Category Archives: Neoliberalism

The Stomach-churning Violence of Monsanto, Bayer and the Agrochemical Oligopoly

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: RINF

As humans, we have evolved with the natural environment over millennia. We have learned what to eat and what not to eat, what to grow and how to grow it and our diets have developed accordingly. We have hunted, gathered, planted and harvested. Our overall survival as a species has been based on gradual, emerging relationships with the seasons, insects, soil, animals, trees and seeds. And out of these relationships, we have seen the development of communities whose rituals and bonds have a deep connection with food production and the natural environment.

However, over the last couple generations, agriculture and food production has changed more than it had done over previous millennia. These changes have involved massive social upheaval as communities and traditions have been uprooted and have entailed modifying what we eat, how we grow our food and what we apply to it. All of this has been driven by geopolitical concerns and powerful commercial interests with their proprietary chemicals and patented seeds. The process of neoliberal globalisation is accelerating the process as farmers are encouraged to produce for global supply chains dominated by transnational agribusiness.

Certain crops are now genetically engineered, the range of crops we grow has become less diverse, synthetic biocides have been poured on crops and soil and our bodies have been subjected to a chemical bombardment. We have arrived at a point where we have lost touch with our deep-rooted microbiological and social connection with nature and have developed an arrogance that has placed ‘man’ above the environment and all other species. One of the consequences is that we have paid an enormous price in terms of the consequent social, environmental and health-related devastation.

Despite the promise and potential of science, it has too often in modern society become a tool of vested interests, an ideology wrapped in the vestiges of authority and the ‘superstition’ that its corporate-appointed priesthood should not be challenged nor questioned. Instead of liberating humankind, it has now too often become a tool of deception in the hands of companies like Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta which make up the oligopoly that controls what is an increasingly globalised system of modern food and agriculture.

These corporations have successfully instituted the notion that the mass application of biocides, monocropping and industrial agriculture are necessary and desirable. They are not. However, these companies have used their science and propaganda to project certainty in order to hide the fact that they have no real idea what their products and practices are doing to human health or the environment (and in cases when they do know, they do their best to cover it up or hide behind the notion of ‘commercial confidentiality‘).

Based on their limited, tainted studies and co-opted version of science, they say with certainty that, for example, genetically engineered food and glyphosate are ‘safe’. And when inconvenient truths do emerge, they will mobilise their massive lobbying resources to evade regulations, they will seek to hide the dangers of their products or they will set out to destroy scientists whose findings challenge their commercial bottom line.

Soil microbiologists are still trying to fully comprehend soil microbes and how they function as anintegrated network in relation to plants. The agrochemical sector has little idea of how their biocides have affected soils. It merely churns out public relations spin that their inputs are harmless for soil, plants and human health. Such claims are not based on proper, in-depth, long-term studies. They are based on a don’t look, don’t find approach or a manipulation of standards and procedures that ensure their products make it on to the commercial market and stay there. The devastating impacts on soil are increasingly clear to see.

And what are these biocides doing to us as humans? Numerous studies have linked the increase in pesticide us with spiralling rates of ill health. Kat Carrol of the National Health Federation is concerned about the impacts on human gut bacteria that play a big role in how organs function and our neurological health. The gut microbiome can contain up to six pounds of bacteria and is what Carroll calls ‘human soil’. She says that with their agrochemicals and food additives, powerful companies are attacking this ‘soil’ and with it the sanctity of the human body.

And her concerns seem valid. Many important neurotransmitters are located in the gut. Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, these transmitters affect our moods and thinking. Feed gut bacteria a cocktail of biocides and is it any surprise that many diseases are increasing?

For instance, findings published in the journal ‘Translational Psychiatry’ provide strong evidence that gut bacteria can have a direct physical impact on the brain. Alterations in the composition of the gut microbiome have been implicated in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including autism, chronic pain, depression, and Parkinson’s Disease.

Environmental campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason has written extensively on the impacts of agrochemicals (especially glyphosate) on humans, not least during child and adolescent development. In her numerous documents and papers, she cites a plethora of data and studies that link the use of agrochemicals with various diseases and ailments. She has also noted the impact of these chemicals on the human gut microbiome.

Writing in The Guardian, Mo Costandi discusses the importance of gut bacteria and their balance. In adolescence the brain undergoes a protracted period of heightened neural plasticity, during which large numbers of synapses are eliminated in the prefrontal cortex and a wave of ‘myelination’ sweeps across this part of the brain. These processes refine the circuitry in the prefrontal cortex and increase its connectivity to other brain regions. Myelination is also critical for normal, everyday functioning of the brain. Myelin increases a nerve fibre’s conduction velocity by up to a hundred times, and so when it breaks down, the consequences can be devastating.

Other recent work shows that gut microbes control the maturation and function of microglia, the immune cells that eliminate unwanted synapses in the brain; age-related changes to gut microbe composition might regulate myelination and synaptic pruning in adolescence and could, therefore, contribute to cognitive development. Upset those changes, and, As Mason argues, there are going to be serious implications for children and adolescents. Mason places glyphosate at the core of the ailments and disorders currently affecting young people in Wales and the UK in general.

Yet we are still being subjected to an unregulated cocktail of agrochemicals which end up interacting with each other in the gut. Regulatory agencies and governments appear to work hand in glove with the agrochemical sector.

Carol Van Strum has released documents indicating collusion between the manufacturers of dangerous chemicals and regulatory bodies. Evaggelos Vallianatos has highlighted the massive fraud surrounding the regulation of biocides and the wide scale corruption at laboratories that were supposed to test these chemicals for safety. Many of these substances were not subjected to what was deemed proper testing in the first place yet they remain on the market. Shiv Chopra has also highlighted how various dangerous products were allowed on the commercial market and into the food chain due to collusion between these companies and public officials.

Powerful transnational corporations are using humanity as their collective guinea pig. But those who question them or their corporate science are automatically labelled anti-science and accused of committing crimes against humanity because they are preventing their products from being commercialised ‘to help the poor or hungry’. Such attacks on critics by company mouthpieces who masquerade as public officials, independent scientists or independent journalists are mere spin. They are, moreover, based on the sheer hypocrisy that these companies (owned and controlled by elite interests) have humanity’s and the environment’s best interests at heart.

Many of these companies have historically profited from violence. Unfortunately, that character of persists. They directly profit on the back of militarism, whether as a result of the US-backed ‘regime change’ in Ukraine or the US invasion of Iraq. They also believe they can cajole (poison) nature by means of chemicals and bully governments and attack critics, while rolling out propaganda campaigns for public consumption.

Whether it involves neocolonialism and the destruction of indigenous practices and cultures under the guise of ‘development’, the impoverishment of farmers in India, the twisting and writing of national and international laws, the destruction of rural communities, the globalisation of bad food and illness, the deleterious impacts on health and soil, the hollowing out of public institutions and the range of human rights abuses we saw documented during The Monsanto Tribunal, what we are witnessing is structural violence in many forms.

Pesticides are in fact “a global human rights concern” and are in no way vital to ensuring food security. Ultimately, what we see is ignorance, arrogance and corruption masquerading as certainty and science.

“… when we wound the planet grievously by excavating its treasures – the gold, mineral and oil, destroy its ability to breathe by converting forests into urban wastelands, poison its waters with toxic wastes and exterminate other living organisms – we are in fact doing all this to our own bodies… all other species are to be enslaved or driven to extinction if need be in the interests of human ‘progress’… we are part of the same web of life –where every difference we construct artificially between ‘them’ and ‘us’ adds only one more brick to the tombstone of humankind itself.” – from ‘Micobes of the World Unite!’ By Satya Sager

Gaius Publius: Defining Neoliberalism

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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.

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* 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.

What You May Not Know About Today’s Economic War

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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.

Zucktown, USA

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Facebook, Amazon, and Google are reviving the ill-fated “company towns” of the Gilded Age

By Julianne Tveten

Source: The Baffler

EARLIER THIS YEAR IN SILICON VALLEY, a phalanx of six-figure-earning Facebook engineers confronted Mark Zuckerberg about subsidizing their extortionate rents. Meanwhile, the contract laborers who serve them bacon kimchi dogs and duck confit found themselves cordoned off from the affordable housing market—where salaries approaching $74,000 qualify—and began converting their garages into homes. Still, if these events point to a dire situation, they’re but the latest stirrings of the hulking leviathan that is the region’s housing crisis—an issue that has peppered the headlines of news outlets great and small for nearly a decade.

Thanks in part to this accretion of bad press, Zuckerberg and his fellow cyborgian billionaires have sprung into action as property developers. In July, Facebook announced plans to create “Willow Campus,” an aggressively rectilinear, Rem Koolhaas-designed rebrand of a Menlo Park office complex it purchased in 2015. The expansion of its headquarters will boast fifteen hundred units of housing, 15 percent of which it claims will be “offered at below-market rates.” If that isn’t sufficiently microcosmic, the company promises to dedicate 125,000 square feet to commercial space, promising a grocery store, pharmacy, and the cryptically worded “additional community-facing retail.”

Equally if not more responsible for crafting California’s bloodsucking geometric crapscape is Google, whose newfangled parent company Alphabet has vowed to provide temporary housing, in the form of modular dwellings, for three hundred of its employees in its home city of Mountain View. For years, Google has been seeking to wrest control of the city from its government; last year, it gained over 370,000 square feet of office space along with the right to develop 1.4 million square feet in the North Bayshore neighborhood after vying with LinkedIn to furnish the territory with a new police station, road improvements, and college scholarships. (The modular homes will be constructed on a former NASA air base, which the company signed an agreement to lease for sixty years.)

We’re witnessing, in these schemes, a revival of the company town. An oft-recurring feature of the Western capitalist imaginary, the company town’s American variety dates back to the nineteenth century; railroad industrialist George Pullman’s eponymous city in Illinois provides one of the more illustrative examples. Pullman characterized his town, completed in 1884, as a lucrative, pro-business utopia filled with satisfied participants, employee and investor alike. Its veneer was indeed shiny: the amenities it promised—yards, indoor plumbing, gas, trash removal—were rare for industrial workers of the time, and its ultra-formal gardens and shopping center, which equipped them with a barbershop, dentist’s offices, a bank, and a slew of overpriced retail, offered a vanguard capitalist’s dabbling in luxury.

There was a catch: paternalistic and omnipresent capitalism. Immaculately manicured trees were merely curtains obscuring a panopticon, one that kept workers behaviorally economized. (White workers, that is—the town expressly excluded black people.) “[Pullman] wanted to create a company town where everybody would be . . . content with their place in the capitalist system,” Jane Eva Baxter explained to Paleofuture. Workers were forced to rent—with no option to buy—the uniform row houses that corralled them, and from which they worried over persistent inspection and imminent eviction. Their employers likewise controlled which books filled their libraries and which performances took place in their theaters, and a ban precluded them from congregating at saloons or holding town meetings unless sanctioned by the Pullman Company, lest they entertain the notion of unionizing.

The forced exchange not just of labor, but of personal autonomy, for the tenuous ability to buy bread or light one’s stove is, in a word, inhumane, and in three, cause for revolt. Pullman workers had organized several strikes throughout the 1880s, but none were so monumental as the one in 1894. In response to the prior year’s economic depression, Pullman opted to slash workers’ wages; rents, however, remained steadfastly fixed, enriching the company’s reported worth of $62 million while leaving workers with as little as two cents (after paying for housing costs). In partnership with the American Railway Union, four thousand Pullman workers, galvanized and desperate, withheld their labor, and legions of workers throughout the nation would soon join them. Yet the strike collapsed when the Cleveland administration, in a violent display of authoritarianism, deployed federal troops and imprisoned labor leaders. Not long after, by Illinois Supreme Court order, the town was forced to sell everything not used expressly for “industry.”

Still, Pullman’s fiasco didn’t discourage other magnates. In 1900, chocolatier Milton Hershey began construction on a factory complex near a collection of dairy farms in rural Pennsylvania, where he declared there’d be “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil”—a Delphic precursor to Google’s now infamous and defunct slogan, “Don’t be evil.” To attract workers, Hershey reclaimed many of Pullman’s gilded comforts: indoor plumbing, pristine lawns, central heating, garbage pickup, and eventually, the theaters and sports venues any company town worth its salt would host.

What was designed as a wholesome advertisement for the company quickly morphed into a miserly surveillance state. Hershey, who served as the town’s mayor, constable, and fire chief, patrolled neighborhoods to survey the maintenance of houses and hired private detectives to monitor employees’ after-hours alcohol consumption. While the town managed to stage a sort of idyllic capitalist performance for onlookers, by the 1930s its employees resented their binding environs and the Depression-era layoffs they endured from a company earning ten times its annual payroll in after-tax profits. A crippled attempt to unionize with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) bred a 1937 sit-down strike; days later, farmers and company cheerleaders armed with rocks and pitchforks bloodied and ejected the dissidents, destabilizing for good another corporate-civic lark. Hershey’s vast estate, however, remains unscathed to this day.

If Facebook and Google have begun to revive the company town, Amazon has already given it a futuristic luster. California’s inchoate company towns pale in comparison to their northern counterpart, which occupies 19 percent of Seattle’s office space and a farcical 8.1 million square feet. (Its CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, has vowed to acquire four million more over the next five years, a muscular move meant to complement his midlife-crisis physique.) Touting its sponsorship of local engineering and sustainability programs, Amazon crows about such “investments” as its dog park, playing fields, art installations, and Buckyball-reminiscent domical gardens. Of course, with Bezos’s colonizing aspirations comes yet another bellicose rental market—the very conditions Facebook and Google claim to be combatting. When considered alongside its recent purchase of Whole Foods, Amazon’s dream of tethering its employees to their jobs—by way of homogenized cubes for rent and lightly discounted quinoa chips—is fast becoming a reality.

Like George Pullman and Milton Hershey, the tech industry’s elites take all prisoners in their respective campaigns to expand, absorb, and dominate. The tech company town, that most contemporary of neofeudalist wangles, is the next step in West Coast corporate behemoths’ quest to lure employees into a twenty-four-hour working existence—the totalizing successor to bottomless Indian food spreads, on-site bike-repair shops, and Frank Gehrized habitats. Its premise deviates not at all from that of its antecedents: a genial, painstakingly aestheticized service to workers, where beneficent corporate hands take the reins of the public good  for the well-being of the community. This time around, though, that community will be bridled with union–busting and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate.

Certainly, the megalomaniacs who aim to populate municipal fixtures with registered-trademark logos will expect cities to genuflect at every turn. Bezos has exemplified this in Seattle, whose recent measure to “tax the rich” drove him to seek another location in which to build Amazon’s second headquarters. While residents of its hometown grapple with a commandeering leech that “suck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep,” Amazon will soon attempt to prime another city to be sapped. Meanwhile, the smooth-faced metallic vampires of California have just begun to cosplay as frontiersmen, raring to follow Bezos’s lead. Drunk on glib TED Talk propagandizing, and accustomed to dismissing the civic inconveniences of corporate regulations and poor neighborhoods, our technosettlers feel little need to heed the lessons of the past when their chief interest is to monopolize the future. Taxing the techie billionaires is a start, but only when cities refuse to be their hosts will they cease to be their parasites.

 

Julianne Tveten writes about the technology industry’s relationship with socioeconomics and culture. Her work has appeared in Current Affairs, Hazlitt, In These Times, The Outline, and elsewhere.

Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy

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By C.J. Hopkins

Source: The Unz Review

Back in October of 2016, I wrote a somewhat divisive essay in which I suggested that political dissent is being systematically pathologized. In fact, this process has been ongoing for decades, but it has been significantly accelerated since the Brexit referendum and the Rise of Trump (or, rather, the Fall of Hillary Clinton, as it was Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for eight more years of corporatocracy with a sugar coating of identity politics, and not their enthusiasm for Trump, that mostly put the clown in office.)

In the twelve months since I wrote that piece, we have been subjected to a concerted campaign of corporate media propaganda for which there is no historical precedent. Virtually every major organ of the Western media apparatus (the most powerful propaganda machine in the annals of powerful propaganda machines) has been relentlessly churning out variations on a new official ideological narrative designed to generate and enforce conformity. The gist of this propaganda campaign is that “Western democracy” is under attack by a confederacy of Russians and white supremacists, as well as “the terrorists” and other “extremists” it’s been under attack by for the last sixteen years.

I’ve been writing about this campaign for a year now, so I’m not going to rehash all the details. Suffice to say we’ve gone from Russian operatives hacking the American elections to “Russia-linked” persons “apparently” setting up “illegitimate” Facebook accounts, “likely operated out of Russia,” and publishing ads that are “indistinguishable from legitimate political speech” on the Internet. This is what the corporate media is presenting as evidence of “an unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy,” a handful of political ads on Facebook. In addition to the Russian hacker propaganda, since August, we have also been treated to relentless white supremacist hysteria and daily reminders from the corporate media that “white nationalism is destroying the West.” The negligible American neo-Nazi subculture has been blown up into a biblical Behemoth inexorably slouching its way towards the White House to officially launch the Trumpian Reich.

At the same time, government and corporate entities have been aggressively restricting (and in many cases eliminating) fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, the right to privacy, and the right to due process under the law. The justification for this curtailment of rights (which started in earnest in 2001, following the September 11 attacks) is protecting the public from the threat of “terrorism,” which apparently shows no signs of abating. As of now, the United States has been in a State of Emergency for over sixteen years. The UK is in a virtual State of Emergency. France is now in the process of enshrining its permanent State of Emergency into law. Draconian counter-terrorism measures have been implemented throughout the EU. Not just the notorious American police but police throughout the West have been militarized. Every other day we learn of some new emergency security measuredesigned to keep us safe from “the terrorists,” the “lone wolf shooters,” and other “extremists.”

Conveniently, since the Brexit referendum and unexpected election of Trump (which is when the capitalist ruling classes first recognized that they had a widespread nationalist backlash on their hands), the definition of “terrorism” (or, more broadly, “extremism”) has been expanded to include not just Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or whoever we’re calling “the terrorists” these days, but anyone else the ruling classes decide they need to label “extremists.” The FBI has designated Black Lives Matter “Black Identity Extremists.” The FBI and the DHS have designated Antifa “domestic terrorists.” Hosting corporations have shut down several white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites, along with their access to online fundraising. Google is algorithmically burying leftist news and opinion sources such as Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, and Truthout, among others. Twitter, Facebook, and Google have teamed up to cleanse the Internet of “extremist content,” “hate speech,” and whatever else they arbitrarily decide is inappropriate. YouTube, with assistance from the ADL (which deems pro-Palestinian activists and other critics of Israel “extremists”) is censoring “extremist” and “controversial” videos, in an effort to “fight terrorist content online.” Facebook is also collaborating with Israel to thwart “extremism,” “incitement of violence,” and whatever else Israel decides is “inflammatory.” In the UK, simply reading “terrorist content” is punishable by fifteen years in prison. Over three thousand people were arrested last year for publishing “offensive” and “menacing” material.

Whatever your opinion of these organizations and “extremist” persons is beside the point. I’m not a big fan of neo-Nazis, personally, but neither am I a fan of Antifa. I don’t have much use for conspiracy theories, or a lot of the nonsense one finds on the Internet, but I consume a fair amount of alternative media, and I publish in CounterPunch, The Unz Review, ColdType, and other non-corporate journals. I consider myself a leftist, basically, but my political essays are often reposted by right-wing and, yes, even pro-Russia blogs. I get mail from former Sanders supporters, Trump supporters, anarchists, socialists, former 1960s radicals, anti-Semites, and other human beings, some of whom I passionately agree with, others of whom I passionately disagree with. As far as I can tell from the emails, none of these readers voted for Clinton, or Macron, or supported the TPP, or the debt-enslavement and looting of Greece, or the ongoing restructuring of the Greater Middle East (and all the lovely knock-on effects that has brought us), or believe that Trump is a Russian operative, or that Obama is Martin Luther Jesus-on-a-stick. What they share, despite their opposing views, is a general awareness that the locus of power in our post-Cold War age is primarily corporate, or global capitalist, and neoliberal in nature. They also recognize that they are being subjected to a massive propaganda campaign designed to lump them all together (again, despite their opposing views) into an intentionally vague and undefinable category comprising anyone and everyone, everywhere, opposing the hegemony of global capitalism, and its non-ideological ideology (the nature of which I’ll get into in a moment).

As I wrote in that essay a year ago, “a line is being drawn in the ideological sand.” This line cuts across both Left and Right, dividing what the capitalist ruling classes designate “normal” from what they label “extremist.” The traditional ideologicalparadigm, Left versus Right, is disappearing (except as a kind of minstrel show), and is being replaced, or overwritten, by a pathological paradigm based upon the concept of “extremism.”

* * *

Although the term has been around since the Fifth Century BC, the concept of “extremism” as we know it today developed in the late Twentieth Century and has come into vogue in the last three decades. During the Cold War, the preferred exonymics were “subversive,” “radical,” or just plain old “communist,” all of which terms referred to an actual ideological adversary. In the early 1990s, as the U.S.S.R. disintegrated, and globalized Western capitalism became the unrivaled global-hegemonic ideological system that it is today, a new concept was needed to represent the official enemy and its ideology. The concept of “extremism” does that perfectly, as it connotes, not an external enemy with a definable ideological goal, but rather, a deviation from the norm. The nature of the deviation (e.g., right-wing, left-wing, faith-based, and so on) is secondary, almost incidental. The deviation itself is the point. The “terrorist,” the “extremist,” the “white supremacist,” the “religious fanatic,” the “violent anarchist” … these figures are not rational actors whose ideas we need to intellectually engage with in order to debate or debunk. They are pathological deviations, mutant cells within the body of “normality,” which we need to identify and eliminate, not for ideological reasons, but purely in order to maintain “security.”

A truly global-hegemonic system like contemporary global capitalism (the first of this kind in human history), technically, has no ideology. “Normality” is its ideology … an ideology which erases itself and substitutes the concept of what’s “normal,” or, in other words, “just the way it is.” The specific characteristics of “normality,” although not quite arbitrary, are ever-changing. In the West, for example, thirty years ago, smoking was normal. Now, it’s abnormal. Being gay was abnormal. Now, it’s normal. Being transgender is becoming normal, although we’re still in the early stages of the process. Racism has become abnormal. Body hair is currently abnormal. Walking down the street in a semi-fugue state robotically thumbing the screen of a smartphone that you just finished thumbing a minute ago is “normal.” Capitalism has no qualms with these constant revisions to what is considered normal, because none of them are threats to capitalism. On the contrary, as far as values are concerned, the more flexible and commodifiable the better.

See, despite what intersectionalists will tell you, capitalism has no interest in racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, or any other despotic values (though it has no problem working with these values when they serve its broader strategic purposes). Capitalism is an economic system, which we have elevated to a social system. It only has one fundamental value, exchange value, which isn’t much of a value, at least not in terms of organizing society or maintaining any sort of human culture or reverence for the natural world it exists in. In capitalist society, everything, everyone, every object and sentient being, every concept and human emotion, is worth exactly what the market will bear … no more, no less, than its market price. There is no other measure of value.

Yes, we all want there to be other values, and we pretend there are, but there aren’t, not really. Although we’re free to enjoy parochial subcultures based on alternative values (i.e., religious bodies, the arts, and so on), these subcultures operate within capitalist society, and ultimately conform to its rules. In the arts, for example, works are either commercial products, like any other commodity, or they are subsidized by what could be called “the simulated aristocracy,” the ivy league-educated leisure classes (and lower class artists aspiring thereto) who need to pretend that they still have “culture” in order to feel superior to the masses. In the latter case, this feeling of superiority is the upscale product being sold. In the former, it is entertainment, distraction from the depressing realities of living, not in a society at all, but in a marketplace with no real human values. (In the absence of any real cultural values, there is no qualitative difference between Gerhard Richter and Adam Sandler, for example. They’re both successful capitalist artists. They’re just selling their products in different markets.)

The fact that it has no human values is the evil genius of global capitalist society. Unlike the despotic societies it replaced, it has no allegiance to any cultural identities, or traditions, or anything other than money. It can accommodate any form of government, as long as it plays ball with global capitalism. Thus, the window dressing of “normality” is markedly different from country to country, but the essence of “normality” remains the same. Even in countries with state religions (like Iran) or state ideologies (like China), the governments play by the rules of global capitalism like everyone else. If they don’t, they can expect to receive a visit from global capitalism’s Regime Change Department (i.e., the US military and its assorted partners).

Which is why, despite the “Russiagate” hysteria the media have been barraging us with, the West is not going to war with Russia. Nor are we going to war with China. Russia and China are developed countries, whose economies are entirely dependent on global capitalism, as are Western economies. The economies of every developed nation on the planet are inextricably linked. This is the nature of the global hegemony I’ve been referring to throughout this essay. Not American hegemony, but global capitalist hegemony. Systemic, supranational hegemony (which I like to prefer “the Corporatocracy,” as it sounds more poetic and less post-structural).

…

We haven’t really got our minds around it yet, because we’re still in the early stages of it, but we have entered an epoch in which historical events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped, not by sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests. Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments thereto. Forget about the United States (i.e., the actual nation state) for a moment, and look at what’s been happening since the early 1990s. The US military’s “disastrous misadventures” in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia, among other exotic places (which have obviously had nothing to do with the welfare or security of any actual Americans), begin to make a lot more sense. Global capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation, eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clear-and-holding” the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies have been militarized, their citizens placed under constant surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate media.

I’m not suggesting there’s a bunch of capitalists sitting around in a room somewhere in their shiny black top hats planning all of this. I’m talking about systemic development, which is a little more complex than that, and much more difficult to intelligently discuss because we’re used to perceiving historico-political events in the context of competing nation states, rather than competing ideological systems … or non-competing ideological systems, for capitalism has no competition. What it has, instead, is a variety of insurgencies, the faith-based Islamic fundamentalist insurgency and the neo-nationalist insurgency chief among them. There will certainly be others throughout the near future as global capitalism consolidates control and restructures societies according to its values. None of these insurgencies will be successful.

Short some sort of cataclysm, like an asteroid strike or the zombie apocalypse, or, you know, violent revolution, global capitalism will continue to restructure the planet to conform to its ruthless interests. The world will become increasingly “normal.” The scourge of “extremism” and “terrorism” will persist, as will the general atmosphere of “emergency.” There will be no more Trumps, Brexit referendums, revolts against the banks, and so on. Identity politics will continue to flourish, providing a forum for leftist activist types (and others with an unhealthy interest in politics), who otherwise might become a nuisance, but any and all forms of actual dissent from global capitalist ideology will be systematically marginalized and pathologized.

This won’t happen right away, of course. Things are liable to get ugly first (as if they weren’t ugly enough already), but probably not in the way we’re expecting, or being trained to expect by the corporate media. Look, I’ll give you a dollar if it turns out I’m wrong, and the Russians, terrorists, white supremacists, and other “extremists” do bring down “democracy” and launch their Islamic, white supremacist, Russo-Nazi Reich, or whatever, but from where I sit it looks pretty clear … tomorrow belongs to the Corporatocracy.

This Chart Defines the 21st Century Economy

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

There is nothing inevitable about such vast, fast-rising income-wealth inequality; it is the only possible output of our financial and pay-to-play political system.

One chart defines the 21st century economy and thus its socio-political system: the chart of soaring wealth/income inequality. This chart doesn’t show a modest widening in the gap between the super-wealthy (top 1/10th of 1%) and everyone else: there is a veritable Grand Canyon between the super-wealthy and everyone else, a gap that is recent in origin.

Notice that the majority of all income growth now accrues to the the very apex of the wealth-power pyramid. This is not mere chance, it is the only possible output of our financial system. This is stunning indictment of our socio-political system, for this sort of fast-increasing concentration of income, wealth and power in the hands of the very few at the top can only occur in a financial-political system which is optimized to concentrate income, wealth and power at the top of the apex.

Well-meaning conventional economists have identified a number of structural causes of rising wealth/income inequality, dynamics that I’ve often discussed here over the past decade:

1. Global wage arbitrage resulting from the commodification of labor, a.k.a. globalization

2. A winner-takes-most power law distribution of the gains reaped from new technologies and markets

3. A widening mismatch between the skills of the workforce and the needs of a rapidly changing economy

4. The concentration of capital gains in assets such as high-end real estate, stocks and bonds that are owned almost exclusively by the top 10% of households

5. The long-term stagnation productivity

6. The secular decline in the percentage of the economy that flows to wages and salaries

While each of these is real, the elephant in the room few are willing to mention much less discuss is financialization, the siphoning off of most of the economy’s gains by those few with the power to borrow and leverage vast sums of capital to buy income streams–a dynamic that greatly enriches the rentier class which has unique access to central bank and private-sector bank credit and leverage.

Apologists seek to explain away this soaring concentration of wealth as the inevitable result of some secular trend that we’re powerless to rein in, as if the process that drives this concentration of wealth and power wasn’t political and financial.

There is nothing inevitable about such vast, fast-rising income-wealth inequality; it is the only possible output of our financial and pay-to-play political system.

Policy tweaks such as tax reform are mere public relations ploys. The cancer eating away at our economy and society arises from the Federal Reserve and the structure of our financial system, and the the degradation of our representative democracy into a pay-to-play auction to the highest bidder.

Perpetual Prosperity And The ‘Strategy of Tension’

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By Graham Vanbergen

Source: TruePublica

Marco Rubio, the American politician, attorney and former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives once said; “Every nation on the Earth that embraces market economics and the free enterprise system is pulling millions of its people out of poverty. The free enterprise system creates prosperity, not denies it.”

Statements such as these are common amongst politicians, especially wealthy ones who hold wealth driven values. But one man’s prosperity is another man’s misery in a world blighted by an economic model that demands eternal growth.

The only one constant that sits well with this model is that world population continues to increase, but even that is tailing off. Global population currently sits at 7.5 billion and rising at a rate of 80 million per year. The rate of population increase was 2.19 percent at its peak in 1963, which has now halved.

Concerns of the Fourth Industrial Revolution fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, and impacting all disciplines, economies and industries emanate from the corporations who now see their future declining revenue potential being rescued through reduced reliance on human labour.

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To keep prosperity on a perpetual upward trajectory in the backdrop of a continually shrinking and less well off consumer base, the most politically influential now work in concert with the corporate behemoths – the new rulers of the world.

The strategies adopted to keep the ball rolling over the last few decades centre around a financial architecture that requires drastic anti-democratic political support. As Noam Chomsky warns “The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.”

One does not have to look far to see these principles at work. Trillions of desperately needed taxes to support a decaying system of civil society are illegally offshored by household named corporations and individuals. Unfortunately, this form of extreme neoliberalism still isn’t enough to keep the ball rolling.

Naomi Klein’s 2007 book ‘Shock Doctrine, the rise of Disaster Capitalism’ exploded the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Klein highlights how the “puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades is the real story of how America’s “free market” policies came to dominate the world, through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.”

Then, one year later, Klein’s prognosis saw the 2008 financial crisis offering up more disaster shocked peoples at the global level as neoliberalism wriggled free from the remnants of regulation to reach a new pinnacle for the few and a created an even greater crisis of daily life for the hundreds of millions left behind.

This erroneous ideology delivered little more than world economic stagnation, crippling austerity, peak inequality, a global environmental crisis, the slowest economic recovery in history and monumental debt of every country it infected. This was no mistake, no unforeseen event, that we were told stunned our leaders and their captains.

The problem always existed that extreme wealth was never going to come from a global post-war peace through globalisation – so a ‘strategy of tension’, an Anglo/American innovation, was invented to keep the exploitation model alive.

The actual definition of this strategy is that “Western governments during the Cold War used tactics that aimed to divide, manipulate and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and terrorist actions in order to achieve their strategic aims.”

Amongst many, one of those aims was financial domination.

During the closing days of the Cold War, the UK, US and other western governments along with the secret services colluded to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on Russia. This is now so well documented it needs no elaboration here (1).

However, the objective was always clear. By mobilising public opinion against left-wing parties (and their policies) and legitimising war, capitalism was to be forever invigorated. Ultimately though, this required the denying of national independence movements, mainly in the third world, to fund new forms of Western wealth.

The Cold War, stoked and fuelled by a deliberate strategy of tension gave us ‘Red Russia’ and the potential for nuclear Armageddon. When that ran its course, imaginary foes such as Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi were invented. The war on terror was used as a means to an end. Today, Red Russia is back on the agenda once again.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed, the award winning investigative journalist wrote about this Strategy of Tension:

“The immense fear and chaos generated by the impact of this phenomenon throughout Western Europe was instrumental in legitimising the interventionist policies of the Anglo-American alliance throughout the Cold War period. The number of people killed across the third world as a consequence of this militarisation process is shocking, its implications genuinely difficult to absorb.” (2)

Ahmed goes on to say that 12 to 15 million people since WW2 have been sacrificed for this strategy with many millions more suffering as their economies were destroyed and denied the right to restructure whilst Western corporations made fortunes at their ultimate expense.

Dr Daniele Ganser, a Swiss historian who specialises in contemporary history, international politics, covert warfare, resource wars and geo-strategy confirms that this strategy is very much alive and in use to this day.

“What you may have, if you translate our experience from the Cold War to the current day situation, is that a strategy of tension is still being implemented, but this time against Muslims,” Ganser says. “We all know that the west is dependent upon oil, and a pretext is needed to develop more operations in Iran, Iraq etc. We can’t just go there and invade them, so we have to have this idea that they’re trying to kill us, then it’s possible, or at least imaginable that a strategy of tension in which the Muslims are playing the role that the communists played in the Cold War, is happening.”

The result is that the world is facing a new desperate multi-faceted game of thrones – as it morphs into something even more destructive.

Conflict and change is now the new norm. Global peace and domestic security is fading as the world order spirals out of control. This engineered spiral is going to prove to be a disaster for everyone, in what looks a lot like a coming global collapse on every front.

Civil society is now shrouded in a cycle of fear, terrorism, surveillance and experiencing a perpetual loss of rights and liberties as the world order disintegrates.

Today, we are now unable to make reasonable predictions of our near future as war, lawlessness, terrorism and now threats of nuclear annihilation become ever more real.

Even hope is diminishing. People of the West are now so afraid they want to stop perceived threats from foreigners, they want them expelled. Manufactured geo-political tensions have created a migration of people in the 21st century even greater than mankind’s greatest tragedy – the last world war. This is no mistake, no unforeseen event either.

China was once the greatest economic power on earth, followed by India, Britain and then America. Not once has the continent of Africa produced a global GDP exceeding 5% in its history, with 16% of the world’s population.

Having deprived this entire continent any possible chance of progression, a migrant surge is now destabilising the very regions responsible for pillaging it.

Alongside all of these pressures, environmental collapse seems inevitable when extreme capitalism sees natural catastrophic events such as the oil industry viewing melting ice caps as nothing more than an investment opportunity.

America is still fighting wars in the Middle East, threatening China, Iran, Korea, India, and even the European Union. The EU is breaking down into four distinct regions as the fifty-year unity project is visibly disintegrating. Is this just a fight for dwindling resources or something else?

Total global debt is now $227 trillion – or 327 percent of global GDP and something like 45 percent higher than the 2008 apex of the financial meltdown.

The Bank of International Settlements urged just two months ago that policymakers need to press on with rate rises notwithstanding the financial market turbulence it will cause.

The world’s six largest pension saving systems – the US, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Canada and Australia – are expected to reach a $224 trillion gap by 2050, a new study by the World Economic Forum shows. Implosion is its only obvious trajectory as there is nowhere near than amount of money anywhere in the world to plug such a gap as that (3).

Total US household debt surged by $460 billion last year, the sharpest one-year rise ever, with an eye-watering $13 trillion outstanding (4). Britain’s household debt is rising at 10 percent per year, five times the rate of earnings growth and has just surpassed the 2008 level of debt as households struggle to keep afloat (5).

The World Economic Forum has also determined that unemployment, an energy price shock, fiscal crisis, failure of national governance and profound social instability makes up the top five global risks to economic performance (6).

To rid the world of its debt’s, kick-start the world economy and take advantage of the shifting global chess board, some believe conflict is the only consequential route left. NATO’s threats to Russia supported by mass media hysteria only adds to the WEF global risks list.

We have a lot to be fearful of. The fact that any combination of the risk list could happen at the same time in today’s world is no longer the conspiratorial thinking of doom-mongers but the architecture of a strategy that the world has seen before.

Public intellectual Tariq Ali wrote a warning in his 2010 book “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad:

“This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.”

Seven years after Ali’s book we are experiencing a never-ending relay of crisis after crisis; democracy under threat, capitalism out of control and the very real threat of facing another human catastrophe.

In his sobering analysis, Professor Ugo Bardi, a professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence and president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), dissects historical statistics on war to unpick the patterns of the violence of the past. He warns that statistical data suggests we are on the brink of heading into another round of major wars resulting, potentially, in mass deaths on a scale that could rival what we have seen in the early 20th century. This is confirmation indeed that a ‘Strategy of Tension’, controlled or not, is heading towards its ultimate apogee. At this juncture, it is reasonable to conclude we are all in trouble.

 

(1) Operation Gladio (see Post war creation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

(2) Nafeez Ahmed – Strategy of Tension: http://www.nafeezahmed.com/2007/05/strategy-of-tension.html

( 3 ) Global pension funding gap: https://www.weforum.org/press/2017/05/global-pension-timebomb-funding-gap-set-to-dwarf-world-gdp/

(4) US household debt: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/20/debt-f20.html

(5) UK household debt: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/07/31/growing-risk-uk-household-debts-warns-moodys-amid-lending-boom/

(6) World Economic Forum – Global Risks: http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2017/global-risks-of-highest-concern-for-doing-business-2017/

It’s time to call the housing crisis what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory

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By Laurie Macfarlane

Source: OpenDemocracy.net

One of the basic claims of capitalism is that people are rewarded in line with their effort and productivity. Another is that the economy is not a zero sum game. The beauty of a capitalist economy, we are told, is that people who work hard can get rich without making others poorer.

But how does this stack up in modern Britain, the birthplace of capitalism and many of its early theorists? Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released new data tracking how wealth has evolved over time. On paper, the UK has indeed become much wealthier in recent decades. Net wealth has more than tripled since 1995, increasing by over £7 trillion. This is equivalent to an average increase of nearly £100,000 per person. Impressive stuff. But where has all this wealth come from, and who has it benefitted?

Just over £5 trillion, or three quarters of the total increase, is accounted for by increase in the value of dwellings – another name for the UK housing stock. The Office for National Statistics explains that this is “largely due to increases in house prices rather than a change in the volume of dwellings.” This alone is not particularly surprising. We are forever told about the importance of ‘getting a foot on the property ladder’. The housing market has long been viewed as a perennial source of wealth.

But the price of a property is made up of two distinct components: the price of the building itself, and the price of the land that the structure is built upon. This year the ONS has separated out these two components for the first time, and the results are quite astounding.

In just two decades the market value of land has quadrupled, increasing recorded wealth by over £4 trillion. The driving force behind rising house prices — and the UK’s growing wealth — has been rapidly escalating land prices.

For those who own property, this has provided enormous benefits. According to the Resolution Foundation, homeowners born in the 1940s and 1950s gained an unearned windfall of £80,000 between 1993 and 2014 alone. In the early 2000s, house price growth was so great that 17% of working-age adults earned more from their house than from their job.

Last week The Times reported that during the past three months alone, baby boomers converted £850 million of housing wealth into cash using equity release products – the highest number since records began. A third used the money to buy cars, while more than a quarter used it to fund holidays. Others are choosing to buy more property: the Chartered Institute of Housing has described how the buy-to-let market is being fuelled by older households using their housing wealth to buy more property, renting it out to those who are unable to get a foot on the property ladder. And it is here that we find the dark side of the housing boom.

As house prices have continued to increase and the gap between house prices and earnings has grown larger, the cost of homeownership has become increasingly prohibitive. Whereas in the mid-1990s low and middle income households could afford a first time buyer deposit after saving for around 3 years, today it takes the same households 20 years to save for a deposit. Many have increasingly found themselves with little choice but to rent privately. For those stuck in the private rental market, the proportion of income spent on housing costs has risen from around 10% in 1980 to 36% today. Unlike homeowners, there is no asset wealth to draw on to fund new cars or holidays.

In Britain, we have yet to confront the truth about the trillions of pounds of wealth amassed through the housing market in recent decades: this wealth has come straight out of the pockets of those who don’t own property.

When the value of a house goes up, the total productive capacity of the economy is unchanged because nothing new has been produced: it merely constitutes an increase in the value of the land underneath. We have known since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo that land is not a source of wealth but of economic rent — a means of extracting wealth from others. Or as Joseph Stiglitz puts it “getting a larger share of the pie rather than increasing the size of the pie”. The truth is that much of the wealth accumulated in recent decades has been gained at the expense of those who will see more of their incomes eaten up by higher rents and larger mortgage payments. This wealth hasn’t been ‘created’ – it has been stolen from future generations.

House prices are now on average nearly eight times that of incomes, more than double the figure of 20 years ago. It’s unlikely that house prices will be able to outpace incomes at the same rate for the next 20 years. The past few decades have spawned a one-off transfer of wealth that is unlikely to be repeated. While the main beneficiaries of this have been the older generations, eventually this will be passed on to the next generation via inheritance or transfer. Already the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ has become the ninth biggest mortgage lender. The ultimate result is not just a growing intergenerational divide, but an entrenched class divide between those who own property (or have a claim to it), and those who do not.

Misleading accounting and irresponsible economics have provided cover for this heist. The government’s national accounts record house price growth as new wealth, ignoring the cost it imposes on others in society – particularly young people and those yet to be born. Economists still hail house price inflation as a sign of economic strength.

The result is a world which is rather different to that described in economics textbooks. Most of today’s ‘wealth’ isn’t the result of entrepreneurialism and hard work – it has been accumulated by being idle and unproductive. Far from the positive sum game capitalism is supposed to be, we have a system where most wealth is gained at the expense of others. As John Stuart Mill wrote back in 1848:

“If some of us grow rich in our sleep, where do we think this wealth is coming from?  It doesn’t materialise out of thin air. It doesn’t come without costing someone, another human being. It comes from the fruits of others’ labours, which they don’t receive.”

Britain’s housing crisis is complicated mess. Fixing it requires a long-term plan and a bold new approach to policy. But in the meantime let’s start calling it what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory.