The Next Crisis – Part Three – The World Turned Upside Down

At this point I would like to make it clear that just because I have suggested the Global Over Class are likely to have thought ahead to what they will need to achieve before the next crisis arrives and have outlined some of what I think their Manifesto might contain, does not mean I think they will succeed. I am merely saying watch out for them trying. If we know what to look out for we are in a far better position to stop them. You can’t defuse a bomb if you don’t know how it works. Moreover, I do not think their position, for all that they strut and pose at their meetings and offer endless, dire warnings and stern advice to our leaders, is in any way secure. I think they and their paper wealth are as precariously at risk as they were when Hank Paulson threatened the US Congress with anarchy if he and his friends were not bailed out. He didn’t quite say it like that of course but that is what it amounted to. Nor do I think people should despair at what the Over Class calls, and sincerely hopes is, voter apathy. People are not apathetic. One look at the Scottish referendum tells you that people will engage and vote in their droves, when there is something worth voting for.  I want a tee shirt which says “Give me something worth voting for!” and on the back it will say, “And I’ll vote for it”.

It is true that there is a palpable despondency in the air. But I believe it is more from shock than despair. People, I think, have been genuinely  sickened and slightly stunned by how massively they have been betrayed. There is something which leaves you feeling winded for a moment, when someone betrays you. People feel violated. But this moment of stunned silence is passing. And what might follow frightens our Dear Leaders and the people they work for – the Over Class. And in my opinion they have every reason to be afraid and we have reason for hope.

 

So now we come to the heart of it: Items 6 and 7 from the Manifesto for the 1%.

6) Effective ways must be found to convince people that democratic rule is no longer sufficient to protect them.

7) An alternative to Democracy must be introduced and praised. That alternative must be the Rule of International Law as written and controlled by the lawyers of the 1%.

It would seem a hard thing for me to argue, that the rulers of the West, who never cease extolling the moral superiority of Democracy and who go to war with increasing regularity to impose this superiority, should be at the same time trying to discredit it – or at least tell you it isn’t enough. And yet when you look there is a veritable industry devoted to it. So how do you discredit that which you extol? Well the answer, is to by subtle degrees gradually change what the word means even as you use it.  Which means it is imperative that we have our own very clear understanding of what Democracy means.

So what does Democracy mean? I suggest there have always been two core parts to Democracy. There is the ‘Will of the People’ part (the old ‘of the, by the, for the’ notion), which is the radical, sometimes even revolutionary side, saying as it does that there is no God anointed ruler or privileged class. If God anointed anyone then it is the people equally and together. So that the ultimate authority in a Democracy is The People and only they can grant power for others to use until such time as it pleases the people to withdraw it.  But there is also the ‘Rule of Law’ part which is the normative aspect which says that in a Democracy there will be no arbitrary use of power or force because all power has to obey the law. Of course what this means is that as the Law grows it begins to assume a permanent power of its own. It comes eventually to be like the thousand little cords which tied Gulliver to the ground. And there is always a tension between these two sides. Without the Will of the People part there would not have been any English, American or French revolutions and therefore no Democracy at all. It is the side which has the power to overthrow systems when they are corrupt. Whereas the normative Rule of Law part is what protects not only the people from arbitrary abuses of force, but the system as well – sometimes from the very Will of the People who set up the law in the first place.

The Law is to Democracy what Lucifer was to God. The most powerful servant who can, though overweening pride and arrogance, chose to turn the power given to him, against his creator. That, I argue is what is happening in our democracies today. The priesthood of the Law is intent on emphasising the unruly, dangerous aspect of the “Will of the People” and claiming that only the Rule of law can, and must, protect us from it…from ourselves.

And the way they are doing that is to shift what pops in to people’s minds when they think of the populist, Will of the People part of democracy. And the word Populist is their chosen starting place.  Because“Populism” can easily be given a strong connotation of crowds of protestors led by power-seeking demagogues.  Populism can then be graded over into a selfish and ignorant “Tyranny of the Majority” (the tyrannous majority in question being, of course, the ‘envious, undeserving and ignorant  poor’) and from there it is but a rhetorical flourish to  re-brand of ‘the Will of the People’ as nothing more than the Rule of the Mob. And what and who can protect us from this danger? Well only the law and those who serve it. 

As a quick side note, the Arab Spring will, I think, come to serve this purpose for the Over Class rather well – once the well-paid and tenured apologists for our system get a chance to re-brand it. It will become, I suggest, a cautionary tale told by the over class, to us, the various under classes, of naive high hopes dashed and perverted because the democratic urge was left in the hands of well intentioned mobs of people gathered in squares shouting slogans – who are all too easily controlled by the wily, and perverted by the shadowy; the high hopes of Tahrir square leading to the Muslim Brotherhood or worse.

That is, I argue, the plan. Is there evidence? Yes.

I cannot do more than touch upon the vast literature devoted to neutering and domesticating, even demonizing democracy, and replacing it with a much more amenable and toothless look-alike.  So I have chosen just two articles which give you a feel what is underway. The first is by a man called Jan Paulsson. Mr Paulsson is one of the elite group of 15 arbitrators who handle the largest arbitration cases where corporations sue nations. Recently he has been arbitrator for ConocoPhilips (P.40) helping it sue Venezuela for $30 billion. Mr Paulsson spent 20 years at the vast international law firm Freshfields. Freshfields is not known for its pro bono work for environmental causes or labour rights or social issues. It works for the over class – their banks and their corporations – and advises governments who need ‘professional advice’ (see part 2).  Mr Paulsson is a triple national of Sweden, France and Bahrain. He was based in London but just this year moved to the United States. Where he founded his own boutique law fim, Three Crowns LLP, specializing in arbitration, and also joined the University of Miami as a “Distinguished Scholar”. You can read his CV which gives you an idea of what real international power and influence look like.

In 2009 Mr Paulsson wrote an article for the Kluwer Arbitration Blog which is a forum for International arbitrators and experts to discuss how they think things should be. His article was entitled, “Repudiation of International Arbitration Agreements and the Public Interest.” As you might imagine Mr Paulsson takes grave legalistic exception to international agreements being repudiated just because to do so might be in the interest of the people. I recommend the article because it reveals the prejudices and thinking of a whole group of people who already hold power over you and plan to take more.

I will quote extensively from it because it seems better to let Mr Paulsson make my argument for me.  The article begins by setting up a straw man, a leader whom he calls Rex.

Rex has recently installed himself as the benevolent dictator of a resource-rich country where many live in poverty. He took power from a government he accuses of having distributed national wealth in a grossly unfair manner. He proclaims a policy of redistributive justice, and enjoys passionate popularity among the vast disadvantaged segments of the population. He accuses foreign business interests of having colluded with formerly powerful national elites.

So is Rex an example of the revolutionary aspect of the Will of the People or a dictator?  It is easy to, and Paulsson hopes you will, see Rex as Chavez of Venezuela or Castro.  But take away what Paulsson labels him, “benevolent dictator”, and look at what Rex has done, and the genuine support he has, and how far away, really, is the description of Rex from George Washington? Both Rex and Washington over-turned an existing set of laws and treaties by force. Revolutionaries make people uneasy but we all owe everything we have in the way of freedom to them.

Certainly you might think stopping the corrupt looting of a previous government and then redistributing the wealth in a fairer manner would make Rex one of the good guys. Not in the world Paulsson represents.

In pursuit of his policies, Rex will naturally find it convenient, as he sees fit, to abrogate treaties, laws, and contracts. His political majority will support him – and so will the legislators and judges he has put in office.

And here Paulsson starts his work. Rex may be doing good – Paulsson allows him that – BUT in order for Rex to achieve what he wants, he has to tear up some of the treaties, laws and contracts his predecessor had agreed. He is over-turning the rule of Law. Given that some of these agreements were what codified and made ‘legal’ the looting, you might think this a reasonable way forward. Especially since the majority of the people support him. But for Paulsson any good Rex might do, is outweighed by the fact that Rex has “abrogated treaties” and “put in office” new legislators and judges. Of course it does not seem to have struck Paulsson that it was the previously agreed treaties and laws that gave away the nation’s wealth and that it was the old judges and legislators, the ones Rex has replaced, who legislated for, and gave legal approval to, the grossly unfair distribution of the nation’s wealth. It doesn’t take a genius to know that with the old laws and treaties, legislators and judges all left in place, no change was going to happen. What would Paulsson have Rex do? Presumably get in to power on a wave of popular support but then achieve nothing in the face of entrenched interests in the old legislature and judiciary. Did Washington leave the taxes that led to the Boston Tea Party in place? Did he replace any of King George’s judges with those loyal to the new order? Of course he did. He broke the law. Not only broke it but re-wrote it.

But what Paulsson sees in Rex is just a dangerous  populist who is removing people like Paulsson from positions of power and putting the Will and Interests of the People, above the Rule of Law.

Yet Rex has a thorn in his side: international tribunals. Rex insists that he respects the rule of law. In particular, he affirms adamantly that he abides by international law. But by “law” he means the rules that need to be put into place to further his policies, proclaimed to be in the national interest. He finds it intolerable that an external authority should be allowed to determine what is lawful, or that international obligations accepted by his predecessors should be given effect.

Now we are coming to Paulsson’s solution to the threat of Rex. In Paulsson’s view, if Rex can sweep aside the old system within his nation on the say so of the people, then there MUST be an external authority which is given the power to declare any or all of Rex’s actions to be unlawful internationally and have the means to enforce this judgement. In other words the Will of the People is to be made subservient to a higher and external authority. And wouldn’t you know it, that authority is what Paulsson holds. Fancy that! The system of Investor State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) – which is the Tribunal system Paulsson is a part of – is the teeth inside all Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) and Trade Agreements such as Nafta, the TPP and TTIP – and gives exactly this power of veto over sovereign laws and provides the means for enforcing that veto.

An international tribunal may reject a discriminatory law because it contravenes a treaty signed by Rex’s predecessor (which therefore is part of the national law),

In other words you can have any new law you like and replace any old law you don’t like but if your actions are challenged in a Tribunal the arbitrators who sit in the tribunal (men such as Paulsson) will simply declare your new law invalid (it will be an ‘unlawful enactment’) and your nation will lose. And you will be forced to pay billions in damages.

In this sense, an unlawful enactment may be seen as a species of denial of justice: an attempt to subvert the legal process by the deployment of purported laws which are contrary to the law.

Rex may pass a new law but the arbitrators will decide if it is a ‘good’ law. If it is not, because in their opinion it violates some previous agreement, then it is void no matter what the people think.

But of course there’s no need to panic this is only in the case of “Rex” the populist dictator in the third world.  And they always seem to start as saviours and end as presidents for life. So perhaps ‘their’ democracy should be overseen by nice white lawyers working for the corporations of Europe and America? But wait…,

Let us leave aside the subject of the tyranny of the majority within a nation, which has occupied political philosophers for a very long time. Let us instead consider the consequences of Rex’s options as he seeks to escape external limits to his authority.

What? Wait. Stop! Did I hear someone mention “the tyranny of the majority”?  Of course it was just a throw away line wasn’t it? Well actually international lawyers don’t usually indulge in throw away lines. Lawyers write carefully. So if Paulsson writes this line it is because he wants his readers to understand he DOES mean Rex to stand for the tyranny of the majority without having to be explicit about it.  And here is the rub. Almost any Democratic decision taken anywhere, can be seen by someone as a Tyranny of the Majority. And so the goal posts move from democracy as a danger when it is 3rd world populism, to when it is the Tyranny of the majority. But when is ‘good’ democracy, the kind Paulsson no doubt loves with all his heart, in danger of becoming a tyranny of the majority?

Now bear in mind that Paulsson wrote his article in 2009 at the worst point of the financial crisis.  How many of us felt then and feel even more so now that the political stagnation and economic cronyism in our own countries for the last 7 years has become systemic and unmovable, completely impervious to the Ballot box? And this, I suggest was not far from Paulsson’s mind when he wrote his piece.  Rex could be Chavez, but he could equally be some as yet to rise popular leader who manages to focus opposition to the entrenched interests of our own elite, Over Class. Imagine such a person getting elected on a platform of repudiating those Trade Agreements, or setting up a debt commission to see which debts and bond holders the nation should pay and which should be repudiated and not paid. Such a leader could go direct to the people and give them a referendum on each question. And that is what really worries the Paulsson’s of the Over Class. 

Remember when the Greek government of Mr Papandreou who suggested the Greeks might have such a referendum? Just three days after offering the Greeks a vote Papandreou was gone.  Would such a vote have been the democratic expression of the Will of the People or the Tyranny of the Majority? Don’t worry you don’t have to decide. You’ve already been saved from that one.

So we have had Rex as populist demagogue and benevolent dictator, and now Rex is to be understood as the tyranny of the majority – AKA democracy as you know it.

It is my contention that this brings us to the threshold of international lawyers and particularly arbitrators going one last step and arguing that if a law can be judged bad by an ‘impartial body of arbitrators’ why not a whole government? So the people may elect a government but the arbitrators and lawyers will declare if that government can be ignored and … and then what? 

Of course if this was just an isolated opinion we could ignore it. But it isn’t. It is already under way.

In one of the quotes given above Paulsson derides Rex when Rex claims to respect the law because,

by ‘law’ he means the rules that need to be put into place to further his policies, proclaimed to be in the national interest.

My question is whose policies and interests should he be trying to further in Paulsson’s opinion, if not those of the nation? And why does Paulsson sneer at the justification that Rex’s policies are in the national interest?

I think the answer is not far to look.  Here is a full page advert taken out in the Financial Times a few days ago on the 25th of September 2014. It is an advert paid for by  – look carefully at the small print at the bottom – atfa.org.  Follow the link and you will find a whole web site telling you what a terrible person the Argentine president is and how she is wholly and terribly in the wrong to default on her bonds. It does not mention that Argentina was not going to default on its bonds. It had in fact agreed with most of its bond holders to a restructuring in which they would get back some but not all of their money. Such restructuring is wholly within international law. But a small group, led by Paul Singer’s Vulture funds Elliot Managment Corporation and NML (also owned by Paul Singer), would not agree to any restructuring and have thereby forced a default. None of this is mentioned at atfa.org  possibly because atfa.org, though it does not say so on its web site anywhere I could find – is founded and funded by…NML.

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Perhaps these are the interests that Mr Paulsson felt Rex was ignoring and in fact dismantling. Are these the interests that would be far better served if national governments, populist ones, even wholly democratic duly elected ones like Argentina’s, were overseen by Arbitrators? Certainly in the case of Argentina the President has been trying to put the interests of her people – the people who democratically elected her – above the profits of the Vulture funds.

The advert is full of claims about the need to value the rule of law and how every nation must not “fail to meet it’s international financial and legal obligations.” It is Paulsson’s argument in action,  in black and pink – the primacy of international financial and legal obligations over and above any merely democratic interests or obligations. No mention of democracy at all. No mention of the will of the people let alone their needs, just legal and financial obligations. No matter than the Argentine President is not a dictator but an elected representative of her people.

No, one of that matters because, perhaps, she is guilty of being the face of the tyranny of the majority. And the wealthy minority are not going to stand for it. How long before it is mooted that a government judged to be illegitimate does not have the same rights as those judged legit?

 

The second article  is from The Journal of Democracy and there are two reasons to look at it. First because of who sponsors the Journal and its rather Orwellian role in promoting certain interests, and second because it introduces much of the language that I think will be used in the next few years. Every political force needs its own terms and definitions as the way of explaining and justifying the new order it wants. And part of its success depends on getting its terms accepted as the new and correct way to frame thinking and to help people forget the old way of thinking. Control the terms of the debate and you have already won.

The Journal of Democracy is an academic looking publication but one largely funded by and, as it says in its web site,  actually a part of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED).  Lots has been written about NED. I shall quote from William Blum’s book Rogue State. This web page contains a lengthy excerpt about the NED.

You may not like Blum on the grounds that he has been a fierce critic of the CIA’s off-book activities and as such is sometimes accused of being anti-America, He’s not. In my opinion he is simply an agitator for truth and accountability.

The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan as a response to all the revelations in the late 70’s about how the the CIA overturned, ousted or simply got rid of  elected governments and leaders it didn’t like. The idea was that the NED would find more peaceful and less obvious ways for the ideologues in US government to meddle in other countrys’ affairs and softly engineer regime change. As Blum writes,

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Officially the NED,

… meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, … and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A freemarket economy is equated with democracy, reform and growth, and the merits of foreign investment are emphasized.

On the one hand you could say, “how generous and kind to help.” Except that this help is always in favour of one kind of group, with one kind of political outlook. If a radical consumer group springs up, the NED makes sure a much more corporate friendly/corporate staffed group gets far more funding and gets far more access to decision makers. If a pro-worker union is organized the NED makes sure a compliant or even a corrupt one is better funded. The NED consistently undermines the very democracy it says it is in favour of by stifling any sort of pluralism or real debate. That, Blum and I and many people agree, is its job. Destroy any real, possibly radical democracy in favour of a debased and empty kind. Blum goes on,

The Endowment maintains that it’s engaged in “opposition building” and “encouraging pluralism”. “We support people who otherwise do not have a voice in their political system,” said Louisa Coan, a NED program officer. But NED hasn’t provided aid to foster progressive or leftist opposition in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua or Eastern Europe-or, for that matter, in the United States even though these groups are hard pressed for funds and to make themselves heard. Cuban dissident groups and media are heavily supported however.

NED’s reports carry on endlessly about “democracy”, but at best it’s a modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers-that-be or the way-things-are, unless of course it’s in a place like Cuba.

Exactly the kind of vetted and neutered democracy Paulsson might find agreeable I think. And now NED and its mouthpieces like the Journal of Democracy are turning their attention to us and our democracy. Not directly, not yet. But they will provide the means by which new concepts, new definitions, new arguments are given currency and legitimacy.

The NED article I have in mind is another which is ostensibly about South America but is, I think, more aimed at us. It is called “Latin America’s Authoritarian Drift: The Threat from the Populist Left”. In it the author, Professor Kurt Weyland argues that left wing populist leaders have done far more damage to Democracy than those of the right.  How have they done more damage? Well, (From the précis)

Self-styled socialist leaders command more solid, durable support, use growing economic interventionism to boost their power , invoke nationalism as a shield against foreign democracy promotion , and act as a coordinated group in suffocating democracy.

Well there’s litany of crimes if ever I saw one. They have durable and solid support. Terrible! Use economic interventionism? – means they re-built state enterprises and take back ownership and control of vital services and sovereign resources from private hands. You may not like the idea but it’s not a crime to chose it. They invoke nationalism against foreign democracy promotion – meaning they point out to people that organizations like the NED are not neutral and are not trying to promote democracy but are agents of a foreign government that has a very long track record of disliking and trying to kill off other people’s democratic choices.

Weyland’s article is fabulous. In it you will learn a whole new vocabulary of doubleplusgood terms designed to denigrate any kind of democracy other than the one we have now – which, as you are aware, is working so very well. Weyland seems not to have noticed this however. Maybe he doesn’t get out much. We have “plebecitarian or participatory democracy” which is awful because it involves the leader asking the people directly, as in a plebiscite or referendum such as the Scottish just had. And to make it worse,

“Chavez and friends have claimed to institute a new participatory – and hence qualitatively better – form of democracy and to promote social equity and national independence. (p.19)

obviously anyone advocating this sort of thing must be branded a populist dictator.

Then there is Discriminatory legalism – which is when the incumbent uses laws to,

…limit debate, strike at opponents, and drastically tilt the electoral playing field…Their brand of soft authoritarianism violates basic principles of democracy by placing controls on the media and the opposition while the government electioneers using state resources, Even when presidents command high popularity, as left-wing populists often have, contests held under such profoundly unfair conditions cannot count as democratic. Where parameters of political choice are so badly distorted, majority support cannot compensate for serious infringement of pluralism and competitiveness. (P.23)

Now I an mot going to claim these things do not happen under Chavez et al. They do. Nor am I going to claim they aren’t bad. They are. But I am going to point out that every ones of these things happens in our countries under our apparently wonderful system. In the UK we have the recently passed Gagging Law which makes it illegal for NGO or charities to run campaigns or even pass comment on subjects or issues that will be part of the electoral campaign for a year prior to the election. The government and other parties can of course party away but none of us, no other groups at all can be heard. In the US we have the law which allows corporations to pour as much money as they like in to the campaign of the person and party they prefer. There is also the vast industry of lobbying from monied interests of all levels of government. None of this, of course, tilts the playing field or distorts political choice. Not at all.

And then there is profound brand of discriminatory legalism which underpins the entire edifice of International law. Lawyers like Paulsson always love to refer to the law as neutral and unbiased. Yet the lawyers themselves pick and chose which bits of international law they will laud and which bits they will ignore. For example there is the Calvo Doctrine which says,

 jurisdiction in international investment disputes lies with the country in which the investment is located.

Or to put it another way, nations can and should always judge matters within their own courts NOT at international arbitration. This principle is far older than the johnny-come-lately notion of nations being judged by panels of arbitrators sitting behind closed doors. Yet the lawyers pretend the Calvo doctrine never existed and never mention it.

Or there is the long established legal right of a sovereign to default (just like a company) and to restructure its debt. Not to mention the right of a sovereign nation to set up a Debt Commission which has the power to judge which debts were taken on for the good of the people and which were fraudulent or odious and will be repudiated. This idea is part of international law and has been done. Yet the whole set of rulings in favour of the Vulture funds deny there can be any default and restructuring and ignore the idea of a debt commission entirely.

International law is not neutral at all. It is discriminatory. When lawyers like Paulsson talk of the sanctity of international law they mean only the laws which benefit those who pay the lawyers the most.  

Weyland warns of the damage done to pluralism and choice. Would anyone tell me how much choice, real choice, we have in any of our political systems? Is there any party which offers a real alternative or has a different set of assumptions from the others? It is interesting that when Weyland and others ask how did these left-wing ‘outsiders’ rise to power, they say it was because of a crisis of the old party system where none of the parties and the elites who controlled them could or would offer solutions to the on-going problems of inequality, poverty and exclusion. And they cannot see how this applies more and more in the west?

This is Weyland one last time. He is referring to Latin America. But apply it to us and see if it fits.

 Left wing populists…base their appeal on structural problems. They highlight…longstanding social deficits, especially widespread poverty and inequality. While the established political class looks self-serving and beholden to privileged elites, left-wing populists project concern for common citizens and start generous social programs that  – despite frequent administrative problems stemming from politicization – significantly increase benefits, alleviate destitution, and bring symbolic recognition as well. Left-wing populists claim to be the first chief executives to embrace a preferential option for the poor. Their social programs embody this commitment but cannot quickly overcome longstanding structural deficits….Thus, activist social policies further cement identity-based political loyalties. These bonds give left-wing populism more reliable political sustenance than neoliberal leaders can command and allow left-wing populists to do graver damage to democracy.

If the global Over Class cannot see how their own analysis of Latin America applies increasingly to us then they are lost. And if the only conclusion they can come up with from that entire analysis, is that ‘this allows left-wing populists to do graver damage to democracy’, then truly their ideas are as bankrupt as their banks. 

The Over Class have no solution other than to continue the looting till the last moment and to subvert democracy as fully as they can in order to do so.

If they have any ‘positive’ vision at all it is a corporate version of spaceship earth. But the spaceship will be a private craft where we must pay our way as passengers. They will own. We will work our passage down in third class away below decks.

If any of you have seen Titanic then you know how the story will end and what care those on the upper decks will have for you when the ship starts to sink.

 

To me this conclusion and the whole traducing of democracy that I hope I have shed a little light upon is as Orwellian as it gets. Is there hope? I think there is more hope now than at any time in my life.

The Over Class is already scared and is forcing ever more draconian measure upon and ever more angry populace. It takes an ever more militarised and violent State to do it They require ever more hysterical scar-mongering, ever more foreign enemies and ever less regard for the ideals they claim to champion. The Over Class have no answers to any of the global systemic challenges.  We know it, they know it, even their supporters who continue to support them more out of fear than hope, know it. 

So where is my hope?

I  go back to a far older writer than Orwell, to Gerrard Winstanley, one of the great leaders and heroes of the English revolution. He wrote that “Freedom is the man who will turn the world upside down.” Since Winstanley’s time this idea of turning the world upside down has been used to frighten people in to rejecting any idea of radical change. It has been used to cow them in to listening to the priests of “The Rule of Law über alis.” Yet Winstaley was speaking of something our leaders have forgotten. What Winstanley knew was that the people of his time felt their lives had already been turned upside down long before the revolution.  And when your life has already been turned upside down and your hopes already ransacked then what do you have to fear from radical change? Nothing.

Winstanley was as ordinary as you or me. Yet he helped start a revolution which is ours to take up. We have unfinished business. And the time is now.

And that is what Paulsson and the Over Class are beinging to sense and fear. And it is why they will lose and we will win.

 

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102 thoughts on “The Next Crisis – Part Three – The World Turned Upside Down”

  1. John McCain is I believe, connected to the NED, Maybe even its Chairman.His day job as a US Senator is but a cover for his other CIA activities. He was heavily involved in the Ukraine coup as was the NED, and also supporting the Jihadist in Syria. A mean machine ,spreading chaos thru’ out the planet.

    1. I didn’t know about McCain. Figures though. Its a nasty mess out there. But I have to say teh sign as piling up that teh next installment is fast approaching. At the very least expect a huge new round of stimulus. Too many big companies finding ‘holes’ in their earnings and watching their shares dive. China roilling over at last. Watch Oz.

  2. A little background info on ‘Jihad’ John McCain , a sower of chaos and horror world wide. Real nasty piece of work.
    I suspect his run for the Presidency with running mate Sarah Palin was a diversionary tactic to allow George ‘Dubya’ Bush a clean run,
    These CIA people run bubbles of deceit and distraction within bubbles.
    Enough to make a man head down the rabbit hole wearing a tinfoil hat.

    http://www.infowars.com/senator-mccain-pimps-for-cia-spawned-color-revolution-in-ukraine/

  3. Salford Lad, what are sheeple? who are they or what is it that makes sheeple sheeple,what is the remedy. I have heard the term from several quarters, not often on this blog but usually it is disparaging. In a piece where democracy is considered to dangerous for we common folk by the Overlords defined by David do we elevate our cause for a voice by disparaging those of our number who may have been decieved. I am the first to admit that however hard I try I am usually seeing but a small part of any thing I study and that part which I do see is laden with prior assumptions which may well turn out to be false, on this basis I find it highly unlikely that I am not one of these sheeple and must be open to any insights fellow sheeple are prepared to share.

    Desiderata
    Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
    As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
    Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
    Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
    If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
    for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

    Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
    Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
    Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
    But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals;
    and everywhere life is full of heroism.

    Be yourself.
    Especially, do not feign affection.
    Neither be critical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

    Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
    Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings.
    Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

    You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
    you have a right to be here.
    And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

    Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
    and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
    With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

    © Max Ehrmann 1927

    1. Not too keen on the word ‘sheeple’ partly because sheep are as hard as nails but also because the use of personification is particularly fruitful and evocative:

      E.g. in John Milton’s attack on the clergy in the following lines from ‘Lycidas’ written in 1637.

      “Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
      A sheep-hook, or have learn’d ought els the least
      That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs!
      What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
      And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
      Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw,
      The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
      But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
      Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:”

  4. This series of articles is excellent and incisive. Today you mention two of my favourite thinkers Winstanley and Orwell … here’s a Winstanley quote as you failed to supply a link:

    “Take notice, That England is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures. For the People have not laid out their Monies, and shed their Bloud, that their Landlords, the Norman power, should still have its liberty and freedom to rule in Tyranny in his Lords, landlords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and State Servants; but that the Oppressed might be set Free, Prison doors opened, and the Poor peoples hearts comforted by an universal Consent of making the Earth a Common Treasury, that they may live together as one House of Israel, united in brotherly love into one Spirit; and having a comfortable livelihood in the Community of one Earth their Mother.
    If you look through the Earth, you shall see, That the landlords, Teachers and Rulers, are Oppressors, Murtherers, and Theeves in this manner; But it was not thus from the Beginning. And this is one Reason of our digging and labouring the Earth one with another; That we might work in righteousness, and lift up the Creation from bondage: For so long as we own Landlords in this Corrupt Settlement, we cannot work in righteousness; for we should still lift up the Curse, and tread down the Creation, dishonour the Spirit of universal Liberty, and hinder the work of Restauration.
    Secondly, In that we begin to Digge upon George-Hill, to eate our Bread together by righteous labour, and sweat of our browes, It was shewed us by Vision in Dreams, and out of Dreams, That that should be the Place we should begin upon; And though that Earth in view of Flesh, be very barren, yet we should trust the Spirit for a blessing. And that not only this Common, or Heath should be taken in and Manured by the People, but all the Commons and waste Ground in England, and in the whole World, shall be taken in by the People in righteousness, not owning any Propriety; but taking the Earth to be a Common Treasury, as it was first made for all.” Gerrard Winstanley (1649)
    The True Levellers Standard Advanced: Or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men.

    https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/winstanley/1649/levellers-standard.htm

    And a marketing video for ‘George Hill’ today:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj8rLLhu6_A

    1. Sexby…….But it seems now, except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived.

      The Putney Debates….Ireton,cromwell et al.

  5. @ Salford Lad – I’m not at all sure you can use the term “tin foil hat” and throw in a link to “infowars” and expect anyone to take your comment seriously – even if it’s true!

    Alex Jones?……Really??

    Great article….as usual.

  6. Just wow, part 3 is a tour de force on it’s own never mind the first two parts. My only criticism is that you fail to continue calling the over class The Disloyal which is what they are. The Disloyal inhabit a country called International that has no government, God or leader. They worship only usury and advantage. Empathy with their fellow humans is the ultimate sin and monetisation of all problems solves them. They have already reduced politics, and in particular economics, to parody we are still discussing problems in the terms set by Yes Minister in the 80’s.

    I know some people find the term “sheeple” offensive but it is an accurate description of people who only receive news through the MSM. Dear God even the Guardian says the Tories best claim to be the next government is their “handling of the economy”. No I am not making that up, we really are converging towards any economics you like as long as its’ neoliberalism.

    We need to use our power of free speech whilst it still exists. more and more people are turning to the blogs for their information and it is starting to show. We will beat The Disloyal because we will be better informed.

    1. Bill40,

      You are quite right I should have called them the DIsloyal at least a few times. I am annoyed that I didn’t think.
      I’m really glad you liked part 3. I was seriously, still am a bit, worried it was too long and perhaps over-written.

      1. It probably is too long but what do I know? No blog of yours could ever be too long for me (Lord I read Bill Mitchell!) I am thinking more of casual readers only. Only you can know when to break things down my advice, for the very little it is worth, is too break when you feel it natural.

        Your more devoted followers don’t care how long you make your articles just the casuals whom we must engage. I hope you will go on Twitter more there you will recruit an army to help get the word out.

        People are ready to listen, especially to you.

      2. This article was not too long. It covers enough that if you had not read the first two you do have an idea of where you are going. I just happened onto this article as it was a link. I fully intend to read the first two and anything else you have written. I particularly like the comment section as well as your readers seemed to be very informed and I learn a great deal from them as well. Yes, People’s eyes are starting to open in surprising places here in the USA. A few years ago if I raised these issues or questions they had no idea what I was talking about, but now they are starting to see and that is a beginning.

      3. Thank you for a fine series!.

        As a daily digest I have the time to read extensively both online and print.

        If you have not seen this I urge you to!

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96c2wXcNA7A
        by Damon Vrable …Renaisance 2.0 Financial Empire lessons 1-6

        One of your commenters in article 2 left a link to…
        The Quigley Formula by G. Edward Griffin
        (The Creature from Jekyl Island)

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynVqPnMQ2sI&app=desktop
        ..The Quigley Formula

        As an ex actor he delivers well,
        this particular offering covers the essential ‘deep state’.

        Implemented by Cecil Rhodes(who died 1902) using Professor Quigley’s
        “rings within rings” system of of top down control,using secrecy structures.

        One of the ‘rings’ he does not mention(in 2012) is The Pilgrims Society
        established in London 1902 and NewYork 1903 the people in these societies
        appear to form the basis of social.financial,industrial and military control.

        Giving rise to the ‘Council on Foreign Relations’,’Bilderburg Group’,
        ‘The Trilateral Commision’ and spawning NED, USAID and all the
        seemingly ‘helpful’ agencies looting the world of real assets.

        It seems quite clear that the most successful means of looting a country
        is achieved by issuing interest bearing Sovereign Bonds (in order to issue its own currency).

        Once one understands this system and it’s totally corrupt nature,
        it is quite clear that the ‘Elites’ will never allow the return of ‘Debt Free Money’.

        Although I previously understood this aspect of the system,
        Damon Vrable and Bill Still explain it really well.

        Cheers.

    2. Well Golem ~ i can appreciate your concern about length … very provocative in terms of the vast ideascape that is ahead of any visionary who is expanding the limits of their articulation skills in the wide unknown.

      I have read a great deal of your work over some time now, and employing the (perhaps unfair) simplicity of categorization … would venture to say that your work in this blog may fit into any or all of these categories Geopolitical, Finance, History, Philosophy and Economics to name a few and always with clear aim to inform/educate the reader in a fair manner.

      This recent trilogy definitely spans multiple categories and Part-3 above might be breaking into uncharted territory (probably too early to tell.)

      While it is extremely tempting to try and envision how the will of the Global Overclass (The Disloyal) will manifest over the short or long-term, your opening paragraph definitely challenges the reader to do just that. History (even very recently) provides many examples of what The Disloyal have been willing to do to (entire) populations for long periods of time in order to get their way.

      Where we are at this moment in history probably behooves us to imagine those examples from the (recent) past and then update them given the currently available means (personal technologies, etc.) to implement them even more effectively and efficiently. A scary prospect indeed, but necessary anticipation in terms of survival.

      While one should never underestimate an adversary, I do wonder if you might be overestimating the ability and efficacy of the The Disloyal to think ahead… To that point, I have just read another article published today that immediately appeared as complementary (to some extent) to your Part-3 article.

      ==> http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept14/oil-game9-14.html

      All the best …

  7. Bagehot-by-the-Bay

    Topical illustration on how the Rule of Law takes over. In Colorado, a right-wing school board is revising the history books to leave out the “revolution” part of the American, French, and other revolutions. From the New York Times:

    ARVADA, Colo. — A new conservative school board majority here in the Denver suburbs recently proposed a curriculum-review committee to promote patriotism, respect for authority and free enterprise and to guard against educational materials that “encourage or condone civil disorder.”

    full story http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/us/in-colorado-a-student-counterprotest-to-an-anti-protest-curriculum.html

    1. And also on cue:

      British PM David Cameron says non-violent extremists including 911 truthers and conspiracy theorists are just as dangerous as ISIL terrorists:

      http://www.globalresearch.ca/british-pm-david-cameron-non-violent-extremists-including-911-truthers-and-conspiracy-theorists-are-just-as-dangerous-as-isil-terrorists/5405059

      And today, Theresa May’s anti-civil-liberties, anti-“extremists” speech.

      And last week, Tony Abbot pulled off a Patriot Act shut-down of Australia.

      They’re moving fast.

  8. Thank you for this.

    I doubt we can ever persuade the top of the top to relent, or the worst of the mob for that matter. The latter is unmoved by reason, and the former are shameless and driven mad by their own emptiness.

    I think the target audience would be the enablers in the professional class, the thinkers or thought leaders. They are offered ‘the bullet or the bribe’ career-wise, and for now are comfortable enough to turn their heads at best, or join the voices for rationalizing the unspeakable at the worst.

    1. Au contraire…”the professional class, the thinkers or thought leaders” – so-called – (there is no thinking worthy of the name involved – think of Anne Applebaum -, only perversions of truth, twisting of traditions / history and salaried cover ups of crime in action) have served and continued to serve as the appointed ennablers of the Over Class, or whatever these people call themselves. In a bloody revolution the ennablers would be the ones whose heads would roll first, simply because they are easier to find. As mere paid shills – ‘useful idiots’ – they are not provided with bunkers.

      These individuals received the benefit of an education – on paper – but proved supremely stupid, uneducatable, and lacking any spine, ethics, humble faith or moral compass. Any “relenting” they might do would be utterly worthless and meaningless, and only to save their skin in a turn of the tide. They are the paid amoral traitors walking among us, who have proved what they are with every lie and poisonous action. The very LAST people to trust or appeal to.

      Without these talking heads & scribblers – ‘professors’, ‘journalists’, ‘think tankers’, ‘analysts’, ‘economists’, ‘lawyers’ – the Princes of Darkness would today be absolutely nowhere. This is a 30 year effort, on steroids for the last 13 years. A massive capitulation and corruption of the upper middle class against its own interests. Worse, in the case of professionals, a complete betrayal of the ethics of the professions they vowed to serve. Professionals actually have professional vows and oaths, and for those of us who do wholeheartedly and humbly serve them, this is an especially painful sight.

      Unlike you I believe the people have it right. They might not grasp all the details – I am a “professional” and I don’t really ‘get’ all the details of the market for example (it’s not my field) – but they DO see to the heart of what’s happening. They experience it first hand since they – taxi drivers, school teachers, nurses, shop workers, builders, factory hands, rail workers etc. etc. – are the mere expendables.

      By now most of the professions are already expendable – priests, doctors / veterinarians, architects and engineers – or mere ‘fodder’ ie the armed forces.

      The point line of resistance is with the dissident economists, lawyers and judges who are protecting civil liberties and law, positing alternate economics. This is backed up by honest, thoughtful alternate media, numerous other voices for truth, the good sense and apostolic kindness of the majority of different faiths. And the raw common sense of the so-called tyrranical mob.

  9. I’m not an academic, but I will stick my neck out a bit here. I have written this story on the Guardian CIF a few times, and it’s about property rights. Now property rights are good, we all know that, and my house and back garden are mine, but is there a dark side to property rights, where things might start to go a bit wrong? Like how Sun gives us life, but too much of it kills.

    Now let’s say I live in a very poor country where people only just get enough to eat everyday and don’t have much else. Then someone discovers an oil well under their plot of land, but no one in his country can afford to buy it, and neither can his government, when compared to what mega rich western bankers are able to pay him for it. So he sells the oil well to the rich western bankers and goes to live in Florida. Happy ending!

    Now many other people soon discover oil wells in their plots of land too, and so they sell them to other very rich western bankers too because they have lots of money. Then diamond mines and gold are found, and these soon get sold to the highest bidders, which are more western bankers or very wealthy people. Eventually all the profitable bits in the country get owned by foreigners and so it gets fenced off, but now the hungry population can only look through the steel fences and see all the mineral wealth that’s beyond them. The poor now remain poor forever, while the rich grow even more fabulously wealthy, and with this new found wealth they can buy up even more of the world’s resources in lots of other countries too.

    Imagine living in a very rich country where the vast majority of people are very poor indeed because all the wealth, and its fertile land, are all owned by only a few western elite, and so now all the fertile land is used to grow cash crops for the big corporations, while the rest of the population live as paupers. But where did the elite get all that money from? Well much of it came the western banking fractional reserve system where bankers invented the money out of nothing, but also, much of it came from past centuries of war and looting, while with even more of it came from the slave trade.

    Now imagine that, all these mega rich bankers are using the money they got, not just by robbing those third world countries of their resources in the first place, but also by turning many of their inhabitants into slaves over the centuries gone by, and now they are using that stolen wealth – which has been passed down through the generations within their families, or through the big western institutions, to ‘legally’ buy up all the rest of the third world’s resources as well. Apparently this is the meritocracy, where these people have earned their money. Really?

    Now imagine that in Texas the Chinese mega rich own absolutely everything of value because they did exactly what the West had done to the rest of the world, but as a result, all the red neck, tea party folk are dead poor and own absolutely nothing. Well, I can’t imagine all those red necks staying pretty calm and accepted it because it’s capitalism, you know, i.e. it’s market forces? I reckon they would soon go hopping mad and be right up there on their horses brandishing about all those guns they love so much. They always said that they might need them in case they have fight their own government.

    Now imagine that a third a world country democratically elects a government that nationalised its country’s resources. But if you are a third tin pot world country with lots of oil and diamonds, you can bet every cheat, bandit, thug, criminal, good for nothing degenerate, will soon be doing everything possible to get hold of all that oil and those diamonds. Not only that, the CIA and the western mega rich will be very busy indeed with their espionage, dirty tricks, backhanders, and corruption, doing everything they can to get you thrown out, or even murdered, and so in desperation to save your life, and your family’s life, you will have no choice but to come down very heavy handed indeed on any dissidents and throw them into prison. But now you will get branded as a ruthless dictator who squashes freedom and democracy. (I’m not making an apology for any brutal dictators here).

    Anyway, you know the rest of the story, so I will end it here.

    1. Thanks Kavy. Just imagine, if you were teaching at Harvard that would have come out as a peon to the spread of democracy, knowledge transfer, the gift of education for illiterate peasants, eradication of disease, well drilling by the peace corps because the [stupid] people didn’t know about things like that that….the benefits of civilisation itself 😉

  10. You mention the politics of envy, Golem, but research shows that that no one is more envious of the rich than the rich themselves. They really hate it if someone is richer than them. I once read about a magazine that listed ten richest men in America, but soon after that the tenth richest man got put in prison for insider dealing. Everyone was stunned as he was one of the richest men in the world, but when journalists asked his wife about it, she said that he hated being number 10, the bottom of the list.

    1. Sackerson,

      Good to be reminded. I remember hearing that the subject was discussed when the US was ‘liberating’ Iraq. Unitl it was pointed out that many of Iraq’s debts that would be found to be odious were owed to US banks.

  11. After reading the above I came across another, also long & fascinating piece entitled ‘ Democracy Promotion ‘ & Neo-Liberalism in the Middle East. written in 2006 by Adam Hanieh who is now at SOAS in London;

    “Democracy – understood in the narrow sense of regular electoral competitions between different sections of the elite – is necessary to prevent ‘coups or revolutions’ and is aimed at providing popularly sanctioned legitimacy for neo-liberal economic measures.”

    Obviously pre – financial crisis but I think it describes the modus operandi of the forces David describes above when they were probably a little more relaxed in their looting & when it was still largely something that was done to Third World countries. The game has moved on & as David describes the lawyers are moving in with the trade deals to truss us up within our faux Democracies.

    The article starts with a brief description William Robinson’s 1996 book, ‘Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony’.

    ” Robinson argues that democracy promotion is aimed at strengthening polyarchy – the rule of a small minority in which mass participation consists of periodic choices in formally free elections managed by competing sections of the elite. Robinson argues that polyarchy’s fixation with the formal act of voting serves to justify the influence and power that comes with possession of material wealth. Democracy promotion thus plays an ideological role in legitimating the division between politics and economics predicated in liberal theory. By concentrating on the form of elections, it serves to justify prodigious concentrations of wealth both within and between nations ”

    The IMF, World Bank, USAID, NED & CIPE were all involved in Iraq, Jordan, Egypt & others with USAID using private company contractors with experience of looting in other parts of the world, notably South America to set up shop in TME;

    “In a remarkably frank outline of US plans for the Iraqi economy, Bearing Point was required to “… assess state owned enterprises (SOEs) in Iraq in terms of their potential market value for sale as ongoing concerns … [the] contractor will also evaluate and recommend the potential for liquidation or dissolution of specific firms or industries, as necessary…. Based on contractor recommendations (and approved by USAID), the contractor will implement a privatization plan, focusing first if approved on strategic investors and on creating and supporting an institution responsible for privatization…. If changes to legislation are required, contractor will assist legislative reform specifically to allow for the privatization of state-owned industries and firms and/or establishing a privatization entity. The contractor will implement USAID approved recommendations to begin supporting the privatization of strategic industries and appropriate privatization of public utilities, including potentially food distribution and agro-processing industries.”

    & : A central institutional player in this strategy is the US-based private company, Research Triangle Institute (RTI). RTI has been awarded a very large number of USAID contracts around the world in countries such as South Africa, El Salvador, Benin, Uganda, Bulgaria, and Indonesia. Any doubts over the way decentralization/devolution is used to deepen neo-liberalism are quickly dismissed through an examination of USAID’s Decentralization and Democratic Local Governance Programming Handbook (May 2000), written in close collaboration with RTI. [19] The USAID handbook serves as a detailed recipe for promoting decentralization in a variety of different national contexts where there may be resistance to such methods. A central theme of the handbook is shifting responsibility for public service provision away from the state and towards local governments. The Handbook envisages a situation in which: “Local governments are doing more than merely cleaning streets; they are taking on a variety of non-traditional service responsibilities, such as assuring primary health care, basic education, public security, public utilities, environmental protection, and building regulation.”

    In order to provide these services, local governments will be forced to raise their own revenues, and be given the power to introduce fees, privatize and borrow money on the international capital markets. “They may employ new or innovative approaches, including public-private partnerships, proactive participation in development programs with the national government or donors, and contracting out for services.” [21] In doing so, revenue collection will be shifted towards the local level and will include the collection of fees for public services. [22]

    These identical themes are being repeated in Iraq. A 2003 USAID contract, awarded to Research Triangle Institute (RTI) and worth $230 million to date, required RTI to: “Build sub-national administrative capacities to … develop performance-oriented, transparent and accountable budgets; and undertake local economic development …. and strengthen local authorities’ capacity to engage in discussions on appropriate devolution of responsibility to local levels of government.”

    Then there is the ‘ Iraq Foundation ‘ connected to FDD

    ” The Iraq Foundation, an organization funded almost entirely by the NED and US State Department, works in close alliance with a flagship, neo-conservative entity such as the FDD, which, in turn, is funded by some of the wealthiest individuals and companies in the US. Both the Iraq Foundation and FDD are closely linked to the US-backed Iraqi government. Rend Francke, executive director of the Iraq Foundation as the representative of the Iraqi National Council in Washington D.C., and Tanya Gilly, former FDD staff member, as an elected representative in the current Iraqi government. These links indicate that concern with ‘democracy’ – the public face of both the Iraq Foundation and the FDD – are inseparable from the interests of US capital and neo-liberal policy makers ”

    Worked out well for a few – who will hope they can use the horror & chaos they caused to convince the majority that they need to be protected by them, from the horror & chaos they intend to impose on them anyway. A racket where the gangster can make you pay for protection against something supposedly worse than him, while he slowly robs you totally blind.

    http://www.stateofnature.org/?p=5438

  12. Another amazing installment in a profound series of posts. I am still parsing this latest one, but I immediately began to speculate how this is all playing out in the arena of climate change governance: to wit, the emphasis on strong centralized international agreements.

    I’m new to this research, but so far I am seeing a few trends that indicate that national sovereignty and self-determination will be further eroded in pursuit of international climate agreements:

    1) Placing market-based (neoliberal) solutions above all others

    2) Emphasis on rapid development of “green/renewable” technologies, financed by public tax funds and private equity, owned exclusively by private corporations (the so-called “responsible investment” scheme)

    3) Emphasis on “linking” carbon pricing/trading schemes, so that wealthy countries can sell credits to poorer ones (or, perhaps, trade them for exclusive access to resources) (Globally Linked Carbon Markets)

    4) Emphasis on centralized monitoring, tracking, pricing, and enforcement systems (controlled by the UNFCCC and developed by industry groups like the International Emissions Trading Association)

    5) Funding for climate mitigation will be dependent on adherence to internationally agreed-upon goals for “sustainable development” (“balancing” climate goals with development goals)

    6) Subsuming human rights to climate goals in the name of more “effective” and “consistent” implementation

    A “Major Opportunity” for international control:

    “[I]n a speech at the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations, [UNFCCC Executive Secretary] Ms Figueres highlighted the worldwide momentum building to Paris 2015, where governments are slated to enact a new, universal climate change agreement.

    “… ‘We’re on the verge of a turning point. And that turning point is mankind’s ability to face the challenges in front of us once we understand the impacts we face if we don’t act and once we understand the opportunity climate change brings. By making the right decisions, by making the right investments, by making the right policy decisions, by putting together the package of policy and financing incentives, we have a major opportunity,’ she said.”

  13. Thanks to Jesse for the connection to Golem XIV. I have eagerly awaited the next part of this series after reading the first and will now go back and re-read all three. Very well done! You are on my short list for insight.

    1. I doubt I would ever have found Golem XIV were it not for my regular visits to Jesse’s Cafe Americain.
      David Malone is an incisive and thought-provoking writer.

  14. Some more on ‘Jihad’John McCain.

    http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/john-mccain-organiser-of-regime-change.html
    John McCain … is in fact President of the republican branch of NED (The National Endowment for Democracy) which is a CIA front. The NED has a100 million dollar budget to fund agent provocateur activity.
    McCains day job as a US Senator is just a cover for his real activities as a CIA point man for regime change in various East Europe, Latin America the Arab states.
    He was also heavily involved in the Ukrainian coup with Victoria Nudelmann., who stated that they had spent $5 billion to ensure regime change, apart from the ‘ F– the Eu’ remark.

  15. The following helps to reverse the damage. The AMI (The American Monetary Institute) conference is less than 1 WEEK away and features Michael Hudson, Steve Keen, Kaoru Yamaguchi, Joseph Huber among others. We need the debt-free money to fix our economies, jobs, and urgently to attempt to reduce the terrible damage of Fukushima, WIPP and to reverse Climate Change. These projects will take many generations and huge money to engineer.

    http://www.monetary.org/2014schedule.html

    The American Monetary Institute announces its 10th Annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference
    October 2 – 5, 2014 at University Center in downtown Chicago
    Register by Phone at 224-805-2200
    Register by e-mail at [email protected]

    Big discounts for Students & Teachers, If finances are making it hard for you to attend our Conference, let me know (by phone or email) and we’ll work it out together.

    http://www.monetary.org/2014-conference

    Dear Friends of the American Monetary Institute,

    We proudly announce our tenth annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference, and bring together some of the world’s most serious advocates of real and achievable monetary reforms.

    The banking disaster, created and facilitated by false economic and monetary ideas, used by some very bad people, actually poses a real danger to the survival of the species. We must transform the ongoing disaster into an opportunity to achieve real and lasting monetary reforms for mankind. These are the reforms indicated as necessary by decades of study and centuries of experience.

    Regular working people understand that a moral approach is needed to lead to a future
    worthy of humanity. Around the world they are way ahead of their leadership, which ignores moral considerations, seeming to rely on media dominance to hold onto undeserved privileges for a tiny minority of the population. But clearly, in order for the financial crisis to have occurred, thousands of financiers had to break our nation’s very serious laws; and yet not a single one of them has been charged for those crimes.

    The main cause of the problem is using debt in place of money when the banks make loans, as our present system does. That single error, promoted by those really trying to block monetary reform, and by some economics professors trying to keep their salary checks coming, is all it takes to wreck any monetary system, and begin the insane concentration of wealth, into exactly the wrong hands, as we now see in our society! The conference shows why money must be created by our government and spent into circulation on infrastructure, healthcare, and education. The conference highlights recent important moves in that direction by key people, and institutions, around the world.

    We have a once in several generations opportunity to fix an obviously flawed money system that is causing so much pain and hardship among a growing section of our people. It is clearly time to fix our monetary and banking system! Come and find out how, and the role you can play in that process.

    In addition to top notch “real monetary reform” speakers, we’ll focus on some important themes:

    The Student Debt Crisis

    This tragedy has the potential to wreck the lives of an entire generation of young people! That would wreck our nation. We are not going to let that happen – we are going to look at adjusting Kucinich’s N.E.E.D. Act ever so slightly so that it will forgive all student debt. The Act as written already pays for education – adjustments will be discussed to also make that retroactive. Sounds unbelievable? This conference will look at that question in complete detail.

    Remember how Students demonstrated against the Viet Nam War? They didn’t want to be drafted and killed. The student debt question can have a similar effect. We can imagine an army of young people(and their parents!) who will promote monetary reform, and force Congress to end their student debt.

    We made a special effort to bring students into the conference and offered them scholarships at only $49 to attend the whole conference. Several are doing this, and we are looking forward to helping get them started on monetary reform. They are able to stay at the HI Youth Hostel across the street from University Center, at $35 a night, after arriving in Chicago inexpensively on Megabus! Please help finance this by donating to the American Monetary Institute. Believe me if students (and their parents) are in serious debt and not seriously employed, their outlook is bleak.

    And Teachers Are in Trouble Too

    Not only in Chicago, but around the country Teachers are under attack, because they are still making a living wage, and that’s no longer allowed; and their earned pensions are threatened. Remember the Chicago Teacher’s Union supports Kucinich’s N.E.E.D. Act. We are making a special effort to bring in teachers to this conference. If telling people about monetary reform is an educational task, who better to help us do that than the professional educators? Please help spread the word among teachers.

    And What About You? We’d like you to consider attending this conference. There is very little time left to make all the arrangements. And the registration fee has been kept low for a long time but must now rise to the full $395 level. SO Think, and Act NOW! If you can’t come, please make a donation to help us offer those student scholarships at only $49! Click a donate button at our homepage http://www.monetary.org.

    And one more thing!: The sequester and austerity gang are really trying to do damage to our people and others around the world. They are operating under cover of pretending they don’t understand how destructive and evil their actions are – pretending to be trying to do good for the country. Folks – Don’t buy that “cover story” for a minute. They know exactly the damage they are doing! If finances are making it hard for you to attend our Conference, let me know (by phone or email) and we’ll work it out together.

    We won’t be stopped by such maneuvers! Do not be afraid – and remember “Action dispels fear.”

    Thanks and Warm regards, Hoping to see you in October!

    Warm regards,
    Stephen Zarlenga
    Director, AMI

    1. Great post, Stephen, I hope we can win this. With my readings over the last few years I now realise how powerful the 1% really are, and with an electorate half asleep they can fill them with all sorts of lies.

      There was some negative articles about Assad and Iran in The Guardian recently and most people seemed to be buying for blood, one even said that Assad was a mass torturer. I don’t know what he does but I pointed out that we have allies in the Middle East that are far worse but hardly any real criticism is made of them. I tried to tell them how propaganda works and how demonising your enemy is how the governments get their civilians to accept war. It all falls on death ears, though, because they’re so brainwashed most don’t believe me.

      ‘War, Media Propaganda and the Police State – Prof. James F. Tracy’

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQGfj1ZBnKA

      Dr Udo Ulfkotte, was a journalist and author, describes how he used to write propaganda in mainstream newspapers, but now he has decided to risk his life and speak the truth because he is very concerned that what is happening now may lead to WW3.

      Whistleblower Dr Udo Ulfkotte

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm4OUcfiM-8

  16. I enjoyed reading this post but I have two objections:

    1. The constant brainwashing of people by the mass media (Ministry of Truth) and the distraction by gadgets (smartphones) and trivial social media chatter (Facebook, Twitter) makes it difficult to mobilize a broad and coordinated resistance. Misinformation campaigns will try to belittle grievances and obscure their origins, and if that fails, will try to deflect resulting aggressions away from the ruling class by directing them to external foes (Gaddafi, Chavez, Assad, Putin).

    2. Many people are individualistic, egoistic, competitive, because they grew up in a society where this are the main social paradigms. People are not selfish by nature (debatable), but they learned to be selfish from the first day of their life. The rulers can always pick individuals to serve as their sycophants and lackeys, they can employ a part of the population as their pretorian guard.

    A revolution only based on discontent and disdain will not succeed, it will flare up in various places but burn down fast. The revolution will not be televised. The old order can only be overturned if the old structures (networks, support systems) are systematically sabotaged while parallel alternative structures (networks, support systems) are secretly established.

  17. The blog is a beacon. My comment is off-beat. The ‘mechanisms’ of suppression are not well understood. Crude levels of biology are involved – current jargon includes ‘co-evolutionary arms’ races’ between parasite-slaver ants and their hosts. Control in animal groups is often chemical – examples are legion. Long story cut short, our global overclass hardly behave rationally and our mass reactions hardly seem rational either. One can think in metaphor of the overseers as queen spider-ants gushing smell proteins that cause chemical reactions in us.

    Go to a small thought experiment from this. Imagine yourself a cop discovering, at 2 am, a family complaining their 13 year old daughter is being sexually abused. All of us, no doubt, want to get help for the girl and family, gather evidence and get on with prosecution and prevention. Now think Rotherham, where none of this happened 100 times a year. The truth is ‘An Inspector Calls’ of failure by ‘professionals’. Cops even threatened a researcher revealing the truth in a very nasty manner.

    Only time to suggest here that there are many mechanisms of suppression we may be missing in use by the global slavers. They are likely operating in us. For all I agree the ‘democratic problem’, it has been all-too-traditional to discuss virtue ethics whilst whistling up meals and entertainment from slaves. We need some kind of analysis of the disabling network and its use of incompetence in regulation.

  18. In Lat-Am, the populist revolt put leftist governments in power. In the Western world, if there ever is a popular revolt, it will most probably elect far-right parties. It’s no longer unthinkable that Martine Le Pen will one day be president of France. She curiously blends policies that appeal to the right and policies that appeal to the left. She’s apparently an economic nationalist (anti-globalization, anti-free-trade) which appeals to a large segment of the French population. (All I know about her comes from commenter “Working Class Nero” at Naked Capitalism). It looks like our masters, in their awesome foresightedness, have already designed plans to deal with people like her.

  19. The Dork of Cork

    This is funny but in a sick way….
    Would you believe anything that comes out of the great sage known as Dan McLaughlin…even if it is banking gobbledygook

    Getting to the fucking point (even if grossly wrong as below)in a brisk fashion. is not acceptable in official discourse it seems.

    http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2014/10/01/a-macro-prudential-policy-framework-for-ireland/#comment-1333856

    Judging by the above comment you would think Ireland is a economy closed to outside capital flows or something.
    Its very simple – internal credit growth remains deeply negative in Ireland ( resident people are experiencing continued declining purchasing power and standards of life)
    Meanwhile people and companies with access to external credit are pushing up the price of assets giving the illusion of scarcity.
    There is no physical scarcity of houses in Ireland (even in Dublin where the system/ rental managers take a share before the remains move out of the country.)
    Increasing numbers are being forced to enter the rental market.
    But who exactly are they renting from ?
    Houses are everywhere in Ireland.
    The average family should have two at the very least
    This is no less then a massive attack on ireland & previous co- op culture ( albeit it was always a rural tradition rather the the cities which have always remained in extreme poverty)
    The rural tradition was of course taken over by the country and western dupes in the 1970s – with so much diesel to burn but with little brain cells to spare as they embraced the euro agri experiment which of course also was a disaster. (as it was designed to be as such)

    This is such a simple yet true comment to make.
    Nothing complex about it.
    We are being farmed – no question about it.
    Some insiders on the scheme are concerned that we get humane treatment but we are livestock in their eyes nevertheless.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMqYYXswono

    The refusal to redistribute the wealth in Ireland by simply giving away the house to mortgage holders shows us the true goal of these demonic scarcity merchants.
    The simple questions were not asked back in 2009 when Rothschild moved in as the offical “advisor” to the Irish banking jurisdiction.
    Such as why people don’t have the purchasing power to buy stuff when it is already made ?????

  20. The Dork of Cork

    “current rise in property prices in Dublin is not being driven by credit”

    This is the most absurd comment for a economist to make.

    Prices are always driven by credit.
    Wealth is not , but prices sure are.

    Imagine a simple closed economy model with 100 units of credit tokens / no usury and a fixed amount of goods such as Irelands current housing capital stock.
    Reduce the amount of tokens to 50 units ,
    It does not really matter if the population rises or falls or indeed if more or less goods are produced in totality.
    The price of all goods is reduced in half regardless of population or production dynamics.
    For example : The price of goods in a 50 unit economy could never be worth 60 units !!!!

  21. Great series, and comments too.
    We only need to look at the social insects to see how playing at civilization without an egalitarian ethical code works out, just how few genetic lines would it take to maintain an viable genome? Or will we diverge into three species the sociopathic ‘royals’ at the top, the psycopathic policy enforcers in the middle and the befuddled masses drugged and memed into behaving against their own best interests for eternity at the base.
    More food for thought http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-pizzigati/why-an-unequal-planet-can_b_5906592.html?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=Green
    http://www.sciencecodex.com/changing_antarctic_waters_could_trigger_steep_rise_in_sea_levels-142713

    Extract: “The research published in Nature Communications found that in the past, when ocean temperatures around Antarctica became more layered – with a warm layer of water below a cold surface layer – ice sheets and glaciers melted much faster than when the cool and warm layers mixed more easily.

    This defined layering of temperatures is exactly what is happening now around the Antarctic.
    “The reason for the layering is that global warming in parts of Antarctica is causing land-based ice to melt, adding massive amounts of freshwater to the ocean surface,” said ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science researcher Prof Matthew England an author of the paper.
    “At the same time as the surface is cooling, the deeper ocean is warming, which has already accelerated the decline of glaciers on Pine Island and Totten. It appears global warming is replicating conditions that, in the past, triggered significant shifts in the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet.””
    http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/09/28/washingtons-secret-agendas-paul-craig-roberts/

    1. And if we do?

      Will we find ourselves accused of being extremists?

      Seems to me Mr Dudley is three small words away from coming out and saying what he really wants to say. Just add in “be allowed to” where it seems to fit and we’re there.

  22. For me all of this boils down to the simple fact that in the final analysis there are those who own everything (or everything that is important) and the rest of us who either own nothing or nothing of any significance. Karl Marx made this point 150 years ago

    In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.

    Class society has reached the stage where we are forced to face the fact that until we rid ourselves of it a decnet life will be impossible for all but a very few of us.

    Again I quote Marx:

    And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

    All Marx did was lay bare the nature of the Capitalism. His major work was called Capital not Communism.

    Of course ‘Marx was wrong, it always leads to horror’

    Who told us that?

    1. Socialism & Communism perceived as virtually the same thing in the minds of many. If the same logic was applied, then surely Capitalism & Fascism should also be seen as one & the same, especially Corporatism, which Mussolini equated to the right hand branch of totalitarianism.

      Just a question of extremism perhaps & the fact that the Capitalist shark has to keep moving & feeding in order to survive. A situation that within a world of shrinking resources will soon lead to ever increasing extreme behaviour revealing the predator’s true colours, Perhaps one day the word Fascism ( being used instead of Capitalism ) will be spat out by a majority, or at least by those who manage to survive it’s death throes, In a reflection of those who earlier survived a similar hell through Communism.

      A bleak assessment by William I. Robinson from Truthout which ends with some optimism largely dependent on our being able to counter a transnational elite with a transnational resistance:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2BfQu5vHGQ

        1. Thanks for that – If you put that together with this, it makes for a happy future for the Neo-Libs, Neo-Cons & various racketeers, but perpetual misery for those worthless commodities – the human beings who somehow have to survive there :

          https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/a-war-for-power/

          This article from Adam Hanieh gives a good description of how the Gulf states operate within the Middle East. Tyrannies of extreme wealth who use mainly desperate migrants, working in terrible conditions as a throwaway workforce – while the West supports those states in the crushing of all dissidents. It is obviously much harder to force a native workforce into such desperate straits, but it is also obvious there are those who hold power in the West are trying to make this Neo-Liberal wet dream come true.

          https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/a-petrodollar-and-a-dream/

  23. Golem XIV – “And if we do?

    Will we find ourselves accused of being extremists?

    This is something I am concerned about. If we question authority or the official story, it seems the names we are called are becoming more extreme. Are we the non-violent extremists that Cameron was talking about in his UN speech recently? Because our world view is not the world view that the Disloyal have been trying to peddle/foist upon us since day dot… Ugh!

    Thanks again for three jam-packed posts David. They dove-tail nicely with all the other alternative news sources I am reading. We are being called to action by quite a few. Time to take our freedom and independence.

    1. Thanks for that, Okie. In fact, a world currency was mentioned in the Truth Never Told videos that I posted below. Chris Duane, of TNT, say’s that bankers want a global currency to escape from all government regulation and control.

      Chris Duane say’s that the western world is coming to an end, but I’m glad the bankers don’t think so, because this gives us a chance to sort this mess out.

  24. Over the last few weeks I have had most of my posts on CIF removed by the Guardian moderators. I believe the US is the number cause of terrorism in the world but I try to tame my posts right down but they still get removed. I back my CIF posts with lots of links which makes them too powerful for the Guardian. It’s a shame, I wrote on CIF recently complaining that even if I’m wrong people should at least be able to debate these things. Criticising the US to harshly is not allowed in the UK, it seems. So much for western free speech?

    Yesterday I had another one removed but it had this excellent link in it which I have given below. I think Golem would like it. There are lots of other great videos by Class War Films which can all be found in the YouTube link. They are a moderate left group with some excellent journalists.

    Financial Crime:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqvU83sqhPE

    More videos here:

    http://www.classwarfilms.com/videos.html

    1. I had a post I put out about US genocide removed from CIF last week. Perhaps you can see why they get removed.

      The United States of Genocide:Putting the US on trial for genocide against the peoples of Korea, Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Iraq and elsewhere.

      Quote:

      ‘The United States of America was built on a foundation of genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America. In fact, all successful settler colonial societies are founded in genocide. The process is one of dispossession – the erasure of one group identity and the imposition of another on the people and/or on the land. But genocide is not merely the foundation of the US nation state, it is also the foundation of the US empire. The US habit of genocide has not died, but has transformed. The US has become a serial perpetrator of genocide with the blood of many millions of innocents spilled in pursuit of imperial hegemony.’

      http://ongenocide.com/2013/09/28/the-united-states-of-genocide/

  25. Hello, I set up a small monthly donation. These past three articles alone are worth it. I hope to increase that when I get some work!

    I enormously appreciate the work, effort, insight, talent and soul that goes into this blog, even if I don’t really know what to do with the information and commentary I read. But I’m glad there are people like you (and your regular commenters) out there.
    Thank you.

  26. ‘Turning the world upside down’ and your mention of Winstanley prompts me to post this piece. My first contribution to Golem, who I have followed for a considerable time. Many thanks for your courage and insights. My apologies for the length of this.

    The End of the Holding Exercise

    Now, six years into the crisis, we have gained some perspective on what are the essential dynamics of what is going on in the world of global economics, international corporate finance, and hence also in world governance. The word ‘hence’ holds the key – for while it may not have always been a given that government is welded to finance, it is now dismayingly and unequivocally self-evident.

    The crisis was essentially one of ideas – in this sense: that one group of human actors, the banks, successfully promoted a new definition of what is of value, of what is real. Through the introduction of the concept of securitisation – and it is a concept, an idea, not a natural phenomenon – one class of person was enabled to magic wealth out of thin air. And this they did with spectacular enthusiasm, whipping up a humungous candy floss of meaningless paper assets out of any notional boom they could extract it from – sub-prime being just one such smelly trough and the one in which it started to unravel, quantitative easing being the current methadone of choice. In this way, the finance sector effectively imposed a new map of the human world on the rest of us – a map in which the healthy planet we assumed was our place is now attached to a dark and ballooning cancerous growth: the dark matter of debt and mumbo jumbo financial derivatives. And when the air in the balloon began to go limp, as it always would given the ephemera it fed on, that class of person, the banks, turned on the rest of us and demanded that we honour this new map and cede them their territory. We bailed them out. We accepted their fairy-tale version of who owns what, and have been handing over the assets of our world, our real world of work and things, to them ever since.

    What we have been living through is a holding exercise. A time in which power has in desperation done whatever is necessary to maintain the rickety scaffolding of its new fantasy landscape. The wealthy are doing whatever it takes to hold onto their wealth – even though on examination that wealth is in fact rotting and unreal. A mortgage holder in debt does not represent wealth in any meaningful sense, if he cannot generate real value from things and work in the real world – but on paper, to the banks, he does. And the rest of us must stump up our lives to hold the corpse upright.

    In this new world of mutualised necrophilia, a new set of priorities has established itself. What matters is no longer the job of creating things and work for the betterment of the broader population – although of course they hope against hope that us feisty commoners will be able, despite exhaustion, to continue making bread, for without a strong peasantry to hold it up the corpse collapses. Instead, what matters is the bits of the machine which holds it all together – the managers, the accountants, the bought soldiery. They contribute nothing. But they are the rivets on the rusting metalwork and it is therefore they who are greased and polished. The managerial infrastructure is the new ascendancy. The healthy growers of things and work can be damned. Hence the obscene inequalities of reward, hence the bonuses and the pension schemes for the technocrats of the rickety scaffolding. At all costs, the new map must be stopped from evaporating.

    But it is equally evident that the corpse is indeed a corpse. A skeleton is an inherently unstable structure, without the musculature of the real economy of things and work. Things no longer stack up. Reality is being sacrificed to maintain an unreality. It is therefore only a matter of time before some rusty rivet, some evaporating girder, some barely secured appendage of the fantasy finance economy finally crumbles with catastrophic consequences for those of us in the real world of work and things. We live in an eery landscape of creaking structures, an echoing interregnum, glad temporarily that the whole shaboodle hasn’t come crashing down, but stunned into mute paralysis and anxiety, and waiting for the next flicker on the screen. This is not a way to live.

    I say unto you: if the crisis was one of ideas, a Jesuitical phantasm whose fabric is unravelling, then the redemption from it must also be one of ideas. I hear a stone, dislodged, bouncing and banging down the ravine .. What in heaven’s name is that new idea? Who can imagine the map, the step-by-step directions, which will guide us from our precarious perch? First of all, then, let us work the same magic as the conjurers. Let us, by an effort of imagination and will, turn the cliff face through ninety degrees and stand once again on solid ground. A ground which we define for ourselves. A terra firma in which we define what matters. And what matters will be centred on the flowering of each person, in the real world, through the accumulation of real things, of real value, through real work. Not this current ghastly conscription of the masses to maintaining the teetering stage props. It is not a difficult thing to imagine – a world in which the guiding principle is a life of good fortune for all people. It is the aspiration to which the system already pays lip-service. Only the satisfaction the system offers us – the dreams and baubles of consumerism – is not in fact good fortune at all. Instead it is a manufactured taste, a pleasure buzz aimed at our primitive pleasure centres, an addiction which ravages rather than nourishes us. We must therefore educate our tastes. We must therefore collectively find a new practice of attending to what is real. Open our eyes and see the sun, not the screen. Open our senses to fuller dimensions and turn from the reductive gibberish of the austerian wraiths. Get thee hence, ghoul! Let us reclaim our land from this alien fog. To horse!

  27. To recover Democracy, you have to take public control of the vote counting process:

    I see now that in Scotland, paper ballots are being hand counted….but, unfortunately only after having been MOVED TO A CENTRAL LOCATION to be counted. That is the problem: the ballots should have been counted in Precinct on election night and posted in Precinct all under public observation. The Scots have been subjected to another, different man-in-the-middle attack not via electronic hacking, but none the less, a man-in-the-middle attack via human opportunity for intervention during transport to or once at the central location…

    SAME THING.

    Call Lynn Landes
    CONTACT: [email protected] / 215-629-3553

    MISSION:

    Our mission is to return to voters direct access to a paper ballot and effective public oversight of the voting process.

    We support paper ballots and hand counts at the polls on election day.

    http://www.counttheballots.org/

    CANDIDATES!! DON’T CONCEDE UNTIL YOU’VE AUDITED YOUR ELECTION RESULTS.

    Audits are in order, even if you think you lost in a landslide. Clint Curtis found in his audit results a 12-24% difference from the ‘official’ results. So, flood your city council and election board meetings, and demand paper ballots and hand counts!

    FOLKS! DON’T GIVE UP!
    Whether you are a candidate or a voter, whether you won or lost, we all must keep fighting for our right to vote on a paper ballot and to have those ballots counted properly. Audit the Vote, sue in court, demonstrate in the streets, organize your community, just do something!

    We will never really know who won this or any other election until we COUNT THE BALLOTS! Voting is the linchpin of democracy. And democracy demands transparency, not trust.

    Yet, in America today there is no transparency to our elections. That’s because 95% of all votes (including paper ballots) are computer-counted. And 50% of all voting is early or absentee. It is an open door to undetectable election fraud and massive miscounts.

    We need to give poll watchers something to watch on Election Day. If not, all bets are off as to who gets to vote and whose votes get counted.

    ……………

    Why Democracy is always undermined:

    http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2014/09/michael-parenti-on-globalisation.html

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE5Ha52PBVg
    21 September 2014

    Michael Parenti on Globalisation, Terrorism, and Conspiracy

    “In societies that worship money and success, the losers become objects of scorn. Those who work the hardest for the least are called lazy. Those forced to live in substandard housing are thought to be the authors of substandard lives. Those who do not finish high school or cannot afford to go to college are considered deficient or inept.

    No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.

    Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.

    The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.

    The guiding principle of ruling elites was–and still is: when change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.”

    Michael Parenti

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE5Ha52PBVg

    …………………..

    Some suggestions for remedies:

    http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8889 By Brad Friedman

    Recommended #OWS Demand: Let ALL Citizens 18 and Older Vote, On Paper Ballots, Count Them in Public

    I offer the following simple “demand” for consideration by OWS, as this one likely underscores almost every other. Or, at least, without it, all other demands may ultimately be rendered moot.

    Every U.S. citizen 18 years of age or older who wishes to vote, gets to vote. Period. Those votes, on hand-marked paper ballots, will be counted publicly, by hand, on Election Night, at the precinct, in front of all observers and video cameras.

    ………..

    Or, voters could try a public vote, like roll call in Congress:

    See: Lynn Landes
    http://www.thelandesreport.com/VotingSecurity.htm

    The Case For Open Voting
    Democracy demands transparency, not trust -Sign up and be counted

    There is no transparency to our current voting system. Congress has legalized election fraud by allowing, if not mandating, non-transparent voting systems that prohibit direct access to a paper ballot and meaningful public oversight:

    ABSENTEE VOTING (1870’s)
    SECRET BALLOT (1880’s)
    VOTING MACHINES (1890’s)

    I believe that there should be only one standard of voting for both our political representatives and voters. I believe that all voting should be open and public – no machines, no absentee or early voting, and no secret ballots. Secret ballots are really an anonymous ballots that corrupt election officials can count any way they want. Why one standard of voting for politicians and another for the public?

    Under current circumstances, the only thing candidates and voters can do to find out how citizens really voted is to conduct their own CITIZEN AUDITS.

    Lynn Landes

    SUMMATION: This is how, for all practical purposes, America’s voting process became completely nontransparent and highly vulnerable to vote fraud by a relatively small group of people.

    Voting is the linchpin of democracy. And democracy demands transparency, not trust. Yet, there is no real transparency to the way Americans vote today. While our politicians are required to vote publicly and openly, we citizens are held to a different standard – a lower standard. We vote remotely, privately and anonymously by machine, absentee, early, and secret ballot. It’s an invitation to massive and undetectable vote fraud. Things weren’t always this way.

    BEFORE the Civil War, voting was a completely transparent process. It was only AFTER the Civil War, as the right to vote expanded to African Americans, that the voting process itself began to recede from public view and meaningful oversight. It started with absentee voting in the 1870’s, secret ballots in the 1880’s, and voting machines in the 1890’s. Today in America, 50% of all voting is by absentee or early, 95% of all votes are machine-processed, and 100% of all ballots are secret and anonymous. For the sake of convenience and ‘alleged’ voter protection, Congress has destroyed the transparency,
    verifiability, and integrity of America’s voting process.

    Making matters worse, our public voting system has been privatized and outsourced to a handful of domestic, foreign, and multi-national corporations, most of whom have close ties to the right wing of the Republican Party. Just two companies, ES&S and Diebold, started by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich, electronically process (using
    touchscreen machines or optical scanners), 80% of all votes. Their employees are in a perfect position to rig elections nation-wide. And evidence is mounting that elections in America have been computer programmed to prefer conservative candidates of both political parties.
    ………

    If we cannot get rid of the right wing machines:

    pdf of Gene Sharp’s online book: From Dictatorship to Democracy
    Look in the back index for over 200 nonviolent actions to construct positive change.
    http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FDTD.pdf

    …………………

    via: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/04/president-carter-bush-didnt-win-2000.html

    President Carter: Bush Didn’t Win in 2000

    In comments: another Democracy fighter, Statistician Richard Charnin:

    See: http://richardcharnin.com/ Richard Charnin (Truth Is All)

    Election Fraud (1968-2012) Quantitative Analysis and True Vote Models

    In 2000, Al Gore won the 540,000 recorded votes (48.4-47.9%). But the unadjusted state exit polls (58,000 respondents) indicated he won by 50.8-44.4%, a 6 million vote margin. There were nearly 6 million uncounted votes.The True Vote Model had him winning by 51.5-44.7%. But the Supreme Court awarded the election to Bush (271-267 EV). In Florida, 185,000 ballots were uncounted. The following states flipped from Gore in the exit poll to Bush in the recorded vote: AL AR AZ CO FL GA MO NC TN TX VA. Gore would have won the election if he captured just one of the states. Democracy died in this election.
    snip

    The bedrock of the evidence derives from this undisputed fact: Final national and state exit polls are always forced to match the recorded vote – even if doing so requires an impossible turnout of prior election voters and implausible vote shares. All demographic categories are adjusted to conform to the recorded vote. To use these forced final exit polls as the basis for election research is unscientific and irresponsible. The research is based on the bogus premise that the recorded vote is sacrosanct and represents how people actually voted. Nothing can be further from the truth.

    It is often stated that exit polls were very accurate in elections prior to 2004 but have
    deviated sharply from the recorded vote since. That is a misconception. The UNADJUSTED exit polls have ALWAYS been accurate and closely matched the True Vote in 1988-2008. A comparison of ADJUSTED, PUBLISHED exit polls in elections prior to 2004 and PRELIMINARY exit polls since then is like comparing apples to oranges. The adjusted, published exit polls have always exactly matched the fraudulent RECORDED vote because they have been forced to do so. That’s why they APPEAR to have been accurate. The RECORDED vote has deviated from the TRUE VOTE in EVERY election since 1968 –always favoring the Republicans.

    ………………………

    Quoting Charnin from above: The following states flipped from Gore in the exit poll to Bush in the recorded vote: AL AR AZ CO FL GA MO NC TN TX VA. Gore would have won the election if he captured just one of the states. Democracy died in this election.

    This means Gore won those states, even Texas, Bush’s state. We must get rid of electronic voting, scanning machines owned by the right-wing that remove or hide physical evidence.

    …………………..

    re: I want a tee shirt which says “Give me something worth voting for!” and on the back it will say, “And I’ll vote for it”.

    I would add for Primaries and General Elections: “And My Vote Will Count-By Paper Ballot, Hand Counted & Results Posted In Precinct In Public On Election Night!”

    That’s what you need: Democracy.

    ……………….

    http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-crispin-miller-forbidden-thoughts.html

    Mark Crispin Miller: Forbidden Thoughts and Fighting For the Truth

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0G6z0qGhZI

    He talks overall about certain stories that are not considered to be appropriate for discussion in the mainstream media. He sees ‘conspiracy theory’ as a method of shutting down discussion, and traces its use as a rhetorical device to a memo in 1967.

    He more specifically discusses the 2000 election of G. W. Bush, and what he considers related stories that are ruled off the table in a presentation to the 911 Architects and Engineers for Truth.

    1. ‘Cui Bono’ …”as a benefit to whom?”

      Jeb Bush governor of Florida…….”.there you go ‘Dubya”…

      reward ….Supreme Court decision 5-4? …2 Justices relatives get administration jobs…

      reward … Al Gore ….silence is golden …. Fed ?? how much do you want?? or/and …NSA shall we show/tell ??

      Supreme reward … 911 = blank cheque .. e.g. Patriot act,NDDA,money laundering laws,civil asset forfeiture(confiscation) laws,

      using cash is suspicious?? = 2.5 billion stolen from those who have nothing left to fight back with.I am sure you are up to speed on

      all this corruption but you may not know, that as soon as DC says dance! the ‘five eyes’ …say ‘aye aye aye aye’ sir !!

      The UK(where I survive) legislate exactly the same as the US et al….

      Unlike you in the USSA …with personal protection available in most states…

      we in debt serf-land are not allowed to defend ourselves,some will claim that is false,
      but police, almost everywhere here, insist that you rely totally on their system (good luck with that!!).

      Preppers are looked upon as conspiracy nut jobs…but !.. an empty belly for twenty four hours,will bring most people to heel.

      When I lived in Australia, I lived twice in a seasonal flood area,although one of the driest places on Earth,the Northern Rivers District
      of Northern NSW,Australia…… frequently had cyclone floods…what to do ??? ..

      We had a flood cupboard!… everything you consider to be essential to your way of life!!….for at least two weeks!

      Once the ground is saturated,nature takes it’s course…neh?…creeks backup…rivers flood..they rise 20-30-40-ft in a day!!

      No New World Order can conquer my world!… yes it is mine and yes it is yours!…before you come to oppose,understand that thing which you oppose!.

      When/if you oppose them in the streets, you legitemize their authority…re-vitalize their repression..

      The press? something to write about and earn some bank credit… sometimes called, salary..wage.. compensation?… what? for lying?

      Make the flood cupboard larger …two months !!! minimum!! .Please… do not get lost in words/dialectic …Right vs Left

      Lastly, never ever forget …Water !! …if you are healthy ? …you can live 6-8 weeks without food !…without water/liquid, in 14 days

      you will start to die !!….try it ! …soon you will see the truth of it ,that truth is a living/dying moment.

      Thank you for work in attempting a more honest world…amen to that !!

  28. http://www.lasexta.com/programas/sexta-noche/noticias/pablo-iglesias-estamos-europa-pare-decirle-bce-que-nos-deje-tomar-pelo_2014100500004.htm
    pablo iglesias, the euro deputy for podemos on spanish tv last nite. The other parties dont know how to handle podemos or his appeal. The interview is worth watching for the way he deals with the right wing press.
    For the undecided voters in spain( my wife) although podemos has the appeal of not being one of the above, its how they justify their electoral programme:
    external audit of spain’s debt
    minimum wage of 6oo euros
    retirement at 60.
    after so much hardship in spain, people are cautious about where the money would come from. Podemos suggests the rich should patriotically pay a bit more, , let the tax inspectors go after the rich who have savings outside of spain (jordi puyol, the god father of catalan independence.),

  29. The Dork of Cork

    Just sat back and watched Tommy Tiernans (a Irish comedian) latest tour of eurotrashland.

    He went to Europe without a script .
    Because he did not have a product to sell – what he was giving could not be consumed.

    It was more then a bit educational .
    The extremely linear thought process of the audience was seen in stark relief.
    Tommy the comedian was much more comfortable with the dead air of silence then the audience.

    Whats striking to the last few dozen irish people who remain is how alien the rest of the world truely is.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Air

    A girl in the audience asked
    “Whats going on ”

    Second girl
    “tell us a story”

    First girl
    “I paid for a babysitter for a hour” (Time is precious in this manic world of running hither and thither )
    They find it impossible to remain still.

    Afterwards a organisational girl thinks the comedy man is having a breakdown when in fact he is trying to become more adjusted to the present reality.

    He later talks about the history of Victorian mental hospitals in Ireland during a very hard money period.
    It required just one signiture before a person was committed.
    Obviously during such a hard money period there was monetary pressure to lock up people who appeared not quite normal in the artificial glasshouse of the time that was defined as natural by the establishment.

    A mainly Irish expat audience working inside Zurichs financial warrens got so rough because they were not getting “the product” that the man had to revert to normal programming.
    People were then comfortable again with the rythm of wam bam consumption that they settled again.
    They could again absorb the product.

    A dutch man at another event – “could you pick up the pace if you want us to stick around”
    Tommy :” friend there is no pace to pick up……………
    If you don’t want to stick around…..”
    Dutchman : “But we are not going to leave.”
    Tommy ; “So just relax then something funny will come up – don’t worry”

    He also trys to connect with a German audience
    Attacks their dead inside thinking
    Waste of time.
    A dead way of life.
    “Theres nothing in it lads ,nothing fucking in it.”

    Probably only available to irish resident audiences.
    http://www.rte.ie/player/ie/show/10328844/

    The last word for from a swiss girl in the german audience
    “Please don’t improvise in Switzerland…………”

  30. The rich stuff £millions into their think tanks and other right wing causes because they know they will get £billions back.

    The 1% saw in the 60’s the success of left radical progressives movements and so they set up a fake grassroots movement called libertarianism. They thought they could hoodwink young people into a political idea that doesn’t affect the them, or their wealth. The Koch brothers pumped $millions into these fake grassroots movements.

    Many young Americans today feel hip and not staid like their parents because they proudly say are libertarians. And with no police (i.e. no grown ups to spoil your fun) and with legalised drugs this appealed greatly too, especially as it disturbed their parents.

    In the 1900’s some very right wing libertarians were against war because it raised taxes and destroyed capital. They were never concerned about the suffering or loss of life that war caused. Because the anti-war movement in the 60’s was so strong the Koch brothers felt they had to go along with it a little bit as most young people don’t really want to go to war. So they added the anti-war part which Ron Paul takes up so much today.

    Mark Ames has done lots of research on then Koch brothers and libertarians and wrote the book, Meet Charles Koch’s Brain. Here’s a link below:

    ‘The True History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda, by mark Ames:

    Before Milton Friedman was earning plaudits as an economic genius, he was a shill for the real estate industry and an early pioneer for big business propaganda known as libertarianism.’

    http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda

    I donate to Paul Crag Roberts terrific site, and I have a small monthly payment to Positive Money. I donated to Paul Jay’s The Real Network which recently appealed for donations. Paul Jay is one of the people behind Class War Films. As I did some O/T this week I was able to donate a small sum to this site too.

  31. I have hope like you DM. And I write from the perspective of a reader of books by John Michael Greer. The ruling elite, are likely to suffer from the arrogance all ruling elites suffer from in the twilight of an empire. In our case the modern industrialised empire. They make assumptions many of which will prove to be false, and so that will be their undoing. Like their assumption of endless growth in a finite world and their infallibility. They can plan all they like, but the unintended consequence of their actions will come back to haunt them. The biggest assumption I believe is the ‘faith’ in progress and endless growth in a finite world. The idea that the future will always be greater and bigger. The idea that technology and its development will overcome all obstacles. I would suggest reading JMG book the Ecotechnic Future for more detail. Our modern day age is based on oil, which is now rapidly depleting. I don’t believe an alternative solution will arrive that will allow this obstacle to be overcome and allow endless growth. The power of the elite comes from that source, and all the technology it allows to reinforce that power. If and when that source of power starts to decline, then global control will be lost, and the world will become a larger place again. We will move from globalisation to localisation once again. And power will be held at a much reduced scale. No doubt ruling elites will remain, but at a much smaller scale. Of course this process will take a long time. In addition, a finite world, means that the trickle up of wealth will continue, and as it does the resentment will continue to grow. Eventually people will hit the snapping point, where doing anything is preferable to allowing the status quo to continue. There is also another factor. Especially in the west, people are educated to a much higher level than past ‘revolutions’. The tendency to question established assumptions and doubt the propaganda, no matter how subtle it is, means that it will be far more difficult to brainwash the masses than in the past. This is a significant advantage in our favour.

    1. I wrote about this on the Guardian website today. If a bank lends you £100,000 at 5% over 25 years they expect back £175,000. Where does the extra £75,000 come from I asked people? If it comes from the bank then they will expect interest to be paid back on that too, i.e. a no win situation.

      The extra money gets put into circulation when other people take out new loans and they spend this money into the economy which pays other people their wages and with this they can pay back the money they owe. One problem, though, these new loans have to have the interest paid back too at some stage, and so even more new loans need to be issued which means the problem just gets worse. The world is driven to endless growth to get the money to pay the interest that can never get paid off because all the money can only come from new loans – which have interest added as well.

      Phew! That was hard to explain but I expect most people knew this anyway.

      Anyway, soon after I wrote this on CIF I came across these videos from a blog called Truth Never Told. I think the guy who runs the blog might be a libertarian but he seems to be quite a nice guy. His videos fitted in very well with what I had written on CIF so I posted these videos there. Part two is a little bit too scary and over dramatic for me, and is written in typical American libertarian style, ‘The end of the world is coming’, that sort of thing, you know, like Storm Clouds Gathering, but these are interesting videos just the same.

      The End Of The Line Part 1- The Rise and The Fall of the Bankster

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJBwyjqw5ak

      The End Of The Line Part 2- The Rise and the Fall of the Bankster

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhE6zUoUd98

      1. Kavy

        Your money model isn’t right there. What you’re missing is that money circulates round and can be used to pay several times.

        That is, much of the interest is the banks’ own income, which is paid out in wages & other costs back into the economy, which in turn goes round again.

        Steve Keen has explained this when it came up in a Q & A session during one of his youtube’d lectures.

        I urge anyone who wants to get a better grasp of this to watch Steve explaining his modelling of the economy as the ‘dynamic’ system it is. (In fact not just dynamic & complex, but characterised by ‘chaos’ maths where the economy can appear to be stable within a range of outcomes & then suddenly change dramatically and at enormous rate of change.

        I think Keen has the basic principles right, even if precise forecasting (or even reverse analysis) would likely never be as acurate as we would like.

        But on the basis, as Keynes said, that “… it is better to be roughly right, than precisely wrong… ” (on understanding the macro economy), Keen’s dynamic system model is already far better than junk like the DSGE models used now at a cost over the years of literally $billions.

        1. Thanks, Yes, I did read that Keen had some maths to explain how the interest could be paid. I will have to check it out.

          1. The first thing I did was scan the internet and the first thing I saw was Money Creation: Money as Debt ii, which is mainly a cartoon clip (I couldn’t find part I). Now if you look at it you will see a bank issuing loans where the interest never gets paid off, it just gets past on down to others spiralling out of control.

            There are hundreds of these sorts of videos on the net, which are mainly made by libertarians, who tend to be quite bright. It’s interesting because the banks in these videos never show any expenditure, i.e. money going back out again into the community. So, there’s much for me to ponder on here. Thanks again.

            Money Creation – Money is Debt II

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnUURopUu-Y

      2. I think the following accounts for a large part of the interest payments:

        http://moneyaswealth.blogspot.com/2009/04/bankruptcies-no-end-in-sight.html

        Bankruptcies – No End In Sight.

        Don’t you wonder what happens to the money that was borrowed and then spent into the economy, when a person goes bankrupt?

        The money is now “out” in the economy, right? It did not get paid back to the bank, right?

        That is the money, that the rest of the “customers” of this scam the banking system is running on the world, use to pay their interest. As you know, there is no mechanism in the system, to create money to pay interest, the way it is set up now.

        We should change that so that we have a system that works without requiring bankruptcies, fraud and money laundering – just to function.

  32. David, I’ve been busy for a while with the intent of Scotland gaining its independence (good -but not good enough) but, having cast aside my mourning weeds have had time to read your 3 part serial which, as a diagnosis of causation based on effects I entirely agree with. However the prognosis to my mind has wandered towards ambivalence.

    While it’s true, due to the very nature of the beast, the 0.9% would in due course find themselves as victims to the top predators of the 0.1%; I do not believe this idiocy will develop the supremacy even the sustainability for it to succeed because of one very basic elemental biological fact.

    In essence their dream is of a virtual world created by a virtual product with a virtual value without first having created a virtual food. They’ve got near it with their advertising, Pr spins and distorting lexicons but they’re not there yet.

    1. Welcome Back John,

      • When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money.
      ~ Cree Prophecy

      1. I will second that & add something to hang on to :

        To love. To be loved.
        To never forget your own insignificance.
        To never get used to the unspeakable violence
        and the vulgar disparity of life around you.
        To seek joy in the saddest places.
        To pursue beauty to its lair.
        To never simplify what is complicated
        or complicate what is simple.
        To respect strength, never power.
        Above all, to watch.
        To try and understand.
        To never look away.
        And never, never to forget.

        Arundhati Roy

        1. Thank you. Here is another writing so wonderful by Carl Sagan:

          http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blue-dot.html

          A Pale Blue Dot

          This excerpt from Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

          The Pale Blue Dot of Earth

          Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

          The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

          Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

          The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

          It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

          — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

          1. Bev

            Like Einstein Sagan was a scientist who was also a visionary. The TV series ‘ Cosmos ‘ & then the book, expanded my then much more limited horizon by leading me onto a path which led off in many directions. It kindled in me a desire for knowledge in regard to how the universe & all that is in it had evolved to it’s then present state – My real education had begun.

            Incidentally in case you are not aware – David’s father was executive producer for the TV series.

          2. @ steviefinn

            Thank you for the good information. I now see in the “about me” section:

            “My name is David Malone. I am a second generation documentary film-maker. My father made The Ascent of Man with Bronowski, The Age of Uncertainty with Galbraith and Cosmos with Sagan.”

            I dearly loved all those documentaries. I think that such truth and knowledge inspires the most awe, and human connectedness to one’s self, each other and the whole of the universe itself.

            I too would have had a much more limited outlook and life without just such programs to teach these scientific truths so wondrously shared.

  33. Some attention for MMT in the UK & quite a good explainer piece (longish) here:

    http://www.renewal.org.uk/articles/modern-money-and-the-escape-from-austerity

    Bill Mitchell still blogging prolifically, with an MMT commentary on the Kafka-esque insanity that passes for mainstream macro….

    ‘The myopia of Neo Liberalism and the IMF is now evident to all.’

    http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=29180

    Also… Steve Keen has been appointed Head of Economics at Kingston University (London), which is great news imo 🙂

    1. Hi Mike,

      I have been playing with Steve Keens downloadable Minsky model. I have high hopes for The New department he is starting at Kingston. One thing that does sadden me is that Steve seems still to be a firm believer in Capitalism and feels it can be reformed. I may be wrong about that but I do get the impression that with all the insights he undoubtedly has that he is still wedded to some sort of Capitalist vision. Personally I beieve we need to find something else more modern and sustainable.

      Here is where you can get Minsky ( I expect you already have it Mike, it is great fun.

      https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2123355930/minsky-reforming-economics-with-visual-monetary-mo

      FOr PC
      http://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/files/latest/download

      It´s a shame that Minsky is underfunded.( no prizes for guessing why.)
      http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2014/10/02/assistance-for-minsky-required/

      This is the latest from Steves blog, well worth a watch for anyone interested in Minsky, Post Keynsian hetrodox economics.
      http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2014/09/23/the-overdue-copernican-revolution-in-economics/

  34. Some of the Irish are putting up some resistance to the new water charges which it seems are similar to what some described as a ‘ Water War ‘, which took place in Dublin in the 90’s. Here’s a description of how that was won by the protesters which might be useful for anyone involved:

    http://struggle.ws/rbr/rbr3_water.html

    In terms of water wars another country which unlike Ireland, isn’t blessed with such high rainfall, namely Bolivia – managed to defeat the World banks Neoliberal privatisation efforts. This was mainly centred around Cochabamba & compared with the above protest in Ireland was bloody. Since Morales became president things have improved, but there are still problems with the infrastructure which needs investment, some of which has to come from foreign loans.

    http://nacla.org/blog/2013/6/5/water-wars-water-scarcity-bolivia%E2%80%99s-cautionary-tale

    Morales rose to prominence as an organiser of resistance in the ‘ Water War ‘ & since becoming president has it seems been responsible for an overall improvement in the lives of many. Perhaps as in Bolivia a population has to totally screwed by human cash registers before they finally recognise the true enemy & revolt against it – & with some luck they might actually find a leader who actually gives a shit about them. Syriza finally appear to be in the ascendant within Greece & hopefully they will not turn into another false dawn.

    Here is some good news for a change in terms of the long suffering Bolivian people, for whom it seems things are getting better ;

    http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Ten-Important-Accomplishments-Under-Evo-Morales-20141009-0069.html

  35. Baffled Popperian

    Dear sir. In the most unlikely of places a conversation seems to have started that you might be interested in following. The readers comments section of Mr. Hitchens’ blog for his article of the 10th October.

  36. Great post, thanks. Like David I am actually quite hopeful …not what I came on to write.

    The below are not contra-the-post, but sort of side issues, complications.

    I agree that we the common ppl are, and are to be, increasingly subject to supra-national principles, guidelines, laws, strictures, and so on. One need only look at the EU for ex.

    However, international law (post WW2 to say 1985) has been steadily eroded over this time, with the UN, Intl. treaties, agreements, and even organisms like the WTO (not my favorite), in all areas, war, territory, agression, money and banking, energy, agriculture, communications, patents, even health, increasingly treated as obsolete, simply set aside, forgotten, not mentioned, etc. It is something that Putin and Lavrov for ex. consistently complain about. I mean, for ex. who remembers that the war on Iraq was ‘illegal’ (many here I suppose), … Iran was locked out of SWIFT and that an International court has recently declared that sanction ‘illegal’? Most often, one is simply dealing with a ‘fait accompli.’

    The main culprits here are the USA (+ Isr.) who simply behave as they wish (“deal with it and f** you” — mind you they are not alone of course), and large International Corporations, who either twist the arms of Gvmt, lobby, that is, still seek some ‘justifications’, be seen as somehow ‘within the scope of the law.’

    The 1% are part of these entities and the Gvmt. + Corps ‘represent it’ or ‘serve it’ in many ways, but not uniquely, as about 20% of the population (US, France, for ex.) are fully on board and dependent, part of the system. They are the domineering power centers that override in many ways the Westphalian ‘Nation States’ and vaunted ‘democracy’ (a hollow shell now only good for engineered Color Revolutions care of NED), but they implement the attack in various confused ways that ppl are increasingly seeing through.

    The hopeful part is that the 1% is very vulnerable in the present shifting landscape. They – imho – don’t quite understand what is happening and are being subject to all the horrors of churning instability, something they are not equipped to deal with. Of course they feel their ‘wealth’ even if quite diminished by the financial ‘crisis’ (yes they suffered) insulates them and affords them a back-up.

    A good if somewhat marginal ex. is the oligarchs in Ukraine, who ran, and do run, the country (through ad-hoc pol. parties, multiple alliances, oligarchs and Gvmt. is one entity in Ukraine, etc.) and are now at (hidden) loggerheads, and suffering from civil war and general horrific murderous disorder. Not that I wish that kind of civil war be an example in any way.

    1. Continued, heh,

      One should be aware of the dangers of separatism and a masked kind of ethno-supremacy. To limit to the EU: Catalonia, Scotland, Flanders, others not on the stage right now…(Basques, etc.) – ppl being able to decide their own future, that is all very well.

      What is left out, and was particularly evident in Scotland, is that independence is wished from the closest neighbors, to merely fall into a larger supra-national authority – in this case – the EU, which was not analysed or mentioned much, as far as I could see from the outside.

      Independent Scotland could not have survived as Tranistria or even Moldova, it would have to be part of the EU – but what did the separatists have to say about the EU? — or the currency and banking for that matter? — Yes there were discussions.. I’m not too familiar..

      The EU bureaucracy, top dogs, have a dream – it is a dream of Regions (not large) who will have to deal with it directly.

      It is the divide and conquer strategy writ covert. The EU, as supra-national, has confusedly planned for a long time to effect the break up of Nation States and get rid of power games between the main players, Germany, France, Italy, etc. Maybe many there up in Brussels don’t even realise. They just vaguely support, turn by turn, national unity, regionalisation, more self-determination. Whatever…hundreds of meetings and weird speeches.

      Another issue is that in the main aspiring break-away regions are the richest (Northern Italy is a good ex.) and they wish to leave the poor neighbors behind and win the competition. They adopt the ‘liberal’ mantra of being superior, more hard-working, having more growth, less unemployment, being winners who need to get rid of losers, and that is somehow linked to ‘who they are’ in an essential sense.

      This mind set was applied to Greece for ex. Though of course Greece could not be kicked out of the EU, or allowed to leave, as the debts (mostly to German / other banks) had to be paid…so assets were up for grabs. EU solidarity this is NOT.

      1. Hello Andrea,

        Thank you for a very thoughtful comment. I agree about the dangers of separatism. In general I am in favour of people being able to determine for themselves. But as you say it is so often those who think they have the most to gain wishing to be separate from those who they feel have less. Why shouldn’t greater London vote for devolution from the rest of the the UK and keep everything they have for themselves for example? Separatism can cut both ways.

        But at the same time bringing democracy closer to the people seems a good aspiration.

        Personally I think we would all do better in the longer run to think of standing together rather than seeking separation. All we are going to have going forward is each other.

        As for the rule of Law – as I said it is entirely arbitrary which bit of the law is lauded and which bits ignored. But however much the Over Class ignore and destroy the rule of those laws they do not like – those that restrain them – they will insist that we obey the laws that the Over Class do like.

        That said, I agree with you that the Over Class – the DIsloyal – are more vulnerable now than in ’09. They know it and that is what shapes their current actions and fears.

  37. The one thing you can be sure of is that when there is so much distraction going on, the groundwork is being laid for the 0.01% ascendancy.

    Within the last month we have seen renewed distractions in Syria and Iraq, while Ukraine has died down a little and a disease [Ebola] apparently patented by the United States is allegedly running riot in several African countries.

    I was watching the Transtlantic and Transpacific Trade Agreements and Fukushima but these were only simmering away.

    Then were was this little note of discord in the carefully choreographed mainstream news feeds

    = = = = =

    http://www.activistpost.com/2014/09/david-cameron-says-non-violent.html

    David Cameron Says Non-Violent Conspiracy Theorists Are Just As Dangerous As ISIS
    Activist Post

    David Cameron told the U.N. that “non-violent extremism” is just as dangerous as terrorism and must be eradicated using all means at the government’s disposal. He references 9/11 and 7/7 Truthers as examples of the type of extremism that must be dealt in a similar fashion to ISIS.

    If you thought Obama’s War is Peace speech to the U.N. was creepy, wait until you get a load of this. Cameron is officially announcing the plan to use a full assault on dissenting views.

    = = = = =

    Yes, I know, its an Activist Post link but I just couldn’t find the mainstream link I posted during the past week. THIS is what we should have been watching.

    = = = = =

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5LopL3TqCuc

    While All Eyes On Ebola, UN Passes World Patriot Act!

    = = = = =

    Could all of this have come from an original widely spread article by Nick Hanauer or even this little video?

    = = = = =

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8

    Nick Hanauer: Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming

    = = = = =

    NIck Hanauer is probably better known for this video extolling the virtues of supporting the Middle Class in America as the REAL creators of sustainable jobs.

    = = = = =

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx2Y5HhplI

    Nick Hanauer on inequality

    = = = = =

    So whether Nick is merely laying the ground for the 0.01% or is a visionary pointing out the way and the consequences, the agenda has been laid by the UN, America’s lapdog, as defined by Cameron, the other American lapdog.

    We are like children being groomed by pedophiles.

    The world has allowed America’s touch to be unchallenged when they were bombing little brown people in far away countries on the basis of NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER and now this is coming back to haunt us all.

    With the ability to protest peacefully interpreted by Cameron and the Deviant Elite’s front men as a terrorist act, what chance have we stopping the devolution from even our present warped Capitalist Democracy (where each twists the other) to a Rule by the Transnational Corporations, which even Governments will be unable to sue if the Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade Agreements are ratified.

    Still, at least the battle lines are drawn.

    1. Thanks for the links – The Cameron verbal diarrhea would have sounded reasonable enough to me a few years ago before I got a big kick up the arse, which eventually led to my present way of looking at things. Now it’s not hard to see how TPTB need a good bogeyman in order to circle the wagons. His talk of inclusiveness is as hollow as his place inside. where empathy for any others who are not fortunate enough to be members of his own privileged class should be.

      The worst thing for me in regard to Cameron & veterans like Blair, Cheney, Wolfiwitz & many others is that besides those things like building 7 that do not appear to make sense, is the fact that I am now of the opinion that they are capable of going to any lengths to obtain their ends.

      The above would possibly be enough to put me in with the non-chopping off of heads terrorists, although I cannot see what Jews have to do with it, although they do seem to be blessed like everybody else with a plentiful supply of heartless tyrants.

      TTIP scares me in many ways, not least because if the morality of corporations becomes the benchmark for whatever goes, then we are indeed in deep toxic securities. When the next financial realisation of reality occurs, it’s not likely to lead to an improvement in how the above try to feed their already bloated bellies, particularly if the bloating only exists on a computer screen.

      Compared to the US the UK has a roughly 500 per100,000 smaller prison population, which roughly equates to about a 325,000 national shortfall in order to match the US figures Coincidentally this figure almost matches the estimated amount of native German dissenters killed by the Nazis but perhaps business interests would consider that these people might be more productive within private prisons – such as those in the US – funded by Wall St. who are increasing their market share.

      If things got really desperate then TPTB would be sure to crack down on dissenters, never mind food rioters etc & if a corporation sees an opportunity to make some cash in what would by then by necessity be a police state, they can perhaps then inforn whichever puppets they have dangling that by not arresting enough people they are stifling free enterprise.

      Maybe voices of moderation like Nick Hanauer might prevail & this is just the product of my feverish imagination – but I am reminded of a private housing estate on which I once used to have some gardening contracts. This place was full of wealthy people with palatial houses, but the road that ran through it was like the surface of Mars. Most of the residents deplored this state of affairs but as a few refused to pay the relatively small amount needed as a share in order to properly surface the road – this meant the work was never carried out. I think it’s likely that those similar in their outlook to the Koch brothers would win the day.

      One side has definitely drawn it’s battle lines, goodness knows how bad it will have to become before there is any effective resistance to it. – I only hope they don’t stick me in a wing reserved for the Illuminati / Zionist conspiracy theorists.

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