Putting an End to the Rent Economy

Posted on January 16, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Hudson and Vlado Plaga

Interview with Vlado Plaga in the German magazine FAIRCONOMY, September 2017.

Originally, you didn’t want to become an economist. How did it come that you changed your plans and digged so deep into economics?

I found economics aesthetic, as beautiful as astronomy. I came to New York expecting to become an orchestra conductor, but I met one of the leading Wall Street economists, who convinced me that economics and finance was beautiful.

I was intrigued by the concept of compound interest and by the autumnal drain of money from the banking system to move the crops at harvest time. That is when most crashes occurred. The flow of funds was the key.

I saw that these economic cycles were mainly financial: the build-up of debt and its cancellation or wipe-out and bankruptcy occurring again and again throughout history. I wanted to study the rise and fall of financial economies.

But when you studied at the New York University you were not taught the things that really interested you, were you?

I got a PhD as a union card. In order to work on Wall Street, I needed a PhD. But what I found in the textbooks was the opposite of everything that I experienced on Wall Street in the real world. Academic textbooks describe a parallel universe. When I tried to be helpful and pointed out to my professors that the textbooks had little to do with how the economy and Wall Street actually work, that did not help me get good grades. I think I got a C+ in money and banking.

So I scraped by, got a PhD and lived happily ever after in the real world.

So you had to find out on your own… Your first job was at the Savings Banks Trust Company, a trust established by the 127 savings banks that still existed in New York in the 1960s. And you somehow hit the bull’s eye and were set on the right track, right from the start: you’ve been exploring the relationship between money and land. You had an interesting job there. What was it?

Savings banks were much like Germany’s Landesbanks. They take local deposits and lend them out to home buyers. Savings and Loan Associations (S&Ls) did the same thing. They were restricted to lending to real estate, not personal loans or for corporate business loans. (Today, they have all been turned into commercial banks.)

I noticed two dynamics. One is that savings grew exponentially, almost entirely by depositors getting dividends every 3 months. So every three months I found a sudden jump in savings. This savings growth consisted mainly of the interest that accrued. So there was an exponential growth of savings simply by inertia.

The second dynamic was that all this exponential growth in savings was recycled into the real estate market. What has pushed up housing prices in the US is the availability of mortgage credit. In charting the growth of mortgage lending and savings in New York State, I found a recycling of savings into mortgages. That meant an exponential growth in savings to lend to buyers of real estate. So the cause of rising real estate prices wasn’t population or infrastructure. It was simply that properties are worth whatever banks are able and willing to lend against them.

As the banks have more and more money, they have lowered their lending standards.

It’s kind of automatic, it’s just a mathematical law…

Yes, a mathematical law that is independent of the economy. In other words, savings grow whether or not the economy is growing. The interest paid to bondholders, savers and other creditors continues to accrue. That turns out to be the key to understanding why today’s economy is polarizing between creditors and debtors.

You wrote in “Killing the Host” that your graphs looked like Hokusai’s “Great Wave off Konagawa” or even more like a cardiogram. Why?

Any rate of interest has a doubling time. One way or another any interest-bearing debt grows and grows. It usually grows whenever interest is paid. That’s why it looks like a cardiogram: Every three months there’s a jump. So it’s like the Hokusai wave with a zigzag to reflect the timing of interest payments every three months.

The exponential growth of finance capital and interest-bearing debt grows much faster then the rest oft he economy, which tends to taper off in an S-curve. That’s what causes the business cycle to turn down. It’s not really a cycle, it’s more like a slow buildup like a wave and then a sudden vertical crash downward.

This has been going on for a century. Repeated financial waves build up until the economy becomes so top-heavy with debt that it crashes. A crash used to occur every 11 years in the 19th century. But in the United States from 1945 to 2008, the exponential upswing was kept artificially long by creating more and more debt financing. So the crash was postponed until 2008.

Most crashes since the 19th century had a silver lining: They wiped out the bad debts. But this time the debts were left in place, leading to a massive wave of foreclosures. We are now suffering from debt deflation. Instead of a recovery, there’s just a flat line for 99% of the economy.

The only layer of the economy that is growing is the wealthiest 5% layer – mainly the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. That is, creditors living of interest and economic rent: monopoly rent, land rent and financial interest. The rest of the economy is slowly but steadily shrinking.

And the compound interest that was accumulated was issued by the banks as new mortgages. Isn’t this only logical for the banks to do?

Savings banks and S&Ls were only allowed to lend for mortgages. Commercial banks now look for the largest parts of the economy as their customers. Despite the fact that most economic textbooks describe industry and manufacturing as being the main part of economy, real estate actually is the largest sector. So most bank lending is against real estate and, after that, oil, gas and mining.

That explains why the banking and financial interests have become the main lobbyists urging that real estate, mining and oil and gas be untaxed – so that there’ll be more economic rent left to pay the banks. Most land rent and natural resource rent is paid out as interest to the banks instead of as taxes to the government.

So instead of housing becoming cheaper and cheaper it turns out to be much less affordable in our days than in the 1960s?

Credit creation has inflated asset prices. The resulting asset-price inflation is the distinguishing financial feature of our time. In a race tot he bottom, banks have steadily lowered the terms on which they make loans. This has made the economy more risky.

In the 1960s, banks required a 25-30% down payment by the buyer, and limited the burden of mortgage debt service to only 25% of the borrower’s income. But interest is now federally guaranteed up to 43% of the home buyer’s income. And by 2008, banks were making loans no down payment at all. Finally, loans in the 1960s were self-amortizing over 30 years. Today we have interest-only loans that are never paid off.

So banks loan much more of the property’s market price. That is why most of the rental value of land isn’t paid to the homeowner or commercial landlord any more. It’s paid to the banks as interest.

Was this the reason for the savings and loan crisis that hit the US in 1986 and that was responsible for the failure of 1,043 out of the 3,234 savings and loan associations in the United States from 1986 to 1995?

The problem with the savings and loan crisis was mainly fraud! The large California S&L’s were run by crooks, topped by Charles Keating. Many were prosecuted for fraud and sent to jail. By the 1980s the financial sector as a whole had become basically a criminalized sector. My colleague Bill Black has documented most of that. He was a prosecutor of the S&L frauds in the 1980s, and wrote a book “The best way to rob a bank is to own one”.

That’s a famous quotation, I also heard that.

Fraud was the main financial problem, and remains so.

Since 2007 Americans were strangled by their mortgages in the sub-prime crisis…

These were essentially junk mortgages, and once again it was fraud. Already in 2004 the FBI said that the American economy was suffering the worst wave of bank fraud in history. Yet there was no prosecution. Essentially in the United States today, financial fraud is de-criminalized. No banker has been sent to jail, despite banks paying hundreds of billions of dollars of fines for financial fraud. These fines are a small portion of what they took illegally. Such payments are merely a cost of doing business. The English language was expanded to recognize junk loans. Before the financial crash the popular press was using the word “junk mortgages” and “Ninjas”: “No Income, No Jobs, no Assets”. So everybody knew that there was fraud, and the bankers knew they would not go to jail, because Wall Street had become the main campaign contributor to the leading politicians, especially in the Democratic party. The Obama Administration came in basically as representatives of the bank fraudsters. And the fraud continues today. The crooks have taken over the banking system. It is hard for Europeans to realize that that this really has happened in America. The banks have turned into gangsters, which is why already in the 1930s President Roosevelt coined the word “banksters”.

I also heard the nice English sayings “Too big to fail” or “Too big to jail”…
But what has become of those 10 million households that ended up losing their homes to foreclosure? How are their economic and living conditions today? What has become of their houses? The economy has recovered…

Most of the houses that were foreclosed on have been bought out by hedge funds for all cash. In the wake of 2008, by 2009 and 2010 hedge funds were saying “If you have $5,000,000 to invest, we’re going to buy these houses that are being sold at distress prices. We’re going to buy foreclosed properties for all cash, because we can make a larger rate of return simply by renting them out.” So there has been a transfer of property from homeowners to the financial sector. The rate of home-ownership in America is dropping.

The economy itself has not recovered. All economic growth since 2008 has accrued only to the top 5% of the economy. 95% of the economy has been shrinking by about 3% per year… and continues to shrink, because the debts were kept in place. President Obama saved the banks and Wall Street instead of saving the economy.

That’s why we live in an “age of deception” as the sub-title of your latest book suggests, I guess?

“People have the idea that when house prices go up, somehow everybody’s getting richer. And it’s true that the entry to the middle class for the last hundred years has been to be able to own your own home…”

What is deceptive is the fact that attention is distracted away from how the real world works, and how unfair it is. Economics textbooks teach that the economy is in equilibrium and is balanced. But every economy in the world is polarizing between creditors and debtors. Wealth is being sucked up to the top of the economic pyramid mainly by bondholders and bankers. The textbooks act as if the economy operates on barter. Nobel prices for Paul Samuelson and his followers treat the economy as what they call the “real economy,” which is a fictitious economy that in theory would work without money or debt. But that isn’t the real economy at all. It is a parallel universe. So the textbooks talk about a parallel universe that might exist logically, but has very little to do with how the real economy works in today’s world.

If you had a picture you’d see me nodding all the time, because that’s what I also found out: if you look at the mathematics, it is polarizing all the time, it is de-stabilizing. Without government interference we’d have crash after crash… It is not under control anymore.

But you also suggest that there’s another factor that makes housing prices go up – and that’s property tax cuts. Why?

“Taxes were shifted off the Donald Trumps of the world and onto homeowners….”

Whatever the tax collector relinquishes leaves more rental income available to be paid to the banks. Commercial real estate investors have a motto: “Rent is for paying interest.” When buyers bid for an office building or a house, the buyer who wins is the one who is able to get the largest bank loan. And that person is the one who pays all the rent to the bank. The reason why commercial investors were willing to do this for so many decades is that they wanted to get the capital gain – which really was the inflation of real estate prices as a result of easier credit. But now that the economy is “loan up,” prospects for further capital gains are gone. So the prices are not rising much anymore. There is no reason to be borrowing. So the system is imploding.

So, how could we change the situation and make land a public utility?

There are two ways to do this. One way is to fully tax the land’s rental value. Public investment in infrastructure – roads, schools, parks, water and sewer systems – make a location more desirable. A subway line, like the Jubilee tube line in London, increases real estate prices all along the line. The resulting rise in rents increases prices for housing. This rental value could be taxed back by the community to pay for this infrastructure. Roads and subways, water and sewer systems could be financed by re-capturing the rental value of the land that this public investment creates. But that is not done. A free lunch is left in private hands.

The alternative is direct public ownership of the land, which would be leased out to whatever is deemed to be most socially desirable, keeping down the rental cost. In New York City, for instance, restaurants and small businesses are being forced out. They’re closing down because of the rising rents. The character of the economy is changing. It is getting rid of the bookstores, restaurants and low-profit enterprises. Either there should be a land tax, or public ownership of the land. Those are the alternatives. If you tax away the land’s rent, it would not be available to be paid to the banks. You could afford to cut taxes on labor. You could cut the income tax, and you could cut taxes on consumption. That would reduce the cost of living.

To me that’s pretty close to the position of Georgists on how to handle land, isn’t it?

I don’t like to mention Henry George, because he didn’t have a theory of land rent or of the role of the financial sector and debt creation. The idea of land tax came originally from the Physiocrats in France, François Quesnay, and then from Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and in America from Thorstein Veblen and Simon Patten. All of these economists clarified the analysis of land rent, who ended up with it, and how it should be taxed. In order to have a theory of how much land rent there is to tax, you need a value and price theory. Henry George’s value theory was quite confused. Worst of all, he spent the last two decades of his life fighting against socialists and labor reformers. He was an irascible journalist, not an economist.

The classical economists wrote everything you need to know about land rent and tax policy. That was the emphasis of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill… all the classical economists. The purpose of their value and price theory was to isolate that part of the economy’s income that was unearned: economic rent, land rent, monopoly rent, and financial interest. I think it is necessary to put the discussion of tax policy and rent policy back in this classical economic context. Henry George was not part of that. He was simply a right-wing journalist whom libertarians use to promote neoliberal Thatcherite deregulation and anti-government ideology. In Germany, his followers were among the first to support the Nazi Party already in the early 1920s, for instance, Adolf Damaschke. Anti-Semitism also marked George’s leading American followers in the 1930s and ‚40s.

So I guess I have to go back a bit further in history, to read the original Physiocrats as well…

John Stuart Mill is good, Simon Patten is good, Thorstein Veblen is wonderful. Veblen was writing about the financialization of real estate in the 1920s in his Absentee Ownership. I recently edited a volume on him: Absentee Ownership and its Discontents (ISLET, Dresden, 2016).

Germany’s land tax reform seems to go in the wrong direction. Germany has to establish new rules for it’s “Grundsteuer” that in fact is a mingled tax on land and the buildings standing on it, based on outdated rateable values of 1964 (in the West) and 1935 (in the East). The current reform proposals of the federal states will maintain this improper mingling and intend a revenue neutral reform of this already very low tax. It brings about 11 billion Euro to the municipal authorities, but this is only 2% of the total German tax revenue, whereas wage tax and sales tax make up for 25% each. We need a complete tax shift, don’t we?

Germany is indeed suffering from rising housing prices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. One is that Germans have not had a real estate bubble like what occurred in the US or England. They did lose money in the stock market, and many decided simply to put their money in their own property. There is also a lot of foreign money coming into Germany to buy property, especially in Berlin.

The only way to keep housing prices down is to tax away the rise in the land value. If this is done, speculators are not going to buy. Only homeowners or commercial users will buy for themselves. You don’t want speculators or bank credit to push up prices. If Germany lets its housing prices rise, it is going to price its labor out of the market. It would lose its competitive advantage, because the largest expense in every wage-earner’s budget is the cost of housing. In Ricardo’s era it was food; today it is housing. So Germany should focus on how to keep its housing prices low.

I’d like to come back to the issue of interest once more. The English title of “Der Sektor” is “Killing the host – How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy”. It’s much more coming to the point. It struck me that you mention John Brown. He wrote a book called “Parasitic wealth or Money Reform” in 1898. I came across his book some years ago and thought that he was somehow America’s Helmut Creutz of the 19th century. He was a supporter of Henry George, but in addition John Brown analyzed and criticized the interest money system and its redistribution of wealth. He said that labour is robbed of 33% of its earnings by the parasitic wealth with subtle and insidious methods, so that it’s not even suspected. Why does almost nobody know this John Brown?

John Brown’s book is interesting. It is somewhat like that of his contemporary Michael Flürscheim. Brown’s book was published by Charles Kerr, a Chicago cooperative that also published Marx’s Capital. So Brown was a part of the group of American reformers who became increasingly became Marxist in the 19^th and early 20^thcentury. Most of the books published by Kerr discussed finance and the exponential growth of debt.

The economist who wrote most clearly about how debt grew by its own mathematics was Marx in Vol. III of Capital and his Theories of Surplus Value . Most of these monetary writers were associated with Marxists and focused on the tendency of debt and finance to grow exponentially by purely mathematical laws, independently of the economy, not simply as a by-product of the economy as mainstream economics pretends.

So you recommend reading his book?

Sure, it is a good book, although only on one topic. Also good is Michael Flürscheim’s Clue to the Economic Labyrinth (1902). So is Vol. III of Capital.

Brown’s plan of reforms included the nationalization of banks and the establishment of a bank service charge in lieu of interest. The latter sounds remarkably up-to-date. In Germany the banks are raising charges because of the decrease in their interest margins. How is your view on the matter of declining interest rates?

Well, today declining interest rates are the aim of central bank Quantitative Easing. It hasn’t helped. The most important question to ask is: what are you going to make your loans for? Most lending at these declining interest rates has been parasitic and predatory. There’s a lot of corporate take-over lending to companies that borrow to buy other companies. There is an enormous amount of stock market credit that has helped bid up stock prices with low-interest credit and arbitrage. This has inflated asset prices for stocks, bonds and real estate. If the result of low interest rates is simply to inflate asset prices, the only way this can work is to have a heavy tax on capital gains, that is asset price gains. But in the US, England, and other countries there are very low taxes on capital gains, and so low interest rates simply make housing more expensive, and make stocks and buying a flow retirement income (in the form of stocks or bonds that yield dividends and interest) much more expensive.

I guess Brown is getting to the positive aspects of low interest also.

What Brown was talking about were the problems of finance. In the final analysis there is only one ultimate solution: to write down the debts. Nobody really wants to talk about debt cancellation, because they try to find a way to save the system. But it can’t be fixed so that debts can keep growing at compound rates ad infinitum. Any financial system tends to end in a crash. So the key question is how a society is NOT going not to pay debts that go bad. Will it let creditors foreclose, as has occurred in the US? Or are you going to write down the debts and wipe out this overgrowth of creditor claims? That’s the ultimate policy that every society has to face.

Very topical, the German Bundesbank sees the combination of low interest rates and a booming housing market as a dangerous cocktail for the banking sector. “The traffic lights have jumped to yellow or even to dark yellow”, Andreas Dombret said, after the Bundesbank had denied the problem in the last years by dismissing it as Germany’s legitimate catch-up effects. The residential property prices have gone up by 30% since 2010, in the major cities even by more than 60%. The share of real estate loans in the total credit portfolio is significantly rising. The mortgage loans of the households have increased in absolute terms as well as relative to their income. It’s only due to the low interest rates that the debt service has not increased yet. But the banks and savings companies are taking on the risk: the mortgages with terms of more than ten years have risen to more than 40% of the residential real estate loans. The interest-change risks lie with the banks. Don’t we have to face up to the truth that interest rates shouldn’t go up again?

What should be raised are taxes on the land, natural resource rent and monopoly rent. The aim should be to keep housing prices low instead of speculation. Land rent should serve as the tax base, as the classical economists said it should. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill… all urged that the basis of the tax system should be real-estate and natural resource rent, not income taxes (which add to the cost of labor), the cost of labor and not value-added taxes (which increase consumer prices). So tax policy and debt write-downs today are basically the key to economic survival.

Banking should be a public utility. If you leave banking in the present hands, you’re leaving it in the hands of the kind of crooks that brought about the financial crisis of 2008.

Couldn’t the subprime-crisis have been prevented if the Fed had introduced negative interest rates in the 1990s?

No. The reason there was the crash was fraud and speculation. It was junk mortgages and the financialization of the economy. Pension funds and people’s savings were turned over to the financial sector, whose policy is short-term. It seeks gains mainly by speculation and asset price inflation. So the problem is the financial system. I think the Boeckler foundation has annual meetings in Berlin that focus on financialization and explain what the problem is.

Yes, that’s a big topic. The financial sector is interested, as you said, in short-term gains, but people who want to save for their retirement are interested in long-term stability – that is contradictory. Do you know the “Natural Economic Order by Free Land and Free Money” by Silvio Gesell?

It is not practical for today’s world, it is very abstract. The solution to the financial problem really has to be ultimately a debt write-down, and a shift to the tax system, as the classical economists talked about.

Gesell was also advocating the taxing of land. I think he had something in mind with bidding for the land, letting the market fix the prices.

He did not go beneath the surface to ask what kind of market do you want. Today, the market for real estate is a financialized market. As I said, the basic principle is that most rent is paid out as interest. The value of real estate is whatever a bank will lend against it. Unless you have a theory of finance and the overall economy, you really don’t have a theory of the market.

You are advocating a revival of classical economics. What did the classical economists understand by a free economy?

They all defined a free economy as one that is free from land rent, free from unearned income. Many also said that a free economy had to be free from private banking. They advocated full taxation of economic rent. Today’s idea of free market economics is the diametric opposite. In an Orwellian doublethink language, a free market now means an economy free for rent extractors, free for predators to make money, and essentially free for financial and corporate crime. The Obama Administration de-criminalized fraud. This has attracted the biggest criminals – and the wealthiest families – to the banking sector, because that’s where the money is. Crooks want to rob banks, and the best way to rob a bank is to own one. So criminals become bankers. You can look at Iceland, at HSBC, or at Citibank and Wells-Fargo in the news today. Their repeated lawbreaking and criminal activities have been shown to be endemic in the US. But nobody goes to jail. You can steal as much money as you want, and you’ll never go to jail if you’re a banker and pay off the political parties with campaign contribution. It’s much like drug dealers paying off crooked police forces. So crime is pouring into the financial system.

I think this is what’s going to cause a return to classical economics – the realization that you need government banks. Of course, government banks also can be corrupted, so you need some kind of checks and balances. What you need is an honest legal system. If you don’t have a legal system that throws crooks in jail, your economy is going to be transformed into something unpleasant. That’s what is happening today. I think that most Europeans don’t want to acknowledge that that’s what happened in America (USA). There is such an admiration of America that there is a hesitancy to see that it has been taken over by financial predators (a.k.a. “the market”).

We always hear that oligarchies are in the east, in Russia, but hardly anyone is calling America an oligarchy… although alternative media says that it’s just a few families that rule the country.

Yes.

Michael Hudson is the author of Killing the Host (published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet). His new book is J is For Junk Economics. He can be reached at mh@michael-hudson.com

To Liberate Cambodia

Posted on January 12, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

A long-standing French protectorate briefly occupied by Japan during World War II, Cambodia became independent in 1953 as the French finally withdrew from Indochina. Under the leadership of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia remained officially neutral, including during the subsequent US war on Indochina. However, by the mid-1960s, parts of the eastern provinces of Cambodia were bases for North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front (NVA/NLF) forces operating against South Vietnam and this resulted in nearly a decade of bombing by the United States from 4 October 1965. See ‘Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War’.

In 1970 Sihanouk was ousted in a US-supported coup led by General Lon Nol. See ‘A Special Supplement: Cambodia’. The following few years were characterized by an internal power struggle between Cambodian elites and war involving several foreign countries, but particularly including continuation of the recently commenced ‘carpet bombing’ of Cambodia by the US Air Force.

On 17 April 1975 the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of Cambodia. Following four years of ruthless rule by the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge, initially under Pol Pot, they were defeated by the Vietnamese army in 1979 and the Vietnamese occupation authorities established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), installing Heng Samrin and other pro-Vietnamese Communist politicians as leaders of the new government. Heng was succeeded by Chan Sy as Prime Minister in 1981.

Following the death of Chan Sy, Hun Sen became Prime Minister of Cambodia in 1985 and, despite a facade of democracy, he and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have been in power ever since. This period has notably included using the army to purge a feared rival in a bloody coup conducted in 1997. Hun Sen’s co-Prime Minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was ousted and fled to Paris while his supporters were arrested, tortured and some were summarily executed.

The current main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) was founded in 2012 by merging the Sam Rainsy Party and the Human Rights Party. Emblematic of Cambodia’s ‘democratic’ status, more than two dozen opposition members and critics have been locked up in the past year alone and the CNRP leader, Kem Sokha, known for his nonviolent, politically tolerant views, is currently imprisoned at a detention centre in Tboung Khmum Province following his arrest on 3 September 2017 under allegations of treason, espionage and for orchestrating anti-government demonstrations in 2013-2014. These demonstrations were triggered by widespread allegations of electoral fraud during the Cambodian general election of 2013. See ‘Sokha arrested for “treason”, is accused of colluding with US to topple the government’.

On 16 November 2017 the CNRP was dissolved by Cambodia’s highest court and 118 of its members, including Sokha and exiled former leader Sam Rainsy, were banned from politics for five years.

Cambodian Society

Socially, Cambodia is primarily Khmer with ethnic populations of Chinese, Vietnamese, Cham, Thai and Lao. It has a population of 16 million people. The pre-eminent religion is Buddhism. The adult literacy rate is 75%; few Cambodians speak a European language limiting access to western literature. Most students complete 12 years of (low quality public) school but tertiary enrollment is limited. As in all countries, education (reinforced by state propaganda through the media) serves to intimidate and indoctrinate students into obedience of elites. Discussion of national politics in a school class is taboo and such discussions are rare at tertiary level. This manifests in the narrow range of concerns that mobilize student action: personal outcomes such as employment opportunities. Issues such as those in relation to peace, the environment and refugees do not have a significant profile. In short, the student population generally is neither well informed nor politically engaged.

However, many other issues engage at least some Cambodians, with demonstrations, strikes and street blockades being popular tactics, although the lack of strategy means that outcomes are usually limited and, despite commendable nonviolent discipline in many cases, violent repression is not effectively resisted. Issues of concern to workers, particularly low wages in a country with no minimum wage law, galvanize some response. See, for example, ‘Protests, Strikes Continue in Cambodia: Though their occupations differ, Cambodian workers are united in their push for a living wage’. Garment workers are a significant force because their sector is important to the national economy. Land grabbing and lack of housing mobilize many people but usually fail to attract support beyond those effected. See, for example, ‘Housing Activists Clash With Police in Street Protest’. Environmental issues, such as deforestation and natural resource depletion, fail to mobilize the support they need to be effective.

Having noted that, however, Cambodian activists require enormous courage to take nonviolent action as the possibility of violent state repression in response to popular mobilization is a real one, as illustrated above and documented in the Amnesty International report ‘Taking to the streets: Freedom of peaceful assembly in Cambodia’ from 2015.

Perhaps understandably, given their circumstances, international issues, such as events in the Middle East, North Korea and the plight of the Rohingya in neighbouring Myanmar are beyond the concern of most Cambodians.

Economically, Cambodians produce traditional goods for small local households with industrial production remaining low in a country that is still industrializing. Building on agriculture (especially rice), tourism and particularly the garment industry, which provided the basis for the Cambodian export sector in recent decades, the dictatorship has been encouraging light manufacturing, such as of electronics and auto-parts, by establishing ‘special economic zones’ that allow cheap Cambodian labour to be exploited. Most of the manufacturers are Japanese and despite poor infrastructure (such as lack of roads and port facilities), poor production management, poor literacy and numeracy among the workers, corruption and unreliable energy supplies, Cambodian factory production is slowly rising to play a part in Japan’s regional supply chain. In addition, Chinese investment in the construction sector has grown enormously in recent years and Cambodia is experiencing the common problem of development being geared to serve elite commercial interests and tourists rather than the needs (such as affordable housing) of ordinary people or the environment. See ‘China’s construction bubble may leave Cambodia’s next generation without a home’.

Environmentally, Cambodia does little to conserve its natural resources. For example, between 1990 and 2010, Cambodia lost 22% of its forest cover, or nearly 3,000,000 hectares, largely to logging. There is no commitment to gauging environmental impact before construction projects begin and the $US800m Lower Sesan 2 Dam, in the northeast of the country, has been widely accused of being constructed with little thought given to local residents (who will be evicted or lose their livelihood when the dam reservoir fills) or the project’s environmental impact.

Beyond deforestation (through both legal and illegal logging) then, environmental destruction in Cambodia occurs as a result of large scale construction and agricultural projects which destroy important wildlife habitats, but also through massive (legal and illegal) sand mining – see ‘Shifting Sand: How Singapore’s demand for Cambodian sand threatens ecosystems and undermines good governance’ – poaching of endangered and endemic species, with Cambodian businesses and political authorities, as well as foreign criminal syndicates and many transnational corporations from all over the world implicated in the various aspects of this corruptly-approved and executed destruction.

In the words of Cambodian researcher Tay Sovannarun: ‘The government just keeps doing business as usual while the rich cliques keep extracting natural resources and externalizing the cost to the rest of society.’ Moreover, three members of the NGO Mother Nature – Sun Mala, Try Sovikea and Sim Somnang – recently served nearly a year in prison for their efforts to defend the environment and the group was dissolved by the government in September 2017. See ‘Environmental NGO Mother Nature dissolved’.

Cambodian Politics

Politically, Cambodians are largely naïve with most believing that they live in a ‘democracy’ despite the absence of its most obvious hallmarks such as civil and political rights, the separation of powers including an independent judiciary, free and fair elections, the right of assembly and freedom of the press (with the English-language newspaper The Cambodia Daily recently closed down along with some radio stations). And this is an accurate assessment of most members of the political leadership of the CNRP as well.

Despite a 30-year record of political manipulation by Hun Sen and the CPP – during which ‘Hun Sen has made it clear that he does not respect the concept of free and fair elections’: see ‘30 Years of Hun Sen: Violence, Repression, and Corruption in Cambodia’ – which has included obvious corruption of elections through vote-rigging but also an outright coup in 1997 and the imprisonment or exile of opposition leaders since then, most Cambodians and their opposition leaders still participate in the charade that they live in a ‘democracy’ which could result in the defeat of Hun Sen and the CPP at a ‘free and fair’ election. Of course, there are exceptions to this naïveté, as a 2014 article written by Mu Sochua, veteran Cambodian politician and former minister of women’s affairs in a Hun Sen government, demonstrates. See ‘Crackdown in Cambodia’.

Moreover, as Sovannarun has noted: most Cambodians ‘still think international pressure is effective in keeping the CPP from disrespecting democratic principles which they have violated up until this day. Right now they wait for US and EU sanctions in the hope that the CPP will step back.’ See, for example, ‘The Birth of a Dictator’. He asks: ‘Even assuming it works, when will Cambodians learn to rely on themselves when the ruling party causes the same troubles again? Are they going to ask for external help like this every time and expect their country to be successfully democratized?’

The problem, Sovannarun argues, is that ‘Cambodians in general do not really understand what democracy is. Their views are very narrow. For them, democracy is just an election. Many news reports refer to people as “voters” but in Khmer, this literally translates as “vote owners” as if people cannot express their rights or power beside voting.’

Fortunately, recent actions by the CPP have led to opposition leaders and some NGOs finally declaring the Hun Sen dictatorship for what it is. See, for example, ‘The Birth of a Dictator’. But for Sovannarun, ‘democratization ended in 1997. The country should be regarded as a dictatorship since then. The party that lost the election in 1993 still controlled the national military, the police and security force, and the public administration, eventually using military force to establish absolute control in 1997. How is Cambodia still a democracy?’

However, recent comprehensive research undertaken by Global Witness goes even further. Their report Hostile Takeover ‘sheds light on a huge network of secret deal-making and corruption that has underpinned Hun Sen’s 30-year dictatorial reign of murder, torture and the imprisonment of his political opponents’. See ‘Hostile Takeover: The corporate empire of Cambodia’s ruling family’ and ‘Probe: Companies Worth $200M Linked to Cambodian PM’s Family’.

So what are the prospects of liberating Cambodia from its dictatorship?

To begin, there is little evidence to suggest that leadership for any movement to do so will come from within formal political ranks. Following the court-ordered dissolution of the CNRP on 16 November 2017 – see ‘Cambodia top court dissolves main opposition CNRP party’ – at the behest of Hun Sen, ‘half of their 55 members of parliament fled the country’. And this dissolution was preceded by actions that had effectively neutralized the opposition, with two dozen opposition members (including CNRP leader Kem Sokha) and critics imprisoned in the past year alone, as reported above, and the rapid flight of Opposition Deputy President Mu Sochua on 3 October after allegedly being notified by a senior official that her arrest was imminent. See ‘Breaking: CNRP’s Mu Sochua flees country following “warning” of arrest’. But while Mu Sochua called for a protest gathering after she had fled, understandably, nobody dared to protest: ‘Who dares to protest if their leader runs for their life?’ Sovannarun asks.

Of course, civil society leadership is fraught with danger too. Prominent political commentator and activist Kem Ley, known for his trenchant criticism of the Hun Sen dictatorship, was assassinated on 10 July 2016 in Phnom Penh. See ‘Shooting Death of Popular Activist Roils Cambodia’ and ‘Q&A With Kem Ley: Transparency on Hun Sen Family’s Business Interests is Vital’. Ley was the third notable activist to be killed following the union leader Chea Vichea in 2004 – see ‘Who Killed Chea Vichea?’ – and environmental activist Wutty Chut in 2012. See ‘Cambodian Environmental Activist Is Slain’. But they are not the only activists to suffer this fate.

In addition, plenty of politicians, journalists and activists have been viciously assaulted by the security forces and members of Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit – see, for example, ‘Dragged and Beaten: The Cambodian Government’s Role in the October 2015 Attack on Opposition Politicians’ – and/or imprisoned by the dictatorship. See ‘Cambodia: Quash Case Against 11 Opposition Activists: No Legal Basis for Trumped-Up Charges, Convictions, and Long Sentences’. In fact, Radio Free Asia keeps a record of ‘Cambodian Opposition Politicians and Activists Behind Bars’ for activities that the dictatorship does not like, including defending human rights, land rights and the natural environment.

Moreover, in another recent measure of the blatant brutality of the dictatorship, Hun Sen publicly suggested that opposition politicians Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha ‘would already be dead’ had he known they were promising to ‘organise a new government’ in the aftermath of the highly disputed 2013 national election result. See ‘Rainsy and Sokha “would already be dead”: PM’. He also used a government-produced video to link the CNRP with US groups in fomenting a ‘colour revolution’ in Cambodia. See ‘Government ups plot accusations with new video linking CNRP and US groups to “colour revolutions”’.

In one response to Hun Sen’s ‘would already be dead’ statement, British human rights lawyer Richard Rogers, who had filed a complaint asking the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the Cambodian ruling elite for widespread human rights violations in 2014, commented that it was simply more evidence of the government’s willingness to persecute political dissidents. ‘It shows that he is willing to order the murder of his own people if they challenge his rule’. Moreover: ‘These are not the words of a modern leader who claims to lead a democracy.’ See ‘Rainsy and Sokha “would already be dead”: PM’. Whether Hun Sen is even sane is a question that no-one asks.

So what can Cambodians do? Fortunately, there is a long history of repressive regimes being overthrown by nonviolent grassroots movements. And nonviolent action has proven powerfully effective in Cambodia as the Buddhist monk Maha Gosananda, and his supporters demonstrated on their 19-day peace walk from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh through war ravaged Khmer Rouge territory in Cambodia in May 1993, defying the expectations of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) coordinators at the time that they would be killed by the Khmer Rouge. See ‘Maha Gosananda, a true peace maker’. However, for the Hun Sen dictatorship to be removed, Cambodians will be well served by a thoughtful and comprehensive strategy that takes particular account of their unique circumstances.

A framework to plan and implement a strategy to remove the dictatorship is explained in Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy with Sovannarun’s Khmer translation of this strategy here.

This strategic framework explains what is necessary to remove the dictatorship and, among consideration of many vital issues, elaborates what is necessary to maintain strategic coordination when leaders are at high risk of assassination, minimize the risk of violent repression while also ensuring that the movement is not hijacked by government or foreign provocateurs whose purpose is to subvert the movement by destroying its nonviolent character – see, for example, ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’ – as well as deal with foreign governments (such as those of China, the European Union, Japan and the USA) who (categorically or by inaction) support the dictatorship, sometimes by supplying military weapons suitable for use against the domestic population.

Sovannarun is not optimistic about the short-term prospects for his country: Too many mistakes have been repeated too often. But he is committed to the nonviolent struggle to liberate Cambodia from its dictatorship and recognizes that the corrupt electoral process cannot restore democracy or enable Cambodians to meaningfully address the vast range of social, political, economic and environmental challenges they face.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Gaius Publius: Defining Neoliberalism

Posted on January 11, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Yves Smith

Source: Naked Capitalism

For years I’ve been using the term “neoliberalism” (or sometimes neo-liberalism*) and I’m always uncomfortable, since it sounds so academic. So I usually add one-phrase definitions and move on. For example, this from a recent piece on Puerto Rico:

If neoliberalism is the belief that the proper role of government is to enrich the rich — in Democratic circles they call it “wealth creation” to hide the recipients; Republicans are much more blatant — then the “shock doctrine” is its action plan.

That’s sounds pretty blunt, but it’s a true statement, even among academics. See this great interview (start at about 6:15) with Professor Philip Miroski of the University of Notre Dame on how modern neoliberals have come to see the role of government in society. It’s weedy but excellent.

I want to offer our readers a better description of neoliberalism though, yet not get into too many weeds. So consider these excerpts from a longer Guardian essay by the British writer George Monbiot. (My thanks to Naked Capitalism commenter nonclassical for the link and the idea for this piece.)

Neoliberalism — The Invisible Water the West Is Swimming In

We’ll start with Monbiot’s brief intro, just to set the scope of the problem:

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Ask people to define “neoliberalism,” even if they’ve heard of it, and almost no one can. Yet the comparison of our governing ideology to that of the Soviet Union’s is a good one — like “communism,” or the Soviet Union’s version of it, neoliberalism defines and controls almost everything our government does, no matter which party is in office.

The Birth of Neoliberalism

What is neoliberalism and where did it come from? Monbiot writes:

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

Neoliberalism is an explicit reaction to Franklin Roosevelt and the welfare state, which by a quirk of history was called “liberalism” at the time, even though, in the nineteenth century, “liberalism” had roughly the same meaning that “neoliberalism” has today. In other words, “FDR liberalism” is in many ways the opposite of classical “liberalism,” which meant “liberty (freedom) from government,” and a quirk of history has confused these terms.

Back to Monbiot and Hayek:

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international” [a term modeled on “the Communist International]: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Note the mention of Milton Friedman above. Neoliberalism is a bipartisan ideology, not just a Clintonist-Obamist one.

Democrats, Republicans and Neoliberalism

As Monbiot explains, for a while neoliberalism “lost its name” and was more or less a fringe ideology in a world still dominated by the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian economics. When neoliberalism later came back strong in the Republican Party, it wasn’t called “neoliberalism” but “Milton Friedman free market conservativism,” or something similar.

Only when Bill Clinton and his Democratic Party allies adopted it in the 1980s did the term “neoliberal” re-emerge in public discourse.

[I]n the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. [emphasis added]

Note the role of Jimmy Carter and start of deregulation in the late 1970s. For that reason, many consider Jimmy Carter to be the “proto-neoliberal,” both for the nation and the Democratic Party.

Neoliberalism — “Just Deserts” for Predators and Prey

What makes “neoliberalism” or “free market conservatism” such a radical — and destructive — ideology? It reduces all human activity to economic competition. It creates and glorifies, in other words, a world of predators and prey, a world like the one we live in as today:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

In a world where competition is right and good, a world in which the “market” is the defining metaphor for human activity, all social ties are broken, the individual is an atom left to survive as an individual only, the strongest relentlessly consume the weakest — and that’s as it should be. (It’s easy to imagine how the apex predators of our social order would be attracted to this, and insist on it with force.

Thus the bipartisan world we live in today. Under a neoliberal regime, everyone gets what they deserve. Big fish deserve their meal. Little fish deserve their death. And government sets the table for the feast.

The Role of Government in a Neoliberal World

Since for neoliberals, the “market” is the source of all that is good in human interaction, non-interference in “the market” is rule one for government.

Over time that has changed, however, as winners have grown more successful and their control of government more absolute. The proper role of government in today’s neoliberal regime is not merely to allow the market to operate for the benefit of wealth-holders; it’s to make sure the market operates for the benefit of wealth-holders.

In other words, the role of government is to intervene in the market on behalf of wealth-holders, or, as I put it more colloquially, to proactively enrich the rich. The interview with Professor Mirowski, as I noted above, makes that same point, but from an academic standpoint.

From this it should be also clear that until we free ourselves of rule by neoliberals and the pain and misery they create, we’ll always be victims to the predatory giants — the very very wealthy and the corporations they use as power-extenders — those, in other words, who want merely to own everything else in the world.

This means we need to free ourselves from neoliberals in both parties, not just the ones in current seats of power. But that idea seems to have been excised from most discussions these days. Fair warning though. If the Age of Trump ends with the Restoration of Mainstream Democrats, we’ll have won almost nothing at all.

____________

* I sometimes spell “neo-liberalism” with the hyphen to suggest the following connection: Neo-liberalism is “new liberalism,” and has the same relationship to FDR liberalism as New Labour has to Labour — the two are exactly opposite.

The Public Are All Alone: Understanding How the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

Posted on January 10, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

In political matters, the public are taught to believe that some political Party is ‘good’, and that the others are “bad”; but the reality in recent times, at least in the United States, has instead been that both Parties are rotten to the core (as will be clear from the linked documentation provided here).

Belief in this myth (that the opposition between Parties is between ‘good’ ‘friend’ versus ‘bad’ ‘enemy’) is based upon the common adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” One side is believed, and ones that contradict it are disbelieved — considered to be lying, distorting: bad. But, maybe, both (or all) Parties are deceiving; maybe all of them are enemies of the public, but just in different ways; maybe each of them is trying to control the country in the interests of (and so to obtain the most financial support from) the aristocracy, while all of them are actually against the public.

Can it really be false that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Not only can be, but often is. And no one is able to vote intelligently without recognizing this fundamental political fact.

It’s true between entire nations, too — not only within nations.

For example: Hitler and Stalin were enemies of each other, but neither of them was a friend of America (except that Stalin did more than anyone else to defeat Hitler, and thereby saved the world, though the U.S. — far less a factor than the U.S.S.R. was in defeating Hitler — still refuses to acknowledge the fact that Stalin did more than anyone else did to prevent the entire world’s becoming dictatorships; so, whatever democracy exists today, is a result of that dictator, Stalin, even more than it’s a result of either FDR or Churchill).

What about internally, then?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became enemies of each other, but neither of them had ever really been a friend of the American public: both of them were instead liars who would, and did, do everything they could to grab control (on the aristocracy’s behalf, who financed their respective campaigns) over what is supposed to be our Government, in a democracy. That’s just a sad fact about reality, which both of America’s political Parties deny (because they both need those voters, not merely those mega-donations; they need the public to believe that the Party cares about them).

Most of the American public have been successfully deceived by the ‘news’media, and by the ‘history’-books (likewise published by agents for the aristocracy), to believe that the U.S. Government serves the public-interest, and not the interest of the centi-millionaires and especially billionaires, who finance political campaigns. But it’s no truer than it’s true that the enemy of your enemy is necessarily your friend: both enemies of each other can be your enemies, too. The difference here is that the enmity between the aristocracy and the public is basically intrinsic, whereas the enmities between (Republican versus Democratic, or any other divisions between) aristocrats, are basically personal — these are matters of business, instead of matters of state. They are, in a sense, different business-plans — competing business-plans. But they are all assisting the aristocracy, to control the public, so as to advance the interests of the aristocracy. They’re all competing for the aristocracy’s support, and deceiving for the public’s support. Two blatant recent examples displaying this were America’s invasion in 2003 that destroyed Iraq, and America’s invasion in 2011 that destroyed Libya. Did either of those invasions advance the interests of the American public? But the owners of Lockheed Martin and other ‘defense’ contractors blossomed after 9/11. In fact: U.S. arms-exports are at record highs.

The now-proven reality in America is that the U.S. Government really does represent those billionaires and centi-millionaires, and not the public. It’s a now-proven reality, that the U.S. isn’t a democracy but a dictatorship — albeit, a two-Party one, with a real competition between billionaire and centi-millionaire Republicans on the one hand, versus billionaire and centi-millionaire Democrats on the other. But all billionaires and centi-millionaires are takers (that’s how they came to be super-rich, even the ones who didn’t inherit it from their parents), who (notwithstanding any ‘charity’ they may establish to avoid taxes while extending their control) receive from the public far more than they give to the public; and, so, there is actually an intrinsic class-war — not at all like Karl Marx famously said, between the bourgeoisie (including small-business owners) versus the proletariat (including some centi-millionaires and billionaires who became super-wealthy from being movie-stars or athletic stars and who don’t necessarily actually control any business at all, and so they’re “proletariats”), but instead between the aristocracy versus the public: the ancient and permanent class-conflict. It’s the entire aristocracy-of-wealth (which is maybe half of the nation’s wealth) that’s arrayed against the public (the poorer 99+% of the people). (In fact, Marx — the promoter of the view that the bourgeoisie are the public’s enemies — had aristocratic sponsors, and he would have remained obscure and died poor, if he had instead blamed the aristocracy, not “the bourgeoisie” — which is mainly the middle class — as being the exploiting-class. Marx, too, was an agent of aristocracy. He succeeded and became famous because he had aristocratic sponsors. Otherwise, his name would have simply been forgotten.)

Anyway, the American public are now alone. No Government represents our interests. It’s now been proven that America’s Government doesn’t represent us; and it’s not even the business of any other Government in the world to represent us; so, no foreign government does, either. No Government represents us.

In order to understand any aristocracy, one must understand what gives rise to almost all wars, because almost all wars throughout history have been between contending aristocracies — between the aristocracies of different nations. Each aristocracy needs to be able to fool its national public, to believe that they’re fighting against the foreign public, when, in fact, they’re fighting against the foreign aristocracy, and they’re fighting for the home-nation’s aristocracy — they are, almost always, fighting for one aristocracy, against another aristocracy. Any public who would know that this is the reality, would just as soon commit a democratic revolution, against the local aristocracy, as go to war for the local one, against the foreign ones. This is the reason why, in every dictatorship, the local centi-millionaires and billionaires buy up all of the ‘news’media that inform, or (on essential matters) misinform, their audiences about international relations, and about who did what to whom and why. They hire only ‘reporters’ who comply with whatever deceptions the owners feel to be necessary, in order to be able to attract sponsorships from other aristocrats’ corporations and ‘charities’. But, the aristocrats themselves are actually all in this together, because their mutually shared enemy is the public. Without deceiving the public about essential matters, no national news-medium would be able to attract the sponsorships it needs in order to grow, or even to survive.

The public thinks it’s fighting an international war, when, in fact, they’re fighting for the local aristocracy (and its allied aristocracies), against foreign aristocracies (and their allied aristocracies). This has been true since the dawn of human civilization. Only the weapons are bigger now, and the alliances (in the World Wars) are now global. (But, of course, if there is another World War, then all of human civilization will immediately end, and not long thereafter, all human and most other forms of life will also end.)

An excellent example of the real class-war, and of its international nature, is James Bamford’s 3 April 2012 masterful and pioneering article in Wired, “Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA”. He documented that even very high-up people in America’s NSA were kept out of the loop when joint U.S.-and-Israeli intelligence-agencies and private corporations were creating the present 1984-ish, “Big Brother” reality, in (at least) those countries (but, actually, the Sauds, and probably a few others, were also on the inside — the aristocracies not merely of those two countries, U.S. and Israel, are in the alliance).

The “Deep State” isn’t merely one nation’s aristocracy and its agents; it is basically a form of actually international gang-warfare. That’s what got us into invading and destroying Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, Ukraine (by coup 2014), and so many other nations. It wasn’t done in order to serve the American public’s interests. That’s just the standard lie — and it keeps going on, and on. Maybe until we invade Russia.

What You May Not Know About Today’s Economic War

Posted on January 9, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Many people believe the world is spiraling in a downward freefall toward Armageddon. At the same time billions on Earth feel the sting of crippling poverty, sanctions, and austerity imposed by the elites – the numbers of billionaires have risen geometrically. And so have those billionaire’s profits. It’s time we took a closer look at where we stand as of 2018, if we are to be left anything at all to cling to. From the steppes of Russia to the ancient lands of the Minoans, economic terror now reigns.

When I left Germany for Greece several months ago, the common belief there was that the “lazy Greeks” were part of the cause of Deutsche banker discomfort. My neighbors in Germany’s oldest city of Trier honestly believe the bailout of Greece is because Greeks unwilling to work hard. The bitter irony of this believe lies in the fact the average German would melt under the workload of the average citizen here in Heraklion on Crete. As an American what I witnessed in Germany can only be considered a “part-time” employment state. But here in Greece the average person works seven days a week, and usually at more than one job. This microeconomic perception is one that has been implanted by state and corporate controlled media in Germany. There’s a very good reason for this, which I will now explain.

A New Secret Economic Weapon – Organized Failures

The International Monetary Fund, the German and American bankers, the globalist elites who control financial systems in the so-called “west” – they’ve been on a mission since 2008. The “meltdown” of markets when Barack Obama first took office as American president was not some random and chaotic economic mistake. Wall Street and the global markets were turned upside down on purpose. In his book “Secret Weapon”, the CEO of Freeman Global Holdings and a New York Times bestselling author Kevin Freeman presents a persuasive chain of evidence pointing to the fact the crash of September 2008 was the result of a deliberate and well-prepared act of sabotage. Even though the author blames competing governments like China and Iran for what he terms “economic terrorism”, his proofs and theories are correct in so far as the “meltdown” being on purpose. The fact Freeman is founder and chairman of the NSIC Institute, and a Senior Fellow of the Center for Security Policy suggests his work may be a double dealing by the financial community to obscure the real perpetrators. But for my report it’s more important to follow the trail of financial chaos to our financial reality.

Freeman is not alone in his suggestion the economic crisis was a conspiracy. The financial disaster of 2008 costs Americans nearly $20 trillion dollars, as framed in this Forbes piece by investment banker and former Forbes editor, Robert Lenzner. In the report the financial guru inadvertently points the finger at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, claiming the Greenspan Treasury allowed them to “master their own appetite for profits,” which in turn led to the various collapses that forced the American people to bail out the banks. Lenzner, to his great credit, goes on to describe the lurking dangers for total collapse we still face. But what about Greece, the rest of Eastern Europe, the Germans and the rest of the indebted world? Who can we blame for destroying the futures of a billion people? When I’m done your come to realize the Nazis never lost World War II. Read on.

Win-Win or Lose-Lose for Ukraine

Ukraine was turned into a “scorched Earth” when Hitler’s operation Barbarossa threatened Russia. When the armies commanded by Joseph Stalin during the German Army’s invasion of the Soviet Union in the Second World War destroyed crops and goods in their path, the invaders found nothing to fuel their advance. Today Ukraine is laid waste by an economic Barbarossa where the Russians had no opportunity to defend the steppes. Some will remember Vice President Joe Biden’s son taking a position to reap Ukrainian energy benefits. Other readers may recall when a Franklin Templton investment fund, one controlled by the Rothschild bankers, bought up 20% of Ukraine’s debts at junk bond prices. You see, the US orchestrated situation in Ukraine is not simply about events on the Maidan and the ongoing war in the Donbass as a byproduct of the geopolitics of the United States seeking to cut off Ukraine from Russia. Agri-giant Monsanto and other GMO companies had targeted Ukraine long before the events on Maidan Square, and the fact Ukraine is a Central hub in the supply of Russian gas to Europe cannot be under-stressed. Where foreign profiteering in Ukraine is concerned, this story on my blog tells of an Oakland Institute report where more than 1.6 million hectares of land in Ukraine went under the control of foreign-based corporations. This quote from the report makes my case for economic terrorism by the west for me:

“International financial institutions swooped in on the heels of the political upheaval in Ukraine to deregulate and throw open the nation’s vast agricultural sector to foreign corporations….Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont, and how corporations are taking over all aspects of Ukraine’s agricultural system.”

These stories were more than two years ago. Today we see the catastrophic effects of the Euromaidan far from the battle front and the Donbass region’s pro-Russian separatists.

When I first learned that the forests in the Ukrainian Carpathians were being chopped to the ground back in 2016, the impending ecological disaster perpetrated by these globalist blood suckers hit home hard. This Counterpunch story tells the tale of a brand of liberty and democracy no Ukrainian can afford. Despite the aerial photos and other proofs Ukraine’s forests were being stolen from under the people, the Lviv Regional Forestry and Hunting Agency denied all such reports in customary Eastern European mafia form. The fact is, the Petro Poroshenko assisted in selling out Carpathian forests. Ecologists now predict an ecological Armageddon for western Ukraine. These photos from Censor.net prove the disaster in progress. This RT story on the firesale by the Poroshenko regime of 22 out of 34 state assets being put up for sale at a 60 percent discount leads us into the Greece situation, where the legacy of a people is up for grabs.

Those lazy Greeks! Funny, I just walked around the corner to the bakery here in Heraklion to get a coffee from the same lady I get coffee from every day. She was there Christmas, and I am sure she’ll be there behind the counter New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The shopkeeper across the street, he sees Alexis Tsipras on TV and shoves an open hand toward Greece’s Prime Minister shouting; “Malaka!”, which can only be translated coldly as “jerk-off”. Also in the hotel lobby, at the donut house in the city center, and at each-and-every shop along Heraklion’s many retail districts, Greece officials are all Malakas (in ancient Greek – mentally ill) or worse. I’ll bet most Germans don’t know or care to know that the VAT in Greece is now 24%, and that the average shopkeeper pays 37% – 45% in income tax on top of the VAT for the goods they purchase. As crazy as it sounds though, Cretans are still especially friendly toward foreigners like me. If they only know what the German and American bankers did to them.

The Greece Fire Sale – A Tsipras Sellout

I just made a report about the great Greek sellout of privatization on my travel news site Argophilia Travel News this morning. Researching it prompted me to do this piece for NEO. The long and short of the Greek economic crash that was assisted by none other than Goldman Sachs, is that the same privatization the globalists had in store for Russia during the Yeltsin years is being exacted on Greeks. The latest sellout by Tsipras, who swore he’d end privatization, the Germans and Americans snapping up the Thessaloniki Port and the future of LNG shipments to Europe through Greece. I found it interesting that one of the principals in this sale, South Europe Gateway Thessaloniki (SEFT) Limited Director, Alexander von Mellenthin Has a distinguished German name. I’m not certain, but I believe he is a close relative of both General of the artillery, Horst Alexander, Alfred Paul von Mellenthin, and his brother, Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, who served as Hitler’s chief of staff of the XXXXVIII Panzer Corps in the occupied Soviet Union, including the Battle of Kursk, the Battle of Kiev, and the spring 1944 retreat through the western Ukraine. The term “irony” will simply not do if Mellenthin is the son or grandson of a key Nazi general. Financial Blitzkrieg, Financial Armageddon, and the Fourth Reich finalizing the rape of Greece! Wow.

Regardless of whether or not the kin of old Nazis are expanding the Fourth Reich or not, the fact the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank have insisted on Greek and other privatization schemes as a condition for much-needed loans for bailouts is a smoking gun held by the same elites who always fuel wars. The fallacy of the “lazy Greek” lives on because of those who would reap the vast financial rewards of yet another deconstructed economy. It’s no coincidence that the Greek privatization plan’s administrator — the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (TAIPED) — so closely resembles Germany’s Treuhandanstalt, or the agency charged with the privatization of East Germany’s state-owned enterprises following unification. Few readers will recall Treuhandanstalt being accused of turning over to West German big business hundreds of billions of Deutsche Marks in national property for little or nothing. And, though a number of Treuhandanstalt managers were ultimately indicted for corruption and embezzlement, this brand of pillaging has escalated in the Greece situation. There was even a plan back in 2014 to convert much of Greece’s protected coastal areas into “composite tourist villages,” a move which would essentially privatize every inch of valuable Greek seaside. Former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis called the Treuhandanstalt-like plan for Greece “an abomination” in this Huff Post piece. Varoufakis, who resigned on principle from the Tsipras administration, goes on to frame the Greek debt debauchery, describing the real IMF scheme:

“The plan is politically toxic, because the fund, though domiciled in Greece, will effectively be managed by the troika. It is also financially noxious, because the proceeds will go toward servicing what even the IMF now admits is an unpayable debt. And it fails economically, because it wastes a wonderful opportunity to create homegrown investments to help counter the recessionary impact…”

Yanis Varoufakis proposed to the Germans and the Rothschild bankers of Luxembourg and Frankfurt a Greek plan for repayment of the staggering debt the Goldman Sachs bankers helped usher into Greece. But the IMF and the new Reich refused, of course. His plan was for Greece to cooperate via its own newly formed central holding company for some Greek assets. The IMF and the banksters would have nothing of it, they needed complete control of what, and for how much Greece was to be auctioned off. Tsipras betrayed his country, and the only decent politician the Greeks have had in decades stepped down.

James C. Scott’s Against the Grain

Posted on January 4, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By chilke

Source: The HipCrime Vocab

During my long discursion on the history of money, the academic James C. Scott published an important book called Against the Grain: A Deep History of the First States.

Regular readers will know that this has been a longstanding area of research (or obsession) of mine. I’ve referred to Scott’s work before, particularly Seeing Like A State, which I think is indispensable in understanding many of the political divisions of today (and why left/right is no longer a useful distinction). We’re in an era where much of the “left” is supporting geoengineering and rockets to Mars, and the “right” (at least the alt-right) is criticizing housing projects and suburban sprawl.

It’s unfortunate that Scott’s title is the same as another one of my favorite books on that topic by journalist Richard Manning: Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization, another book I’ve referred to often. Manning’s book is not only a historical account about how the rise of grain agriculture led to war, hierarchy, slavery and sickness, but a no-hold-barred exploration of today’s grain-centric agribusiness model, where wheat, corn, soy and sugar are grown in mechanized monocultures and processed by the food industry into highly-addictive junk food implicated in everything from type two diabetes, to depression to Alzheimer’s disease (via inflammation):

Dealing with surplus is a difficult task. The problem begins with the fact that, just like the sex drive, the food drive got ramped up in evolution. If you have a deep, yearning need for food, you’re going to get along better than your neighbor, and over the years that gene is going to be passed on. So you get this creature that got fine-tuned to really need food, especially carbohydrates. Which brings us to the more fundamental question: can we ever deal with sugar? By making more concentrated forms of carbohydrates, we’re playing into something that’s quite addictive and powerful. It’s why we’re so blasted obese. We have access to all this sugar, and we simply cannot control our need for it—that’s genetic.

Now, can we gain the ability to overcome that? I’m not sure. You have to add to this the fact that there’s a lot of money to be made by people who know how to concentrate sugar. They have a real interest in seeing that we don’t overcome these kinds of addictions. In fact, that’s how you control societies—you exploit that basic drive for food. That’s how we train dogs—if you want to make a dog behave properly, you deprive him or give him food. Humans aren’t that much different. We just like to think we are. So as an element of political control, food and food imagery are enormously important.

The Scourge of Agriculture (The Atlantic)

Cancers linked to excess weight make up 40% of all US diagnoses, study finds (The Guardian)

Child and teen obesity spreading across the globe (BBC)

In that interview, Manning also makes this point which got so much attention in Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster, Sapiens (which came out years later):

…it’s not just human genes at work here. It’s wheat genes and corn genes—and how they have an influence on us. They took advantage of our ability to travel, our inventiveness, our ability to use tools, to live in a broad number of environments, and our huge need for carbohydrates. Because of our brains’ ability, we were able to spread not only our genes, but wheat’s genes as well. That’s why I make the argument that you have to look at this in terms of wheat domesticating us, too. That co-evolutionary process between humans and our primary food crops is what created the agriculture we see today.

As for the title, I guess Against the Grain is just too clever a title to pass up 🙂

I’m still waiting on the book from the library, but I have seen so many reviews by now that I’m not sure I’ll be able to add too much. What’s interesting to me is the degree to which the idea that civilization was a great leap backward from what we had before is starting to go mainstream.

The old, standard “Whig version” of universal progress is still pretty strong, though. Here’s one reviewer describing how it was articulated in the turn-of-the-century Encyclopedia Britannica:

The Encyclopaedia took its readers through a panorama of universal history, from “the lower status of savagery,” when hunter-gatherers first mastered fire; to the “middle status of barbarism,” when hunters learned to domesticate animals and became herders; to the invention of writing, when humanity “graduated out of barbarism” and entered history. Along the way, humans learned to cultivate grains, such as wheat and rice, which showed them “the value of a fixed abode,” since farmers had to stay near their crops to tend and harvest them. Once people settled down, “a natural consequence was the elaboration of political systems,” property, and a sense of national identity. From there it was a short hop—at least in Edwardian hindsight—to the industrial revolution and free trade.

Some unfortunate peoples, even entire continents such as aboriginal North America and Australia, might fall off the Progress train and have to be picked up by kindly colonists; but the train ran along only one track, and no one would willingly decline to board it…

What made prehistoric hunter-gatherers give up freedom for civilization? (The New Republic)

But, it turns out that the reality was quite different. In fact, hunter-gatherers resisted agriculture. Even where farmers and H-G’s lived side-by-side, the H-G’s (and herders) avoided farming as long as they could. When Europeans equipped “primitive” societies with seeds and hoes and taught them to farm, the natives threw away the implements and ran off into the woods. The dirt farmers of colonial America often ran away to go and live with the nomadic Indians, to the extent that strict laws had to be passed to prevent this (as documented in Sebastian Junger’s new book Tribe).

The shift to agriculture was in some respects…harmful. Osteological research suggests that domiciled Homo sapiens who depended on grains were smaller, less well-nourished and, in the case of women, more likely to be anaemic, than hunter-gatherers. They also found themselves vulnerable to disease and able to maintain their population only through unprecedentedly high birthrates. Scott also suggests that the move from hunting and foraging to agriculture resulted in ‘deskilling’, analogous to the move in the industrial revolution from the master tradesman’s workshop to the textile mill. State taxation compounded the drudgery of raising crops and livestock. Finally, the reliance on only a few crops and livestock made early states vulnerable to collapse, with the reversion to the ‘dark ages’ possibly resulting in an increase in human welfare.

Book Review: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (London School of Economics)

So why did they do it? That is a question that nobody know the answer to, but it appears they stumbled into not because it was a better way of life, but due to some sort of pressures beyond their control. As Colin Tudge put it, “People did not invent agriculture and shout for joy; they drifted or were forced into it, protesting all the way.”Rather than taking up agriculture because it presented a better, more secure way of life as the Victorians thought (due to chauvinism and ignorance), it was actually much more unpleasant and much more work. Here’s a bit from Richard Manning’s book (pp. 23-24):

Why agriculture? In retrospect, it seems odd that it has taken archaeologists and paleontologists so long to begin answering this essential question of human history. What we are today–civilized city-bound, overpopulated, literate, organized, wealthy, poor, diseased, conquered, and conquerors–is all rooted in the domestication of plants and animals. The advent of farming re-formed humanity. In fact, the question “Why agriculture?” is so vital, lies so close to the core of our being that it probably cannot be asked or answered with complete honesty. Better to settle for calming explanation of the sort Stephen Jay Gould calls “just-so stories.”

In this case, the core of such stories is the assumption that agriculture was better for us. Its surplus of food allowed the leisure and specialization that made civilization. It’s bounty settled, refined, and educated us, freed us from the nasty, mean, brutish, and short existence that was the state of nature, freed us from hunting and gathering. Yet when we think about agriculture, and some people have thought intently about it, the pat story glosses over a fundamental point. This just-so story had to have sprung from the imagination of someone who never hoed a row of corn or rose with the sun for a lifetime of milking cows. Gamboling about plain and forest, hunting and living off the land is fun. Farming is not. That’s all one needs to know to begin a rethinking of the issue. The fundamental question was properly phrased by Colin Tudge of the London School of Economics: “The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adopt agriculture but why anybody took it up at all when it is so obvioulsy beastly.” Research has supported Tudge’s skepticism.

Circumstances beyond their control must have played a role. Climate change is most commonly implicated. Overpopulation must have played a role, but this raises a chicken-and-egg problem: overpopulation is a problem created by agrarianism, so how could it have caused it?

One novel idea I explored earlier this year was Brian Hayden’s idea that the production of ever-increasing surpluses was part of a strategy by aggrandizing individuals in order to gain political power.

Periodic feasting events were ways to increase social cohesion and deal with uneven production in various climatic biomes–it was a survival strategy for peoples spread-out among a wide geographical area (mountains, plains, wetlands, riparian, etc.). If food was scarce in one area, resources could be pooled. Such feasting/resource pooling regimes were probably the earliest true “civilizations” (albeit before cities). It was also the major way to organize mass labor, and this lasted well into the historical period (both Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts testify to celebratory work feasts).

At these events, certain individuals would loan out surplus food and other prestige items in order to get people in debt to them. Cultural expectations meant that the debts would have to repaid and then some (i.e. with interest). These people would get their families and allies to work their fingers to the bone in order to produce big surpluses in societies where this was possible, such as horticultural and affluent forager societies. They would then become “Big Men”–tribal leaders without “official” status.

Would-be Big-Men would then try and outdo one another by throwing bigger feasts than their rivals. Competitive feasting provided an opportunity for aggrandizers to try and outdo one another in a series of power games and status jockeying. But the net effect such power games had across the society was to ramp up food production to unsustainable levels. This, in turn, led to intensification.

At these feasts, highly “prized” foodstuffs would be used by aggrandizers to lure people into debt and other lopsided obligations, as well as get people to work for them. Manning notes above how food has been traditionally used to control people. And, Hayden speculates, the foods used were probably ones with pleasurable or mind-altering effects. One common one was almost certainly alcohol.

He speculates that grains were initially grown not for flavor or for carbohydrates, but for fermentation. It’s fairly certain that alcohol consumption played a major role in feasting events, and it’s notable that the earliest civilizations were all big beer drinkers (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica). Most agricultural village societies around the world have some sort of beer drinking/fermentation ritual, as Patrick E. McGovern has documented. The first “recipe” ever written down was for beer brewing. Hayden speculates that early monoliths like Gobeckli Tepe and Stonehenge were built as places for such feasting events to take place, wedded to certain religious ideologies (all of them have astronomical orientations), and archaeology tends to confirm this. It’s notable that the earliest sites of domestication/agrarianism we know of are typically in the vicinity of these monoliths.

In other words, the root of this overproduction was human social instincts, and not just purely environmental or climatic factors. Is there some connection between plant/animal domestication and religious ideology? Is it any wonder that religious concepts in these societies transform to become very different from the animist/shamanic ones of hunter-gatherers? Flannery and Marcus point out that the establishment of a hereditary priesthood that constructs temples (replacing the shaman) is always a marker of the transition from an egalitarian society to a hierarchical one with hereditary leadership. Even in the Bible, king and temple arise more or less simultaneously (e.g. Saul/David/Solomon).

Scott’s book emphasizes the key role that cereal agriculture played in the rise of the early states.

It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived through it.

It’s worth noting that it wasn’t simply agriculture, but cereal production that relied on artificial irrigation that saw the rise of the first states. The need to coordinate all that labor, partition permanent plots of land, and resolve settlement disputes, must have led to the rise of an elite managerial class, as Ian Welsh points out:

Agriculture didn’t lead immediately to inequality, the original agricultural societies appear to have been quite equal, probably even more so than the late hunter-gatherer societies that preceded them. But increasing surpluses and the need for coordination which arose, especially in hydraulic civilizations (civilizations based around irrigation which is labor intensive and require specialists) led to the rise of inequality. The pharoahs created great monuments, but their subjects did not live nearly as well as hunter-gatherers.

The Right Stuff: What Prosperity Is and Isn’t (Ian Welsh)

And sedentism, as I’ve noted, is not so much a product of agriculture as a cause. Sedentary societies coexisted with high mobility for some time. Likely sedentary societies needed to be around for some time in order to build up the kind of surpluses aggrandizing elites needed to gain power. These probably started as “redistributor chiefs” who justified their role through a combination of martial leadership and religious ideology:

Sedentism does not have its origins in plant and animal domestication. The first stratified states in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley appeared ‘only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism’. Sedentism has its roots in ecologically rich, preagricultural settings, especially wetlands. Agriculture co-existed with mobile lifestyles in which people gathered to harvest crops. Domestication itself is part of a 400,000 year process beginning with the use of fire. Moreover, it is not a process (or simply a process) of humans gaining increasing control over the natural world. People find themselves caring for dogs, creating an ecological niche for mice, ticks, bedbugs and other uninvited guests, and spending their lives ‘strapped to the round of ploughing, planting, weeding, reaping, threshing, grinding, all on behalf of their favorite grains and tending to the daily needs of their livestock’.

This was also noted in the Richard Manning interview, above:

…we always think that agriculture allowed sedentism, which gave people time to create civilization and art. But the evidence that’s emerging from the archeological record suggests that sedentism came first, and then agriculture. This occurred near river mouths, where people depended on seafood, especially salmon. These were probably enormously abundant cultures that had an enormous amount of leisure time—they just had to wait for the salmon runs to occur. There are some good records of those communities, and from the skeleton remains we can see that they got up to 95 percent of their nutrients from salmon and ocean-derived sources. Along the way, they developed highly refined art—something we always associate with agriculture.

Of course, agrarian societies using irrigation and plow-based agricuture in set plots are very different from horicultural societies practicing shifting cultivation. This is likley why early agricutural societies were rougly about as egalitarian as their predecessors, as Ian Welsh pointed out above. By the time the trap snapped shut, however, it was too late.

How agriculture grew on us (Leaving Babylon)

I’ve often wondered if, when certain humans learned how to domesticate, they used it as much on their fellow man as they did their animals. In this Aeon article, this passage really struck me:

When humans start treating animals as subordinates, it becomes easier to do the same thing to one another. The first city-states in Mesopotamia were built on this principle of transferring methods of control from creatures to human beings, according to the archaeologist Guillermo Algaze at the University of California in San Diego. Scribes used the same categories to describe captives and temple workers as they used for state-owned cattle.

How domestication changes species including the human (Aeon)

Indeed, the idea that humans domesticated themselves is another key concept in Harari’s Sapiens. Perhaps that domestication was much more “literal” than we have been led to believe. Perhaps human sacrifice was a way for early religious leaders to “cull” individuals who had undesirable traits from their standpoint: independence, aggression, a questioning attitude, etc. Indeed, hunter-gatherers do not like obeying orders from a boss. I wonder to what extent this process is still going on, especially in modern-day America with its schools, prisons, corporate cubicles, police, military, etc.:

Anthropologists and historians have put forward the ‘social control hypothesis’ of human sacrifice. According to this theory, sacrificial rites served as a function for social elites. Human sacrifice is proposed to have been used by social elites to display their divinely sanctioned power, justify their status, and terrorise underclasses into obedience and subordination. Ultimately, human sacrifice could be used as a tool to help build and maintain systems of social inequality.

How human sacrifice helped to enforce social inequality (Aeon)

And this is very relevent to our recent discussion of money: writing and mathematics were first used as methods of social control. As Janet Gleeson-White points out in this essay, accounting was our first writing technology. Money–and taxes–were an outgrowth of this new communications technology:

War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing. “It is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping,” Scott maintains. All the good things we associate with writing—its use for culture and entertainment and communication and collective memory—were some distance in the future. For half a thousand years after its invention, in Mesopotamia, writing was used exclusively for bookkeeping: “the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.”

Early tablets consist of “lists, lists and lists,” Scott says, and the subjects of that record-keeping are, in order of frequency, “barley (as rations and taxes), war captives, male and female slaves.” Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, who committed suicide while trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe, said that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that every complicated and beautiful thing humanity ever made has, if you look at it long enough, a shadow, a history of oppression.

The Case Against Civilization (The New Yorker)

And the connection between writing and domestication/subjugation is powerfully made by this article from the BBC documenting the world’s oldest writing:

In terms of written history, this is the very remote past. But there is also something very direct and almost intimate about it too. You can see fingernail marks in the clay. These neat little symbols and drawings are clearly the work of an intelligent mind.

These were among the first attempts by our human ancestors to try to make a permanent record of their surroundings. What we’re doing now – my writing and your reading – is a direct continuation. But there are glimpses of their lives to suggest that these were tough times. It wasn’t so much a land of milk and honey, but porridge and weak beer.

Even without knowing all the symbols, Dr Dahl says it’s possible to work out the context of many of the messages on these tablets. The numbering system is also understood, making it possible to see that much of this information is about accounts of the ownership and yields from land and people. They are about property and status, not poetry.

This was a simple agricultural society, with a ruling household. Below them was a tier of powerful middle-ranking figures and further below were the majority of workers, who were treated like “cattle with names”. Their rulers have titles or names which reflect this status – the equivalent of being called “Mr One Hundred”, he says – to show the number of people below him.

It’s possible to work out the rations given to these farm labourers. Dr Dahl says they had a diet of barley, which might have been crushed into a form of porridge, and they drank weak beer. The amount of food received by these farm workers hovered barely above the starvation level. However the higher status people might have enjoyed yoghurt, cheese and honey. They also kept goats, sheep and cattle.

For the “upper echelons, life expectancy for some might have been as long as now”, he says. For the poor, he says it might have been as low as in today’s poorest countries.

Breakthrough in world’s oldest undeciphered writing (BBC)

So the earliest writing tends to confirm Scott’s account. And not just Scott’s account, but that of anthropologist James Suzman, who has simultaneously come out with a book about the disappearing way of life of the the !Kung San Bushmen of the Kalahari. This is also reviewed in the New Yorker article, above. These hunter-gatherers are going through today exactly what those people in the Near East experienced roughly 6-8000 years ago, giving us a window into history:

The encounter with modernity has been disastrous for the Bushmen: Suzman’s portrait of the dispossessed, alienated, suffering Ju/’hoansi in their miserable resettlement camps makes that clear. The two books even confirm each other’s account of that sinister new technology called writing. Suzman’s Bushman mentor, !A/ae, “noted that whenever he started work at any new farm, his name would be entered into an employment ledger, documents that over the decades had assumed great mystical power among Ju/’hoansi on the farms. The secrets held by these ledgers evidently had the power to give or withhold pay, issue rations, and determine an individual’s right to stay on any particular farm.”

Writing turned the majority of people into serfs and enabled a sociopathic elite to live well and raise themselves and their offspring above everyone else.

And here we are at the cusp of a brand new “information revolution” where literally our every thought and move can be monitored and tracked by a tiny centralized elite and permanently stored. And yet we’re convinced that this will make all our lives infinitely better! Go back and reread the above. I’m not so sure. I already feel like “cattle with a name” in our brave new nudged, credit-scored, Neoliberal world.

We’re also experiencing another period of rapid climate change and resource depletion, just like that experienced at the outset of the original coming of the state. We’re now doing exactly what they did: intensification, and once again it’s empowering a small sociopathic elite at the cost of the rest of us. And yet Panglossians confidently tell us we’re headed for a peaceful techno-utopia where all new discoveries will be shared with all of us instead of hoarded, and we’ll all live like gods instead of being exterminated like rats because we’re no longer necessary to the powers that be. Doubtless the same con (“We’ll all be better off!!!”) was played on the inhabitants of early states, too. Given the human social instincts noted above, let’s just say I’m not optimistic. Please pass the protein blocks.

Scott points out that the state is a very novel development, despite what we read in history books. We read about the history of states because states left written history, and we are their descendants. But that doesn’t mean most people lived under them. By Scott’s account, most humans lived outside of nation-states well into the 1500’s. A review of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday by Scott published a few years back in The London Review of Books was a foreshadowing of his current book (and may have even inspired it). In that review, he stated:

…Homo sapiens has been around for roughly 200,000 years and left Africa not much earlier than 50,000 years ago. The first fragmentary evidence for domesticated crops occurs roughly 11,000 years ago and the first grain statelets around 5000 years ago, though they were initially insignificant in a global population of perhaps eight million.

More than 97 per cent of human experience, in other words, lies outside the grain-based nation-states in which virtually all of us now live. ‘Until yesterday’, our diet had not been narrowed to the three major grains that today constitute 50 to 60 per cent of the world’s caloric intake: rice, wheat and maize. The circumstances we take for granted are, in fact, of even more recent vintage …Before, say, 1500, most populations had a sporting chance of remaining out of the clutches of states and empires, which were still relatively weak and, given low rates of urbanisation and forest clearance, still had access to foraged foods. On this account, our world of grains and states is a mere blink of the eye (0.25 per cent), in the historical adventure of our species.

Crops, Towns, Government (London Review of Books)

Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated (VOX)

Wither Collpase?

One of the more provocative ideas from Scott’s book is to question whether the withering away of state capacity–that is, a collapse–is really a bad thing at all!

We need to rethink, accordingly, what we mean when we talk about ancient “dark ages.” Scott’s question is trenchant: “ ‘dark’ for whom and in what respects”? The historical record shows that early cities and states were prone to sudden implosion.

“Over the roughly five millennia of sporadic sedentism before states (seven millennia if we include preagriculture sedentism in Japan and the Ukraine),” he writes, “archaeologists have recorded hundreds of locations that were settled, then abandoned, perhaps resettled, and then again abandoned.” These events are usually spoken of as “collapses,” but Scott invites us to scrutinize that term, too.

When states collapse, fancy buildings stop being built, the élites no longer run things, written records stop being kept, and the mass of the population goes to live somewhere else. Is that a collapse, in terms of living standards, for most people? Human beings mainly lived outside the purview of states until—by Scott’s reckoning—about the year 1600 A.D. Until that date, marking the last two-tenths of one per cent of humanity’s political life, “much of the world’s population might never have met that hallmark of the state: a tax collector.”

Book Review: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (LSE)

Is the Collapse of Civilizations A Good Thing? (Big Think)

Indeed, is collapse even a relevant concept? What, really is collapsing?

We also need to think about what we apply the term ‘collapse’ to – what exactly was it that collapsed? Very often, it’s suggested that civilisations collapse, but this isn’t quite right. It is more accurate to say that states collapse. States are tangible, identifiable ‘units’ whereas civilisation is a more slippery term referring broadly to sets of traditions. Many historians, including Arnold Toynbee, author of the 12-volume A Study of History (1934-61), have defined and tried to identify ‘civilisations’, but they often come up with different ideas and different numbers. But we have seen that while Mycenaean states collapsed, several strands of Mycenaean material and non-material culture survived – so it would seem wrong to say that their ‘civilisation’ collapsed. Likewise, if we think of Egyptian or Greek or Roman ‘civilisation’, none of these collapsed – they transformed as circumstances and values changed. We might think of each civilisation in a particular way, defined by a particular type of architecture or art or literature – pyramids, temples, amphitheatres, for example – but this reflects our own values and interests.

[…]

States collapsed, civilisations or cultures transformed; people lived through these times and employed their coping strategies – they selectively preserved aspects of their culture and rejected others. Archaeologists, historians and others have a duty to tell the stories of these people, even though the media might find them less satisfactory. And writers who appropriate history for moral purposes need to think carefully about what they are doing and what they are saying – they need to make an effort to get the history as right as possible, rather than dumbing it down to silver-bullet theories.

What the idea of civilisational collapse says about history (Aeon)

Scott’s book gives us hope that the collapse of states, rather than being a bad thing, might lead to a flourishing of human freedom. In that, there is some hope. I’ll end with this thought from Scott’s review of Diamond:

Anthropology can show us radically different and satisfying forms of human affiliation and co-operation that do not depend on the nuclear family or inherited wealth. History can show that the social and political arrangements we take for granted are the contingent result of a unique historical conjuncture.

The Pentagon’s New Wonder Weapons for World Dominion

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Or Buck Rogers in the 21st Century

By Alfred McCoy

Source: The Unz Review

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.]

Not quite a century ago, on January 7, 1929, newspaper readers across America were captivated by a brand-new comic strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It offered the country its first images of space-age death rays, atomic explosions, and inter-planetary travel.

“I was twenty years old,” World War I veteran Anthony “Buck” Rogers told readers in the very first strip, “surveying the lower levels of an abandoned mine near Pittsburgh… when suddenly… gas knocked me out. But I didn’t die. The peculiar gas… preserved me in suspended animation. Finally, another shifting of strata admitted fresh air and I revived.”

Staggering out of that mine, he finds himself in the 25th century surrounded by flying warriors shooting ray guns at each other. A Mongol spaceship overhead promptly spots him on its “television view plate” and fires its “disintegrator ray” at him. He’s saved from certain death by a flying woman warrior named Wilma who explains to him how this all came to be.

“Many years ago,” she says, “the Mongol Reds from the Gobi Desert conquered Asia from their great airships held aloft by gravity Repellor Rays. They destroyed Europe, then turned toward peace-loving America.” As their disintegrator beams boiled the oceans, annihilated the U.S. Navy, and demolished Washington, D.C. in just three hours, “government ceased to exist, and mobs, reduced to savagery, fought their way out of the cities to scatter and hide in the country. It was the death of a nation.” While the Mongols rebuilt 15 cities as centers of “super scientific magnificence” under their evil emperor, Americans led “hunted lives in the forests” until their “undying flame of freedom” led them to recapture “lost science” and “once more strike for freedom.”

After a year of such cartoons filled with the worst of early-twentieth-century Asian stereotypes, just as Wilma is clinging to the airship of the Mongol Viceroy as it speeds across the Pacific , a mysterious metallic orb appears high in the sky and fires death rays, sending the Mongol ship “hissing into the sea.” With her anti-gravity “inertron” belt, the intrepid Wilma dives safely into the waves only to have a giant metal arm shoot out from the mysterious orb and pull her on board to reveal — “Horrors! What strange beings!” — Martians!

With that strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century moved from Earth-bound combat against racialized Asians into space wars against monsters from other planets that, over the next 70 years, would take the strip into comic books, radio broadcasts, feature films, television serials, video games, and the country’s collective conscious. It would offer defining visions of space warfare for generations of Americans.

Back in the 21st Century

Now imagine us back in the 21st century. It’s 2030 and an American “triple canopy” of pervasive surveillance systems and armed drones already fills the heavens from the lower stratosphere to the exo-atmosphere. It can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out enemy satellite communications at a moment’s notice, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances. It’s a wonder of the modern age. Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated military information system ever created and an insurance policy for global dominion deep into the twenty-first century.

That is, in fact, the future as the Pentagon imagines it and it’s actually under development, even though most Americans know little or nothing about it. They are still operating in another age, as was Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates when he complained that “our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917.”

With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed… the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.” Obama then offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space.”

Indeed, working in secrecy, the Obama administration was presiding over a revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the future full-scale weaponization of space. From stratosphere to exosphere, the Pentagon is now producing an armada of fantastical new aerospace weapons worthy of Buck Rogers.

In 2009, building on advances in digital surveillance under the Bush administration, Obama launched the U.S. Cyber Command. Its headquarters were set up inside the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland, and a cyberwar center staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees was established at Lackland Air Base in Texas. Two years later, the Pentagon moved beyond conventional combat on air, land, or sea to declare cyberspace both an offensive and defensive “operational domain.” In August, despite his wide-ranging attempt to purge the government of anything connected to Barack Obama’s “legacy,” President Trump implemented his predecessor’s long-delayed plan to separate that cyber command from the NSA in a bid to “strengthen our cyberspace operations.”

And what is all this technology being prepared for? In study after study, the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and related think tanks have been unanimous in identifying the main threat to future U.S. global hegemony as a rival power with an expanding economy, a strengthening military, and global ambitions: China, the home of those denizens of the Gobi Desert who would, in that old Buck Rogers fable, destroy Washington four centuries from now. Given that America’s economic preeminence is fading fast, breakthroughs in “information warfare” might indeed prove Washington’s best bet for extending its global hegemony further into this century — but don’t count on it, given the history of techno-weaponry in past wars.

Techno-Triumph in Vietnam

Ever since the Pentagon with its 17 miles of corridors was completed in 1943, that massive bureaucratic maze has presided over a creative fusion of science and industry that President Dwight Eisenhower would dub “the military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the nation in 1961. “We can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense,” he told the American people. “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” sustained by a “technological revolution” that is “complex and costly.” As part of his own contribution to that complex, Eisenhower had overseen the creation of both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and a “high-risk, high-gain” research unit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, that later added the word “Defense” to its name and became DARPA.

For 70 years, this close alliance between the Pentagon and major defense contractors has produced an unbroken succession of “wonder weapons” that at least theoretically gave it a critical edge in all major military domains. Even when defeated or fought to a draw, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s research matrix has demonstrated a recurring resilience that could turn disaster into further technological advance.

The Vietnam War, for example, was a thoroughgoing tactical failure, yet it would also prove a technological triumph for the military-industrial complex. Although most Americans remember only the Army’s soul-destroying ground combat in the villages of South Vietnam, the Air Force fought the biggest air war in military history there and, while it too failed dismally and destructively, it turned out to be a crucial testing ground for a revolution in robotic weaponry.

To stop truck convoys that the North Vietnamese were sending through southern Laos into South Vietnam, the Pentagon’s techno-wizards combined a network of sensors, computers, and aircraft in a coordinated electronic bombing campaign that, from 1968 to 1973, dropped more than a million tons of munitions — equal to the total tonnage for the whole Korean War — in that limited area. At a cost of $800 million a year, Operation Igloo White laced that narrow mountain corridor with 20,000 acoustic, seismic, and thermal sensors that sent signals to four EC-121 communications aircraft circling ceaselessly overhead.

At a U.S. air base just across the Mekong River in Thailand, Task Force Alpha deployed two powerful IBM 360/65 mainframe computers, equipped with history’s first visual display monitors, to translate all those sensor signals into “an illuminated line of light” and so launch jet fighters over the Ho Chi Minh Trail where computers discharged laser-guided bombs automatically. Bristling with antennae and filled with the latest computers, its massive concrete bunker seemed, at the time, a futuristic marvel to a visiting Pentagon official who spoke rapturously about “being swept up in the beauty and majesty of the Task Force Alpha temple.”

However, after more than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops with tanks, trucks, and artillery somehow moved through that sensor field undetected for a massive offensive in 1972, the Air Force had to admit that its $6 billion “electronic battlefield” was an unqualified failure. Yet that same bombing campaign would prove to be the first crude step toward a future electronic battlefield for unmanned robotic warfare.

In the pressure cooker of history’s largest air war, the Air Force also transformed an old weapon, the “Firebee” target drone, into a new technology that would rise to significance three decades later. By 1972, the Air Force could send an “SC/TV” drone, equipped with a camera in its nose, up to 2,400 miles across communist China or North Vietnam while controlling it via a low-resolution television image. The Air Force also made aviation history by test firing the first missile from one of those drones.

The air war in Vietnam was also an impetus for the development of the Pentagon’s global telecommunications satellite system, another important first. After the Initial Defense Satellite Communications System launched seven orbital satellites in 1966, ground terminals in Vietnam started transmitting high-resolution aerial surveillance photos to Washington — something NASA called a “revolutionary development.” Those images proved so useful that the Pentagon quickly launched an additional 21 satellites and soon had the first system that could communicate from anywhere on the globe. Today, according to an Air Force website, the third phase of that system provides secure command, control, and communications for “the Army’s ground mobile forces, the Air Force’s airborne terminals, Navy ships at sea, the White House Communications Agency, the State Department, and special users” like the CIA and NSA.

At great cost, the Vietnam War marked a watershed in Washington’s global information architecture. Turning defeat into innovation, the Air Force had developed the key components — satellite communications, remote sensing, computer-triggered bombing, and unmanned aircraft — that would merge 40 years later into a new system of robotic warfare.

The War on Terror

Facing another set of defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the twenty-first-century Pentagon again accelerated the development of new military technologies. After six years of failing counterinsurgency campaigns in both countries, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to help pacify sprawling urban areas. And when President Obama later conducted his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, that country became a frontier for testing and perfecting drone warfare.

Launched as an experimental aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was deployed in the Balkans that very year for photo-reconnaissance. In 2000, it was adapted for real-time surveillance under the CIA’s Operation Afghan Eyes. It would be armed with the tank-killing Hellfire missile for the agency’s first lethal strike in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in October 2001. Seven years later, the Air Force introduced the larger MQ-9 “Reaper” drone with a flying range of 1,150 miles when fully loaded with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing it to strike targets almost anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia. To fulfill its expanding mission as Washington’s global assassin, the Air Force plans to have 346 Reapers in service by 2021, including 80 for the CIA.

Between 2004 and 2010, total flying time for all unmanned aerial vehicles rose sharply from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours. By 2011, there were already 7,000 drones in a growing U.S. armada of unmanned aircraft. So central had they become to its military power that the Pentagon was planning to spend $40 billion to expand their numbers by 35% over the following decade. To service all this growth, the Air Force was training 350 drone pilots, more than all its bomber and fighter pilots combined.

Miniature or monstrous, hand-held or runway-launched, drones were becoming so commonplace and so critical for so many military missions that they emerged from the war on terror as one of America’s wonder weapons for preserving its global power. Yet the striking innovations in drone warfare are, in the long run, likely to be overshadowed by stunning aerospace advances in the stratosphere and exosphere.

The Pentagon’s Triple Canopy

As in Vietnam, despite bitter reverses on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington’s recent wars have been catalysts for the fusion of aerospace, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence into a new military regime of robotic warfare.

To effect this technological transformation, starting in 2009 the Pentagon planned to spend $55 billion annually to develop robotics for a data-dense interface of space, cyberspace, and terrestrial battle space. Through an annual allocation for new technologies reaching $18 billion in 2016, the Pentagon had, according to the New York Times, “put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power,” exemplified by future drones that will be capable of identifying and eliminating enemy targets without recourse to human overseers. By 2025, the United States will likely deploy advanced aerospace and cyberwarfare to envelop the planet in a robotic matrix theoretically capable of blinding entire armies or atomizing an individual insurgent.

During 15 years of nearly limitless military budgets for the war on terror, DARPA has spent billions of dollars trying to develop new weapons systems worthy of Buck Rogers that usually die on the drawing board or end in spectacular crashes. Through this astronomically costly process of trial and error, Pentagon planners seem to have come to the slow realization that established systems, particularly drones and satellites, could in combination create an effective aerospace architecture.

Within a decade, the Pentagon apparently hopes to patrol the entire planet ceaselessly via a triple-canopy aerospace shield that would reach from sky to space and be secured by an armada of drones with lethal missiles and Argus-eyed sensors, monitored through an electronic matrix and controlled by robotic systems. It’s even possible to take you on a tour of the super-secret realm where future space wars will be fought, if the Pentagon’s dreams become reality, by exploring both DARPA websites and those of its various defense contractors.

Drones in the Lower Stratosphere

At the bottom tier of this emerging aerospace shield in the lower stratosphere (about 30,000 to 60,000 feet high), the Pentagon is working with defense contractors to develop high-altitude drones that will replace manned aircraft. To supersede the manned U-2 surveillance aircraft, for instance, the Pentagon has been preparing a projected armada of 99 Global Hawk drones at a mind-boggling cost of $223 million each, seven times the price of the current Reaper model. Its extended 116-foot wingspan (bigger than that of a Boeing 737) is geared to operating at 60,000 feet. Each Global Hawk is equipped with high-resolution cameras, advanced electronic sensors, and efficient engines for a continuous 32-hour flight, which means that it can potentially survey up to 40,000 square miles of the planet’s surface daily. With its enormous bandwidth needed to bounce a torrent of audio-visual data between satellites and ground stations, however, the Global Hawk, like other long-distance drones in America’s armada, may prove vulnerable to a hostile hack attack in some future conflict.

The sophistication, and limitations, of this developing aerospace technology were exposed in December 2011 when an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel drone suddenly landed in Iran, whose officials then released photos of its dart-shaped, 65-foot wingspan meant for flights up to 50,000 feet. Under a highly classified “black” contract, Lockheed Martin had built 20 of these espionage drones at a cost of about $200 million with radar-evading stealth and advanced optics that were meant to provide “surveillance support to forward-deployed combat forces.”

So what was this super-secret drone doing in hostile Iran? By simply jamming its GPS navigation system, whose signals are notoriously susceptible to hacking, Iranian engineers took control of the drone and landed it at a local base of theirs with the same elevation as its home field in neighboring Afghanistan. Although Washington first denied the capture, the event sent shock waves down the Pentagon’s endless corridors.

In the aftermath of this debacle, the Defense Department worked with one of its top contractors, Northrop Grumman, to accelerate development of its super-stealth RQ-180 drone with an enormous 130-foot wingspan, an extended range of 1,200 miles, and 24 hours of flying time. Its record cost, $300 million a plane, could be thought of as inaugurating a new era of lavishly expensive war-fighting drones.

Simultaneously, the Navy’s dart-shaped X-47B surveillance and strike drone has proven capable both of in-flight refueling and of carrying up to 4,000 pounds of bombs or missiles. Three years after it passed its most crucial test by a joy-stick landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush in July 2013, the Navy announced that this experimental drone would enter service sometime after 2020 as the “MQ-25 Stingray” aircraft.

Dominating the Upper Stratosphere

To dominate the higher altitudes of the upper stratosphere (about 70,000 to 160,000 feet), the Pentagon has pushed its contractors to the technological edge, spending billions of dollars on experimentation with fanciful, futuristic aircraft.

For more than 20 years, DARPA pursued the dream of a globe-girding armada of solar-powered drones that could fly ceaselessly at 90,000 feet and would serve as the equivalent of low-flying satellites, that is, as platforms for surveillance intercepts or signals transmission. With an arching 250-foot wingspan covered with ultra-light solar panels, the “Helios” drone achieved a world-record altitude of 98,000 feet in 2001 before breaking up in a spectacular crash two years later. Nonetheless, DARPA launched the ambitious “Vulture” project in 2008 to build solar-powered aircraft with hugewingspans of 300 to 500 feet capable of ceaseless flight at 90,000 feet for five years at a time. After DARPA abandoned the project as impractical in 2012, Google and Facebook took over the technology with the goal of building future platforms for their customers’ Internet connections.

Since 2003, both DARPA and the Air Force have struggled to shatter the barrier for suborbital speeds by developing the dart-shaped Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle. Flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet, it was expected to “deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours.” Although the first test launches in 2010 and 2011 crashed in midflight, they did briefly reach an amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22 times the speed of sound.

As often happens, failure produced progress. In the wake of the Falcon’s crashes, DARPA has applied its hypersonics to develop a missile capable of penetrating China’s air-defenses at an altitude of 70,000 feet and a speed of Mach 5 (about 3,300 miles per hour).

Simultaneously, Lockheed’s secret “Skunk Works” experimental unit is using the hypersonic technology to develop the SR-72 unmanned surveillance aircraft as a successor to its SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s fastest manned aircraft. When operational by 2030, the SR-72 is supposed to fly at about 4,500 mph, double the speed of its manned predecessor, with an extreme stealth fuselage making it undetectable as it crosses any continent in an hour at 80,000 feet scooping up electronic intelligence.

Space Wars in the Exosphere

In the exosphere, 200 miles above Earth, the age of space warfare dawned in April 2010 when the Defense Department launched the robotic X-37B spacecraft, just 29 feet long, into orbit for a seven-month mission. By removing pilots and their costly life-support systems, the Air Force’s secretive Rapid Capabilities Office had created a miniaturized, militarized space drone with thrusters to elude missile attacks and a cargo bay for possible air-to-air missiles. By the time the second X-37B prototype landed in June 2012, its flawless 15-month flight had established the viability of “robotically controlled reusable spacecraft.”

In the exosphere where these space drones will someday roam, orbital satellites will be the prime targets in any future world war. The vulnerability of U.S. satellite systems became obvious in 2007 when China used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down one of its own satellites in orbit 500 miles above the Earth. A year later, the Pentagon accomplished the same feat, firing an SM-3 missile from a Navy cruiser to score a direct hit on a U.S. satellite 150 miles high.

Unsuccessful in developing an advanced F-6 satellite, despite spending over $200 million in an attempt to split the module into more resilient microwave-linked components, the Pentagon has opted instead to upgrade its more conventional single-module satellites, such as the Navy’s five interconnected Mobile User Objective Systems (MUOS) satellites. These were launched between 2013 and 2016 into geostationary orbits for communications with aircraft, ships, and motorized infantry.

Reflecting its role as a player in the preparation for future and futuristic wars, the Joint Functional Component Command for Space, established in 2006, operates the Space Surveillance Network. To prevent a high-altitude attack on America, this worldwide system of radar and telescopes in 29 remote locations like Ascension Island and Kwajalein Atoll makes about 400,000 observations daily, monitoring every object in the skies.

The Future of Wonder Weapons

By the mid-2020s, if the military’s dreams are realized, the Pentagon’s triple-canopy shield should be able to atomize a single “terrorist” with a missile strike or, with equal ease, blind an entire army by knocking out all of its ground communications, avionics, and naval navigation. It’s a system that, were it to work as imagined, just might allow the United States a diplomatic veto of global lethality, an equalizer for any further loss of international influence.

But as in Vietnam, where aerospace wonders could not prevent a searing defeat, history offers some harsh lessons when it comes to technology trumping insurgencies, no less the fusion of forces (diplomatic, economic, and military) whose sum is geopolitical power. After all, the Third Reich failed to win World War II even though it had amazingly advanced “wonder weapons,” including the devastating V-2 missile, the unstoppable Me-262 jet fighter, and the ship-killing Hs-293 guided missile.

Washington’s dogged reliance on and faith in military technology to maintain its hegemony will certainly guarantee endless combat operations with uncertain outcomes in the forever war against terrorists along the ragged edge of Asia and Africa and incessant future low-level aggression in space and cyberspace. Someday, it may even lead to armed conflict with rivals China and Russia.

Whether the Pentagon’s robotic weapon systems will offer the U.S. an extended lease on global hegemony or prove a fantasy plucked from the frames of a Buck Rogers comic book, only the future can tell. Whether, in that moment to come, America will play the role of the indomitable Buck Rogers or the Martians he eventually defeated is another question worth asking. One thing is likely, however: that future is coming far more quickly and possibly far more painfully than any of us might imagine.

Jesus Was Born in a Police State

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Jesus is too much for us. The church’s later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from ‘extremism.’”—author Gary Wills, What Jesus Meant

The Christmas narrative of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable, where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus.

Unfortunately, Jesus was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say—things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Yet what if Jesus, the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet, had been born 2,000 years later? What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets were in their home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they would have been turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later. Daniel Shaver, 26 years old, was crawling on the floor, sobbing and begging for his life, and had just reached down to pull up his shorts when a police officer opened fire on him with an AR-15 rifle. “If you move, we’re going to consider that a threat and we are going to deal with it and you may not survive it,” the cop shouted at Shaver before his partner started shooting.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Either way, whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Indeed, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what Jesus and other activists suffered in their day is happening to those who choose to speak truth to power today.

For those who celebrate Christmas as a season of miracles, it is indeed a time for joy and thanksgiving. Yet it should also be a time of reckoning, re-awakening and re-commitment to making this world a better place for all humanity.

Remember, what happened on that starry night in Bethlehem is only part of the story. That baby in the manger grew up to be a man who did not turn away from evil but instead spoke out against it, and we must do no less.

Thus, we are faced with a choice: remain silent in the face of evil or speak out against it. As Nobel Prize-winning author Albert Camus proclaimed:

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally.

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Category Archives: History

The Pentagon’s New Wonder Weapons for World Dominion

Or Buck Rogers in the 21st Century