" I say we
had better look our nation searchingly in the face,
like a physician diagnosing some deep disease."
--Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas"
"Governments arise either
out of the people or over the people."
--Thomas Paine, "The Rights of Man", 1791
"Whatever
games are
played with us,
we must play no
games
with ourselves."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
End Game
for the Industrial Era?
- "There is a systematic
plan to use the concepts of war to
rearrange the chess pieces on the world playing board.
It has to do with the New World Order, Globlism and the attack on
national sovereignty we are seeing. Occasionally, the globalists who
want One World Government have to turn to war to accelerate things."
- Joel Skousen
PREFACE NOTE:
- There is going to be One World Government, one way or
the other. One way (the way it's been going) is towards a totalitarian
Orwellian nightmare of a surveillance society and police state with
"lockstep freedom" to think and act only in highly prescribed ways --
virtually slavery "in the box" of politically correct guidelines delineated
by government bureaucrats, self-righteous theocrats, subservient mediacrats,
mindless educrats, disease-care medicrats, and self-serving corporate
autocrats... all serving the power elite bankster
plutocrats who value the
LOVE OF POWER
above all.
The other way (of, by and for the people
worldwide), is towards sovereignty of global Netizens in an Internetworked
(Net-centric) organizational framework that optimizes Freedom and
Opportunity through a higher standard of God governance -- the
POWER OF LOVE
-- that fulfills U.S. Founders intent... worldwide; The
LOVE Model.
This is the final choice, "judgment" and
"Armageddon" facing mankind... to either champion the win/win victory
virtues in the POWER OF LOVE
at the heart of an economics of Abundance... or succumb to the victim
values that go along like mindless sheople, suffering class warfare under
the win/lose scarcity-based values of a highly centralized, top-down, command-and-control
elite whose LOVE OF POWER
would try to convince the 99.99% of humanity that "We the People" should not
have the sovereign right to own our own lives in a highly decentralized,
cooperative and win/win way that the global Internet now makes possible.
Enlightened Netizens worldwide understand
that WHAT WE ARE SEEING NOW
in the disintegration of civility and civilization today is a "healing
crisis" -- the systemic dis-ease symptoms of a deeply entrenched economics
of scarcity that has reached it's "end
game" of ultimate scarcity in
mindless fear-based divisions, endless war mania and the inversion of true
spirituality -- abundant love - due to the materialistic "value of
scarcity".
Many are aware that the prevailing system of scarcity economics -- based on fiat
currency with no gold backing -- is
bankrupt:
-
spiritually (the oxymoronic "value
of scarcity"),
- mentally
(misinformation re: "the
system"),
- emotionally
(terror dialectic to compel compliance),
- fiscally
(massive deficits).
Understanding the
history, signs and symptoms of the current disintegrating system manifesting
ultimate scarcity is the first step in coming out of denial of the problem
with intent to "take stock" in a wholly new model of integration
along abundance-centric lines (God Government) envisioned by U.S. Founding Fathers. That system, of
course, would require:
- spiritual
abundance (universal
Law Language of God Government),
- mental
abundance (understanding of
the Law and Language),
- emotional
abundance (holy spirit of
the Law-in-action),
- physical
abundance (fulfillment of
the Law).
The BIG SHIFT
is in process. The spiritual capstone to the great material base of
civilization is now in place. Powershift Chart at
www.heartcom.org/powershift.htm . Blueprint coordinates at
www.heartcom.org/blueprint.htm .
In the spirit
of personal and planetary sovereignty, it's time
to finish what U.S. Founders began... worldwide.
All Ways Victory When We LOVE Enough,
-Christopher
"You have to stand
against the whole world although you may have to stand alone.
You have to stare in the face the whole world although the world may look at
you
with blood-shot eyes. Do not fear. Trust the little voice residing within
your heart."
-- Mahatma
Gandhi
----------------- article follows:
The US and Eurasia:
End Game
for the Industrial Era?
February 2003
- "From society's point of view,
geopolitics is a Darwinian collective struggle for increased carrying
capacity;
- but from the individual
geostrategist's viewpoint, it
is a game.
- Indeed, geopolitics could
be considered the ultimate human game
- - one with immense
consequences, and one that can only be
played within a tiny club of elites."
- "When the
game
is over, the king and the pawn go into the same box."
-
Italian proverb
by Richard Heinberg
Richard Heinberg, a journalist and educator, is a member of the core faculty
of New College of California in Santa Rosa, where he teaches a program on
Culture, Ecology, and Sustainable Community. He writes and publishes the monthly
MuseLetter. This article is
adapted from his book, The
Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies .
With the dawn of the 21st century the
world has entered a new stage of geopolitical struggle. The first half of the
20th century can be understood as one long war between Britain (and shifting
allies) and Germany (and shifting allies) for European supremacy.
The second half of the century was dominated by a Cold War between the US, which
emerged as the world's foremost industrial-military power following World War
II, and the Soviet Union and its bloc of protectorates.
The US wars in Afghanistan (in 2001-2002) and Iraq (which, counting economic
sanctions and periodic bombings, has continued from 1990 to the present) have
ushered in the latest stage, which promises to be the final geopolitical
struggle of the industrial period - a struggle for
the control of Eurasia and its energy resources.
- NOTE: That should read
"a struggle for the control of Eurasia THROUGH control
of its energy resources". Enlightened Netizens
worldwide know that there is new technology that could provide inexpensive
clean energy that makes fossil fuels obsolete. Water-fuel cell technology
runs buses in German. Cars run on compressed air in South Africa. I
personally know several inventors who have run cars across the US on
water-to-hydrogen conversion technologies. Tom Beardon and others have
developed scalar technologies for "free energy". Solar panel breakthroughs
are suppressed as are win-turbine breakthroughs. Oil and gas wells were long
ago capped in the U.S. and Canada to create an artificial scarcity for
control of geopolitics through the Middle East, as explained in this article. -CR
My purpose here is to sketch the general
outlines of this culminating chapter of history as it is currently being played
out.
First, it is necessary to discuss geopolitics in general, and from a historical
perspective, in relation to resources, geography, military technology, national
currencies, and the psychology of its practitioners.
The Ends and Means of Geopolitics
It is never enough to say that
geopolitics is about "power," "control," or "hegemony" in the abstract. These
words have usefulness only in relation to specific objectives and means: Power
over what or whom, exerted by what methods? The answers will differ somewhat in
each situation; however, most strategic objectives and means tend to have some
characteristics in common.
Like other organisms, humans are subject to the perpetual ecological constraints
of population pressure and resource depletion.
[Economics of Scarcity -CR] While it may be
simplistic to say that all conflicts between societies are motivated by the
desire to overcome ecological constraints, most certainly are. Wars are
typically fought over resources - land, forests, waterways, minerals, and
(during the past century) oil. People do occasionally fight over ideologies and
religions. But even then resource rivalries are seldom far from the surface.
Thus attempts to explain geopolitics without reference to resources (a recent
example is Samuel Huntington's
The Clash of Civilizations) are either misguided or deliberately
misleading.
The industrial era differs from previous periods of human history in the
large-scale harnessing of energy resources (coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium)
for the purposes of production and transportation - and for the deeper purpose
of expanding the human carrying capacity of our terrestrial environment. All of
the scientific achievements, the political consolidations, and the immense
population increases of the past two centuries are predictable effects of the
growing, coordinated use of energy resources.
In the early decades of the 20th century, petroleum emerged as the most
important energy resource because of its cheapness and convenience of use. The
industrial world is now overwhelmingly dependent on
oil for agriculture and transportation.
[And the power elite's domination is based on maintaining
a co-dependence on
their power and control through creation and management of scarcity of these
oil-power resources.
-CR]
Modern global geopolitics, because it implies
worldwide transportation and communication systems
rooted in fossil energy resources,
is therefore a phenomenon unique to the industrial era.
The control of resources is largely a matter of geography, and secondarily a
matter of military technology and control over currencies of exchange. The US
and Russia were both geographically blessed, being self-sufficient in energy
resources during the first half of the century. Germany and Japan failed to
attain regional hegemony largely because they lacked sufficient indigenous
energy resources and because they failed to gain and keep access to resources
elsewhere (via the USSR on one hand and the Dutch East Indies on the other).
Yet while both the US and Russia were well endowed by nature, both have passed
their petroleum production peaks (which occurred in 1970 and 1987,
respectively). Russia remains a net oil exporter because its consumption levels
are low, but the US is increasingly dependent on imports of both oil and natural
gas. [This "peak oil" myth is one of the
politically correct lies that is constantly maintained by the oil-soaked
monopoly press. The power elite's intent for global hegemony would not work
without maintaining the myth of this oxymoronic
"value of scarcity". -CR]
Both nations long ago began investing much of their
energy-based wealth in the production of fuel-fed arms systems with which to
expand and defend their resource interests globally. In other words, both
decided decades ago to be geopolitical players, or
contenders for global hegemony.
Roughly three-quarters of the world's crucial remaining petroleum reserves lie
within the borders of predominantly Muslim nations of the Middle East and
Central Asia - nations that, for historical, geographic, and political reasons,
were unable to develop large-scale industrial-military economies of their own
and that have, throughout the past century, mainly served as pawns of the Great
Powers (Britain, the US, and the former USSR). In recent decades, these
predominantly Muslim oil-rich nations have pooled their interests in a cartel,
the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC).
- [Again, this is the
BIG LIE that must be
maintained in the public's mind if the "Great Powers" are going to be able
to justify their making "pawns" of these Muslim nations and victims of all
the allies who they get to fight and die in wars over these "scarce"
resources". -CR]
While resources, geography, and
military technology are essential to geopolitics, they are not sufficient
without a financial means to dominate the terms of international trade. Hegemony
has had a financial as well as a military component ever since the adoption of
money by Bronze Age agricultural empires; money, after all, is a claim upon
resources, and the ability to control the currency of exchange can effect a
subtle ongoing transfer of real wealth.
Whoever issues a currency - especially a fiat currency, i.e., one not backed by
precious metals - has power over it: every transaction becomes a subsidy to the
money coiner or printer.
During the colonial era, rivalries between the Spanish real, the French franc,
and the British pound were as decisive as military battles in determining
hegemonic power. For the past half-century, the US dollar has been the
international currency of account for nearly all nations, and it is the currency
with which all oil-importing nations must pay for their fuel. This is an
arrangement that has worked to the advantage both of OPEC, which maintains a
stable customer in the US (the world's largest petroleum consumer and a military
power capable of defending the Arab oil kingdoms), and of the US itself, which
receives a subtle financial tithe for every barrel of oil consumed by every
other importing nation.
These are some of the essential facts to bear in mind when examining the current
geopolitical landscape.
- [In short, the
"golden rule" of
the power elite is "he who has the gold
(oil as "black gold")
makes the rules." Power of the power elite
is thus directly proportional to their ability to conceal, waste and
outright destroy ABUNDANCE of every virtue of true value --
especially the Truth of this plot out of hell --
to maintain the "value
of scarcity" that keeps their prices,
profits and CONTROL high. Since the U.S. dollar is not backed by gold,
control of the "black gold" as the core backing of the Federal Reserve's
"fiat currency" is the only thing maintaining "value" in the U.S. dollar and
our economy in general. -CR]
The Psychology and Sociology of
Geopolitics
Geopolitical goals are pursued within
specific environments, and they are pursued by specific actors - by particular
human beings with identifiable social, cultural, and psychological
characteristics.
These actors are, to a certain extent, embodiments of their society as a whole,
seeking benefits for that society in competition
(win/lose gaming -CR] or cooperation
[win/win gaming -CR] with
other societies. However, such powerful individuals are inevitably drawn from a
particular social class within their society - typically the wealthy, owning
class - and tend to act in such a way as to benefit that class preferentially
[they win], even if
doing so means ignoring the interests of the rest of society
[they lose].
Moreover, individual geopolitical actors are also unique human beings with
insights, prejudices, and religious obsessions that may occasionally lead them
to act at cross-purposes not only to their society, but their class as well.
[everyone loses; the environment is destroyed,
economy is destroyed, Abundant Life is destroyed and endless war insanity
prevails]
From society's point of view,
geopolitics is a Darwinian collective struggle
for increased carrying
capacity;
but from the individual geostrategist's viewpoint,
it is a game.
Indeed, geopolitics could be considered the
ultimate human game
- one with immense consequences, and one that
can only be played within a tiny club of elites.
As long as there have been civilizations and empires, kings
and emperors have played some version of this game. The game attracts a
particular kind of personality, and it fosters a certain way of thinking and
feeling about the world and about other human beings. The act of playing the
game confers feelings of immense superiority, aloofness, power, and importance.
One can begin to appreciate the supremely addictive intoxication that flows from
playing the geopolitical game by reading documents composed by prominent
geostrategists - national security briefing papers by people like George Kennan
and Richard Perle, or books by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Take,
for example, this passage from
Kennan's US State Department Policy Planning Study #23 from 1948:
- "We have 50 per cent
of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this
situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do
so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality . . .
we should cease thinking about human rights,
the raising of living standards and democratization."
Such dry, functional prose is at home in a
world of offices, telephones, and limousines, but that is a world utterly
disengaged from the millions - perhaps hundreds of millions or billions - of
people whose lives will be overwhelmingly impacted by a phrase here, a word
there. At one level, the geostrategist is simply a man (after all, the club is
overwhelmingly a men's club) doing his job, and trying to do it competently in
the eyes of onlookers. But what a job it is! - determining the course of
history, shaping the fates of nations.
The geostrategist is a Superman, an Olympian disguised as a mortal, a Titan in a
business suit. Nice work if you can get it.
Eurasia - Grand
Prize of the Great Game
Looking at their maps and model
globes, British geostrategists of 18th and 19th centuries could not help but
notice that Earth's landmasses are highly asymmetrical; Eurasia is by far the
largest of the continents. Clearly, if they were themselves to build and
maintain a truly globe-spanning empire, it would be essential for the British
first to establish and defend strategic footholds throughout this mineral-rich,
densely populated, and history-soaked continent.
But British geostrategists knew perfectly well that Britain itself is only an
island off the northwest of Eurasia. Within this largest of continents, the most
extensive nation was by far Russia, which geographically dominated Eurasia as
Eurasia dominated the globe. Thus the British knew that their attempts to
control Eurasia would inevitably confront the self-preservative instincts of the
Russian Empire. Throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th,
British/Russian conflicts repeatedly flared on the Indian frontier, notably in
Afghanistan. An imperial functionary named Sir John Kaye called this the
"Great Game," a term
immortalized by Kipling in
Kim.
Two costly World Wars and a century of colonial uprisings largely cured Britain
of her imperial obsessions, but Eurasia could not help but remain central to any
serious plan for world domination.
Thus in 1997, in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its
Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor
to US President Jimmy Carter and geostrategist par excellence, would insist that
Eurasia must be at the center of future efforts by the United States to project
its own power globally. "For America," he wrote,
- "The
chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.
For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and
peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out
for global power. Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and
America's global primacy is directly
dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian
continent is sustained."
1>
Eurasia is pivotal, according to Brzezinski,
because it "accounts for about 60 percent of the world's GNP and about
three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." In addition, it contains
three-quarters of the world's population, "all but one of the world's overt
nuclear powers and all but one of the covert ones."
2
In Brzezinski's view, just as the US needs the rest
of the world for markets and resources, Eurasia needs American dominance for
stability. Unfortunately, however, the American people are not accustomed to
imperial responsibilities: "[T]he pursuit of power is not a goal that commands
popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden
threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being."
3
Something fundamental shifted in the world of
geopolitics with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 - which clearly
presented a "sudden threat . . . to the public's
sense of domestic well-being." This shift was felt
again with the new American administration's determination - voiced with
increasing insistence through 2002 and the first weeks of 2003 - to invade Iraq.
These geostrategic shifts seemed centered in a new
American attitude toward Eurasia.
At the end of WWII, when the US and the USSR emerged as the word's dominant
powers, the US had established permanent bases in Germany, Japan, and South
Korea, all to hedge in the Soviet Union. America even waged a failed and
extremely costly war in Southeast Asia to gain yet another vector of Eurasian
containment.
When the USSR collapsed at the end of the 1980s, the US appeared free to
dominate Eurasia, and thus the world, more completely than had any other nation
in world history. The decade that followed was one characterized primarily by
globalization - the consolidation of corporatized economic power centered
largely in the US. It appeared that US hegemony would be maintained economically
rather than militarily. Brzezinski's book conveys the spirit of those times,
advocating the maintenance and consolidation of America's ties to long-time
allies (Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea) and the coddling or co-opting of
the new independent states of the former Soviet Union.
In contrast with this prescription, the new administration of George W. Bush
appeared to be taking a more strident tack - one that took old allies for
granted in its unabashed unilateralism. In his shredding of international
environmental, human rights, and weapons-control agreements; in his pursuit of a
doctrine of pre-emptive military action; and especially in his seemingly
inexplicable obsession with the invasion of Iraq,
Bush was expending enormous political and diplomatic capital, needlessly
creating enemies even among trusted allies. His
rationale for war - the elimination of weapons of mass destruction - was
patently silly, since the US had supplied many of those weapons and Iraq posed
no current threat to anyone; moreover, a new Gulf war risked destabilizing the
entire Middle East.
4
What could possibly
justify such a risk?
What was motivating this bizarre new change in
strategy?
Again, some background discussion is necessary
before we can answer this question.
The US: Colossus Astride the
Globe
At the dawn of the new millennium
the US had the world's most advanced military technology and the world's
strongest currency. Throughout the twentieth century, America had patiently
built its empire, first in Central and South America, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and
the Philippines, and then (following World War II) through alliances and
protectorates in Europe, Japan, Korea, and the Middle East. Its army and
intelligence agency were active in virtually every country in the world, while
its immense powers seemed tempered by its ostensible advocacy of democracy and
human rights.
In the 1980s, the US government came under the
control of a group of neo-conservative strategists surrounding Ronald Reagan and
George Herbert Walker Bush. For years, these
strategists worked to destroy the USSR (which they succeeded in doing by
undermining the Soviet economy) and to consolidate power in Central America and
the Middle East. The latter project culminated in the first US-Iraq war of
1990-1991. Their publicly stated goal was nothing
less than world domination.
While the Clinton-Gore administration emphasized
multilateral cooperation, its push for corporate globalization - which
ruthlessly transferred wealth from poor nations to rich ones - was essentially
an extension of Reagan-Bush policies. However, the
neo-conservatives fumed at their exclusion from the direct reins of power.
They regarded themselves as the country's rightful leadership, and saw Clinton
and his followers as usurpers. When the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush
as President in 2000, the neo-conservatives
returned with a vengeance.
With the assistance of the
fawning media, Bush - the pampered son of a wealthy and deeply politically
connected East-coast family that had made its money from banking, weapons, and
oil - managed to portray himself as a down-home Texan "man of the people."
[Bush's Crawford Texas ranch was created virtually as a media prop to package
him for "country folk". -CR] He immediately
surrounded himself with the group of geopolitical strategists - Donald Rumsfeld,
Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle - who had developed international
policy for the first Bush administration.
In his recent article "The Push for War," international affairs analyst Anatol
Lieven traced the roots of the far-right strategic agenda to a lingering Cold
War mentality, Christian fundamentalism, increasingly divisive domestic
politics, and an unquestioning support for Israel. The basic goal of total
military domination of the globe, Lieven wrote, was
- "shared by Colin
Powell and the rest of the security establishment. It was, after all, Powell
who, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in 1992 that the US
requires sufficient power "to deter
any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage."
However, the idea of pre-emptive defence, now official doctrine, takes this
a leap further, much further than Powell would wish to go.
In principle, it can be used to justify the
destruction of any other state if it even seems that that state might in
future be able to challenge the US.
When these ideas were first aired by Paul Wolfowitz and others after the end
of the Cold War, they met with general criticism, even from conservatives.
Today, thanks to the ascendancy of the
radical nationalists in the Administration and the effect of the 11
September attacks on the American psyche, they have a major influence on US
policy. 5
Whether or not the administration in
some way orchestrated the events of 9/11 - as has been suggested by several
commentators including Gore Vidal - it was clearly poised to take advantage of
them.
6 Bush
immediately proclaimed to the world that "You are
either with us, or you are with the terrorists."
With a bloated military budget, a cowed and
obedient corporate media establishment, and a public frightened into willingly
giving up basic constitutional protections, the neo-conservatives appeared to
have won full control of the nation and to have become masters of its global
empire. But even as their victory seemed complete, rumors of dissent began
swirling.
Insubordination in the Ranks
Popular resistance to corporate
globalization started to materialize in the late 1990s, first coalescing in the
anti-WTO mass demonstration in Seattle in November 1999. Thenceforth, the
anti-globalization movement appeared to grow with each passing year, morphing
into a global anti-war movement in response to US plans to invade first
Afghanistan and then Iraq.
But discontent with US domination of the globe was not confined to leftists in
street demonstrations brandishing giant puppets. As American military bases
sprang up in the Balkans in the 1990s, and in Central Asia in the aftermath of
the Afghanistan campaign, geostrategists in Russia, China, Japan, and Western
Europe began examining their options. Only Britain seemed steadfast in its
alliance with the American colossus.
One seemingly inoffensive response to US global hegemony was the effort of
eleven European nations to establish a common currency - the euro. When the euro
debuted at the turn of the millennium, many predicted that it would be unable to
compete with the dollar. Indeed, for months the euro's comparative value
languished. However, it soon stabilized and began to rise.
A more worrying development, from Washington's perspective, was the increasing
tendency of second- and third-tier nations to overtly abandon the neoliberal
economic policies at the heart of the project of globalization, as new
governments in Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador publicly broke with the World Bank
and declared their desire for independence from American financial control.
Meanwhile, in Russia political theorist Alexander Dugin was gaining increasing
influence with anti-American geostrategic writings. In 1997, the same year
Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard appeared, Dugin published his own manifesto,
The Basics of Geopolitics, advocating a reconstituted Russian Empire composed of
a continental bloc of states allied to cleanse the Eurasian land-mass of US
influence. At the center of this bloc Dugin posited a "Eurasian axis" of Russia,
Germany, Iran, and Japan.
While Dugin's ideas were banned during Soviet times for their echoes of Nazi
pan-Eurasian fantasies, they gradually gained influence among post-Soviet
Russian officials. For example, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently
decried the "strengthening tendency towards the formation of a unipolar world
under financial and military domination by the United States" and called for a "multipolar
world order," while emphasizing Russia's "geopolitical position as the largest
Eurasian state." Russia's Communist party has adopted Dugin's ideas in its
platform; Gennady Zyuganov, Communist Party chairman, even published his own
primer on geopolitics, titled Geography of Victory. Though Dugin remains a
marginal figure internationally, his ideas cannot help but resonate in a country
and continent increasingly hemmed in and manipulated by a powerful and arrogant
hegemonic nation on the other side of the globe.
Outwardly, Russia - like Germany, France, Japan, and China - still usually
defers to the US. Even dissent from the Bush buildup to war on Iraq has remained
fairly muted.
But in private, leaders in all of these countries are no doubt making new plans.
Few would yet go so far as to agree with Alexander Dugin's view that Eurasia
will come to dominate the US, not the other way around.
Yet in just three years, many Eurasian leaders' attitudes
toward American hegemony have shifted from quiet acceptance to biting criticism
to a serious examination of the alternatives.
The American
Dilemma
Dugin and other Eurasian critics of US
power begin from a premise that would seem ludicrous to most Americans. To Dugin,
the US is acting not out of strength, but of weakness.
America has for many years sustained an overwhelmingly negative balance of trade
- which it can afford only because of the strong dollar,
in turn enabled by the cooperation of OPEC in denominating oil exports in
dollars. America's trade balance is negative partly
because its indigenous production of oil and natural gas has peaked and the
nation now relies increasingly on imports. Also, most US corporations have
shifted their manufacturing operations overseas.
A further systemic weakness comes from widespread corporate corruption -
revealed most glaringly in the collapse of Enron - and
the close ties between corporations and the US political
establishment. [the
definition of fascism - CR]
Bubble after bubble - high-tech, telecom,
derivatives, real estate - has either already burst or is about to.
Next to the strong dollar, the other pillar of
American geopolitical strength is its military. But even in this case there are
cracks in the facade. No one doubts that the US possesses weapons of mass
destruction sufficient to wipe out the world many times over. But America
actually uses its weaponry increasingly for the purpose of what French historian
Emmanuel Todd has called "theatrical militarism."
["Shock and Awe" dramas -CR] In an essay titled
"The US and Eurasia: Theatrical Militarism," journalist Pepe Escobar notes that
this strategy implies that Washington
- . . . should never
come up with a definitive solution for any geopolitical problem, because
instability is the only thing that
would justify military action ad infinitum by the only superpower, anytime,
anywhere. . . . Washington knows it is
unable to confront the real players in the world - Europe, Russia, Japan,
China. Thus it seeks to remain politically on top by bullying minor players
like the Axis of Evil, or even more minor players like Cuba.
7
Thus American attacks on Afghanistan
and Iraq simultaneously reveal both the sophistication of US military technology
and the inherent frailties of the US geopolitical position.
Theatrical militarism has the dual purpose of projecting the image of American
invincibility and might while maintaining or extending US military domination
over resource-rich third-tier nations. This largely explains the recent
Afghanistan invasion and the impending attack on Baghdad.
The strategy suggests that terrorist acts against the US
should be covertly encouraged as a justification for more domestic repression
and foreign military adventures.
Yet we have not fully answered the question posed
earlier - why is the current administration willing to expend so much domestic
and international political capital in order to pursue the impending Iraq war?
Critics of the administration insist that this is a war for oil profits, but the
situation is actually more complicated and can be understood only in the light
of two crucial factors not widely acknowledged.
The first is that the continued strength of the
dollar is in question. In November 2000, Iraq
announced that it would cease to accept dollars for its oil, and would accept
instead only euros. At
the time, financial analysts suggested that Iraq would lose tens of millions of
dollars in value because of this currency switch; in fact, over the following
two years, Iraq made millions. Other oil-exporting nations, including Iran and
Venezuela, have stated that they are contemplating
a similar move. If OPEC as a whole were to switch
from dollars to euros, the consequences to the US economy would be catastrophic.
Investment money would flee the country, real estate values would plummet,
and Americans would shortly find themselves living
in Third-World conditions.
8
Currently, if any
country wishes to obtain dollars with which to buy oil, it can do so only by
selling its goods or resources to the US, taking out a loan from a US bank (or
the World Bank - functionally the same thing), or trading its currency on the
open market and thus devaluing it.
The US is in effect importing goods and services
virtually for free,
its massive trade deficit representing a huge interest-free loan
from the rest of the world.
If the dollar were to cease
being the world's reserve currency,
all of that would change overnight
A New York Times article dated 31
January, 2003, titled "For Flashier Russians, Euro Outshines the Dollar," noted
that "Russians are believed to have hoarded as much as $50 billion in American
dollars in coffee cans and under mattresses, the largest such stash of any
nation on earth." But Russians are quietly exchanging their dollars for euros,
and high-ticket items like cars now carry price tags in euros. Further,
"Russia's central bank said today that it had increased
its euro holdings in the last year to 10 percent of its foreign reserves, up
from 5 percent, while the dollar's share had dropped from 90 percent to 75
percent, reflecting the low return on dollar investments."
9
Ironically, even the European Union is concerned
about this trend, because if the dollar sinks too low then European firms will
see their US investments lose value. Nevertheless, as the EU grows (it is slated
to add ten new members in 2004), its economic clout is increasingly perceived as
inevitably surpassing that of the US.
For US geostrategists, the prevention of an OPEC switch from dollars to euros
must therefore seem paramount. An invasion and occupation of Iraq would
effectively give the US a voting seat in OPEC while placing new American bases
within hours' striking distance of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and several other key
OPEC countries.
The second factor likely weighing on Bush's decision to invade Iraq is the
depletion of US energy resources and the consequently increasing American
dependency on oil imports. [That's the myth this
article and the oil-soaked monopoly press plus numerous Internet dis-info agents
of the geostrategists -- including this author
-- constantly try to maintain, for the obvious reasons explained in this
article. -CR] The oil production of all non-OPEC
countries, taken together, probably
peaked in 2002. From now on, OPEC will have ever more economic power in the
world. Moreover, global oil production will probably peak within a few years. As
I have discussed elsewhere, alternatives to fossil fuels have not been developed
[the BIG LIE] sufficiently to permit a coordinated
process of substitution once oil and natural gas grow scarce.
The implications - especially for major consumer nations
such as the US - will eventually be ruinous.
10
- [Control of the media --
suppressing the truth of cheap-clean energy breakthroughs -- is an integral
function of CONTROL by the power elite geostrategist's
game plan for
global hegemony. -CR]
Both problems are of overwhelming
urgency. Bush's Iraq strategy is apparently an offensive one designed to enlarge
the US empire, but in reality it is primarily
defensive in character since its deeper purpose is to forestall an economic
cataclysm.
It is the two factors of dollar hegemony and
[the perception of] oil
depletion - even more than the hubris of the neo-conservative strategists in
Washington - that are prompting an overall de-emphasis of long-standing
alliances with Europe, Japan, and South Korea; and the increasing deployment of
US troops in the Middle East and Central Asia.
While no one is talking about it openly, top echelons in the governments of
Russia, China, Britain, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia and other countries are
keenly aware of these factors - hence the shifting alliances, the veto threats,
and the back-room negotiations leading up to the US invasion of Iraq.
But the war, though by now inevitable, remains a
highly risky gamble. Even if it ends in days or
weeks with a decisive American victory, we will not know for some time whether
that gamble has paid off.
- [This was obviously written
BEFORE the Shock and Awe drama of the Iraq attack and what is clearly now a
Vietnam-like quagmire. The Euro has been gaining far more strength against
the dollar. And the BUSHwhacker neocon
ZioNazis now, after clearly stealing this last
election with monopoly media complicity are now "up against the wall" with
Bush promising to spend his "capital" from his votefraud "election" to further his
unabashed globalist agenda... which to these provocateur terrorists (if you
realize how they think) can only mean another 9-11 type terror tactic to
expand their war powers under "National Emergency" laws BEFORE December 31st
when the Patriot Act expires -- a dangerous
time in the months ahead. -CR]
Who Will Control Eurasia?
As I write this, the US is drawing up
plans to bomb Baghdad, a city of five million people, and to pour in twice as
many cruise missiles during the first two days of the assault as were used in
the entirety of the first Gulf War. Depleted uranium shells and bullets will
again be employed, leaving much of Iraq a radioactive wasteland and condemning
future generations of Iraqis (and American soldiers and their families) to birth
defects, sickness, and early deaths. It is difficult to imagine that the
spectacle of so much unprovoked death and destruction could help but inspire
thoughts of revenge in the hearts of millions of Arabs and Muslims.
- [This creation of instability
with greater war portents, as stated above, is actually the
nefarious intent of the
neocons... being used as an excuse for greater intervention and control
machinations - classic
Machievellian game tactics.
The other key thing to remember -- which you will never read in the
Zionist-controlled press -- is that the Muslim
nations throughout the Middle East believe religiously that ANY interest on
loan (not just 20%+ usury) is worse than unethical - it's sacrilegious...
the root of all bankster evil that makes
merchandise of people and breeds godless materialism of all kinds.
There is a LOT of Truth in that! But imagine how the international
Zionist banksters look at that. Here's all those
Muslim nations sitting on all that black gold -- 3/4 of the "known" oil
reserves -- that is their sovereign birthright. Or in
other words, the moral underpinnings of the Muslim faith is a direct
challenge to the entire empire domination mindset that has proceeded on
baseless fiat "currency" of the privately owned Federal Reserve Band -
predominantly Zionists who represent "the dark side" of our Judeo-Christian
heritage. If that morality caught on or was otherwise
leveraged by the rightful ownership of oil by those Muslim nation... it
would be the end of the banksters "end game".
-CR]
American geopolitical strategists will
call the effort a success if the war ends quickly, if production from Iraqi oil
fields is soon ramped up, and if other OPEC nations are bullied into maintaining
the dollar as their currency of account. But this operation (one cannot really
call it a war), undertaken as an act of economic desperation, can only
temporarily stem a rising tide.
What are the long-term consequences for the US and Eurasia? Many are
unpredictable. Forces are being unleashed now that
may be difficult to contain.
The more reliably foreseeable long-term trends are
not favorable. Resource depletion and population pressure have always been
predictors of war. China, with a population of 1.2 billion, will soon be the
world's largest consumer of resources. In times of plenty, this nation can be
viewed as immense opening market: there are already more refrigerators, mobile
phones, and televisions in China than in the US. China does not wish to
challenge the US militarily and recently gained trade privileges by quietly
backing American military operations in Central Asia. But as oil - the basis for
the entire industrial system - grows scarcer and its reserves more hotly
disputed, China cannot be expected to remain
docile.
North Korea, a Chinese quasi-ally, was being
quietly defanged through negotiations during the Clinton era, but is now chafing
at being labeled by Bush as part of an "axis of evil" and at having crucial
energy-resource imports embargoed by the US. Out of desperation, it is trying to
get Washington's attention by reviving its nuclear weapons programs. Meanwhile,
the new South Korean government is utterly opposed to US unilateralism and wants
to negotiate with the North. The US is threatening to destroy North Korea's
nuclear facilities with air strikes, but to do so would raise a deadly nuclear
cloud over all of northeast Asia.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan also have interests that will likely eventually
diverge from those of the US. These neighbor nations are, of course, nuclear
powers and sworn enemies with longstanding border disputes. Pakistan, currently
a US ally, is also a significant supplier of nuclear materials to North Korea,
and has offered aid to the Taliban and al Qaida -
facts that underscore just how convoluted and counterproductive Washington's
strategy has lately become.
The Americans' worst nightmare would be a strategic
and economic alliance among Europe, Russia, China, and OPEC.
Such an alliance possesses an inherent logic from the
viewpoint of each of the potential participants. If
the US were to try to prevent such an alliance by playing the only strong card
still in its hand - its weaponry of mass destruction - then the Great Game could
end in ultimate tragedy. [That tragedy would be the victory
of the
"Armageddon Belief System" of Evangelical Christian's "holy war" mind-set that
has bought into the neocon "greater Israel"
gameplan for co-opting "true believer" votes this last
election... in order to sanctify or otherwise "spiritualize" their sinister
intent; indeed, there is no greater "evil" (energy
veil) than the
treachery of antichrist (anti-love) "in the name of the Christ". Or as one
of the wisest of U.S. Founding Fathers said so well...
"Religion is indeed a principal thing,
but too much is worse
than none at all.
The world abounds with knaves and villains, but of all knaves,
the religious knave is the worst; and
villainies acted under
the cloak of religion are the most despicable."
-- Benjamin Franklin
Even in the best case, petroleum resources are
limited [note how he keeps repeating this BIG LIE]
and, as they gradually run out over the next few decades, will be unable to
support the further industrialization of China or the maintenance of industrial
infrastructure in Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea, or the US.
Who will rule Eurasia? In the end, no single power will be capable of doing so,
because the energy-resource base will be
insufficient to support a continent-wide system of transportation,
communication, and control.
[the BIG LIE justification for police state control of
transportation and communications]
Thus Russian geopolitical fantasies are as vain as those of the US. For the next
half-century there will be just enough energy resources left to enable either a
horrific and futile contest for the remaining spoils, or a heroic cooperative
effort toward radical conservation and transition to a post-fossil-fuel energy
regime.
- [A revolution in higher consciousness through a
global Net-centric VISION of VIRTUES for the VICTORY of win/win is the best
hope for homeostasis (checks and balances) between the top-down win/lose
LOVE OF POWER
and the grassroots win/win
POWER OF LOVE "of, by and for the people" worldwide.
The next century will see the end of global geopolitics, one
way or another. If our descendants are fortunate, the ultimate outcome will be a
world of modest, bioregionally organized communities living on received solar
energy. Local rivalries will continue, as they have throughout human history,
but never again will the hubris of geopolitical strategists threaten billions
with extinction.
That's if all goes well and everyone acts
rationally.
"Once a government
resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants,
it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants.
A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop.
If such a government ever lets the fear subside
and rational thought return to the
populace,
that government is finished."
--Michael Rivero
###
Footnotes:
- 1.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its
Geopolitical Imperatives (Basic Books, 1997), p. 30.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 31.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 36.
- 4. See Richard Heinberg, "Behold
Caesar," MuseLetter #128, October 2002
- 5.
Anatol Lieven, "The Push
for War," London Review of Books, December 30, 2002
- 6. See Gore Vidal, "The Enemy Within,"
and the Center for
Cooperative Research.
- 7. Pepe Escobar, "The US and
Eurasia: Theatrical Militarism," Asia Times Online, December 4, 2002.
- 8. See: Behind
the Invasion of Iraq" "Protest by switching oil trade from dollar to
euro," Oil and Gas Journal,
April 15, 2002 W. Clark, "The
Real but Unspoken Reasons for the Upcoming Iraq War
- 9. See Michael Wines, "For
Flashier Russians, Euro Outshines the Dollar," New York Times, January
31, 2003.
10. Richard Heinberg, The
Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New
Society, 2003).
(We encourage you to get books
through your local bookstore or from your library. If this is not practical,
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Book links are to Powell's or, if unavailable there, Amazon. These
links are also useful to find out more about the book: price, content and
reviews.)
- FINAL NOTE: The abject
suppression of light-clean energy technologies in the U.S. has been in
direct proportion to the power elite's game
plan to leverage the perception of SCARCITY to
maintain their justification for their end game
of our co-dependence on their power and control over us. That's
because the power elite's real "currency" is their
LOVE OF POWER; they have
almost all the money, or at least promissory notes underlying our home
loans, credit card debt and the mainstream materialistic values that make
merchandise of people who "sell their souls" for "the good things" of life.
Indeed, the most difficult thing in the world is to remain non-attached to
worldly things, maintaining a truly spiritual frame of reference that loves
God - a God of love - at the heart of The Abundant Life.
- .
- All the incessant
terror-tyranny tactics of the power elite we see today is merely the end of
their
"end game"
of totalitarian global empire. The game is at
the final stage. The "fruit" of their 9-11 attack is now seen by
enlightened Netizens worldwide. As Bush said after 9-11,
"You're either with us or with the terrorists".
So anyone who challenges these real terrorists
-- wolves in sheep's clothing who have pulled the wool over the eyes of the
sheople -- are now made enemies of the police state these
BUSHwhackers would create. Yet they have
no more power than "We the People" give them.
"Power
is of two kinds. One is obtained by fear of punishment and the other by arts
of love.
Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent
than power derived from fear of punishment.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
Fearless faith in
POWER OF LOVE always trumps faithless fear in
the LOVE OF POWER.
"When I despair, I remember
that all through history the way of truth and love
has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time
they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall -- think of
it, ALWAYS."
- Gandhi
Checkmate,
-
-
-
Founder-Director of
HEARTcom Services
High touch high tech at the
heart
of Net worth
-
Christopher Rudy
is author of the online interactive book, Blueprint For A Golden Age, at
<www.HEARTcom.org/blueprint.htm>
He appreciates enlightened feedback at geonotes@mcn.net
