Back in late March, top American General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the United States of America would be doubling its military budget in case the Kiev regime was defeated by Russia. At the time, Milley claimed that “not supporting Ukraine now would lead to a massive increase in future defense budgets”. He also added that “it would lead to a global conflict that has been avoided since World War II ended”.
“If that rules-based order, which is in its 80th year, if that goes out the window, then be very careful,” Milley said while testifying before the US Congress on March 23, further adding: “We’ll be doubling our defense budgets at that point because that will introduce not an era of great power competition. That’ll begin an era of great power conflict. And that’ll be extraordinarily dangerous for the whole world.”
Firstly, it should be noted that Milley’s remark about the so-called “rules-based (world) order” supposedly lasting 80 years is completely misplaced. The geopolitical situation in the last three decades has merely been a shadow of the post-WWII global order. With the US conducting virtually incessant aggression against the entire world, any notion that there are actual rules that equally apply to everyone is beyond laughable. However, his claim that Washington DC would need to double its “defense” spending is much more serious and consequential. Ironically, he’s threatening to do that while “warning” about a looming global conflict, one which is solely caused by the US itself, as it’s the only country on the planet with an openly stated strategy of “full spectrum dominance”.
Milley testified before the House Appropriations Committee-Defense on the next year’s DoD (Department of Defense) budget, alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The figure for the Pentagon officially stands at $842 billion, $69 billion more than the $773 billion the military requested for 2023. However, the total spending on national “defense”, including work on nuclear weapons (officially under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy), pushes that up to $886 billion. This is without including the so-called “aid” for the Kiev regime, which stood at approximately $113 billion at the beginning of 2023. However, the updated figure is now getting closer to $150 billion and there’s no indication that it will stop growing any time soon.
General Milley has repeatedly described the conflict in Ukraine as “an important national interest” and “fundamental to the United States, to Europe and to global security”. It could be argued that it’s neither of those things, as the world, the EU and the US itself all have more pressing concerns. Unfortunately, this notion is extremely unlikely to lead to any peaceful settlement, especially as the US Military Industrial Complex (MIC) keeps getting its windfall. While some members of Congress have consistently been skeptical about the “aid” for the Kiev regime, the majority still have a strong preference for the official narrative. The skeptics usually cite “the US and Kiev regime’s failure to more clearly define their strategic goals” as the primary reason for the lack of “more adamant support”.
This clearly indicates that the only “strategic goal” is to keep the war going for as long as possible, which also explains the repeated calls for the perpetual increase of the Pentagon’s budget. However, Milley’s call for doubling it is a major escalation and it’s unclear how exactly Washington DC is planning to achieve such a monumental task. Global military spending for 2022 was around $2.1 trillion, meaning that the US is already at over 40% of the world’s total with its current budget. Doubling it, even over the next several years (also taking into account other superpowers would certainly respond to it) could push that figure close to 60%. In terms of the US federal budget, it would also require further cuts to investment in healthcare, infrastructure, education, etc.
As the military currently spends approximately 15% of the entire US federal budget, obviously, doubling it would mean the percentage would go up to (or even over) 30%. Such figures are quite close to what the former Soviet Union was spending in terms of its overall budget, which was one of the major factors that contributed to its unfortunate dismantlement. On the other hand, it also forces others to drastically increase their own military spending. If China were to follow suit, its military budget would then be close to $500 billion, with Russia’s military budget approaching $200 billion. This would cause a military spending “death spiral” that would be extremely difficult (if possible at all) to control, leading the world into an unprecedented arms race.
However, this “new” Cold War could potentially be far more dangerous than the “old” one, as there would be approximately half a dozen superpowers and great powers competing for influence and a bigger geopolitical footprint. On the other hand, if the rest of the world refuses to respond in kind, such a massive increase in US military spending would only push the multipolar world into greater integration, as it would be the only way to counter US aggression without doubling their own military budgets. Either way, the US is left with a choice – further escalate, not only with Russia, but the rest of the world as well, or find an off-ramp. Otherwise, its inflation will surge so much that the “doubling” of the Pentagon’s budget will happen on its own.
In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. Oxfam and Development Finance International also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next few years.
As a result, almost three-quarters of Africa’s governments have reduced their agricultural budgets since 2019, and more than 20 million people have been pushed into severe hunger. In addition, the world’s poorest countries were due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.
Last year, Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher stated that there was a terrifying prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people would fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone. That year, food inflation rose by double digits in most African countries.
By September 2022, some 345 million people across the world were experiencing acute hunger, a number that has more than doubled since 2019. Moreover, one person is dying of hunger every four seconds. From 2019 to 2022, the number of undernourished people grew by 150 million.
Billions of dollars’ worth of arms continue to pour into Ukraine from the NATO countries as US neocons pursue their goal of regime change in Russia and balkanisation of that country.
Yet people in those NATO countries are experiencing increasing levels of hardship. The US has sent almost 80 billion dollars to Ukraine, while 30 million low-income people across the US are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. In England, 100,000 children have been frozen out of free school meals.
Due to the disruptive supply chain effects of the conflict in Ukraine, speculative trading that drives up food prices, the impact of closing down the global economy under the guise of COVID and the inflationary impacts of pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system between September 2019 and March 2020, people are being driven into poverty and denied access to sufficient food.
Matters are not helped by issues that have long plagued the global food system: cutbacks in public subsidies to agriculture, WTO rules that facilitate cheap, subsidised imports which undermine or wipe out indigenous agriculture in poorer countries and loan conditionalities, resulting in countries ‘structurally adjusting’ their agri sectors thereby eradicating food security and self-sufficiency – consider that Africa has been transformed from a net food exporter in the 1960s to a net food importer today.
Great game food geopolitics continue and result in elite interests playing with the lives of hundreds of millions who are regarded as collateral damage. Policies, underpinned by neoliberal dogma masquerading as economic science and necessity, which are designed to create dependency and benefit a handful of multi-billionaires and global agribusiness corporations who, ably assisted by the World Bank, IMF and WTO, now preside over an increasingly centralised food regime.
Many of these corporations have engaged in rampant profiteering at a time when people across the world are experiencing rising food inflation. For instance, 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the fiscal years 2020 and 2021. At the same time, the UN estimates that $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people.
As a paper in the journal Frontiers noted in 2021, these corporations form part of a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies and export-oriented countries who are subverting multilateral institutions of food governance. Many who are involved in this alliance are co-opting the narrative of ‘food systems transformation’ as they anticipate new investment opportunities and seek total control of the global food system.
This type of ‘transformation’ is more of the same wrapped in a climate emergency narrative in an attempt to move food and farming further towards an ecomodernist techno-dystopia controlled by big agribusiness and big tech, as described in the article “The Netherlands: Template for Ecomodernism’s Brave New World.”
A ‘brave new world’ where a concoction of genetically engineered items, synthetic food and ultra-processed products will do more harm than good – but will certainly boost the bottom line of the pharmaceutical corporations.
While securing further dominance over the global food system and undermining food security in the process, global agribusiness frames this as ‘feeding the world’.
The model these corporations promote not only creates food insecurity but also produces death and illness.
Former Professor of Medicine Dr Paul Marik recently stated:
If you believe the narrative, Type 2 diabetes is a progressive metabolic disease that’ll result in cardiac complications. You’re going to lose your legs. You’re going to have kidney disease, and the only treatment is expensive pharma drugs. That is completely false. It’s a lie.
It is projected that by the end of this decade half of the world’s population are going to be obese and over 20% to 25% will have Type 2 diabetes.
According to Marik, the bottom line is Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disease due to bad lifestyle and really bad eating habits:
“We eat all the time. We snack all the time. This is part of the food industry’s goal. Processed food, starch, becomes an addiction. Most of us are glucose addicted and it’s, in fact, more addictive than cocaine. It creates this vicious cycle of insulin resistance.”
He adds that if you’re insulin resistant, this prevents leptin and the other hormones acting on your brain, so you’re continually hungry:
“If you are continually hungry, you eat more, which causes more insulin resistance. It causes this vicious cycle of overeating carbohydrates…”
Over the past 60 years in Western nations, there have been fundamental changes in the quality of food. In 2007, nutritional therapist David Thomas in “A Review of the 6th Edition of McCance and Widdowson’s the Mineral Depletion of Foods Available to Us as a Nation” noted a precipitous change towards convenience and pre-prepared foods containing saturated fats, highly processed meats and refined carbohydrates, often devoid of vital micronutrients yet packed with a cocktail of chemical additives including colourings, flavourings and preservatives.
Aside from the negative impacts of Green Revolution cropping systems and practices, Thomas proposed that these changes are significant contributors to rising levels of diet-induced ill health. He added that ongoing research clearly demonstrates a significant relationship between deficiencies in micronutrients and physical and mental ill health.
Increasing prevalence of diabetes, childhood leukaemia, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disorders, infertility, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, mental illnesses and so on have all been shown to have some direct relationship to diet, specifically micronutrient deficiency, and pesticide use.
It is clear that we have a deeply unjust and unsustainable food system that causes environmental devastation, illness and malnutrition, among other things. People often ask: So, what’s the solution? The solutions have been made clear time and again and involve a genuine food transition towards agroecology.
Unlike the co-opted version of ‘food transition’ being promoted, agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. Agroecology challenges the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system. Well-known academics like Raj Patel and Eric Holtz-Gimenez have written extensively on the potential of agroecology. And its benefits are clear.
In finishing, let us consider the skin-deep morality pedalled throughout the COVID period. During COVID, the official narrative was underpinned by emotive slogans like ‘protect lives’ and ‘keep safe’. Those who refused the COVID jab were labelled ‘granny killers’ and ‘irresponsible’. All presided over by government politicians who too often failed to obey their own COVID rules.
Meanwhile, while having terrorised the public with a health crisis narrative, they continue to collude with powerful agrifood corporations that destroy health courtesy of their practices. They continue to facilitate a system that serves the needs of global agricapital and ruthless investors like BlackRock’s Larry Fink who secure massive profits from a monopolistic food system (Fink also invests in the pharma sector – one of the biggest beneficiaries of a sickening global food regime) that by its very nature creates illness, malnutrition and hunger.
The COVID narrative was imbued with the notion of moral responsibility. The people who sold it to the masses have no morality. Like the UK’s former health minister and COVID rule breaker Matt Hancock (see Matt Hancock’s Car Crash Interview), they are willing to sell their soul (or influence) to the highest bidder – in Hancock’s case, a £10,000 wage demand for a day’s ‘consultancy’ as a sitting politician or a few hundred thousand to bolster his ego, bank balance and image on a celebrity TV programme.
In a corrupted and corrupting society, the rewards could be even higher for the likes of Hancock when he leaves office (a health minister who helped traumatise the population while doing nothing to hold the health-damaging agribusiness corporations to account). But with a long line of well-rewarded fraudsters to choose from, we already know that.
Watching a once great nation commit suicide is not pretty. President Joe Biden does not seem to understand that his role as elected leader of the United States is to take actions that directly or indirectly benefit the folks who voted for him as well as the other Americans who did not do so. That is how a constitutional democracy is supposed to work. Instead, Biden and the gang of introverts and neocon war criminals that the has surrounded himself with have done everything that can to inflict fatal damage on the economy through rash initiatives both overseas and at home. A spending spree to buy support from the bizarre constituencies that make up the Democrat Party base while also fighting an undeclared war in Europe have meant that nearly two trillion dollars has been added to the national debt under Biden’s rule, a debt that was already unsustainable at nearly $30 trillion, larger than the United States’ gross national product. Plans to cancel student loan debts will add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the red ink.
And those actions undertaken overseas, to include continuing to expand the war in Ukraine against Russia, will do immeasurable more damage. Consider how the Democratic Party has long had it in for Russian Federal President Vladimir Putin, dating back to when Putin took power in 2000 and started kicking out the western scallywags who were looting his country. Subsequently, false intelligence and other innuendoes were contrived by Hillary Clinton and her team in 2016 to implicate Donald Trump as a Russian stooge who was secretly working for Putin. When that didn’t work and Trump was elected, the Russians were accused by the media and Democrats of willy-nilly interfering in US elections more generally speaking, a much-exaggerated claim in contrast to the overwhelming silence surrounding the real electoral and policy interference, which has been coming from Israel and its fifth column inside the United States, who, not coincidentally, are the chief proponents of the war against Russia.
Placing a target on Vladimir Putin’s back appears to have an unfortunate consequence which Biden has yet to wake up to, namely the fact that the United States now has what might be described as a Ponzi scheme faux economy which is very vulnerable, particularly as much of the world has become disenchanted with the US style of global leadership. Note for example the recent state visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to Beijing, where he embraced a “global strategic partnership with China” to bring about a “multipolar” world, freed of “blocs” that is not sheltering behind “Cold War mentality.” Macron also criticized the “extraterritoriality of the US dollar.”
And threats made by the Bidens against both China and Russia have accomplished little beyond drawing the two major political and military powers closer together. Beijing and Moscow entered into a trade agreement in their own currencies in 2014 and have openly taken steps to challenge US dominance of international currency exchanges, creating instead a global multipolar trading environment. Europe aside, many nations are now eager to cut the tie that binds, which is the decades long American dominance of international financial mechanisms and also the general use of dollars to pay for oil and other energy supplies. The widespread use of petrodollars enables the buffoonish Janet Yellen at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve banks to print unlimited unbacked fiat currency, knowing that there will always be a market for it.
Which brings us back to the Ukraine war, pursued “until we win” by Biden and his somnolent Secretary of State Antony Blinken. One of the first moves when Russia intervened in Ukraine was to block and eventually confiscate Russia’s 300 billion dollars-worth of foreign reserves in banks in the US and Europe. That sent a shock wave across currency markets all around the world. Biden and Yellen had weaponized the US’s own national currency, which hitherto had been an untouchable step in international relations for nations that were not actually at war. Countries like China and India with large economies then realized that the US Treasury Department and the dominance of the dollar as an exchange currency had now become a weapon of war and a serious threat to the economies of all other nations.
As a consequence, the US Dollar is right now being rejected by many nations as the world’s reserve currency. Some nations all over the world have agreed to use the Chinese Yuan and Indian Rupee for any-and-all international currency transactions. Saudi Arabia continues to use the petrodollar but does not demand it. Recently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to permit the Saudis to sell oil to China in Yuan. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is now allowing multiple currencies to be used to purchase its oil, a major attack on the primacy of the US dollar and it also has accepted Chinese mediation to mend fences with the US and Israel’s arch enemy Iran. And the Saudis have even more recently refused a Biden Administration request that it start pumping more oil to reduce energy costs, signaling that the shift is both political and economic in nature. Japan, a major economy, has also started purchasing oil and gas directly from Russia against the US imposed energy embargo while Brazil, another major economy, has agreed to use the Yuan in its increasing trade with China. As fewer nations utilize the US dollar, America’s ability to export and ignore its burgeoning domestic debt and inflation to other countries is being diminished.
This might have a decisive impact on the US currency as the drive to break with the petrodollar continues to grow and could produce something like a “perfect storm” impacting on the US economy. It threatens to drastically lower the standards of living of nearly all Americans within the next several years as the dollar loses value and purchasing power. As the US economy is heavily interconnected with many European economies, Europe is also likely to be a victim of the coming disaster.
The good news, of course, is that the United States will no longer be able to afford its endless wars and international interventions. Lacking its economic power, it will no longer be able to declare itself “exceptional” and the enforcer of a “rules based international order.” It would mean an ending of the funding of developments like the Ukraine proxy war and the troops will have to come home from places like Syria and Somalia. And it might even mark the ending of sending billions of dollars annually to a wealthy Israel.
Ending dollar supremacy would inevitably have an immediate impact on what passes for US foreign policy, making it more difficult for Washington to initiate and sustain Treasury Department sanctions on countries like Iran and North Korea. It could also create economic turmoil for many countries until the situation resolves itself by producing greater volatility in currency markets worldwide. The Federal Reserve Bank will no doubt respond to the unfolding crisis by acting as it always does by raising interest rates to astronomical levels, thereby hurting most the Americans who can least afford the shock therapy.
And it did not have to turn out this way. It could have been avoided. If the US, which had no horse in the race, had left Ukraine alone Vladimir Putin would not have become a symbol of defiance against the “Rules Based International Order” and he would not have worked with China to establish multipolarity in the way the financial world operates. Instead, we have a situation where Europe is being de-industrialized due to soaring energy prices and Washington’s destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines while the US is potentially confronting economic disaster as the dollar’s relevance to international trade sinks. The ultimate irony is that Russia, and also the US/Israeli arch enemy Iran, are by comparison doing quite well economically as they sell their oil and gas to anyone in any currency. One has to conclude that when US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently made her secret trip to Kiev to promise the despicable Volodymyr Zelensky billions of taxpayer dollars the United States might just have been better served if she had stayed in Washington and made some minimal effort to address the mounting economic problems confronting us here at home.
According to the best available estimates, the U.S. Government has been spending, in total, for over a decade now, around $1.3T to $1.5T annually on ‘defense’, and this is around half of all military spending worldwide by all 200-or-so nations, and is more than half (around 53%) of all of the U.S. federal Government’s ‘discretionary’ (or congressionally voted for) annual expenditures.
Unlike regular manufacturers, which sell entirely or mainly to consumers and to businesses, not to their Government, armament-firms need to control their Government in order to control their markets (which are their Government and its ‘allied’ Governments — including NATO), and so they (in purely capitalist countries such as the U.S.) do control their Government. This is why the armaments-business (except in countries whose armaments-sector is socialized) is infamously corrupt. In order to hide the extent of that corruption (and to promote ever-higher military spending), the ‘news’-media need — in those countries — to be likewise effectively controlled by the investors in those firms.
Consequently, America, which has no national-security threat from any country (so, these astronomical ‘defense’-expenditures are blatantly inappropriate), spends annually around half of all of the money that the entire world spends on the military. And most of that money gets paid to its armaments-firms. Or, as Stephen Semler, an expert on these matters, put it regarding last year’s numbers, “How much of the $858 billion authorized by the FY2023 NDAA will be transferred to military contractors? I estimate $452 billion.” That is 52% of the 53% of the federal Government’s discretionary spending that is being allocated to ‘Defense’. Thus, 26% of the money that Congress authorizes the U.S. federal Government to pay each year, goes to military contractors. Thus: if $452B is going to armaments-firms, and if $1.356T is going to ‘defense’ (both of which are reasonable estimates), then one-third of ‘defense’ spending goes to armaments-firms, and that is around 17% of the money that the U.S. Government pays each year for everything (including non-discretionary).
If this had not been happening each year after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, then the current U.S. federal debt would be far less, if any at all — but, in any case, that expense (which went, and is going, to exceptionally rich individuals) will be paid by future generations of Americans, by means of both increased taxes and reduced services from the U.S. Government. What pays for bombs (and funds the purchase of yachts) today will be taken from everyone’s infants tomorrow. And it is taking millions of lives in the targeted lands, and has been doing so for decades now. A psychopathic U.S. Government is producing these results.
America’s ‘Defense’ Department is so corrupt that when I happened recently to be re-reading my 14 January 2020 article about its corruptness, “US Military Spending: TRILLIONS of Dollars Unaccounted For”, yet a new detail of this corruptness, which I had not previously noticed, struck me. It happened in this passage:
He presented a representative of America’s Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) asserting, to US House members, that “this is not a new story, it dates back to 2001 and before,”.
And, West noted:
“All these things are accounting things that, as Norquist says ‘occur after the money is spent’. They are things that you want to get right in your accounting, but if you get the values wrong then it does not mean you’ve lost the money. It means you’ve got some estimate wrong, and you’ll put to little or to much [West meant “too much or too little”] in one fund or another.”
Referring, then, to the $21 trillion, he wrote:
“This is just more of the same though, still not missing money, still just unsupported accounting information transfers.”
However, only a sucker would take that casual attitude to the enormous amount of money in the ‘defense’ budget that is “unsupported” as to who received it, and whether or not those payments were in accord with what Congress had actually authorized.
Furthermore, such a casual attitude toward US ‘defense’-expenditures — the expenditures which constitute actually over half of the US federal Government’s discretionary expenditures, and even around half of the total world’s military expenditures — is an invitation to corruption in over half of this Government’s annually authorized spending; and any intelligent person would expect that such an invitation would be taken advantage of by insiders who are in a position to benefit from it.
West quotes from only one alleged authority, the “Defense Department Comptroller, David L. Norquist,” a person who is largely responsible for the problem, who said “it’s an accounting problem that does need to be solved because it can help hide other underlying issues,” but (at 1:43 in the accompanying video) “it’s not the same thing as not being able to account for money that Congress has given you to spend, but it’s still a problem that needs to be fixed.”
Mick West simply trusted this statement, by Norquist — though Norquist is one of the officials responsible for the problem — but Norquist failed to prove (and wasn’t even asked to prove) it, by the Representatives whom he was there addressing, who didn’t seem to be alarmed about where that $21T actually went) his key assertion, that “it’s not the same thing as not being able to account for money that Congress has given you to spend.”
Even if that assertion is true (which should not be assumed, and which even seems ludicrous on its very face), the problem is unquestionably an invitation to corruption in ‘defense’-expenditures, and those are precisely the type of federal expenditures that overwhelmingly dominate the income to the federal Government’s contractors, the corporations that make all or most of their profits from sales to the federal Government and to its allied governments (such as to the Saud family).
Therefore, casually allowing — and not even investigating as being possibly treasonous — these expenditures, is, itself, enormously scandalous, but the Representatives there were treating it so casually.
In fact, at the very opening of the hearing, which was held on 10 January 2018 (at 02:12 in the video of the 1:41:33-long hearing, above) the Chairman of the Committee emphasized the “We must spend more” on the military, even though we already spend around half of the entire world’s military expenditures. Manifestly, this hearing was a charade.
In the full video, the passage that Mick West quoted from is at 18:00-22:00, and the Representatives were clearly on the side of the charade, not on the side of the American people. Clearly, all members of that Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, behave as if they are in the pockets of firms such as Lockheed Martin.
On 15 November 2018, Reuters headlined “Pentagon fails its first-ever audit, official says”, and reported that: “‘We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,’ Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters.”
“On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest discretionary cost center — the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations — after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.”
So, that was the result of the latest version of this charade, which is virtual treason by the Federal Government.
In short: Congress is satisfied for this situation to continue, and the members of Congress evidently have no fear that the voters back home will vote against them if a challenger makes this issue a major issue in that Senator’s or Representative’s next Party primary.
The presumption is that the voters don’t care, and that the ‘news’-media won’t enlighten the voters about this matter, and about how it impacts, for example, which nations the US will categorize as being an “ally,” to sell weapons to, and which nations it will categorize as being an “enemy,” to target for conquest.
——
So, what now struck me now was the name there, “David Norquist.” Maybe you remember the famous libertarian phrase about spending by the U.S. federal Government, that the libertarian goal is to “shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Here is one of the many articles that were published about that:
GROVER NORQUIST’S NO-TAX CALL A WEDGE FOR REPUBLICANS
By Dr Nicole Hemmer, Honorary Associate, United States Studies Centre
“Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?”
The question came from former US president George HW Bush this northern summer, but in the past few weeks many Americans have been asking the same thing.
Norquist, an anti-tax activist, now dominates discussion of the fiscal cliff. His “no-new-taxes” pledge has been signed by nearly every Republican in congress. The problem? To avoid going off that fiscal cliff, congress must make a “grand bargain” by January 1. If it doesn’t include tax rate increases, President Barack Obama won’t sign it into law.
Republicans are in a bind. They could agree to tax-rate increases on Americans making more than $US250,000 a year in return for cuts to programs such as Medicare. That, however, would mean breaking Norquist’s pledge. And Norquist has made it clear that any Republican who does so will face a primary challenge in the next election.
So, to echo Bush: “Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?”
Norquist runs Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax organisation he founded in 1986.
His opposition to taxation is an expression of his deep disdain for government. “I don’t want to abolish government,” he famously quipped. “I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
This “starve the beast” mentality has long been a conservative strategy for reducing the size of government. A strict diet of diminishing revenues, anti-tax advocates argue, will naturally lead to a smaller federal state.
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As it turns out, David Norquist and Grover Norquist are brothers. So: while David Norquist makes money by fronting for the billionaires who control firms such as Lockheed Martin Corporation, Grover Norquist makes money by fronting for the billionaires who control firms such as Lockheed Martin Corporation. David does it by rationalizing away those peoples’ corruptness as being a concern for U.S. taxpayers; and Grover does it by leading the Republican argument against the Government’s non-‘defense’ spending. (While Republicans want to reduce non-‘defense’-spending, they want to increase ‘defense’-spending. Democrats want to increase all federal spending, but ESPECIALLY for ‘defense’.)
The standard libertarian claim that “shrinking the government” is at all an issue or what motivates their wealthiest donors whom they are actually fronting for, is a lie. The only real issue that is involved here is: Who is, and who isn’t, getting the Government’s money.
All of federal politicians’ talk about the need to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” is also lies, because they themselves — those federal office-holders — got there and stay there by participating in it. If they’re not corrupt, they’re not in office, because this system is built upon corruption.
Whereas Republican billionaires demand that all federal expenditures except for ‘defense’ get slashed, Democratic billionaires demand that all federal expenditures get slashed but that ‘defense’ spending must never be reduced. So: what’s the real difference (except for the hypocritical rhetoric on the Democratic or “liberal” side)? The billionaires who control those arms-contracting companies control also which contenders for federal offices will become elected.
The only way for an authentic progressive political candidate to deal with this is to declare publicly (and to document it by means of linked-to-evidence news-reports online, like the present one) that ‘our’ Government and media are controlled by the organized mega-crooks, who are this nation’s wealthiest individuals — the only group of individuals who benefit from it — who are this nation’s actual enemies: its corrupters. But, of course, no billionaire will fund such a campaign, and any news-medium that reports on it (except by lying against it) will likewise get no investors.
That is how bad that the situation really is. People need to be discussing this, in public, here and elsewhere. Because that is the problem. It is the problem that needs to be fixed. But how can it be done? And THAT is the question.
PS: Preliminary reports suggest that on account of this Government’s dual World War III against both Russia and China, the ‘Defense’ budget for next year will probably soar perhaps more than by 10%. The Congress now is well over 95% neoconservatives, in both houses. They’ve virtually all been bought.
Many are those who predict a World War. Indeed, some groups are preparing for it. But the States are reasonable and, in fact, consider rather an amicable separation, a division of the world into two different worlds, one unipolar and the other multipolar. Perhaps we are actually witnessing a third scenario: the “American Empire” is not struggling in the trap of Thucydides; it is collapsing like its former Soviet rival died.
The American “Straussians,” the Ukrainian “integral nationalists,” the Israeli “revisionist Zionists” and the Japanese “militarists” are calling for a generalized war. They are alone and they are not mass movements. No state has yet committed itself to this course.
Germany with 100 billion euros and Poland with much less money are rearming massively. But neither of them seems eager to take on Russia.
Australia and Japan are also investing in armaments, but neither of them has an autonomous army.
The United States is no longer able to replenish its military and is no longer able to create new weapons. They are content to reproduce the weapons of the 1980s in an assembly line fashion. However, they maintain their nuclear weapons.
Russia has already modernized its armies and is organizing itself to renew the ammunition it uses in Ukraine and to mass produce its new weapons, which no one can compete with. China, for its part, is rearming to control the Far East and, in the long term, to protect its trade routes. India thinks of itself as a maritime power.
It is therefore difficult to see who would and could start a World War.
Contrary to their speeches, French leaders are not at all preparing for a high-intensity war [1]. The military programming law, established for ten years, plans to build a nuclear aircraft carrier, but reduces the size of the army. It is a question of giving ourselves the means of projection, but not of defending our territory. Paris continues to reason as a colonial power while the world is becoming multipolar. It is a classic: the generals prepare for the previous war and ignore the reality of tomorrow.
The European Union is implementing its “Strategic Compass”. The Commission coordinates the military investments of its member states. In practice, they all play the game, but pursue different goals. The Commission, on the other hand, is trying to take control of decisions on the financing of armies, which until now have depended on their national parliaments. This would make it possible to build an empire, but not to declare a generalized war. Clearly everyone is playing a game, but apart from Russia and China, none is preparing for a high-intensity war. Rather, we are witnessing a redistribution of the cards. This month, Washington is sending Liz Rosenberg and Brian Nelson, two specialists in unilateral coercive measures [2], to Europe with the mission of forcing the Allies to comply. In the words of former President George Bush Jr. during the war “against terrorism”: “Whoever is not with us is against us”.
Liz Rosenberg is efficient and unscrupulous. She is the one who brought the Syrian economy to its knees, condemning millions of people to poverty because they dared to resist and defeat the Empire’s surrogates.
The Hollywood western discourse a la George Bush Jr. of good guys and bad guys has failed with Türkiye, which has already experienced the 2016 coup attempt and the 2023 earthquake. Ankara knows that it has nothing good to expect from Washington and is already looking to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Yet the same discourse should succeed with the Europeans, who remain fascinated by the power of the United States. Of course this power is in decline, but so are the Europeans. No one has learned any lessons from the sabotage of the Russian-German-French-Dutch gas pipelines, North Stream. Not only did the victims take the blame without saying anything, but they are about to receive further punishment for crimes they did not commit.
The world should therefore be divided into two blocs, on the one hand the US hyperpower and its vassals, on the other the multipolar world. In terms of the number of states, this should be half and half, but in terms of population, only 13% for the Western bloc against 87% for the multipolar world.
The international institutions can no longer function. They should either fall into lethargy or be dissolved. The first examples that come to mind are the effective exit of Russia from the Council of Europe and the empty seats of Western Europeans in the Arctic Council during the year of the Russian presidency. Other institutions are no longer relevant, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was supposed to organize East-West dialogue. Only the attachment of Russia and China to the United Nations should preserve them in the short term, as the United States is already thinking of transforming the Organization into a structure reserved exclusively for the Allied Nations.
The Western bloc should also reorganize itself. Until now, the European continent was dominated economically by Germany. In order to be certain that Germany would never get closer to Russia, the United States wanted Berlin to be content with the western part of the continent and leave the center in the hands of Warsaw. So Germany and Poland armed themselves to impose themselves in their respective zones of influence, but when the American star faded, they would fight against each other.
When the Soviet Empire fell, it abandoned its allies and vassals. Having seen its inability to solve the problems, the USSR first stopped supporting Cuba economically, then dropped its vassals of the Warsaw Pact, and finally collapsed on itself. The same process is beginning today. The first U.S. Gulf War, the 9/11 attacks and their host of wars in the broader Middle East, the expansion of Nato and the Ukrainian conflict will have offered only three decades of survival to the American Empire. It was backed by its former Soviet rival. It has lost its raison d’être with its dissolution. It is time for it to disappear too.
The New York Times routinely tells bigger lies than the clumsy nonsense it published about weapons in Iraq. Here’s an example. This package of lies is called “Liberals Have a Blind Spot on Defense” but mentions nothing related to defense. It simply pretends that militarism is defensive by applying that word and by lying that “we face simultaneous and growing military threats from Russia and China.” Seriously? Where?
The U.S. military budget is more than those of most nations of the world combined. Only 29 nations, out of some 200 on Earth, spend even 1 percent what the U.S. does. Of those 29, a full 26 are U.S. weapons customers. Many of those receive free U.S. weapons and/or training and/or have U.S. bases in their countries. Only one non-ally, non-weapons customer (albeit a collaborator in bioweapons research labs) spends over 10% what the U.S. does, namely China, which was at 37% of U.S. spending in 2021 and likely about the same now despite the highly horrifying increases widely reported in the U.S. media and on the floor of Congress. (That’s not considering weapons for Ukraine and various other U.S. expenses.) While the U.S. has planted military bases around Russia and China, neither has a military base anywhere near the United States, and neither has threatened the United States.
Now, if you don’t want to fill the globe with U.S. weaponry and provoke Russia and China on their borders, the New York Times has some additional lies for you: “Defense spending is about as pure an application of a domestic industrial policy — with thousands of good-paying, high-skilled manufacturing jobs — as any other high-tech sector.”
No, it is not. Just about any other way of spending public dollars, or even not taxing them in the first place, produces more and better jobs.
Here’s a doozie:
“Liberals also used to be hostile to the military on the assumption that it skewed right wing, but that’s a harder argument to make when the right is complaining about a ‘woke military.’”
What in the world would it mean to oppose organized mass murder because it skews right wing? What the hell else could it skew? I oppose militarism because it kills, destroys, damages the Earth, drives homelessness and illness and poverty, prevents global cooperation, tears down the rule of law, prevents self-governance, produces the dumbest pages of the New York Times, fuels bigotry, and militarizes police, and because there are better ways to resolve disputes and to resist the militarism of others. I’m not going to start cheering for mass killings because some general doesn’t hate enough groups.
Then there’s this lie: “The Biden administration touts the size of its $842 billion budget request, and in nominal terms it’s the largest ever. But that fails to account for inflation.”
If you look at U.S. military spending according to SIPRI in constant 2021 dollars from 1949 to now (all the years they provide, with their calculation adjusting for inflation), Obama’s 2011 record will probably fall this year. If you look at actual numbers, not adjusting for inflation, Biden has set a new record each year. If you add in the free weapons for Ukraine, then, even adjusting for inflation, the record fell this past year and will probably be broken again in the coming year.
You’ll hear all sorts of different numbers, depending on what’s included. Most used is probably $886 billion for what Biden has proposed, which includes the military, the nuclear weapons, and some of “Homeland Security.” In the absence of massive public pressure on a topic the public hardly knows exists, we can count on an increase by Congress, plus major new piles of free weapons to Ukraine. For the first time, U.S. military spending (not counting various secret spending, veterans spending, etc.) will likely top $950 billion as predicted here.
War profiteer-funded stink tankers like to view military spending as a philanthropic project to be measured as a percentage of an “economy” or GDP, as if the more money a country has, the more it should spend on organized killing. There are two more sensible ways to look at it. Both can be seen at Mapping Militarism.
One is as simple amounts per nation. In these terms, the U.S. is at a historic high and soaring far, far over the rest of the world.
The other way to look at it is per capita. As with a comparison of absolute spending, one has to travel far down the list to find any of the designated enemies of the U.S. government. But here Russia jumps to the top of that list, spending a full 20% of what the U.S. does per person, while only spending less than 9% in total dollars. In contrast, China slides down the list, spending less than 9% per person what the United States does, while spending 37% in absolute dollars. Iran, meanwhile, spends 5% per capita what the U.S. does, compared to just over 1% in total spending.
Our New York Times friend writes that the U.S. needs to spend more to dominate four oceans, while China need worry only about one. But here the U.S. desire to treat economic competition as a form of war blinds the commentator to the fact that a lack of war facilitates economic success. As Jimmy Carter told Donald Trump, “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war. . . . China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”
As has been carefully documented, under cover of the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative, the Global Elite is implementing long-planned and profound changes to 200 areas of human life.
Needless to say, with some people already resisting and more people likely to perceive the truth of what is happening and join the resistance with the passage of time, policing the imposition of this program will be a critical factor in ensuring its success.
As indicated then, just one area in which profound change will take place is policing.
Future policing will be done by a smaller number of militarily-equipped police, transhuman police and technocratic police supported by corporate private security technology. In this article, I will briefly outline the key changes to policing, in these three distinct categories, and also explain why these changes must be resisted and how we can do this most effectively.
Fewer and MilitarizedPolice
Reflecting a longer term trend, in 2019 the International Association of Chiefs of Police reported that ‘Law enforcement agencies across the United States are struggling to recruit and hire police officers.’ While police killings of innocent civilians – see ‘Mapping Police Violence’ and ‘Not just “a few bad apples”: U.S. police kill civilians at much higher rates than other countries’ – failed to rate a mention in the report, it did at least acknowledge ‘Scrutiny of the police, cellphone recordings of interactions between the police and public, media coverage, and popular entertainment portrayals of police have led many young people to view police differently than their parents may have.’ See ‘The State of Recruitment: A Crisis for Law Enforcement’.
In late 2021, two years into policing the pandemic, US police reported a substantially increased rate of retirement and resignation among police officers, with more than five times as many police leaving the New York Police Department in 2021 as left in 2020. According to the report: ‘In the wake of a spasmodic year of protests and pandemic, plus an aftermath of violent crime, the profession may be fast approaching a generational and possibly historic reckoning.’ See ‘Law enforcement faces unprecedented challenges in hiring and keeping recruits’.
But on top of long-standing issues in relation to police numbers exacerbated by political direction of policing behaviour while enforcing ‘pandemic’ lockdown measures, it is clear that the number of serving police has been reduced throughout the past three years by using two additional mechanisms: In many places, forcing those who resisted the ‘kill shot’ to resign from service – see, for example, ‘Victoria Police facing exodus due to draconian Covid rules’ – and, everywhere, by killing off a proportion of the police who were mandated to take the shot (which will continue to have impact in the years ahead).
Apart from this, the damaged reputation police suffered as a result of their role in enforcing the Elite program against those people willing to nonviolently protest the violation of their constitutional and human rights, has meant that the conscience-based resignation rate of police has risen – see, for example, ‘Conscientious Resignation of Police Officer in Australia’ – while recruitment has suffered in many places.
In any case, two critical questions to ask are these: Were government policies that led to police violence during the pandemic designed to provoke public anger and induce police retirements and resignations as ways of reducing police numbers easily? And was official interference in police decisions about whether or not to investigate injection deaths partly designed to disenchant conscientious officers and induce further resignation/retirements?
Why would governments do this? Could it be part of a plan to facilitate the transformation of how policing is conducted? After all, the World Economic Forum has been clear about the Elite intention to robotize the workforce, with more than half of human workers projected to be replaced by robots within a few years. See ‘Machines Will Do More Tasks Than Humans by 2025 but Robot Revolution Will Still Create 58 Million Net New Jobs in Next Five Years’. So why should we expect police to be forced out of the workforce, one way or another, at a lesser rate than elsewhere?
Moreover, there is an additional problem: Any human police officer with a reasonably ‘normal’ psychological profile has a conscience. And these will not serve well in enforcing the coming technocratic order.
Separately from the numbers issue, the ongoing militarization of police forces around the world has been noted by many scholars. For a summary of some issues in relation to policing in the USA, see this article written in 2017: ‘Why are Police in the USA so Terrified?’
But it is clear that the trend to militarize policing has been accelerating for some years. In a recent article US constitutional attorney John Whitehead succinctly elaborates this trend as just one of the features to be expected from the US government in 2023:
‘Militarized police. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are moving into the next phase of the transformation, turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.’ See ‘What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same’ and ‘Stingray Tracking Devices: Who’s Got Them?’
So police numbers are being reduced and police are being militarized. But that is not all.
Transhuman Police
A critical component of the Elite program is to turn those not killed into transhuman slaves.
While many people involved in this field are concerned with treating disabilities to improve the life experience of those afflicted, and some are engaged in ongoing discussions to consider the ethical issues this raises, it is clear that this is the sanitized version of a program that has far more hideous implications. For a sanitized version, watch this video of a World Economic Forum discussion held on 24 January 2020: ‘When Humans Become Cyborgs’.
But, for the Elite, there is little point deploying these technologies unless they can be controlled by Elite agents. After all, as the World Economic Forum made clear in 2016, by 2030 ‘You’ll Own Nothing. And You’ll Be Happy.’ See ‘8 predictions for the world in 2030’.
Obviously, if you are to own nothing and be happy about it, either you have reached some exalted state of human consciousness in which possessions no longer matter or someone is messing with your mind so that you believe what is not true.
And the best way to mess with someone’s mind is to implant a microchip into their body that enables control of that mind by someone else.
After all, altering what people think, feel, believe and do – through genetic manipulation and implanting technologies – is the very essence of transhumanism. So, to reiterate, transhumanists don’t want individuals with free will, they want individuals whose thoughts, feelings and behaviour can be controlled; that is, they want slaves. While this is explained at some length in the article ‘Beware the Transhumanists’ above, it is also made emphatically clear by World Economic Forum spokesperson, Professor Yuval Noah Harrari, in a 3-minute video which includes these words:
COVID is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance.
We now see mass surveillance systems established, even in democratic countries which previously rejected them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously, surveillance was mainly above the skin, now it’s going under the skin….
In summary then, the technology now available after decades of effort enables receiver nanochips to be sprayed, injected or otherwise implanted into human bodies. With the ongoing deployment of 5G (which includes extensive space and ground-based technologies: see ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’), just one outcome of these combined technologies is that it will be possible to direct the individual behaviour of each person so implanted with directions from an external source.
You can watch a description of how the Covid-19 shots have been used to inject nanotechnology into the bodies of people which, under the direction of other individuals via EMF signals, can be assembled to establish a permanent communication and control link between the transhuman and those responsible for controlling it. Watch Maria Zeee’s interview of Dr. David Nixon who shows real time video footage of the nanotechnology inside the Covid-19 injections assembling robotic arms that guide the nanotechnology development: ‘World First: Robotic Arms Assembling Via Nanotech Inside COVID-19 “Vaccines” – Filmed in Real Time’.
There is another excellent video interview by Dr. Faiez Kirsten of Dr. Ana Mihalcea discussing the transhumanist agenda. This includes consideration of how geoengineering – by spraying metal particulates (such as aluminium, barium and strontium) and synthetic biology into the atmosphere – is being used to modify all life on this planet (‘to modify every cell, every microbe, to digitize it and then to fuse it in its natural state with synthetic biology’), the role of electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) such as 5G in this scheme, and the purpose of nanotechnology ingredients in the injections. In essence, they conclude,besides killing vast numbers of people, they want to control the minds of those left alive. In summarizing, Mihalcea emphasised that her research demonstrates that the unvaccinated are not safe and they must take further action to defend their health from the synthetic biology attacks through atmospheric geoengineering and contaminated food.
‘We are running out of time as the human species and our planet is being destroyed via synthetic biology. If you want to survive and you want your children and grandchildren to have a chance of survival you must rise now and you must fight.’ Watch ‘A Discussion with Dr Ana Mihalcea on Transhumanism and EDTA Chelation’.
Moreover, given that the control technology of its transhuman slaves will be owned by corporate executives, this means that the Elite will be able to control everything from the launch of nuclear weapons (by using remote control to direct the chosen individual in a particular chain of command to order [or execute] the launch of one or more nuclear weapons at the target[s] nominated at the time[s] specified), deploy ‘cyborg soldiers’, ‘cyborg workers’ and ‘cyborg consumers’ to do as directed and, of course, ‘cyborg police’ to carry out the orders issued by those controlling the command technology.
In the case of transhuman police, this could range from duties resembling those now performed by police to any other task whatsoever to which they are assigned. And because the implanted chip will override free will, the transhuman individual will have no awareness of choice and will simply robotically perform the tasks delivered by an artificial intelligence program to the technological implants in its body and brain.
So whether programmed to issue a fine, kill a noncompliant individual, forcibly relocate one or more people from a rural area to the nearest ‘smart city’ or simply go home, the cyborg police officer will do as directed without thought or feeling of its own.
Technocratic Police and Corporate Private Security
And this is clearly evident in relation to police work where, beyond even the measures outlined above, a substantial range of new technologies will robotize policing, particularly in relation to primary functions: surveillance and control.
In essence, an increasing number of policing functions are being technologized to make policing more ruthlessly efficient. This involves use of a range of technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Bodies (IoB), the Internet of Places (IoP), artificial intelligence (AI), geofencing, digital identity, surveillance and facial recognition (3D) cameras, smart street poles and lights (which gather data via facial recognition cameras and environmental sensors, display digital signage and use speakers to instruct the immediate population how to behave), license plate readers and vehicle kill switches as well as autonomous and electromagnetic weapons.
But how these technologies are combined and deployed varies. To illustrate this, consider the Israeli private security company Gabriel Protects which offers a suite of surveillance and control services: ‘Preempt and contain physical threats in real time with smart technology. Billions are spent monitoring and recording security incidents. Gabriel detects and responds to them. Gabriel’s next generation security technology instantly detects and automates the response to violent threats, saving precious time and lives.’
As Whitney Webb explains: ‘much of the company’s future vision coincides with the vision of the intelligence agencies backing it – pre-crime, robotic policing and biometric surveillance.’ Hence, under the guise of stopping mass shootings ‘a surveillance system backed by top Mossad, CIA and FBI officials is being installed in schools, houses of worship, and other civilian locations’ throughout the USA. The Gabriel system includes the company’s ‘threat detection’ technology, which involves the use of ‘smart cameras’ that use AI as well as facial recognition and related technologies to detect weapons, ‘fights’ and ‘abnormal behavior’ in a particular area. The cameras throughout a facility, along with ‘smart shield’ panic buttons which can be activated both manually and remotely, are meant to act as ‘activation triggers’, with the triggering largely automated and managed by AI. When a trigger is set off, the Gabriel system enters the appropriate ‘alert mode’, which includes emergency, panic, silent panic and yellow (for minor incidents). Once activated, the panic button offers two-way communication, a live video feed and gunshot detection by acoustic means. See ‘CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US’ and ‘Anonymous Philanthropist Gifts Israeli Life-Saving Tech to 500 US Synagogues and Schools’.
As one would expect, given the company is providing technologies that enable implementation of the Elite program to lock us all into their ‘smart cities’, Gabriel intends to expand far beyond schools and houses of worship to retail stores, warehouses, data centers and banks and is already heavily reliant on AI and machine learning while using drones and robots as security tools. Beyond this, it intends to develop predictive policing (‘pre-crime’) capabilities. See ‘Incident Response Solutions’ and ‘Disrupting Legacy Security’. Of course, ‘pre-crime’ protocols are designed to ‘eliminate public dissent’. See ‘CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US’.
Gabriel is not the only corporation researching and providing technologies in these fields. Another prominent corporation is Palantir Technologies. There are others.
Needless to say, these corporations have close ties to the academy, the military and the intelligence community as well, all of which are also playing key roles in imposing the Elite program.
Obviously, these surveillance and control technologies are being widely deployed around the world with countries like China, Israel (including in Palestine) and the United States leading the way.
But ‘explosive ordnance disposal robots’ have been used offensively since 1993 when a one-metre tall, 218-kilogram remote-controlled robot was sent into an apartment, used a television camera to locate a suspect hidden in a cupboard and then, under the remote-control direction of a technician, used a high-pressure water gun to knock the shotgun out of the suspected gunman’s hands, enabling the county police department’s version of a SWAT team to arrest him.
More dramatically, a police ‘killer robot’ has already been used to kill a suspected gunman. In 2016, police in Dallas in the USA crudely attached a bomb to a robot originally designed to investigate and safely discharge explosives and then deployed it near a suspect where it was detonated remotely. See ‘How the Dallas Police Used an Improvised Killer Robot to Take Down the Gunman’.
The fundamental point is that human police officers are being replaced by a series of technologies guided by artificial intelligence and ending with the use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS).
And these technologies are already being widely deployed and used as part of the ongoing Elite program to build a technocratic state that will subvert human identity, privacy, dignity, volition and freedom.
How Can We Resist this Technocratic Policing Model Effectively?
A long-planned, vast range and parallel sequence of measures is being rapidly implemented to capture political, social, economic, medical and technological control of the human population. The intention is to kill off a substantial proportion of humanity and imprison those left alive as transhuman slaves in the Elite’s technocratic (surveillance and control) ‘smart’ cities, which will be policed by a range of current and emerging technologies.
And, as I have explained previously – see ‘We Are Being Smashed Politically, Economically, Medically and Technologically by the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’: Why? How Do We Fight Back Effectively?’ – because the Global Elite controls conventional political, economic, financial, technological, medical, educational, media and other important levers of society, the Elite has control of how events unfold while simultaneouslygiving it control of the narrative about what is taking place. As a result, the truth about the Elite planis easily concealed. Consequently, effective resistance to this complex and sophisticated program requires a response based on a full understanding of the Elite’s deeper agenda and that is equally sophisticated.
This means that we cannot rely on any conventional channel, political, legal or otherwise.
Hence, the most effective defence against any aspect, including the technocratic policing model, of the full program that Elite agents in the World Economic Forum and elsewhere are imposing on us is to take action now that prevents foundational components of their program from being put into place.
Obviously, this requires us to clearly identify the foundations on which the Elite program is being built and to then mobilize as many people as possible, in as many countries as possible, to nonviolently noncooperate with the building of these foundations or, to the extent they exist already, to disrupt them so that they cannot function effectively.
And the time to do this is now.
If we do this effectively, the technologies – including 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital ID, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), geofencing, a plethora of ‘Smart’ devices, and the surveillance and facial recognition cameras – that will make the technocratic policing model possible will be stopped before they are fully deployed.
So if you are interested in being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.
One of these strategic goals reads as follows:
‘To cause the police and security personnel to resist the introduction and use of those surveillance and control technologies – including (among many others) 5G, 6G, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), geofencing, smart street poles and lights (which gather data via facial recognition cameras and environmental sensors, display digital signage and use speakers to instruct the immediate population how to behave), digital identity, surveillance and facial recognition cameras, license plate readers, vehicle kill switches, drones (used as aerial police), robots (including as a ‘deadly force option’), autonomous and electromagnetic weapons – that are being used to transform policing to collect your data and control your behaviour as part of the ongoing Elite program to build a technocratic prison that will subvert human identity, human dignity, human volition, human privacy and/or human freedom.’
So one vital role that you can play is to talk to individual police officers that you know personally, inform them of the role they are slated to play in the coming technocratic order, and invite them to consider the implications of this for them and their loved ones, and then listen to them as they talk about it.
And you can visit your local police station or write them a letter to raise awareness of what is happening and ask them to consider whether this is a future they wish for themselves or their family.
In addition, you can download the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.
Moreover, if this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).
And if you want to organize a mass mobilization, such as a rally, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.
Ideally, prior to any such event, a liaison team should visit the police responsible for policing the event to discuss it but also raise awareness of how police are being used by the Elite in this context. See ‘Nonviolent Activism and the Police’ and ‘How To Do Police Liaison’.
At this point too, it is worth keeping in mind that in virtually all contexts, including when dealing with police, it is invaluable to listen, deeply. This should help you understand the other person better and might help open a door to greater awareness on their part in the future. In any case, it is a great gift, whatever its immediate outcome. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.
In parallel with our resistance, we must create the political, economic and social structures that serve our needs, not those of the Elite. That is why long-standing efforts to encourage and support people to grow their own biodynamic/organic food – see ‘23 Reasons You Should Start a Garden in 2023’ – participate in local trading schemes (involving the exchange of knowledge, skills, services and products with or without a local medium of exchange), such as Local Exchange Trading Systems and Community Exchange Systems, as well as develop structures for cooperation, governance, nonviolent defence and networking with other communities are so important.
Conclusion
To summarize very simply: human police officers are being militarily-equipped in the short term, to be rapidly replaced by transhuman police as well as ‘technocratic police’: artificial intelligence (AI) that will direct policing and involve transhuman police, drones, robots and autonomous & electromagnetic weapons systems (AWS). This is one small but vital part of the comprehensive Elite program to kill off most of us, enslave those left alive, enclose the Commons forever and capture all wealth.
Hence, one valuable function we can perform is to inform police of this and invite them to resist it.
Of course, it is not a message that will resonate with every police officer or every member of the community, for that matter. As you already know.
But it is crucial that we keep telling the truth and giving people chances to perceive the deeper Elite program and what it portends for humanity. Because it is not a future any human being, including police officer, should want to embrace if they value human identity, privacy, dignity, volition and freedom for themselves or their children.
Hence, our persistence in presenting the information, while listening well when appropriate, is crucial to mobilizing the resistance we need to succeed.
4/2023
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.
The edifice of American imperial power has never been challenged at its foundation. It is now.
Russia and China are determined to hold the American perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage to account. Uncle Sam’s days – indeed decades – of wanton criminality are over. There’s going to be hell to pay as the imperialist tyranny in Washington hits a wall of reality.
Several weeks have gone by with the United States and its Western lackeys stonewalling at the United Nations Security Council, squirming and resisting calls from Moscow and Beijing for an international criminal investigation into the sabotage of the Baltic Sea pipelines that were blown up in September.
A swathe of independent observers, such as American economics professor Jeffrey Sachs and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, have concurred with the investigative report published on February 8 by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh which claims that U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior White House staff ordered the Pentagon to take out the natural gas pipeline that runs along the Baltic Sea bed from Russia to Germany.
Russia and China are adamant about not letting this vital subject be ignored. They want a proper investigation, international accountability and criminal prosecution. Moscow and Beijing are right to insist on this. Washington and its Western allies’ presumption of impunity has gone on for too many decades. The buck stops here and both Russia and China are strong enough to ensure that the United States cannot threaten, blackmail, or arm-twist its way out of scrutiny.
The Nord Stream project is a major international civilian infrastructure, costing in excess of $20 billion to construct over more than a decade. At 1,200 kilometres in length under the Baltic Sea, it is an impressive feat of engineering, symbolizing the mutual benefits of good neighborliness and cooperative trading.
For the United States to blow this pipeline up in order to knock Russia out of the European energy market so that it could muscle in with its own more expensive gas supplies is a shocking act of state terrorism and criminality. It is also potentially an act of war against Russia and callous sabotage against supposed European allies whose citizens are now suffering economic misery from soaring energy bills. German workers have this week shut down the entire economy from industrial protests over collapsing businesses and unbearable cost of living.
Of course, the Nord Stream sabotage is an urgent matter of basic justice, accountability for an atrocious crime, as well as massive international financial reparations. It’s almost hilarious how the self-proclaimed American protagonist of “rules-based global order” is desperately procrastinating over a glaring incident of dereliction and chaos.
But more than the essential obligation of justice is the legacy of impunity. For the perpetrators of such a wanton terrorist act not to be held accountable sets a perilous precedent. Otherwise, what is stopping the state terrorists from repeating equally brazen acts of sabotage and warmongering? The very concept of international law and the United Nations Charter is demolished, not simply undermined.
The Nord Stream incident potentially opens an era of rampant lawlessness and state banditry – by a nuclear superpower, the United States, using its Western minions for cover. The Western news media, in their reluctance to investigate, are also exposed as nothing more than propaganda channels in the service of imperial masters.
The present is reminiscent of the 1930s during a time of fascist expansionism by Nazi Germany and other imperialist nations, including the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Japan, and others. Nazi Germany was not the unique culprit during that earlier time of barbarism, notwithstanding the official Western revisionism of history to absolve itself.
After the Second World War amid the ashes of international destruction and up to 85 million deaths, the United Nations and its Charter were founded to ostensibly enshrine the stricture that there would be no repetition of the 1930s-style lawlessness and state terrorism.
That lofty aspiration was always a pathetic illusion. The decades after WWII saw no halt to the imperialist warmongering and subterfuges carried out primarily by the United States and its Western allies, in particular Britain. What a mockery that the U.S. and Britain were afforded permanent member states of the UN Security Council given that these two rogue powers have been largely responsible for countless wars post-1945. The decades-long wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are but the most notorious war crimes of the Anglo-American “special relationship”.
During the Cold War decades, the Soviet Union provided a limited check on the worst depredations by Western imperialists. The People’s Republic of China was not strong enough to act as a deterrent force.
For about two decades after the Cold War officially ended in 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States rulers perceived a license for “full-spectrum dominance”. Washington embarked on a frenzy of endless wars that up till recently have prevailed.
The first reality check on the unbridled violence of the U.S. imperialists and their NATO henchmen was Russia’s military intervention in Syria in late 2015 to put an end to the Western machinations for yet another regime-change operation. Washington and its accomplices failed in their nefarious goals in Syria, albeit the Americans persist in illegally occupying part of the Arab country and stealing its oil resources.
Ukraine is the full manifestation of the end to impunity for the United States.
Russia under Vladimir Putin has recovered the military strength that was lost with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In some ways, present-day Russia is even more formidable owing to the development of new forms of weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and S-500 air defenses. Also, Russia’s economy is on a sounder footing than the Soviet Union which relied excessively on militarism. Hence, Moscow has been able to withstand the economic assault that Washington and its allies have tried to mount over the Ukraine conflict.
Just as important, too, China has risen to economic and military superpower status. Together, Russia and China now present an invulnerable countervailing force to the United States and its Western allies.
For nearly eight decades after World War Two, the United States was relatively free to run amok, trashing international law and nations’ sovereignty, racking up death tolls by the millions, and terrorizing the planet with its “benign”, narcissistic tyranny.
The conflict in Ukraine, where Russia has said “enough is enough” to years of U.S.-led NATO aggression, is demonstrating that the days of impunity are finally over for the would-be American hegemon.
Washington has recklessly raised the stakes to an unsustainable height in Ukraine. It has bet the house – and farm – on subjugating Russia for its next insatiable imperial move against China. But Moscow and Beijing are calling Uncle Sam’s bluff. The buck stops here.
The edifice of American imperial power has never been challenged at its foundation. It is now.
After the Crash 