meganmonkey
01-16-2008, 02:23 PM
I haven't finished this yet, but i found it interesting so far especially in light of discussions here regarding Edwards' populist message, some previous discussions regarding the role of the New Deal in soothing/reigning in the masses, etc. Curious to see what others think about it. ---mm
Peak Capitalism? A Commentary
By Richard Moore
1/13/08
I came across a very intriguing article in the NY Times by Peter Goodman , Dec 30: “The Free Market: A False Idol After All?”
http://WWW.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/weeki ... ref=slogin (http://WWW.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/weekinreview/30goodman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
This headline really grabbed my attention. The free market has been the unquestioned economic story line ever since Reagan’s day. What does it mean when the NY Times — the flagship of US propaganda — begins undermining that story line? My attention was grabbed even more by this quote I noticed in the article: “Untethered market forces lead to bad things”, said Mr. Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. “You simply can’t run an economy as complicated as ours on ideology alone”. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a well-known neo-conservative think tank– from which one expects only neoliberal economic views. What’s going on here?? Why are they implicitly but obviously calling for regulatory interventionism? This brings to mind as well the recent statements by the Federal Reserve, implying that new regulations were needed in the credit game.
Keep in mind that this shift from the Economic Policy Institute does not represent any new economic insight on their part. Everyone with any smarts, including them, always knew that the free market was destructive to national economies. Indeed, the purpose of the neoliberal project was to undermine national sovereignty in general.
This EPI statement is a propaganda shift, a shift in ‘the story line’.
Also keep in mind that the US has never really observed the principles of neoliberalism. We forced other nations to open their markets, and drop their subsidies and tariffs — by means of the WTO and IMF — but we always reserved the right to ignore those principles in our own case, as for example with agricultural subsidies, and the time we prevented China from buying an American-owned oil company. We never have been running our economy “on ideology alone”. Again, we see that this statement by the EPI is a change in the story line, not a new insight.
Certainly this EPI shift does not indicate that capitalism is being abandoned, but it does represent a significant turning point. As long as neoliberalism was the unquestioned story line, that meant capitalism was still on the upsurge, still the core of elite management strategy. If neoliberalism is beginning to fall from favor, and if this is going to be reflected in the story line, that suggests the tide of capitalism has passed its highest point, and is beginning to recede. In other words, capitalism may be past its peak as a clique tool, and this NY Times piece might be one of our first signals to that effect, along with the statements by the Federal Reserve.
And there are indeed good reasons why capitalism should be falling from favor in the eyes of our clique — who always look at everything from a long-range perspective. Capitalism, as a fundamental economic model, no longer makes much sense for them. Growth for growth’s sake has been a very powerful tool of wealth accumulation over the centuries; it’s done its job well for those at the top of the financial pyramid. But that growth has now collided with an immovable barrier: the finiteness of the Earth and its resources.
Certainly our clique intends to continue exploiting and plundering, but the capitalist formula, objectively speaking, has now served its purpose — and its dynamics no longer serve our clique as they have in the past. The evidence of this lies before us, as the hyper-inflated capitalist financial bubble is beginning to burst world wide, and the American economy is kaput. Purely from a management perspective, isn’t it clear that it’s time for a reorganization of the system?
In any case, the rest of this analysis will be based on these five assumptions:
(1) - The neocon agenda is no longer the core of clique tactics.
(2) - The neocon agenda has spread dissent and led people to lose faith in the system.
(3) - Major programs are going to be launched around climate change and new energy sources.
(4) - Capitalism is no longer sacrosanct as a basis for economic policy.
(5) - The US economy is in shambles.
Many of us have feared that an economic collapse was in the works — there is certainly much evidence for that at the moment, with subprime mortgages, deficits, and all. That fear led us to the fear that martial law would be imposed, in order to control the resulting chaos — and we saw the Patriot Act as being the preparation for that. That scenario was a core part of the neocon agenda, and that scenario too I think has now been abandoned, or at least postponed indefinitely. There are, given our assumptions, better ways to proceed.
From the clique’s perspective, I’d want to set up the next administration to really turn things around — to take bold steps to create a situation that would move Americans back into their comfort zone. The PNAC agenda was about outright fascism, which made sense if your plan includes a period of economic collapse combined with more aggressive warfare. But if the iron boot of fascism won’t be available to control the masses, it makes sense to avoid economic collapse and ‘bring the masses back onside’ — to restore American’s faith in the system. While Bush gave us only fear and dissent, I’d want the new administration to cheer everyone up, put a smile on their faces. And nothing cheers folks up like a positive economic turn around. If capitalist ideology is no longer sacrosanct, that provides the flexibility needed in order to create such an economic turn around.
What we are likely to see, then, are a bevy of major government economic programs, quite different than those of the New Deal, but on a similar dramatic scale. It’s like this time we’re getting our New Deal just before an economic collapse was going to hit, without having to actually live through another Great Depression. And indeed, another Great Depression would be inevitable without economic interventions on the scale of the New Deal. Even the bankers are beginning to hint in this direction, as they contemplate their debt write-off nightmare.
The Grand Banner of these economic programs will of course be the Gore agenda, ‘doing something’ about climate change and peak oil.
That’s been signaled quite clearly. Even the major fronts in the campaign have been signaled: biofuels, research in and deployment of new energy technologies, more efficient automobiles, carbon taxes, and carbon credits. Many of these programs are already well underway, but that hasn’t been emphasized in the media. Thus the new administration is provided with a head start on their programs, and will be in a position to take all the credit for them.
This kind of economic agenda could indeed generate a lot of economic activity. Government-funded development programs could fan out into increased employment, for example. Or subsidies and taxes could be used to develop new technologies and create markets for those technologies — and we could get a little boom-cycle out of something like electric cars or solar cells. There is a foundation here, upon which could be built an economic-recovery program. But if we really want to put a smile on America’s faces, there’s a lot that needs to be added to this foundation.
For one thing, no one smiles if they and their children have no health insurance. If we are indeed prepared to take ‘bold steps’ — which I think makes sense for our clique at this time — then we can expect the new administration to implement some kind of program that ensures all Americans have at least a minimal level of medical security. That would certainly make the politicians popular as well.
Similarly, unemployed folks don’t smile much, and increased employment needs to be part of any economic recovery program. Thus we can expect the new administration to undertake programs that are effective in moving us toward full employment, more so than we might expect from a Gore agenda alone.
The big problem of course will be how to fund such a neo-New Deal.
According to capitalist economics the US is bankrupt, deeply in debt, and is hemorrhaging cash-flow losses. We have our fingers crossed that China won’t dump it’s deteriorating dollar holdings, but we certainly can’t expect them to fund a New Deal for us by buying up massive new government security offerings. If capitalism is sacrosanct, a neo-New Deal is not feasible. If capitalism is no longer sacrosanct, then a neo-New Deal becomes feasible.
Indeed, any new economic game is always feasible, as long as there is freedom to declare a new set of rules. Our economy is nothing but a game, a game played with tokens issued by the Federal Reserve, tokens whose value and availability is determined by the Federal Reserve. If they decide to issue a new set of tokens, and base their value on some new story line, they can do so. Their currency never has been based on anything real. We’ve always needed to close our eyes and trust them in order to get on with life. They’ve always counted on that, and they can still count on it.
If they want to change the rules of the game — the tax, credit, and regulatory framework — they can do so. If they want to insulate the American economy from the global economy, they can do so. If they want to create a game that operates without economic growth in token terms, they can do so. If they want to turn the game into a command economy, they can do that as well. Us peons will be cheered up by whatever game delivers the goods. We always are. And when we’re getting the goods, we believe we are living in democracies. That’s when our clique feels most secure. The most domesticated of all sheeple are the ones who believe they are free.
Although the economy at one level is a contrived game, there do need to be some real resources available for exploitation in order to fuel real economic activity. And here we can begin to see some of the pieces of the picture coming together. The Gore agenda — biofuels et al — is all about re-allocating the resources of the Global South to fuel the engines of the Industrial North. It’s a global version of seizing the Great Plains from the American Indians. Let’s look at how this works in a particular case, the case of Brazil, whom Washington recently persuaded to begin a massive program of biofuels production.
Biofuels make a lot of sense to Brazilian farmers. They can get a good price on global markets relative to other agricultural products.
And every farmer loves a strong and reliable market for his products, and there it is for biofuels — all those cars, trucks, ships, and planes running around in the world. If global energy prices go up, that’s all the better for the farmers; the biofuel prices track up along with them. For Lulu, closing a deal with Washington for biofuel production scores easy political points with the whole farming sector. But what does it mean for Brazil? And how much do the farmers really benefit?
For the Brazilian people, it means their food supply will be reduced by the same amount that biofuel production increases. If sufficiently many farmers switch to biofuel production, there will be famine and starvation in Brazil. If the new administration pushes really hard for more biofuel production, they are in effect waging a campaign to starve as many Brazilians to death as possible.
When you take away a people’s land, their source of sustenance, for your own use, you are condemning them to either death, exile, or virtual serfdom on the land that was theirs. This is true whether you occupy the land, as we did when we Won the West, or whether you gain control over the land by other means, such as a strong market price for biofuels. As we run our fuel-efficient cars, and our Industrial North, increasingly on biofuels, we are as surely invading Brazil as if we were doing it with covered wagons and the cavalry. To the extent we can maximize the conversion of suitable land to biofuel production, to that extent we are pursuing a path of genocide in the Global South.
As regards the farmers, they will be little more than serfs, whether on their independent farms, or as laborers in industrial farming operations. As in all agricultural sectors these days, the farmer gets a subsistence price for his products, the consumer pays a premium price, and the middle men — the distributors and the financiers — get the lion’s share of the profits from the overall transaction. The ultimate ‘biofuels vision’ would turn the global South into one big biofuel plantation, and the only people living down there would be the plantation slaves and their bosses. Once again we’d have the Industrial North, and the Slave Plantation South, only this time the South would be producing something the North could use, instead of growing cotton for export elsewhere.
Who knows, by following such a colonial vision, it might actually be possible for the automobile, much improved, to survive peak oil.
Given people’s attachment to their cars, they’ll be able to rationalize whatever is required to keep those cars purring along.
Keep in mind that it was only a minority of western pioneers who actually encountered the Indians, and who thought that ‘the only good redskin is a dead redskin’. The bulk of the population in the East was comparatively liberal and sympathetic to the Indians. And yet they acquiesced in the systematic genocide, as their ‘great nation’ pursued its ‘immanent domain’. In general liberal Northerners have adjusted very well to imperialist excesses of all sorts, particularly if they perceived themselves as being well off. If it means people can keep their cars, they won’t be in any mind to connect the dots to mass famines ‘down there’, which the media will be only to eager to blame on unfortunate natural causes.
I’ve been focusing overmuch on biofuels, I fear, as they provide such a rich picture of the nature of the Gore agenda. In fact, the appropriation of the resources of the Global South has been the hallmark of imperialism from the beginning, and a fully exploited South would not be devoted exclusively to biofuel plantations. There would also be mines, oil wells, cattle and coffee plantations, slum factory zones, etc, each area producing whatever it is most efficient at producing. What is special about the biofuel program is that it signals a ‘final assault’ on the Global South, the launching of a ‘final solution’ to the problem of exploiting the resources of the South.
Instead of interventions and intrigues, tin horn dictators and market forces — instead of all these troublesome mechanisms of indirect resource management, we are now going for the jugular, the food supply. We are setting out to clear the land for our use, so that we can keep the Industrial North running. Most of the people on the land are for our purposes now redundant, what Kissinger — author of that infamous Government report on population control — refers to as ‘useless feeders’. We can see this final solution in operation already in Sub-Saharan Africa, where six million children die each year from disease and starvation, and the genocidal process is helped along by destabilizing interventions of various kinds, while the media blames it all on droughts and tribal conflicts.
In the decades following World War II the Industrial North experienced a boom period, under capitalism, based on opening up the Global South (’Free World’) to exploitation by capital generally, no longer restricted by the old colonial boundaries. Now that the capitalist growth paradigm has collided with the immovable barrier of the Earth’s finite resources, a bold new strategy is required in order to keep the engines of the Industrial North running. And once again that strategy will be based on finding a way to more systematically exploit the resources of the Global South. The time has come, evidently, to take a ‘final solution’ approach to that exploitation.
At the same time, this strategy is likely to include a shift away from growth-based economics and the capitalist paradigm. Acquiring exclusive use of the resources of the South provides the engines of the North with considerable fuel of various kinds, but the Earth remains nonetheless finite. An economic game designed more along feudal lines would be a more suitable response to the reality of finiteness. We’d want a game where wealth is measured in terms of ‘resources controlled’, rather than by ’success in speculative ventures’ — where people play fiefdom games of various kinds, at various levels, rather than always seeking to innovate and displace old ways of doing things, thus generating growth and waste. Our clique can run the casino for such a game, and rake in its desired take from each transaction, just as well as with any other game.
Capitalism has always been just a tool, the game of choice for a time. Five hundred years is a long life-span for any paradigm. Did the Roman Empire last longer?
In such a more feudal-like game environment, we’re going to see a major reversal in the tides of globalization. We’re going to see a resurgence of territoriality and regionalism. China is already organizing its region in that way, with the SCO and related initiatives. China has long expressed the desire, nay the natural right, to regional hegemony, and it seems sincere in wanting only that. Self-containment is a very long tradition in Chinese culture.
In the expansion of the EU into the former Soviet Block, we see the creation of another viable regional block, even if it might have been created for other reasons, under an earlier game plan. Russia fits nicely into a game of territories, being so vast on its own, and with a wealth of resources that its neighboring blocks are eager to buy at market price. A reunion with some of the old Soviet Block to the south would make a lot of sense for both parties.
This brings us to the North American Union, and the new Amero currency. Canadians seem to be a lot more aware of the NAU than are folks in the US. To most Americans (by which I usually mean the US variety), the NAU is just another conspiracy theory. Canadians on the other hand have long felt colonized by America, both culturally and economically. Particularly recently, with both free trade treaties and heightened security malarkey, Canadians can see that they are becoming more and more integrated into a North American system of some kind. They have been much more alert to what’s going on, and they’ve been tracking the somewhat covert progress of this other regional block, the North American Union, which is to be made up of Canada, the US, and Mexico, and which is to have a new currency, the Amero.
Canada has lots of resources and relatively few people. It’s got uranium, timber, water, wheat, and much else. Mexico brings to the party lots of cheap labor, lots of good agricultural land, and a variety of resources that can be more systematically exploited with the help of some investment in modernization. The NAU amounts to a colonial expansion on the part of the US, a bit like England absorbing Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in earlier days. On paper there might be some kind equality in the arrangement, but in reality it will be the US operators and the US part of the economy that will get the lion’s share of the benefits. For Mexico, the NAU may turn out to be a good thing nonetheless, if it spares them the holocaust being prepared for the Global South.
Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution present us with two alternative possible futures for South America. The Bolivarian alternative would be by far the best one for the people of South America. This alternative would lead to South America as a regional block in its own right, with its own relatively adequate resource base, oil and all. This alternative would however save South America from the fate of the Global South, and hence would seriously reduce the total resource base available for exploitation by the Industrial North.
As much as I love and support Chavez, and pray for his noble efforts to succeed, I fear that a resurgence is very likely in covert interventions in the left-leaning South American upstart nations.
Perhaps there will even a return to the era of the dictators and the disappeared. The rest of the world, each busy building their own regional havens, would be quite happy to tolerate US imperialism in South America — its traditional back yard — if in return Washington reduces its meddling in the rest of the world’s affairs, hence the PNAC rein-in. Our clique cannot afford to let South America achieve its liberation. In a regionalized world, an Industrialized North America needs South America as its own regional share of the Global South, along with whatever it can grab in Africa and elsewhere (eg, Kenya). The Monroe Doctrine lives on. The new biofuel program in Brazil is the harbinger of the onslaught to come.
As for global warming, Some people will need to migrate or move to higher ground. That’s all that can really be done in any case. The Co2 time bomb has already been unleashed, and any continuation of an Industrial North, even a less wasteful one, guarantees that climate change will not be reversed any time soon. Besides, as we’ve seen with New Orleans and the Southeast Asian tsunami, climate change can be a handy expediter of the genocide, clear-the-land agenda. Naomi Klein writes about this in her excellent book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.
And indeed, Shock Doctrine and Disaster are apt characterizations of the Holocaust scenario we are on the verge of initiating, as we go for the jugular in the Global South, using market forces to starve the natives off the land.
Peak Capitalism? A Commentary
By Richard Moore
1/13/08
I came across a very intriguing article in the NY Times by Peter Goodman , Dec 30: “The Free Market: A False Idol After All?”
http://WWW.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/weeki ... ref=slogin (http://WWW.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/weekinreview/30goodman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
This headline really grabbed my attention. The free market has been the unquestioned economic story line ever since Reagan’s day. What does it mean when the NY Times — the flagship of US propaganda — begins undermining that story line? My attention was grabbed even more by this quote I noticed in the article: “Untethered market forces lead to bad things”, said Mr. Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. “You simply can’t run an economy as complicated as ours on ideology alone”. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a well-known neo-conservative think tank– from which one expects only neoliberal economic views. What’s going on here?? Why are they implicitly but obviously calling for regulatory interventionism? This brings to mind as well the recent statements by the Federal Reserve, implying that new regulations were needed in the credit game.
Keep in mind that this shift from the Economic Policy Institute does not represent any new economic insight on their part. Everyone with any smarts, including them, always knew that the free market was destructive to national economies. Indeed, the purpose of the neoliberal project was to undermine national sovereignty in general.
This EPI statement is a propaganda shift, a shift in ‘the story line’.
Also keep in mind that the US has never really observed the principles of neoliberalism. We forced other nations to open their markets, and drop their subsidies and tariffs — by means of the WTO and IMF — but we always reserved the right to ignore those principles in our own case, as for example with agricultural subsidies, and the time we prevented China from buying an American-owned oil company. We never have been running our economy “on ideology alone”. Again, we see that this statement by the EPI is a change in the story line, not a new insight.
Certainly this EPI shift does not indicate that capitalism is being abandoned, but it does represent a significant turning point. As long as neoliberalism was the unquestioned story line, that meant capitalism was still on the upsurge, still the core of elite management strategy. If neoliberalism is beginning to fall from favor, and if this is going to be reflected in the story line, that suggests the tide of capitalism has passed its highest point, and is beginning to recede. In other words, capitalism may be past its peak as a clique tool, and this NY Times piece might be one of our first signals to that effect, along with the statements by the Federal Reserve.
And there are indeed good reasons why capitalism should be falling from favor in the eyes of our clique — who always look at everything from a long-range perspective. Capitalism, as a fundamental economic model, no longer makes much sense for them. Growth for growth’s sake has been a very powerful tool of wealth accumulation over the centuries; it’s done its job well for those at the top of the financial pyramid. But that growth has now collided with an immovable barrier: the finiteness of the Earth and its resources.
Certainly our clique intends to continue exploiting and plundering, but the capitalist formula, objectively speaking, has now served its purpose — and its dynamics no longer serve our clique as they have in the past. The evidence of this lies before us, as the hyper-inflated capitalist financial bubble is beginning to burst world wide, and the American economy is kaput. Purely from a management perspective, isn’t it clear that it’s time for a reorganization of the system?
In any case, the rest of this analysis will be based on these five assumptions:
(1) - The neocon agenda is no longer the core of clique tactics.
(2) - The neocon agenda has spread dissent and led people to lose faith in the system.
(3) - Major programs are going to be launched around climate change and new energy sources.
(4) - Capitalism is no longer sacrosanct as a basis for economic policy.
(5) - The US economy is in shambles.
Many of us have feared that an economic collapse was in the works — there is certainly much evidence for that at the moment, with subprime mortgages, deficits, and all. That fear led us to the fear that martial law would be imposed, in order to control the resulting chaos — and we saw the Patriot Act as being the preparation for that. That scenario was a core part of the neocon agenda, and that scenario too I think has now been abandoned, or at least postponed indefinitely. There are, given our assumptions, better ways to proceed.
From the clique’s perspective, I’d want to set up the next administration to really turn things around — to take bold steps to create a situation that would move Americans back into their comfort zone. The PNAC agenda was about outright fascism, which made sense if your plan includes a period of economic collapse combined with more aggressive warfare. But if the iron boot of fascism won’t be available to control the masses, it makes sense to avoid economic collapse and ‘bring the masses back onside’ — to restore American’s faith in the system. While Bush gave us only fear and dissent, I’d want the new administration to cheer everyone up, put a smile on their faces. And nothing cheers folks up like a positive economic turn around. If capitalist ideology is no longer sacrosanct, that provides the flexibility needed in order to create such an economic turn around.
What we are likely to see, then, are a bevy of major government economic programs, quite different than those of the New Deal, but on a similar dramatic scale. It’s like this time we’re getting our New Deal just before an economic collapse was going to hit, without having to actually live through another Great Depression. And indeed, another Great Depression would be inevitable without economic interventions on the scale of the New Deal. Even the bankers are beginning to hint in this direction, as they contemplate their debt write-off nightmare.
The Grand Banner of these economic programs will of course be the Gore agenda, ‘doing something’ about climate change and peak oil.
That’s been signaled quite clearly. Even the major fronts in the campaign have been signaled: biofuels, research in and deployment of new energy technologies, more efficient automobiles, carbon taxes, and carbon credits. Many of these programs are already well underway, but that hasn’t been emphasized in the media. Thus the new administration is provided with a head start on their programs, and will be in a position to take all the credit for them.
This kind of economic agenda could indeed generate a lot of economic activity. Government-funded development programs could fan out into increased employment, for example. Or subsidies and taxes could be used to develop new technologies and create markets for those technologies — and we could get a little boom-cycle out of something like electric cars or solar cells. There is a foundation here, upon which could be built an economic-recovery program. But if we really want to put a smile on America’s faces, there’s a lot that needs to be added to this foundation.
For one thing, no one smiles if they and their children have no health insurance. If we are indeed prepared to take ‘bold steps’ — which I think makes sense for our clique at this time — then we can expect the new administration to implement some kind of program that ensures all Americans have at least a minimal level of medical security. That would certainly make the politicians popular as well.
Similarly, unemployed folks don’t smile much, and increased employment needs to be part of any economic recovery program. Thus we can expect the new administration to undertake programs that are effective in moving us toward full employment, more so than we might expect from a Gore agenda alone.
The big problem of course will be how to fund such a neo-New Deal.
According to capitalist economics the US is bankrupt, deeply in debt, and is hemorrhaging cash-flow losses. We have our fingers crossed that China won’t dump it’s deteriorating dollar holdings, but we certainly can’t expect them to fund a New Deal for us by buying up massive new government security offerings. If capitalism is sacrosanct, a neo-New Deal is not feasible. If capitalism is no longer sacrosanct, then a neo-New Deal becomes feasible.
Indeed, any new economic game is always feasible, as long as there is freedom to declare a new set of rules. Our economy is nothing but a game, a game played with tokens issued by the Federal Reserve, tokens whose value and availability is determined by the Federal Reserve. If they decide to issue a new set of tokens, and base their value on some new story line, they can do so. Their currency never has been based on anything real. We’ve always needed to close our eyes and trust them in order to get on with life. They’ve always counted on that, and they can still count on it.
If they want to change the rules of the game — the tax, credit, and regulatory framework — they can do so. If they want to insulate the American economy from the global economy, they can do so. If they want to create a game that operates without economic growth in token terms, they can do so. If they want to turn the game into a command economy, they can do that as well. Us peons will be cheered up by whatever game delivers the goods. We always are. And when we’re getting the goods, we believe we are living in democracies. That’s when our clique feels most secure. The most domesticated of all sheeple are the ones who believe they are free.
Although the economy at one level is a contrived game, there do need to be some real resources available for exploitation in order to fuel real economic activity. And here we can begin to see some of the pieces of the picture coming together. The Gore agenda — biofuels et al — is all about re-allocating the resources of the Global South to fuel the engines of the Industrial North. It’s a global version of seizing the Great Plains from the American Indians. Let’s look at how this works in a particular case, the case of Brazil, whom Washington recently persuaded to begin a massive program of biofuels production.
Biofuels make a lot of sense to Brazilian farmers. They can get a good price on global markets relative to other agricultural products.
And every farmer loves a strong and reliable market for his products, and there it is for biofuels — all those cars, trucks, ships, and planes running around in the world. If global energy prices go up, that’s all the better for the farmers; the biofuel prices track up along with them. For Lulu, closing a deal with Washington for biofuel production scores easy political points with the whole farming sector. But what does it mean for Brazil? And how much do the farmers really benefit?
For the Brazilian people, it means their food supply will be reduced by the same amount that biofuel production increases. If sufficiently many farmers switch to biofuel production, there will be famine and starvation in Brazil. If the new administration pushes really hard for more biofuel production, they are in effect waging a campaign to starve as many Brazilians to death as possible.
When you take away a people’s land, their source of sustenance, for your own use, you are condemning them to either death, exile, or virtual serfdom on the land that was theirs. This is true whether you occupy the land, as we did when we Won the West, or whether you gain control over the land by other means, such as a strong market price for biofuels. As we run our fuel-efficient cars, and our Industrial North, increasingly on biofuels, we are as surely invading Brazil as if we were doing it with covered wagons and the cavalry. To the extent we can maximize the conversion of suitable land to biofuel production, to that extent we are pursuing a path of genocide in the Global South.
As regards the farmers, they will be little more than serfs, whether on their independent farms, or as laborers in industrial farming operations. As in all agricultural sectors these days, the farmer gets a subsistence price for his products, the consumer pays a premium price, and the middle men — the distributors and the financiers — get the lion’s share of the profits from the overall transaction. The ultimate ‘biofuels vision’ would turn the global South into one big biofuel plantation, and the only people living down there would be the plantation slaves and their bosses. Once again we’d have the Industrial North, and the Slave Plantation South, only this time the South would be producing something the North could use, instead of growing cotton for export elsewhere.
Who knows, by following such a colonial vision, it might actually be possible for the automobile, much improved, to survive peak oil.
Given people’s attachment to their cars, they’ll be able to rationalize whatever is required to keep those cars purring along.
Keep in mind that it was only a minority of western pioneers who actually encountered the Indians, and who thought that ‘the only good redskin is a dead redskin’. The bulk of the population in the East was comparatively liberal and sympathetic to the Indians. And yet they acquiesced in the systematic genocide, as their ‘great nation’ pursued its ‘immanent domain’. In general liberal Northerners have adjusted very well to imperialist excesses of all sorts, particularly if they perceived themselves as being well off. If it means people can keep their cars, they won’t be in any mind to connect the dots to mass famines ‘down there’, which the media will be only to eager to blame on unfortunate natural causes.
I’ve been focusing overmuch on biofuels, I fear, as they provide such a rich picture of the nature of the Gore agenda. In fact, the appropriation of the resources of the Global South has been the hallmark of imperialism from the beginning, and a fully exploited South would not be devoted exclusively to biofuel plantations. There would also be mines, oil wells, cattle and coffee plantations, slum factory zones, etc, each area producing whatever it is most efficient at producing. What is special about the biofuel program is that it signals a ‘final assault’ on the Global South, the launching of a ‘final solution’ to the problem of exploiting the resources of the South.
Instead of interventions and intrigues, tin horn dictators and market forces — instead of all these troublesome mechanisms of indirect resource management, we are now going for the jugular, the food supply. We are setting out to clear the land for our use, so that we can keep the Industrial North running. Most of the people on the land are for our purposes now redundant, what Kissinger — author of that infamous Government report on population control — refers to as ‘useless feeders’. We can see this final solution in operation already in Sub-Saharan Africa, where six million children die each year from disease and starvation, and the genocidal process is helped along by destabilizing interventions of various kinds, while the media blames it all on droughts and tribal conflicts.
In the decades following World War II the Industrial North experienced a boom period, under capitalism, based on opening up the Global South (’Free World’) to exploitation by capital generally, no longer restricted by the old colonial boundaries. Now that the capitalist growth paradigm has collided with the immovable barrier of the Earth’s finite resources, a bold new strategy is required in order to keep the engines of the Industrial North running. And once again that strategy will be based on finding a way to more systematically exploit the resources of the Global South. The time has come, evidently, to take a ‘final solution’ approach to that exploitation.
At the same time, this strategy is likely to include a shift away from growth-based economics and the capitalist paradigm. Acquiring exclusive use of the resources of the South provides the engines of the North with considerable fuel of various kinds, but the Earth remains nonetheless finite. An economic game designed more along feudal lines would be a more suitable response to the reality of finiteness. We’d want a game where wealth is measured in terms of ‘resources controlled’, rather than by ’success in speculative ventures’ — where people play fiefdom games of various kinds, at various levels, rather than always seeking to innovate and displace old ways of doing things, thus generating growth and waste. Our clique can run the casino for such a game, and rake in its desired take from each transaction, just as well as with any other game.
Capitalism has always been just a tool, the game of choice for a time. Five hundred years is a long life-span for any paradigm. Did the Roman Empire last longer?
In such a more feudal-like game environment, we’re going to see a major reversal in the tides of globalization. We’re going to see a resurgence of territoriality and regionalism. China is already organizing its region in that way, with the SCO and related initiatives. China has long expressed the desire, nay the natural right, to regional hegemony, and it seems sincere in wanting only that. Self-containment is a very long tradition in Chinese culture.
In the expansion of the EU into the former Soviet Block, we see the creation of another viable regional block, even if it might have been created for other reasons, under an earlier game plan. Russia fits nicely into a game of territories, being so vast on its own, and with a wealth of resources that its neighboring blocks are eager to buy at market price. A reunion with some of the old Soviet Block to the south would make a lot of sense for both parties.
This brings us to the North American Union, and the new Amero currency. Canadians seem to be a lot more aware of the NAU than are folks in the US. To most Americans (by which I usually mean the US variety), the NAU is just another conspiracy theory. Canadians on the other hand have long felt colonized by America, both culturally and economically. Particularly recently, with both free trade treaties and heightened security malarkey, Canadians can see that they are becoming more and more integrated into a North American system of some kind. They have been much more alert to what’s going on, and they’ve been tracking the somewhat covert progress of this other regional block, the North American Union, which is to be made up of Canada, the US, and Mexico, and which is to have a new currency, the Amero.
Canada has lots of resources and relatively few people. It’s got uranium, timber, water, wheat, and much else. Mexico brings to the party lots of cheap labor, lots of good agricultural land, and a variety of resources that can be more systematically exploited with the help of some investment in modernization. The NAU amounts to a colonial expansion on the part of the US, a bit like England absorbing Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in earlier days. On paper there might be some kind equality in the arrangement, but in reality it will be the US operators and the US part of the economy that will get the lion’s share of the benefits. For Mexico, the NAU may turn out to be a good thing nonetheless, if it spares them the holocaust being prepared for the Global South.
Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution present us with two alternative possible futures for South America. The Bolivarian alternative would be by far the best one for the people of South America. This alternative would lead to South America as a regional block in its own right, with its own relatively adequate resource base, oil and all. This alternative would however save South America from the fate of the Global South, and hence would seriously reduce the total resource base available for exploitation by the Industrial North.
As much as I love and support Chavez, and pray for his noble efforts to succeed, I fear that a resurgence is very likely in covert interventions in the left-leaning South American upstart nations.
Perhaps there will even a return to the era of the dictators and the disappeared. The rest of the world, each busy building their own regional havens, would be quite happy to tolerate US imperialism in South America — its traditional back yard — if in return Washington reduces its meddling in the rest of the world’s affairs, hence the PNAC rein-in. Our clique cannot afford to let South America achieve its liberation. In a regionalized world, an Industrialized North America needs South America as its own regional share of the Global South, along with whatever it can grab in Africa and elsewhere (eg, Kenya). The Monroe Doctrine lives on. The new biofuel program in Brazil is the harbinger of the onslaught to come.
As for global warming, Some people will need to migrate or move to higher ground. That’s all that can really be done in any case. The Co2 time bomb has already been unleashed, and any continuation of an Industrial North, even a less wasteful one, guarantees that climate change will not be reversed any time soon. Besides, as we’ve seen with New Orleans and the Southeast Asian tsunami, climate change can be a handy expediter of the genocide, clear-the-land agenda. Naomi Klein writes about this in her excellent book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.
And indeed, Shock Doctrine and Disaster are apt characterizations of the Holocaust scenario we are on the verge of initiating, as we go for the jugular in the Global South, using market forces to starve the natives off the land.