by the Fed enable banks to pay depositors zilch on their savings.

While U.S. taxpayer money goes to funding credit lines for some of the world’s largest corporations and even citizens of other countries, as is the case with New Zealand, they find their own credit line dried up, with small businesses going under and foreclosures surmounting. The New Deal took a lion’s share of governmental authority out of the legislative branch and put it in the Executive branch. The Executive Branch and its subsidiary departments and agencies write bills congress passes, handing them to sponsors. Special Interests have functioned in much the same way. On the other hand, The New Deal created services such as food stamps, welfare and unemployment, without which the approximately 25% of Americans currently without work would have starved this year or be on the brink of starvation.

No credence ought to be handed to Ben Bernanke, who submits the recession is over. The recession is not over, and many critical New Deal agencies and programs face abolition or privatization.

Congressman Paul, an extreme libertarian, remarked recently that government healthcare is not a right. He believes in small government, a relevant argument. On the other hand, we ask who the regulator in such an order would be? As Larry Flynt recently noted, in these times corporations don’t run the government; they are the government. Now that corporations wield the joystick of many crucial government institutions, departments, agencies and organizations, it is crucial that the U.S state be given counter-means determined and overwhelmingly influenced by the populace. Government is not the enemy, indeed big government is not the enemy, for government is merely a tool by which means are realized. For example, over the last year the government has been used as a tool by Wall Street in order to enrich massive multi-nationals, in most cases foreign multi-nationals.

Paul is a critic of Obama’s health plan, which he calls a “magnanimous gift to the health insurance industry.” He notes that the insurance industry has lobbied for decades for mandated coverage. Though pre-existing conditions would have to be covered, it is a small price for the insurance industry to have to pay for increasing their client pool to 100% of the American people. Under the plan, the insurance industry has immunity from all lawsuits, just as Swine Flu vaccine makers, such as Baxter, received immunity from lawsuits stemming from degenerative health conditions caused by their vaccines.

Taxes and fines will see to it that all Americans have to buy into the health care program. Paul ponders a world in which citizens buy memberships to certain hospitals or clinics as if it were a gym. And then bemoans the difficulty for doctors to make house calls. Alternative medical practices are wholesale disadvantaged when the health insurance plan is required. Indeed, alternative health care practices are suppressed. The only options the government has, he says, are force and favors, when attempting to “solve” social issues.

Paul argues that there have been doctors and medicine long before there was health insurance, and the current debate in America is a misnomer, for it nexuses intimately the concepts of health care and insurance.²

Under a free government, people have the right to life. This includes the right to healthcare as a means to furthered life. Therefore, all peoples deserve a universal, diverse healthcare system based on citizen choice and free, well-paid providers. The healthcare discussions in the US, however, represent the degree to which the government does not represent the people, but, instead powerful interest groups.

Desperate to resolve this issue, an issue resolved by the rest of the industrialized world, Americans support Obama in his push to pass the healthcare bill. Due analysis, nonetheless, unveils the bill as a means of protecting and increasing the profits of the insurance companies.

A keystone attribute of the health care bill is the “individual mandate,” which makes a REQUIREMENT of buying the health insurance. Senate Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) has proposed a $3,800 fine on Americans who fail to purchase health insurance.

The ailing economy, with real unemployment around 20-or-so percent, has left approximately 50 million Americans uninsured. Moreover, around 50% of the population has only two weeks of savings to their name. How is it a good idea to burden the taxpayer more?

Former Assistant Secretary Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, states “these proposals are like solving the homeless problem by requiring the homeless to purchase a house.”

Obama: “we’ll provide tax credits” for “those individuals and small businesses who still can’t afford the lower-priced insurance available in exchange.” For those without incomes, a tax credit is not much help.

Medicare, currently, is even too expensive for most Americans, as $100 per month is deducted from the covered persons Social Security check. Moreover, retired persons on Medicare who enjoy no other significant income must pay $4,500 per year in premiums, allowing them coverage which still leaves more than half the prescription medicines out-of-pocket. Oft they pay more. Despite the premiums, payments to doctors and other healthcare providers has fallen alongside coverage for policy holders.

In the midst of government bankruptcy and a tax revolt, adding more public expenditures to the system will in the end benefit insurance companies, and use mandated private coverage as a safety net for curtailing public expenses Medicare and Medicaid.³

In the background, the white noise in the corporate media champions a jobless recovery, as though it were a good thing! But, due to the widening gap between reality and the propaganda, Americans are growing more and more skeptical of their government and media, portending some sort of tipping point in the near-future. Their need now be an emphasis put on organization. People must be able to feed themselves and their neighbors, and means to equitable ends must be pondered and acted upon. The economy may very well move sideways for some time now, in anticipation of the 2010 elections, as the market makers and manipulators attempt to keep the makeup of congress and the senate favorable to their elitist agenda. Nonetheless, things will deteriorate, especially as the U.S. population grows more disgruntled at the disconnect between their interests and the motives of their representatives.

In August, unemployment rose in 27 states. California and Nevada reached record levels of unemployment. Officially, there unemployment rates are 12.2 percent and 13.2 percent, (un)respectively. To be sure, real unemployment numbers of those two states sit at around 27 percent and 28 percent. Conservatively, the U.S. has lost about 6.9 million jobs since the crisis started in December 2007, the most of any downturn since the Great Depression.

Having exacerbated the problem by not implementing controls a la the Glass-Steagall Act, President Obama continues to give lip service to the notion of tighter controls and regulatory measures. He maintains that international cooperation stopped our “economic freefall,” when, in reality, market manipulation and bayonnet economics has slowed the collapse, a trend most likely continued in anticipation of 2010 elections.

Obama recommended a new agency to oversee consumer products, including mortgages and credit cards. There are a myriad of other ways to abate market imbalances. For instance, allowing the bankrupt banks to fail, instead of bailing them out in a socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor economic system. The bailout money could have easily and unquestioningly paid off all mortgages in the U.S. I repeat, all mortgages. A 1% Tobin Tax on all financial transactions would be a form of taxation on the derivatives and other markets outside of the real economy which provides no productive service; consumers pay, in California for example, a 10 percent tax on everything they buy. That is, the sales tax. Why ought not the uberclass pay something similar?

Obama also suggested new ways for the government to dissolve failed companies and oversee the inherent systemic risks of behemoth financial institutions. Why not allow a truly centrifugal, extremely-regional free-market of free associations amongst individuals allow for creativity and diversity to rule the exchange of goods and services? The United States, indeed each state, must turn its economy inwards to build up for domestic demand if Americans intend to avert systemic collapse within the decade, more likely two and a half years. Deglobalization results in neo-serfdom when the multinational can oversee impotent municipal-associations.⁴ At the end of empire, corruption is endemic and, considering the allocation of wealth as it is, functions as a propaganda measure. How demeaning it is for Americans to see absolute disregard of their well-being. This is dangerous: for monumental levels of corruption and nefariousness, as more and more people are forced to markets still thriving such as military and security, are being normalized in the collective brain.

When Bank of America agreed to buy Merril Lynch last year as markets were crashing using taxpayer money, without telling us the terms of the deal, Merril Lynch paid their employees 3.6 billion in bonuses to make sure bonuses were paid before the deal with Bank of America went through, the biggest payout in their history. This according to Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert. Bank of America approved the bonuses. Bank of America claimed to not be paying out such bonuses and were recently fined by

the FCC 33 million dollars. Thankfully, Judge Jed. S Rakoff has stepped in and demanded a hearing.

Bank of America and Merril Lynch have conceded no wrong-doing.

Rakoff: The settlement “suggests a rather cynical relationship between the parties. The FCC gets to claim that its exposing wrongdoing on the park of Bank of America in a high-profile merger, the bank’s management gets to that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators.” Regulators have been in the pockets of these investment banks doing absolutely nothing over the last twenty years to reign in their corporate, oligopolists’ jubilee.

All parties were in violation of the law in a terroristic manner. As Keiser notes, this is financial terrorism, at the expense of shareholders, stakeholders and any sense of human rights and truth.

August numbers show that bank loans from bailed out parties were down 4.4 percent, despite Geithner maintaining in congress they were increasing lending. Derivatives contracts are being stacked up again, and the banks once “too big to fail” are bigger.⁵

Economics is a highly ideological and compartmentalized field. It’s paradigm has done much damage to this planet and human social order, justifying make believe economic relationships and associations. Justifying a free-market which hasn’t existed… since the paleolithic. Ok, perhaps the end of the 18th century. Paleolithic. This crisis is not a normal cycle, but instead a power play by the sentient commanding heights to consolidate not wealth or money, but power. Debts are often not repaid. These debts held by the industrialized west will not be repaid. There needs to be a jubilee a la the Roman Jubilee. We must get rid of the debts or else the economy will never catch up: Permanent Depression.

Government can certainly be a tool to actualize a more just and fair modern order, however the movement of minds is the most useful tool. In a time of disintegration, persons ask the what’s, why’s, and who’s; and so now such persons are more prone to experiencing the earthquake of enlightenment.

There are many virtues to the concept of a free-market, for it does not escape easily the imagination of most typical thinkers. The concept, after all, has been theorized and discussed for centuries. A highly decentralized free-market colored by creativity inspiring diversity runs against the centralizing and Luciferean forces of history, which, in our day and age, enjoy a power that goes a long way.

1. “End the Fed, Save the Dollar.”
2. “Health Care Reform is more Corporate Wealthfare.”
3. “The Health Care Deceit.”
4. “California, Nevada Reach Record Unemployment Levels“; “Obama Says Financial Regulations Must Be Strengthened Globally.”
5. Truth About Markets, featuring Max and Stacy

Rise like lions after slumber
in unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many, they are few!

– Percy Bysshe Shelley “Mask of Anarchy”

If you don’t know your history it’s as if you were born yesterday.

– Howard Zinn

In a recent article, famed trend forecaster, Gerald Celente, wrote:

The natives are restless. The third shot of the “Second American Revolution” has been fired. History is being made. But just as with the first two shots, the third shot is not being heard. America is seething. Not since the Civil War has anything like this happened. But the protests are either being intentionally downplayed or ignorantly misinterpreted.¹

He cites the more than 700 anti-tax rallies and “Tea Parties” as evidence of a burgeoning period of passion. In a nation bearing arms, the power of the first amendment is waning, the power of a chaotic government is encroaching, and the people are growing restless after four decades of declining wages, the prospect of total economic and societal collapse,and a government that must lie in order to perpetuate itself. In the status quo Machiavellian world of the corporate media, the protests have either been ignored or bastardized, oft in sophomoric light, as references to “tea bagging” attest. The media, by and large, operates at a third grade level. Upon the election of Barack H. Obama many well-meaning Americans congratulated themselves for the eradication of racism in their country. However, persons protesting the presidents policies—either by way of demonstrating or what Alex Jones terms “the Poster Revolution—have been labelled racists.

In August many Senators and House members have hinted at the cancellation of their town hall meetings, as incensed citizens use these forums to voice—rather, shout—their myriad concerns about the direction of the Empire. A strong presence of police and bodyguards were needed to quell the fervor of the natives. An increasing number of congressmen speak out against rumors of possible martial law this fall.

Meanwhile, the corporate media slowly integrates such coverage into their programs. According to Brian Wilson on Fox news, “Northcom has a proposal sitting on the desk of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that would authorize the military to backup FEMA should their be an H1N1 pandemic… One assumes this might be necessary should there be mass quarantines.” (according to WHO there already is a level 6 pandemic, organizing all UN nations under effective UN control)

Protestors have been derided as racist, gun-owning militia members of the conservative variety. In actuality, the irate citizens hail from all facets of the American experience. Outrage over the issue of healthcare—though few grasp the complex 1000 page health care reform document, legislators included—is “clearly real and un-staged.”

The healthcare legislation is piled atop a maelstrom of adventurously genocidal White House policies: “a series of gigantic, unpopular, government-imposed (but taxpayer-financed) bailouts, buyouts, rescue and stimulus packages have been stuffed down the gullet of Americans. With no public platform to voice their oppositions, options for citizens have been limited to fruitless petitions, e-mails and phone calls to Congress…all fielded by anonymous staff underlings,” Celente states. The eugenics approach to science under John Holdren, White House Science Czar, has also stirred many to anger.

Congress is in recess, which means that elected representatives are back in their districts. The public is partially active. Celente, who predicted the crash of 1987 and the fall of the Soviet Union, contends, “Though in its early stages, the ‘Second American Revolution’ is underway. Yet, what we forecast will become the most profound political trend of the century—the trend that will change the world—is still invisible to the same experts, authorities and pundits who didn’t see the financial crisis coming until the bottom fell out of the economy.”

Trend Forecast: Conditions will continue to deteriorate. The global economy is terminally ill. The recession is in a brief remission, not the early stages of recovery. Cheap money, easy credit and unrestrained borrowing brought on an economic crisis that cannot be cured by monetary and fiscal policies that promote more cheap money, easy credit and unrestrained borrowing.

Nevertheless, Washington will continue to intervene, tax and exert control. Protests will escalate and riots will follow.

Fourth Shot of the “Second American Revolution”: While there are many wild cards that could light the fuse, The Trends Research Institute forecasts that if the threat of government-forced Swine Flu vaccinations is realized, it will be the fourth shot. Tens of millions will fight for their right to remain free and unvaccinated.

Celente cites new technologies such as the internet, camera-equipped cell phones, access to YouTube, and twitter, as means rendering the revolutionary spirit nearly impossible to control. It “will prove contagious.” He does acknowledge that the “Second American Revolution” could be “derailed through some false flag event designed to deceive the public, or a genuine event or crisis capable of rallying the entire nation behind the President…Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war…A false flag attempt, a genuine crisis, or a declaration of war, may slow the momentum of the “Second American Revolution,” but nothing will stop it.”

While Celente outlines admirably the multitude of circumstances aligning in the United States, he does miss some key points in his report, such as the U.S. military’s mobilization on domestic soil. As Mathew Rothschild from the Progressive details in the article, “The Pentagon Wants Authority to Post Almost 400,000 Military Personnel in U.S.,” the Pentagon has requested congress to grant the Secretary of Defense the authority to post almost 400,000 military personnel all over the United States in times of emergency or major disaster.²

Mike German, the ACLU’s national security policy counsel, articulated condemnation “that the military would propose such a broad set of authorities and potentially undermine a 100-year-old prohibition against the military in domestic law enforcement with no public debate and seemingly little understanding of the threat to democracy.”

Further, other various legislation lays groundwork which enables the state, in the event of a national emergency, to vertically align power so as to better concentrate certain citizens from the rest. For example, the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act allows Homeland Security to use KBR, a subdivision of Haliburton, to establish at least six national facilities for the concenration of civilians, not criminals, on military installations.³

In the Field Manual 3-19-40 Military Police Internment/Resettlement Field Operations, a civilian internee is labeled as such: “CIVILIAN INTERNEE 1-7. A CI is a person who is interned during armed conflict or occupation if he is considered a security risk or if he needs protection because he committed an offense (insurgent, criminal) against the detaining power. A CI is protected according to the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (GC), 12 August 1949.”

The REX 84 Program outlines procedures for the continuity of government and the internment and processing of internment of dissidents in the event of civil unrest. In the United States of America there are federal plans, geared towards events or non-events of unrest or pandemic, for the implementation of martial law and military dictatorship. The evidence is staggering. For two-thirds of the citizenry in the U.S., the Constitution has already been suspended by “Constitution Free Zones,” set up two hundred miles from all borders and coasts.

In a recent Huffington Post article, Larry Flynt called for an agreement on a date on which a general strike would be orchestrated. Music to many of our ears such civil disobedience would be. He also had this to say:

The American government — which we once called our government — has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “economic royalists,” who choose our elected officials — indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

In order to avert senseless bloodshed, starvation, the utilization of an already implemented police state, the United States public must organize and accomplish thousands of large-scale regional switches to partially self-sustainable economies in order to organize a successful and fluid general strike. This is not the revolution of reform, only the beginning thereof. Crisis precipitates change through which power is consolidated. Through the usurpation of power resistance is fomented. Through resistance and crisis the common forum of ideas is expanded; people think. Through thought imagination is realized. A general strike is but the first action, and the realization of community will mark the onset of the revolutionary reform we all desire: an intellectual and emotional revolution.

1. Gerald Celente. “The Second American Revolution.”
2. Mathew Rothschild. “The Pentagon Wants the Authority to Post Almost 400,00 Military Personnel in U.S.” Progressive, 12 August 2009.
3. Byron Tripp. “H.R. 645 And The FEMA Concentration Camps,” 23 August 2009.

But the current financial crisis—and impending societal collapse in the US—threatens Hollywood’s hegemony over the celluloid screen.

As inventor and independent financial analyst Max Keiser reported in his blog for Huffington Post, bond trader Cantor Fiztgerald recently filed an application with regulators with the intention of launching an exchange that allows users to hedge and speculate on the financial performances of movies.

Keiser, host of The Oracle on BBC World and podcast Truth About Markets, predicts that “the Cantor/HSX futures will actually drive the prices of stars, films, marketing and the industry as a whole DOWN:” a topsy-turvy world of rivals selling out rivals and driving down prices—perceptions included—for high prices are good marketing in America. Indeed, Max predicts the Hollywood cartel—at the forefront of the consciousness industry since the 1920’s—will enter into a period of infighting as each studio struggles to be the vanguard of Hollywood.²

The theory of technical primacy encapsulates the importance of Hollywood, arguing that Hollywood—a comparably new innovation in the arsenal of imperialism, especially leading up to and after World War II—played nearly as important a role as military and economic forces in bringing about allied victory during World War II.

For example, immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war became one of the most frequented subjects of the U.S. motion picture industry: from 1942 until 1945, out of the 1,700 movies produced in that period altogether, approximately 500 depicted a pro-war stance.

In fact, the cooperation between Washington and Hollywood’s War Activities Committee in the face of international conflicts was so penetrating, that few agencies within the federal government were not represented by Hollywood, the White House included. Demonstrating symbolically the importance of this relationship, was the U.S governments approval of something like 4,000 members of the U.S. Film Industry—directors, studio bosses and sales managers—to wear military officer uniforms. In reality, the military has been deeply involved with the film industry since the Silent Era.

Hollywood represented a new form of imperialism, not in idea or intent, but rather in effectiveness. It penetrated the public’s consciousness and reoriented social values, as demonstrated by the aforementioned change during the 1950’s in European consumer habits.

The brain is infinitely more advanced at synthesizing data than modern computers. The cornucopia of modules responsible for the gross sum of our realities, nonetheless, functions largely at the realm of the subconscious. In other words, upwards of 90% of our daily experiences are understood separate from our own awareness. In a speech for the leading managers of the U.S. film industry on November 5, 1961, Edward R. Murrow quoted Carl Sandburg:

I meet people occasionally who think that motion pictures, the product that Hollywood makes, is merely entertainment, has nothing to do with education. That’s one of the darndest fool fallacies that is current…Anything that brings you to tears by way of drama does something to the deepest roots of your personality. All movies good or bad are educational and Hollywood is the foremost educational institute on earth, an audience that runs into the estimated 800 million to a billion, What, Hollywood’s more important than Harvard? The answer is, no as clean as Harvard, but nevertheless, farther reaching.

Others echoed this disposition:

“The film is to America what the flag was once to Britain. By its means Uncle Sam may hope someday, if he be not checked in time, to Americanize the world.”³

“If one were to write the history of economic imperialism, the American film production would be one of the most interesting chapters.”⁴

In a study for the State Department, the Institute of Communications Research recommended the liberal use of film, stating: Films are especially suitable for unsophisticated audiences…it makes no difference what we have to show them. You will find this true almost anywhere except perhaps among intellectual groups where they are blasé about it. There is a fascination that films have for people. Even among intellectuals there, they come to be critical…You can do anything you want to them (sic) as long as you don’t drive them away.”

There is a multitude of ironic motifs teased easily out of Hollywood films of the 1950’s, many of which not so different from the recurrent themes of Nazi cinema. An internalization of self-censorship as a result of the McCarthy show trials in the 1950’s sent Hollywood film dollars to politically safe westerns, all-encompassing of subtle allusions to a slimy, collectivist red menace.

Hollywood had mustered so much clout, that the industry could dictate the movies of other countries. In Germany, for instance, Hollywood blocked the subsidizing of the German film industry after the war, a once formidable competitor. Due to widespread devastation in Europe and much of the world after the Second World War, Hollywood had secured a dominant position as the bedrock of the global consciousness industry. In fact, the dominance of the Hollywood cartel was so widespread, that it wholly negated the undertakings of a free market in terms of cinema.

The influence of American culture in Europe after the Second World War was enormous—some have referred to it as the new Monroe Doctrine; that is, the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine. The postwar period was a period of huge opportunities for victors, allowing the U.S. to build upon the old European dream of U.S. democracy as a way of life that secured a high standard of living for the masses, and also had the financial means to organize a comprehensive cultural program that embraced all facets of life. One such cultural program, implemented by the U.S., stated as its mission the use of “each material and psychological medium to create respect, even awe in the lifestyle of America, and also to undermine other political philosophies;” and so they did, on up through today. However, representing the power of the consumer, Hollywood did open up its content during the creedal passion period of the 1960’s to reflect the general sentiment of the population at that time, as well as to keep the cash flow coming. Films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket portrayed war in a much more critical light than, say, John Wayne films of the 40’s and 50’s.

These days, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and Department of Defense occupy entire floors of Los Angeles office buildings so as to ensure films fulfill the agenda of those institutions. In exchange for high-tech, tax payer funded, otherwise unavailable gear, Hollywood allows the military to censor scripts to suit their needs.⁵

Southern California’s reign as the epicenter of American culture might very well be over. The state of California is shambles, and one of the country’s most populous regions—approximately 24 million people call the agglomeration home—is also one of the most fragmented and therefore compromised, for its ability to act in a unified, cohesive manner, should it need to, is severely limited. The problems facing southern California are multi-faceted, especially when multiplied over all major facets of life—economic, social, cultural and environmental. The five-county region that makes up southern California ought to be watched closely over the next decade, as it very well might serve as an example of what industrial collapse is. That is what this series is about, but first: Hollywood.

Fittingly, art is imitating reality. A new wave of Hollywood disaster flicks coming this fall reflects the actual position of Hollywood, if not the world. Unlike disaster flicks of the Atomic-Age and Watergate which dealt with the fall of civilization, the new flicks deal with the struggles of post-apocalypse existence. The wave of post-apocalyptic manuscripts is aimed at cinemas and TV screens, where battles with cannibals, the acquisition of survival techniques, and the struggle to keep one’s humanity will be portrayed in stunning detail.

In January expect The Book of Eli, in which Denzel Washington stars as the fierce protector of a book holding the key to mankind’s redemption in an American wasteland wrought by war. NBC’s Day One features a gang of neighbors trying to survive and come to terms with devastation and a beyond dilapidated and useless infrastructure. The Film adaption of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, due in October, includes footage shot during recent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina.

According to Rob Kutner, writer for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, escapism plays a part in the latest glut of apocalyptic cinema, since “people are less concerned about their house being foreclosed when it’s being taken over by mutant appliances.” Perhaps some of these films serve social engineering programs by way of predictive programming.⁶

By portraying on the big screen a world on the edge, when, in fact, the world is on the edge, engineers in Hollywood predispose audiences to accept extreme austerity and catastrophe, causing them even to expect it, as opposed to sacrificing the crazy-quilt lifestyle of society for true human community and overcoming. A process of gradual and subtle inculcation, predictive programming creates an environment in which feedback loops of expectations generate a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Despite the seriousness of the issues tackled by Hollywood this fall and winter, most of the films strive to avoid moralizing the collapse—a tactic that has been historically lethal at the box office.

What we have in store, according to Roger Smith—an executive at the research firm Global Media Intelligence and a former film executive who oversaw Terminator 2—is “the film version of the Cuban Missile Crisis; we have to get the edge of extinction each time.”

I’d place a bet that, were Hollywood to go bust, the human species would have a better shot at surviving than if not. Indeed, U.S. movie box office grosses for July 31-August 2 were down 21.5 percent from a year ago 21.5 percent, though many Hollywood officials would be quick to deem those statistics insignificant.⁷

With summer blockbuster grosses down, Hollywood continues its struggle to find a place in a digital world that eats old business models for breakfast. In a bid to seek new audiences, IMAX Corp. partnered in June with China’s largest film studio to release three Chinese language movies, representing the first time Imax shows foreign-language films on its giant specialty screens.⁸

New technologies, venues and business models have both benefitted and hurt those businesses which rely on intellectual-property rights. Hollywood has yet to adequately take advantage of the digital positives, such as marketing and distribution, while prosecuting effectively the negatives—negative, at least, in their view—such as piracy. Prosecuting alleged pirates in a court of law has had mixed results. The MPAA, although less-so than the music industry, has indeed also taken this route, though it in many ways has proved inefficient. “You have to do some enforcement,” says Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, “but we have to do more than that, and the focus has to be on technological solutions and on doing a much better job educating people about the impact of piracy.”⁹

Will a Hollywood futures market hasten the loosely knit cartels downfall? Keiser seems to thinks so.¹⁰

Look for studios to sabotage each other’s projects by short selling and ‘naked’ short selling competing projects on the Cantor Exchange to drive the perception of a film’s popularity down before it’s released. No problem, just spend more on marketing. More money will be made trading box office futures than at the box office. Inside information will become legal. Milton Friedman will rise from the dead and advise the Honduran government. Brat Pitt will star.

1. Reinhold Wangleitner. 1994. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War. UNC Press, Chapt. 8, The Influence of Hollywood.
2. Max Keiser. Will Hollywood Futures on the CantorExchange Kill Hollywood? Huffington Post, 8 December 2008.
3. Warning by London Morning Post in 1923.
4. Rudolf Oertel.
5. Nick Turse. Hollywood is Becoming The Pentagon’s Mouthpiece for Propaganda, AlterNet, 22 May 2008.
6. John Jurgensen and Jamin Brophy Warren. Hollywood Destroys the World. Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2009.
7. Lauren A. E. Schuker. Summer Box-Office Sales Cool Down. Wall Street Journal, 3 August 2009.
8. Lauren A. E. Schuker. Imax Set to Partner With Chinese Studio. Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2009.
9. William Tripplet. On The Future of Movies. Wall Street Journal, 21 July 2009.
10. Max Keiser. Dr. Blankfein Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Goldman Sachs, Max Keiser, 2009.

According to Forbes, Holdren’s environmentalism has been celebrated over the years. He has been the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Research Center and a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Holdren partook as a member of The Limits to Growth club. In his 1971 Sierra Club book, Energy: A Crisis in Power, Holdren writes “it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population.” The science supporting notions of peak oil, regardless of Holdren’s confidence, has been seriously scrutinized, giving credence to Forbes claim that Holdren holds serious dogmas.

From Forbes,

In keeping with his dogmatic (my italicization) limits-to-growth convictions, Holdren joined his frequent co-author, eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich, in a famous bet against cornucopian economist Julian Simon.

In 1980, Holdren, Ehrlich and Stanford colleague John Harte picked a basket of five commodities–chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten–that they were sure were going to rise in price as they became increasingly scarce. They drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Holdren, Ehrlich and Harte the same quantities of five metals that could be purchased for $1,000 10 years later at 1980 prices.

If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990. Simply put, the combined real prices of the metals selected by Holdren and his colleagues fell by more than 50% during the 1980s, confirming cornucopian claims that the supply of resources over time becomes more abundant, not scarcer.

Holdren also held the view that, by 2040, the US population would reach 270 million, and that that would pose a “severe” problem. Today, in 2009, the population of the U.S. is about 304 million. In a 1975 The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, Holdren slightly tinkered with his previous conceptions of limits to energy, writing that “civilization is not running out of energy; but it is running out of cheap energy.”

In his 1977 book Ecoscience, Holdren, Paul Ehrlich (head of science under Bush), and Anne Ehrlich write on page 837 that “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society. Few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion, however.”

Holdren also proposes “a comprehensive Planetary Regime (that) could control the development, administration and distribution of all natural resources…not only in the atmosphere and the oceans, but in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes.”

He states further, the “Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits…The Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

Some syndicated columnists argue the claims made by concerned citizens are moot points, for the tome Ecoscience was written more than thirty years ago. Maybe so, until one learns that some of the suggestions are already utilized by the U.S. government, as over 250 different pharmaceutical chemicals have been found in the drinking supply of the unsuspecting U.S. population. Many of these chemicals are attributed to hyper feminization in women and demasculinization in men. In one example, Holdren states his belief that under the current U.S. Constitution, adding sterilants to the nation’s water supply was probably a good thing:

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Eugenics, an outcome of the study of human heredity, aims to “improve” the genetic makeup of the human stock. While the idea of eugenics appears in Plato’s Republic, the modern concept became prominent during the second half of the 19th century. Two widespread philosophical beliefs formed the bedrock of eugenics: a belief in the perfectibility of the human species and a spreading faith in science as the most accurate tool of knowledge.

Social Darwinism was one 19th century predecessor to the 20th century eugenics movement. Two predominant themes of social Darwinism—“struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest”—as applied to human sociality, were premised upon the notion that the rich were more biologically fit than were the poor and, for that reason, more successful in life. More nuanced theories of evolution, naturally, render the assumption that competition is the bedrock mechanism of evolution obsolete, thereby making room for the notion that cooperation is in the driver’s seat. Could some form of competitive cooperation oil the gears of evolution? A healthy competition?

By separating the “better” and “worse” elements, according to social Darwinism, the species could continually be improved. Modern eugenics breaks from that pool of thought in noteworthy ways. The latter featured a laissez-faire approach to the philosophy, maintaining that nature would take such a course; that the worst elements of society would over time be eliminated. Such concepts, many argue, form the foundation of the Nazi program.

Modern eugenics, however, has as its basis the notion that careful planning by way of proper breeding is the best means to improving society; this is the ideology adopted by the Nazi Regime.

In the 1930’s in Germany, the rush to sequester and alleviate mental deficiencies was quickly interpreted to encompass malcontents and dissidents opposed to the Nazi regime. This vague theory gave way to the Nazi Sterilization Act, effective July 1933.²

Dr. Ernst Rudin, a leading and articulate authority in favor of the Sterilization Act, traveled in 1930 to Washington D.C. in order to present a paper called, “The Importance of Eugenics and Genetics in Mental Hygiene.” The paper was well-received in the United States, where many—especially among the moneyed elite—were cordial to German pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy.

In late June 1933, German Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick convened a blue-ribbon committee on demographic and racial policy, during which he unraveled an ambitious program to evaluate “our ethnic body politic according to its genetic value.” Frick propagandized that the decay of das Volk was not attributable to an outside enemy, but, rather, to something within the people themselves. The materialism and lamentable moral decline of the Weimar Era had to be eradicated, and Weimar programs stopped. In reality, despite the crushing of the German economy by western business, the Weimar Republic constituted a vibrant culture and enjoyed relatively successful social programs. Among the programs to be stopped were birth control that reduced the Volk by encouraging a “two-child family system,” superfluous social welfare programs that wasted money on “hopeless clients,” and “sexual freedom [that promoted] the ‘mannish woman.’”³

Frick outlined the overbearing program to eradicate the bad and “select” the beneficial. Such issues were referred to scantily in the Nazi Party program but mostly ignored by the party press. During a party rally in 1929, Hitler commented on the topic, commenting that if, of one million newborns 10,000 of the least desirable died, it would result in a net gain for the Volk.

The engineers of the Nazi sterilization program looked to the U.S. as a model. A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, drafted by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, justified sterilization: In the wake of world war, when “the best of a generation of young men risked their lives for the nation,” Holmes reasoned, “it would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices…in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Nazi sterilization program was initiated during a time when 28 American states as well as a number of European nations employed sterilization programs.

The magnitude of, not the ideas behind, the Nazi “ethnic improvement” schemes was what made them stand out. In the United States between 1907 and 1947, about 45, 127 people were sterilized (conservatively). In Germany, internationally respected eugenicist Friedrich Lenz calculated that 1 million feeble-minded Germans (in a population of 65 million) should be sterilized, whilst Agricultural minister Walter Darre called for ten times that many. Frick adapted his radio audience to the concepts by preparing them for a rate of one in five.

Beginning their eugenics programs on children, the Nazis, on July 14, 1933, passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Children. Leaders of the movement to eliminate “mental defectives” from the German Volk were lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, whose phrase “lebensunwertes Leben”—or “life unworthy of life”—became a popular, albeit chilling phrase.²

Sterilization was the preferred means of prevention, and was administered by special “hereditary health courts.” The Nazi euthanasia program was carried out by secret decries, for Hitler refused to seek a legal ruling, well-aware of such a programs illegal nature under the Weimar Constitution.

Between 1934 and 1945, so it is estimated, more than 400,000 people were sterilized as “life unworthy of life.”

The Nazi regime employed these measures in such a convoluted way—what Robert Jay Lifton terms “bureaucratic mystification”—as to make it nearly impossible for victims, their families and even those working within the system to know the vast nature of the euthanasia program.

In the United States, the Rockefellers—who had, among other endeavors, amassed a bustling oil empire—were also interested in the eugenics movement. In 1910, the Eugenics records Office was established, with grants bestowed unto it on behalf of—but certainly not only—John D. Rockefeller.

In 2009, a number of global crises give rise to a social climate in which talks of “global governance” receive little attention or analysis. The war on terror, global warming, swine flu and peak oil—no matter how contrived these phenomenon may be—create an opportunity for the most radical and disreputed of values to appear in the mainstream.

Right Side News points out that, while Holdren can be criticized for publicizing the aforementioned views and other likes it, because he preceded it by evoking other authorities, it cannot be entirely attributed to him. Holdren, according to Right Side News, escapes guilt by stating, “The impact of laws and policies on population size and growth has, until very recently, largely been ignored by the legal profession. The first comprehensive treatment of population law was that of the late Johnson C. Montgomery, an attorney who was president of Zero Population Growth, and whose ideas are the basis of much of the following discussion.”⁴

Right Side News best investigate precedents set in this nation’s legal history. On October 15, 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO Act) became law. The RICO Act enabled law enforcement to charge persons or a group with racketeering; that is, committing multiple violations of certain varieties within a 10 year period. The purpose of the act was stated to be “the elimination of the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations operating in interstate commerce.” Holdren and his associates, an international ueberclass of about 6,000 individuals, are eligible for such proceedings. Each one of us, naturally, is aware of Nuremburg Trial precedents. The United States government is an organization operating in interstate commerce, as articulated by President Woodrow Wilson in the 1920’s when he said, “the business of America is business.”

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about past scientific overstatements, and riposted, “The motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time.”

Holdren, by the way, has pontificated that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Also, that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century, far exceeding even the most concerned, who place the level at 13 inches.

While introducing Holdren, Barack Obama promised that his administration was “ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”⁵

State directed sterilization breach two deeply rooted principles. One being the secular precept, enshrined in John Locke’s Second Treatise, that “every man has a property in his own person,” and the other the prohibition against any interference in reproduction, which Pope Pius XI forcefully restated in his 1930 Casti Cannubi.³

The Business of Genocide

The H1N1 virus has killed fewer than 500 people. The World Health Organization, nevertheless, declared a global pandemic: “The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century,” according to Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director.⁶

It has been reported by the Washington Times, “children will be a key target population for a pandemic flu vaccine in the fall.” The students would be vaccinated in a three step program in a mass campaign paralleling that of efforts in the 1950’s against polio. Pregnant women, adults with chronic illnesses and health-workers would join children as the first in line. The federal government expects to receive approximately 100 million doses of vaccine by mid-October, assuming the current production, by only five companies, continues as planned. However vaccine for wide use, by about 120 million “especially vulnerable” people, will not be available until later in the fall.⁷

The Department of Homeland Security, moreover, issued in April a swine flu memo to some health care providers. “The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines,” the memo states. Such authority is limited to diseases listed in presidential executive orders; President Bush, however, added new forms of influenza with the potential to cause pandemics in Executive Order 13375. Anyone violating a quarantine order can be punished by a $250,000 fine and a one-year prison term, according to CBS News.⁸

The Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Plan extinguishes the distinction between a civilian and national security emergency situation, what is effectively the end of Posse Comitatus.

Not only the United States, but rather many other countries have announced mandated vaccination programs. The French government, for example, has purchased 28 million vaccines for the country of 60 million +. The Former chairman of the British Medical Association has, also, called for mandatory vaccinations.

The US Secretary of Health and Human Sercices, Kathleen Sebelius, recently signed a decree granting vaccine makers total legal immunity from all lawsuits resulting from any new “Swine Flu” vaccine. The $7 billion US Government program to rush vaccines onto the market in time for the Fall flu season is being done devoid of normal safety testing. Swine Flur, H1N1, furthermore, has yet to be rigorously scientifically isolated, characterized and photographed with an electron microscope—the scientifically acknowledged procedure.⁹

Is the United States social climate such, that forced inoculations would not inspire internal dissent?

Created in 2002 by President Bush, NorthCom, the Pentagons Northern Command—with jurisdiction over the United States—has been running preparedness drills in the event of a flu pandemic for at least the past three years. Northcom, furthermore, was recently assigned its own fighting unit six months ago. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Divison 1st Brigade Combat Team spent much of the last five years battling in Iraq.¹⁰

Head of NorthCom General Victor Renuart, testifying in March, claimed the command center would provide “assistance in support of civil authorities” during an epidemic. Adding, “when requested and approved by the Secretary of Defense or directed by the President, federal military forces will contribute federal support.”

According to the General, NorthCom had prepared for a flu outbreak from Mexico. “Because Mexico is our neighbor and disasters do not respect national boundaries, we are focused on developing and improving procedures to respond to potentially catastrophic events such as pandemic influenza outbreak, mass exposure to dangerous chemicals and materials, and natural disasters.”

NorthCom also has a “private sector cell.”

“We have great participation from industry and from other organizations around the country,” the General testified.

One private sector group that has worked with the FBI and Homeland Security on pandemics is InfraGard, a group of more than 30,000 businesspeople who enjoy special access to confidential FBI Information and may be assigned special—even lethal—duties in times of an emergency.”

InfraGard wishes to be a player in pandemic response. “Utilization of their expertise will help local communities prepare for a possible pandemic event to ensure minimal disruption and quick recover,” one InfraGard press release stated.¹¹

1. Bailey, Ronald. John Holdren, Ideological Environmentalist. Forbes Magazine, 2.03.09.
2. Marrs, Jim. The Rise of the Fourth Reich. Harpers.
3. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience.
4. Kincaid, Cliff. Is Obama’s Science Czar a Crackpot? Right Side News, 7.15.09.
5. Harsanyi, David. Science Fiction Czar. Denver Post, 7.15.09
6. WHO declares global swine flu pandemic and says virus is ‘unstoppable.’ Times online UK.
7. Brown, David and Hsu, Spencer. Students first in Line for Flu Vaccine. Washington Post, July 10, 2009.
8. Department of Homeland Security Guidelines For Possible Swine Flu Quarantines. GlobalResearch
9. Eberhart, Dave. Health Bill Would Allow Forced Vaccinations in Private Homes. Newsmax, 7.16.09.
10. Rothschild, Mathew. Will NorthCom Takeover in Swine Flu Outbreak? The Progressive, 4.29.09
11. Engdahl, William F. Now Legal Immunity for Swine Flu Vaccine Makers. Global Research, 7.22.09.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

– Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816

When Thomas Jefferson refers to a state of civilization, one assumes he has his own in mind; that is western civilization, of course. Why, then, should an ignorant nation never expect to know freedom? Perhaps, as he penned this letter to Charles Yancey, Jefferson had in the back of his head the approximately 6,000 years of scorched earth policies that, within this state, were perpetrated by and for the vector of western progress. The institutions comprising western civilization, he concluded, predisposed agents of history to depravity and conquest. Therefore, it must be so, that the people enjoy the fruits of access to the voluminous amount of data available during any given epoch. Abraham Lincoln, while in office, echoed his forbearer, saying “let the people know the truth and the country is safe.” Like never before do the masses have access to a wealth of information. Many key players in the political and corporate arenas, recognizing this, are positioning themselves and events so as to make a case for further restriction of the internet, while increased supervision in the classroom is on the agenda under Obama.

As the world enters the dog days of summer, families have by now taken their annual financial vacations. The kids have been home from school, work and sports fill up the calendar and finances have been put on the backburner. In the fall, without having sifted through financial statements for three months, parents return to the monetary details of their lives, oftentimes aghast at the holes they had dug for themselves in so short a time. Aside from money shambles on the second leg down of the economic crisis, what can parents, and children, expect this coming fall at their public schools?

Close analysis of Obama’s education policies divulge that, like many other policy areas, no new course will be pursued. Rather, just as the administrations financial policies expound the amount of clout his main financial supporters flex over a woefully command and control economy—Goldman Sachs, for example, controls somewhere in the ballpark of 35 percent of all program trading, which makes up around 50 percent of all activity on NYSE—so too will Washington exacerbate totalitarian trends in the classroom. Basically, the plan for education will lead to more state intervention in school life, continued marketisation, managerialism, standardization and testing, external accountability, intervention in family life, and a modeling of education in such a way as to further the goals of the state-enterprise apparatus—among which stands, first and foremost, centralization of goods, governance and services—as opposed to the consciousness raising and therefore general welfare of the public.¹

First, the continuing budget crisis will precipitate more cuts in school funding. Due to budget cuts limiting the amount of pay allocated to faculty, legislation in California already permits schools meeting certain requirements to reduce the school week to four days. This in a state, of all places, where currently only 43 percent of six million students are considered proficient in reading and 41 percent in math. Furthermore, a recent National Science Foundation report foresees that California’s elementary schools will fall short of reaching their Adequate Year Progression targets by 2014.² The California education outlook, while dire due to the state’s advanced stage in the financial crisis compared with smaller economies in the union, is hardly a black sheep: in the coming months, similar developments will be played out across the country.

The Obama Regime maintains that teachers “should not be forced to spend their academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests.” Their plan, however, reflects the overall Orwellian nature of the contradictory propaganda/measures taken dichotomy thus far employed by the regime in Washington, and increases the amount of standardized testing and externalized accountability by introducing “a broader range of assessments that can evaluate higher-order skills, including student’s ability to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.” This portends the implementation of tests not only for basic literary and math skills, but also vocational and analytical skills.³

The trend of externalized accountability—a euphemism for externalization of authority, away from the teachers and students, and into a vertically executed federal system—will be further extended to the job of teaching. More and more, instead of being certified through a process based on one’s proclivity to creativity in the classroom, measured by one’s ability to inspire a healthy learning environment, teachers will become accredited by way of a checklist of designated competencies. Currently, accreditation is optional for teacher education institutions; under the Obama plan, however, all teacher education programs will be required to endure the accreditation process. The premise of such measures, naturally, is that the interlocked art of teaching and learning is no art at all, but rather a uniform process with no variation across personalities and geography. Historically, the universal application of religions, which have their origin in unique times and places, has meant the debasement and consequential uselessness of those religions. The same logic applies to education, an outcome of its socio-historic roots, as well as a cultures cognitive orientation.

Funding for early learning allows parents more time to work or take part in other activities, especially in the inner city, at which many of these programs are targeted. Most of the programs are offered to children in the cities, and not their suburban counterparts. Obama and Biden argue “the failure to address early learning needs is most apparent with disadvantaged children.” Early learning, they continue, is an economically sound policy, for it leads to a “decreased need for special education services, higher graduation and employment rates, less crime, less use of public welfare systems and better health.”³

The line of reasoning will indeed be furthered, that the purpose of education is the service of the economy. The Obama Regime has outlined a “rewarding and training” system, whereby 40,000 “service scholarships for “high-need” (for the economy) subjects are to be allocated, with main emphasis put on science and math, upon which “over 80 percent of the quickest growing occupations are dependent.”³ The intermixing of private and public education, one must deduce, will create a feedback loop promoting the increase of overlapping interests between the economy and the socialization process. This is demonstrated by the fact that Obama and Biden support charter schools under the guise of parent freedom to choose one school over another. Charter schools are independent and oftentimes focused on religion or owned by a private entity. In the name of diversity and choice, Obama and Biden champion these available options, and though it is true many private schools have been a relative success, leading to innovative initiatives etc., the furthered privatization of the socialization process would mark a fraudulent overlap in interests. The privatization of education in the United States, as many analysts have pointed out, seems inevitable considering that nation’s bankrupt debt-equity ratios.

What might turn up increasingly throughout the country has already in some places. For instance, at Jefferson high school in Portland, Oregon, the basketball team the Portland Trailblazers, in a partnership with the NBA and Toyota funded the building of a new Community Resource Center at the school. The project is one of 15 community service initiatives spearheaded by funding from Toyota Project Rebound. While it is great that the school is receiving a new venue for meetings, etc., Toyota advertisements now adorn the inside of an Oregon public school.⁴

This agenda, aimed primarily at working-class or lower-income families, allows the state a more far reaching hand in the upbringing of its subjects, especially those who, otherwise, would be in the hands of the historically more discontented elements. This logic extends to absurd lengths, even encroaching on the turf of ancient documents, such as the Magna Carta, wherein it states that a man’s home is his castle. Obama and Biden would like to “expand evidence-based home visiting programs to all low-income, first-time mothers.” This is gateway legislation: Creeping intervention on behalf of the state which further erodes the family and the bedrock of openness on which the Republic was founded.⁵

In other school-related news, school-age children, it has been reported by the Washington Times, “will be a key target population for a pandemic flu vaccine in the fall.” The students would be vaccinated in a mass campaign paralleling that of efforts in the 1950’s against polio. Pregnant women, adults with chronic illnesses and health-workers would join children as the first in line. The federal government expects to receive approximately 100 million doses of vaccine by mid-October, assuming the current production, by only five companies, continues as planned. However vaccine for wide use, by about 120 million “especially vulnerable” people, will not be available until later in the fall.⁶

Schools and teacher training institutions do fall flat of expectations. While these systems are in desperate need of overhaul, the policies on which Obama and Biden plan to embark will limit the range of critical topics discussed in the classroom. What they offer are tested insights in regards to education, many of which are proven failures and work towards social engineering goals at the expense of learning and enlightenment. Representative of the failing US public education system, is a recent study calculating that one-third of American college students must enroll in remedial classes. These efforts cost colleges and taxpayers between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually. Tuition at US universities and colleges, moreover, is reaching levels which threaten the ability of the middle class to afford higher education. Many institutions maintain they are embarking on cost-shifting programs, whereby the more moneyed students—able to pay or take out loans—will subsidized through their tuition a poorer colleague. Some colleges and universities, nevertheless, are experiencing financial difficulties which severely limit their ability to offer quality educations.⁷

In early may the Obama administration proposed its first full education budget, funding a plethora of new programs, despite a net decrease for minority-serving colleges and universities; that is, for typically black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions. The administration plans to terminate 12 small federal programs costing $550 million, among others. This new budget should also save $4 billion by way of reducing bank subsidies for federal student loan programs.

1. Standish, Alex. Under Obama: No Child Left Unmonitored. Spiked Online.
2. All Students Proficient on State Tests by 2014? National Science Foundation, 25 September 2008.
3. Barack Obama and Joe Biden Plan for Lifetime Success Through Education
4. Press Release: Trailblazers, Toyota Unveil Community Resource Center at Jefferson High School. Submitted by Sentinel news Service, 3/30/2009.
5. Barack Obama and Joe Biden Plan for Lifetime Success Through Education
6. Brown, David and Hsu, Spencer. Students first in Line for Flu Vaccine. Washington Post, July 10, 2009.
7. Pope, Justin. High School Failing Colleges Now Spend Billions on Remedial Classes for Freshmen. Huffington Post, September 15, 2008.

Many economists assure us the current recession will begin to subside by 2010, but the paradigm from which they conceptualize reality is incomplete, ignoring costs externalized by markets, such as the encroaching effects of habitat destruction. The fledgling and contagious social unrest at hand must be quickly organized, attitudinized and mobilized, for existing environmental, geopolitical and financial upheavals threaten the survival of many. Firstly, the outlook for food yields in 2009 is dismal: Many analysts have warned of a 20 to 40 percent drop in agricultural production, depending on the harshness and duration of the current global drought. Two years ago, however, Science published predictions of “permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” of the United States, and forecast levels of aridity akin to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s that would envelope swaths of land from Kansas to California. The Hadley Center in the UK reported in November 2006,

“Extreme drought is likely to increase from under 3% of the globe today to 30% by 2100 —areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.”

This, of course, is a recipe for widespread desertification. The NOAA foresees drought of considerable duress—“ largely irreversible for 1,000 years”—and identifies the following key regions as facing, insofar as our contemporary purviews are considered, permanent Dust Bowls: (Romm )

• U.S. Southwest
• Southeast Asia
• Eastern South America
• Southern Europe
• Southern Africa
• Northern Africa
• Western Australia

Countries yielding two thirds of the world’s agricultural output are on the precipice of serious climatatic discontinuities reminiscent of the Global Climate Optimum of the 900 to 1300 variety. Food prices will soar, and, in poor countries where food is scarce, millions will starve. One thing we have to fall back on is our natural humanity, —not just our braininess and know how, but also the fact that the collective wet dream that constitutes our social reality skews how many of us can actually live now and in the future. Simply put, by ditching the wet dream and downsizing, we significantly better our plight. There are plenty of atavistics (those who are like, so last dark ages) among us, like Dianne Feinstein, who said that it is Californians “god-given right to water their lawns and gardens.” Southern Californian Scott Thill offers, in an article published by AlterNet, a new definition of the front lawn: “Gorgeously tended middle fingers to reality, which, like death and taxes always, has a way of winning in the end.”

The California drought is anticipated to be the worst in modern times. Already thousands of acres of crops are fallow, with no sign of slowing. Furthermore, the Northern Sierra snowpack for this past winter turned out to be 51% lighter than usual. According to the Los Angeles Times, the state is nearly out of water, leaving it with prayers of rain and a dwindling Northern California supply. Los Angeles has already begun allocation of water, which, as Scott Thill points out, means water to the rich (north) and away from the poor (south). He then portends evacuations and realignments, “by 2100, you will not recognize it.” East of southern California, 18 percent of Texas is burdened by severe drought.

In some countries historical relief efforts have been undertaken. The Chinese government has allocated 86.7 billion yuan (roughly $12.69 billion) to affected regions, and, moreover, lent a helping hand to its western colleagues during the financial crisis, but also to nature itself. Officials in Beijing blasted silver iodide into clouds over northern China to create precipitation as a means of alleviating the most severe drought experienced by the region in half a century. King your fingers crossed (or maybe not, there’’s no telling with these things!), as China produces 18% of the world’s grain each year.

Australia has been in the midst of an unremitting dry spell since 2004, as 41% of the country’s agriculture suffers the worst drought in the 117 years of record-keeping. Rivers have stopped flowing, lakes are being eradicated by toxicity, and farmers have left their land.

Shall we proceed? Argentina’’s worst drought in half a century has turned that country’s verdant landscapes to dust. The country has declared emergency. Soy plants are scorched by the sun and Argentina’’s food production is set to go down a minimum of 50 percent or greater. 2008’’s wheat yield was 16.3 million metric tons, whereas 2009′’s is projected to be merely 8.7 metric tons.

Africa faces food shortages due to lack of rainfall. Half the agricultural soil has lost nutrients necessary to grow plant. The Middle East and Central Asia, to boot, are suffering from contemporary nadir droughts and food grain production is at the lowest levels in decades. A major shortage of planting seed for the 2010 crop is expected.

Stocks of foodstuff are dangerously low worldwide. Agricultural commodities must rise in price so as to obviate even larger food shortages and famine. Wheat, corn, soybeans, etc. must become expensive enough so that every available acre is harvested with the best possible fertilizers. With food prices steady, production will continue to fall and millions would starve.

A spike in food price is likely to spark competitive currency appreciation in 2009. Foreign exchange reserves exist for this. Central banks the globe over would lower domestic food prices by either directly selling off their reserves to appreciate their currency or buying grain from the market. Appreciating a currency is the fastest way to control food inflation. The more valuable a currency the more monopolistic a nation over global resources —so, for example, an overvalued dollar enables the US to consume 25% of the world’s oil, despite only having 4% of the world’s population. Were China to sell off its US reserves, its population of over one billion would then suck up the world’s food supply. Prices soar around the world.

This process, however, would most likely not end up in the impoverishment of nation states per se, though almost certainly the disintegration of the modern middle class, already long past its youthful heyday. The American Dream has been repeatedly resuscitated over the last thirty years through portfolio insurance, Long-Term Capital Management, the internet, the housing market, and now the looters have taken to the streets—oh, excuse me; I mean to their theoretical electronic world—and pillaged the landscape.

Social unrest and soaring food prices go hand in hand, from sea to shining sea. Countries, so as to avoid revolutionary reform from the bottom up, would have no choice but to appreciate their currencies in order to cheapen food imports. China holds the best deck, and so then would sell off more of its reserves. The world’s reserve currency, the dollar, floats into precarious waters. As a fiat currency, the US dollar is, by its very nature, worthless. Trillions of US holdings could be liquidated in favor of food.

“”We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger.” (President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address 24 Feb 2009)

In Washington, talk of bailouts and relief are framed in the realm of economics and economics only, with no considerable deliberation of our species ecological outlook. The budget proposal is sold as a demand oriented New Deal-esque expansionary program, with health, education, renewable energy, investment infrastructure and transportation at its forefront. The hope is to stimulate employment, boost social programs and to revive the real economy. Michel Chossudovsky reports in a recent article published by Global Research, that —– surprise, surprise— — the “stimulus package” is the most substantial diverging of public spending ever, and serves the interests of Wall Street, in particular, the finance, oil and defense cartel. This in and of itself should cause social unrest, and certainly makes more likely the potential evaporation of the middle class.

The 2010 fiscal year, which begins on October 1st, will represent an increase in spending of 32%. The nucleus of the proposal inflates defense and the Middle East War funds, the Wall Street bank “bailouts that never end,” so-called by the New York Times, and interest on a debt that exceeds ten-fold the world’’s GDP. The bailout— financed, in part, by the recipients themselves, the creditors, which, as understood by the Treasury and the banks in the first place, meant the FED enjoyed sweeping authority over how the money was to be spent from the onset of this collapse—continues under the new proposed budget. Unlike Keynesian style deficits, this piling on of debt through the proposed budget would not stimulate investment and consumer demand; there will be no expansion of production and employment, for the giveaway of tax dollars to the financial oligarchs is no more than a monumental concentration of wealth and centralization of world banking power.

Washington places defense spending at $739.5 billion, though some estimates assert aggregate defense and military related spending at more than $1 trillion. The total of both bailouts—, Obama’s $750 billion piled on top of Bush’s $700 billion dollar bailout, —is 1.45 trillion dollars paid for by the Treasury. Virtually all federal government revenues would be expended to finance the bank handouts: 1.45 trillion, the war; $739 billion, and interest payments on public debt; $164 billion. And then the well is dry. There are no funds available for the social programs encapsulated in the stimulus package. Therefore, programs for healthcare and education will most likely be sold to private enterprise to fund the bankrupt state. Education is not the only state asset that is at risk of being privatized: Public infrastructure, urban services, highways, national parks, etc. are all at risk. The worsening fiscal collapse coalesces in the privatization of the state, tilling the land for a much more lucrative market in governance and social control.

Many economists hypothesize that the Obama administration is employing Zimbabwe School of Economics policies, where by hyperinflation is produced through the incessant printing of money, resulting in that currency’s fall to zero. Currently, we are seeing the simultaneous devaluation of the currency and the purchase of the world’’s commodities by corporations, government assets included; a process that will presumably leave the rest of us with toilet paper.

So, that leaves us with a raped resource base and a new system of globalized neo-feudalism. In 1800, —around the time of the Industrial Revolution—, there were 969,000,000 humans on earth. That leaves more than five billion redundant individuals whose lives were made possible by fossil fuels and abundance of water. A ubiquitous and enduring reorientation of human cognition is the key to survival: in short, reprioritization. This problem is of the utmost importance. A change of consciousness would result in a change in mass behavior. This starts at the obvious level: short-showers, low-flow everything, no lawns, total conservation and the reorientation of the economy based on renewable resources and sustenance. We must then work on disbelieving in our governments and the moribund banking system.

An all-pervasive insurgency, attacking multi-laterally the global industrial grid oligarchy, with broad but explicit aims— among which a new harmony with the natural world is foremost— must, before all else, work towards dismantling tyrannical corporations. Computers and electricity are the lifeblood of civilizations. Coordinated attacks against the electric grid, financial markets, and destroyers of the environment could be wildly successful, but could only be so as part of a talented and colossal movement with army-like discipline. Specialization comes in handy. The average American city has food for about half a month, which means economies will need know-how to localize and quick.

Another option would be to create companies of our own to challenge the global giants. Max Keiser, host of the Oracle on the BBC, has championed the idea of creating huge syndicates of boycotters against companies such as Coca-Cola and Exxon/Mobil. The money saved would be diverted to the world’s top activism organizations. The biggest take-home lesson when it comes to boycotts is this: the consumer wields enormous power. You’’ve been told it before and it’’s true. Boycotts of certain market elements such as the Fed Cartel (Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America), in which we move our money, refinance with another bank, sell our stock or quit our jobs, is a major step in the right direction.

Your television lies. Propagandistic news networks like CNN, NBC, ABC, Fox, etc are the only companies from whom Americans get their daily dose of news. The panoply of diverse news websites on the internet forms the most active resistance community around; further privatization and censoring of the internet must be actively challenged. The corporate attitudinized mass media dangles carrots in front of the consumer’s face from the confines of a hallucinatory feedback loop. Awash in an onslaught of terroristic American-style boulevard journalism, dimension is hard to find. The axioms with which the corporate-owned media frame reality are so far off base that it can be taxing for many of us to find the right ripostes while discussing our world with Nationalists. A good example is the recent slandering of Michel Phelps, caught toking with a relatively impressive piece of glass. The pro-marijuana movement has failed utterly, —though they are indeed going up against a billion dollar smear campaign— to gain traction with this simple notion: That had Michel Phelps not indulged in marijuana, his record breaking Olympic performance would have been inconceivable. There are many doctors who have championed the medical benefits of marijuana, some going so far as to suggest THC promotes brain cell growth.

Don’t join the military, for the US government and mercenaries view soldiers as cannon fodder or expendable assets; one in four soldiers in the US is homeless.

Wine-making vats are an excellent habitat for a multitude of micro-organisms. By fermenting the juice of crushed fruit, the organisms explode at first before depleting the once abundant nutrients needed for survival. They eventually die from the accrual of alcohol and carbon dioxide they themselves produced. We choke just the same on our industrial discharge, especially in agglomerations such as Southern California and BosWash on the eastern seaboard. By making our communities self-sustainable with clean energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, and magnetic— forever replacing the obsolete 80-year long enterprise known as the combustible engine—, we make ourselves and our families less dependent on the broken state-enterprise apparatus. Not to mention less toxic.

It’s important to remember, there’’s always the future. We must keep our humanity; —it’s much too late in the ballgame to be weighed down by our razor-thin ideologies, be they Marxism, Capitalism, Christianity, Islam, Nudism, Obamaism, Indie Rockism, Hyphy, Fuck the’ policeism, or what have you. Understanding, compassion, and altruism are the chords deep within our souls, and once struck it is clear that they are the essence of humanity.

Allow me to introduce you to a peculiar form of denial called anosognosia, the condition in which a person suffering from a disability due to brain injury appears unaware or denies the existence of the malady. This ailment applies to radical changes in one’s life, affecting the newly blind or paralyzed. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, suffered from anosognosia after a stroke on October 2, 1919. After the bloodletting of “the war to end all wars” subsided, Wilson’’s first priority was the establishment of the League of Nations, which he believed would help ensure world peace. With the help of those by his side, Wilson ignored the seriousness of his stroke, and continued to look forward to more campaigning in favor of the League, and even the possibility of a third term. Wilson was no more than wool gathering with such hopes in light of his incapacity.

The industrialized world’s superego is suffering from a terminal form of anosognosia: We have all gone insane. That we find solace in proclamations from economists that the current financial crisis will subside in a year’’s time, while momentarily watching the corporate nanny state’s complete submission to corporate rule, is further evidence of our aloofness. Our capacity for widespread social reform is great if only we exercise our power. Malcom X expressed his belief that one day there would be a clash between the rich and poor of the world, and, in all likelihood—, details of how it may or may not play out aside—, we are headed towards such a clash. So, before we starve between a stream and a berry bush, now is the time for us to reconsider our goals and desires. Next week is the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq. I suggest we all consider penciling it into our day planners.