The new apparent Hope – is it what my friend Finian Cunningham says – the first ‘eye blinking’ by Washington facing Russia? Is it Kerry’s laying a wreath at a war memorial in Sochi in a belated May 9 manifestation to honor the 27 million Russians who lost their lives in WWII to safe Europe and the world from fascism?
– Is it the ‘blinking of an eye’ by the emperor’s missionary, Kerry, for which he was rewarded with a Victory Day T-shirt by Mr. Lavrov? – Kerry’s was the first official US visit to Russia in more than two years. He was generously awarded with 4-hour audiences by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin. News has it, that the meetings were friendly, but non-conclusive.
And Madame Nuland, also known as Lady “F… the EU” – the instigator of the Kiev Nazi coup 15 months ago – is she being told by her bosses at the State Department to come to senses, flying to Moscow for ‘reviving’ the Minsk-2 Ukraine truce agreed between Putin, Merkel, Hollande and Washington’s puppet, Poroshenko?
The very ceasefire Washington has been and continues to destabilize for months? – Or is it simply a matter of pride for the exceptional nation muddling also with their diplomatic finger in this otherwise all European accord? Is it faking heart, complementing their dirty killing boots on the ground? – Can we call this hope?
From the bottom of my heart I wish Finian is right. But – my gut feeling tells me that this is merely a new deviation strategy – a new ruse, taking a few steps back preparing a new attack with force. No doubt, Mr. Putin is on his guard and will not fall into this shabby trap – and here lays the HOPE!
Neoliberalism is the doctrine chosen to carry out the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century), the road map for the empire and its stooges to encompass the globe and reach Full Spectrum Dominance. Its instruments resonate with Kissinger’s infamous dictum – “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
The think-tank PNAC and its blueprint for world dominance is the brain child (sic) of a group of neocon Zionists including William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Casper Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz and the like. It emerged from the earlier ‘Pax Americana’, was written in the early 1990s.
It foresaw already then that Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and others must fall. Iran was also on the list. But as of this day the PNAC is continuously adjusted as required by the dynamics of world events. The PNAC’s instruments for subjugation include massive media-led lie campaigns, the Fed and Wall Street dominated western financial system, both controlled by Zionists – and the ultimate solution, the US and NATO killer armies.
Today, neoliberalism is a network of finely researched strategies, invisible to the common eye. They penetrate every fiber of our western society, of our civilization – and our brains.
With the help of the corrupt media, the neocons were able to create a unipolar mindset in the Occident in less than 30 years, addressing constantly the lowest common denominator of humanity – greed, power and egocentricity, thus persistently destroying any potential germination of solidarity.
Solidarity is the basis for a consciousness awakening; awakening from the lies and manipulations to which we submit voluntarily day-in and day-out, 24/7. We are not even aware of it.
Why not? Because if we were to question what the media tell us every day, we would question the very comfort zone we have created around our little islands of Self. We would dare taking to the streets in masses and stop the wars. We would protest the horrible exploitation of labor, of children; the clearing of our tropical forests for corporate profit and greed; the speculation with food causing millions to die from hunger; we would question the veracity of floods of propaganda; we would stand up to the values of integrity and request our elected officials to do likewise. We would stay home, not go to work, and lay the capitalist production mechanism still; we would put the profit grinder to rest, as long as it takes to get an appropriate response.
Let’s hope with Leonard Cohen – “Democracy Is Coming….it’s coming through a crack in the wall, it’s coming from the sorrow in the street.”
After all we are the 99.99 %. We have the power. The 0.01% has only the capital. Capital is dead if nobody moves and works it. The elite are unable to work it by themselves. They need slaves, they need us. We do it – for a pittance. We must stop it. – We must apply civil disobedience – what Howard Zinn called mankind’s ultimate power. We must find back to solidarity; stick together for our inherent values – foremost for solidarity. In solidarity lies Hope.
Solidarity has been decimated by neoliberalism. Solidarity, the backbone of the social movements up to the 1970′ – 80s was gradually destroyed by the neocons’ doctrine of dividing people, societies, entire countries and civilizations, by the lowest common denominators – greed and ego — the old truism: dividing to conquer and reign. The constant of this is chaos. And chaos is what the exceptional nation is sowing everywhere.
The father of the neoliberal concept is a gentleman not known to many people, Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud. He became the inventor of modern-day propaganda. He developed in the 1930s and 40s the tools for effective marketing. Already in 1928 George Washington Hill, President of American Tobacco, hired Edward Bernays, to expand the tobacco market by making it alright for women to smoke, despite the prevailing taboo. This effort successfully continued through the 1950s and 60s. Bernays’ mind-dumbing propaganda sold women the idea that smoking is their right, is not a privilege just reserved for men. Born were Virginia Slims for women. Almost over-night smoking for women became politically correct and contributed to the ‘women’s lib’ movement of the sixties.
Edward Bernays was born in 1891 in Vienna, Austria and moved a year later with his family to New York, where he died in 1995. He was called the ‘father of public relations’, who used the psychoanalytical skills of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, though, without the consent of the latter. Thanks to his mind-manipulative skills, Bernays became a member of the Committee of Public Information (CPI) created in 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson (also called the Creel Committee after the committee’s chairman). The CPI’s purpose was to manufacture consent among the American people to enter the First World War against Germany through an extended propaganda campaign.
Bernays was instrumental in this successful mind-twisting campaign. In the mid-1920s he wrote a book describing the propaganda methods used in WWI. He explained the masses’ herd instinct, saying it was possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies;” – adding that this technology “had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course.” Life Magazine named Bernays one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century.
Bernays’ propaganda consulting services were used throughout the US for designing ‘catching’ (and of course lying) advertising and selling tactics. His enormous success spread throughout the US corporate and commercial world. It also caught the politicians’ eyes and ears. His principles of focusing on greed and ego were applied in the 1980’s by President Reagan in the US and by PM Thatcher in the UK, the infamous tandem of privatization and marketing of ‘everything’ – which went largely uncontested, to the point where even social services, like education, healthcare, public water supply, were up for privatization.
The individual was made to believe that he – not society – was on the highest pedestal of creation. He was a ‘private’ individual and could buy and sell on the ‘private market’ whatever he or she wanted and needed. Needs were generated to expand markets. It was easy. The concept of constantly changing fashions creates constantly new demands.
A huge variety of consumer goods – clothing, cars and other fashion gear – was invented and made available for everybody’s taste. In the late sixties, seventies and eighties consuming became the name of the game – and continues through today. While somewhere in the background was the endless monotonous humming of war hardly audible to the masses whose attention was diverted by consumption, by sports and by ever longer and more elaborate weather reports, replacing the ‘news’ of wars.
The Cold War, the Vietnam War – wars and conflicts all around the globe, needed weapons to threaten and kill. They were offered by the world’s largest arms manufacturers, foremost the United States, thereby steadily fueling the warrior nation’s economy. An excellent lesson was learnt by WWI and WWII. They filled the coffers of an otherwise rotting economy.
This neoliberal trend gave birth to the Washington Consensus of 1989 – an initiative launched by Washington’s three major financial institutions, the Fed, IMF and the World Bank. They mandated an unrestricted ‘everything-goes’ economy which gave birth to market fundamentalism, as we know it today, where there is no limit to ‘markets’.
The markets are king. Offer and demand, manipulated as they may be, are to become the lifeline of societies, regardless of their endless failures, of their inherent discrimination in favor of the ‘haves’ – regardless of the depredation of our planet Earth, and of the growing gap between rich and poor, they have fomented abuse and pillage and continue to do so as of this day.
The masters of the Washington Consensus enlisted Wall Street which had to be helped to break loose from its straightjacket of regulations. The first Clinton Administration, also advised by Bernays and his cronies, effectively loosened the ties to make Big Banking the beast that helps globalize markets. His Treasurer Robert Rubin and later Larry Summers dismantled the Glass-Steagall Act, the banking regulatory system, designed by the two US Parliamentarians in 1934 to help prevent another 1928 banking disaster.
Now the banks were free to speculate, to create money as they pleased and especially to globalize their operations, enlisting the entire western international banking system to subjugate and control nations, to enslave people. – The PNAC’s roadmap is being followed as closely to the letter as possible.
The Washington Consensus freaks were busy inventing new tools and instruments to help neoliberalism expand rapidly. Now that US banks were ‘free’, the western elite-controlled World Trade Organization (WTO), the third of the unholy international financial-economic threesome (IMF, World Bank, and WTO) ruled that any country that wanted to become a WTO member had to ‘deregulate’ its banking system – allowing an unrestricted globalized banking fusion that could generate financial crises as needed for the system to survive. The manufactured European economic disaster of 2007 / 2008 would not have been possible without deregulated banks. – Of course, as we know now, all is controlled by the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon led Fed-Wall Street amalgam.
In the meantime, the World Bank and IMF – and other so-called development institutions of the same league – were busy ‘buying’ Third World leaders (sic), dishing out trillions in blank checks to their governments in the form of structural adjustments, budget support, development policy loans – and whatever other euphemisms they use for the same austerity-imposing, enslaving and poverty-causing financial instruments.
In addition to their own damage-causing debt, they have an enormous leverage effect on commercial banks and other lending institutions, up to ten or more times their own loans. If a country is viable for World Bank and IMF money, then it must be more than viable for commercial loans. Later this despicable trio was joined by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission (EC), puppets to the ravaging, war-mongering American empire.
Mind you – the ECB is led by a former Goldman-Sachs executive – personifying the epitome of Wall Street. In other words, the entire European economy and financial system is in the hands of the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon money lords. The ECB, IMF and EC, under mandate of the Fed and Wall Street, have become the nefarious ‘troika’ that is without scruples destroying whole countries – condemning entire populations into misery.
This is the doctrine of neoliberalism – destruction, hardship and misery for entire peoples so that a few may live in abject luxury. Where is Hope? – Solidarity has faded into a blurry undecipherable little smear on the horizon.
Shameless indebtedness was and still is the sledgehammer of exploitation by the western powers overwhelming the resources rich developing world – attempting to expand ever so much to the east – and not slowing to protect their brothers, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, with Greece and Ukraine being the extreme cases, where austerity is boosting unemployment figures up to a third of the work force or higher, closing hospitals and schools, privatizing public services, causing mortality of children and the elderly to rise astronomically – that is neoliberalism.
“Ukraine for all practical purposes is now a massively indebted failed state turned into an IMF colony”, well said, Pepe Escobar. There is no sense of solidarity left (if there ever was) in the European Union – as recently observed by the President of Switzerland.
Neoliberal thinking has been engrained in our institutions, minds and human behavior – we don’t even notice it anymore. Everything is commercialized, ‘marketized’ and commoditized. Even human beings. Sport icons are traded for (big) money, the poor and unemployed become cheap markets for cannon fodder – and we the others, are dull onlookers, easy prey for the markets of consumerism.
Unemployment, kept artificially high, is a para-market of working class men and women to be drawn upon by capitalists as needed. All helped by the second monstrous tool of neoliberalism (the first being the financial institutions and their instruments) – the media.
The western mass or main-stream media (MSM), in the hands of six, sorry to say it again, Zionist-Anglo-Saxon media giants, control 90% of the information we receive – propaganda information, repeated at nauseatum on a daily basis – lies after lies after lies and manipulations, to become the truth, the accepted truth, truth that creates our comfort – a charade without which we believe we cannot live.
Currency and gold manipulations, directed by the Washington money czars and the Bank for International Settlement (BIS), so as to stretch the dollar hegemony as long as it may still last, are creating a monetary system at absurdum. The money flow is continuously increased to protect the dollar.
To prevent a collapse by inflation, many western central banks, heirs of the dollar-domino casino scheme, are now collecting negative interests from their depositors, i.e. banks.
In other words, with an assumed negative interest of 1%, the central bank collects from their private bank customers’ accounts 1% for safekeeping their money. What has already happened in some cases is that private banks charge their customers also a negative interest. Should this however happen on a large scale, it could kill the economy and that could mean the end of private banking – a good thing, indeed, but certainly not what the neocons had in mind.
Why not think of a scenario where the private bank, instead of depositing its funds with the central bank at a negative interest of 1%, they apply the negative interest principle to their own clients, lending them hundred at a discount of, say, 0.5%. It would safe them 0.5% and could still stimulate the economy. That would be monetary policy at absurdum.
According to a recent ‘shocking’ IMF revelation, worldwide subsidies for fossil fuels are estimated at US$ 5.3 trillion for 2015. The institution says that the subsidies are largely accounting for the money governments have to spend to treat victims of air pollution from CO2 emission and from the loss of income due to illnesses.
In other words, the study has for once accounted for the so-called externalities caused by the use of hydrocarbons. The subsidy counts for about 6.5% of global GDP. Based on figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) cutting the subsidies could reduce premature deaths from outdoor air pollution by 50% – saving 1.6 million lives, because it is assumed to reduce the use of hydrocarbons worldwide.
So – why is no serious effort made to abolish these subsidies, by having the polluter pay the full cost of the damage he causes? The subject of hydrocarbon subsides is not new. It has been whispered about – no loud words, of course – for at least the last five years. Nothing changed. Because the US / NATO military war machine is the world’s largest single fossil fuel consumer.
What fossil fuel subsidies mean is actually subsidizing Washington led invasions, wars, as well as proxy wars instigated by the hegemon’s objectives. – The entire world helps subsidizing, willy-nilly the US-driven killing machine, despite their suffering from it. – So – why should anything change?
Curiously, the climate champions, the same who promote carbon credits generating billions of profits for speculating Wall Street, hardly ever mention the enormous CO2 boot-print of the wars and conflicts around the globe – and their potential for drastic reduction through peace. – Why is that?
Mining for minerals and natural resources has skyrocketed during the past 20 years. Pristine forests and entire ecosystems are being slaughtered and plundered without scruples by international mining corporations. They are helped by the infamous threesome, WTO, IMF, World Bank, through trade agreements and draconian conditions imposed by structural adjustment type lending operations.
Resources owning developing countries are enslaved by debt. Letting their resources being exploited for a pittance, most often without any consideration for environmental protection, despite assertions to the contrary, is their only hope to loosen the noose of debt around their neck – just enough to breathe.
And why has mining become a booming industry, mind you not for the countries that let themselves be mined, but for the mining transnationals – because the western war machine needs lots of minerals and rare earths for their ever more sophisticated electronically and technology-driven weapons and killing gadgets.
Although there are no certain figures available, estimates have it that at least 50% of today’s mining output is used by the industrial war complex. – Mining is one of the globe’s dirtiest, most socially destabilizing and environmentally destructive industries. But it serves the neoliberal advancement towards world domination.
The empires chief vassals, the EU, are tormented during the last few years by an ever growing invasion of refugees from African and Middle Eastern conflict zones. Thousands are dying by attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach the EU’s southern shores to safety –to promised heaven.
More than 4,000 have perished at sea already this year – estimated figures for future victims are increasing rapidly as wars and conflicts – for neoliberal greed – intensify. Those who make it will be held for years in refugee camps, some returned, but few will make it up to the northern European partners.
There is no solidarity in the European Union. To the contrary, the EU Commission has just decided to fight these refugees from misery, disease and death – by military force; completely ignoring that the EU itself with its subservient complicity with Washington is responsible for the conflicts that cause the flood of refugees in the first place. Shame on you, Brussels – shame on you, every single member of the wretched band of egocentric, neoliberal EU members, devoid of any sense of solidarity, of humanity – greed is the epitome of your worthlessness!
The greed economy is everywhere. It is intricately woven into our western system of life. Reforms will hardly make a difference. They are just typical band aid remedies. The octopus loses one tentacle, but two more grow in its stead to give the monster even more ferocity.
We are so thirsty for hope, hope for another, more just, more equitable world, we see hope in the first ‘blinking of an eye’. Hope is good. Hope is the basis for action. And action must be the consequence of hope – hope that not all is lost. Action to break that impasse of neoliberal all-engulfing greed must be simple. We have become strangers to ourselves. We must return to our roots, recognizing where and why we failed to diagnose the beast. Our awakened, re-kindled sense of consciousness may lead us to what we have lost – our inherent sense of solidarity.
Let’s hope together for that to happen – to happen soon, for the suffering is too great to endure much longer. We, the 99.99 % have it in our power to stop this misery and safe our planet.
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.