The absurd rush to perdition

There has been a conspiracy going on for several decades now, in subterranean bunkers and in the utmost secrecy to begin with, where plans have been drawn up for how to extract for their own profit every ounce of valuable goods that the earth is harboring. How many wars will be necessary, and where? How much propaganda to fool the people into sheepish acceptance of these illegal wars? How to get the media to cooperate in this nefarious project?

This is the Project for the New American Century or PNAC—also called The New World Order. The answers to these questions was to buy up the media and to let the propaganda run full-speed, non-stop so as to draw a thick curtain over what was being done to the world in the name of the American people.

A brood of very sick people had been hatching these plans. Their ambition was to enhance the unilateral power of the U.S. Empire in cozy cooperation with the multinational corporations. Corporatism (also called Fascism) was seeing the full light of day and the goal was for the leaders to lay their hands on the most enormous amount of private wealth the planet had ever witnessed. They had no intention of letting us the people in on the secret of what was being done to us and to the world. These emotionally atrophied quasi-human beings are out to control the universe solely in order to enrich themselves.

Seemingly ignoring the most obvious facts—that the resources of the world are finite and that the destruction of the planet will be the end result—they surge ahead to seep the last drop of oil, water and nourishment out of the earth. They are totally void of what we usually consider normal human feelings. Their own enrichment, and nothing else, matters. They don’t seem to care if or when the earth’s resources are going to be completely dried up, so long as they have built their castle on the hill. They seem to imagine that they alone will be secure in their fortresses, even when nobody is able to get any more food out of the soil or any oil from under the earth or the oceans.

So what is then going to run the machinery that their blind march forward has created, the march towards total mechanization of every act on this earth, rendering every natural act and product superfluous? The disconnect from a realistic view of what is lying ahead of us is staggering.

We live in an age where there is only one word that seems to have any true importance: more. The predators know of no way backwards towards sanity, no way back towards regaining a way of life that has anything to do with sane living, a way of dealing with nature that does not lead to destruction. Anything that is not robotic machinery and genetically engineered agricultural and animal products is of no value to the Corpocrats. The goal of the huge corporations that these predators have built up is to dominate nature, rather than living and working at peace with nature, the way it’s been done for millennia.

Forward we go until there is no more healthy soil left, no more water left for agriculture, for humans, animals or plants. Forward we go, poisoning the earth, the water, the air—and our very souls.

The only thing that has any importance at all for these half-humans, disconnected from reality and from any form of normal life, is what they consider Progress. Progress, that is, that creates money to fill their coffers. Money that can, or so they seem to think, give them the illusion that they alone will be spared when the final day of life on earth arrives. Their seeming inability to realize how their path leads to a total train wreck is mind-boggling. How can anyone at all fail to see what we are headed for?

But it is not people that these half-humans are concerned with. People just do not matter in any way, as the base for production (machines will do the job) or as mouths that have to be fed or bodies that have to be cared for. Profit is the only thing that is of any importance to these predators. They are laughingly and blindly running the train of civilization into the ground, and they are sufficiently detached from reality to fail to see that they too are onboard that train. We are in this maelstrom together.

The great illusion

The illusion that keeps feeding those madmen is the firm belief that they have a right to own the world, to do what they wish with the world’s resources, to plunder and kill whatever and wherever they have the desire to do so and to dominate any people on the planet.

The masters of the world have created a web of corporations and military bases around the globe and they never hesitate to strike when they see a need for intervening murderously and greedily. Greed and gleeful killing are the two sides of the same coin. The soldiers of the Empire are never invited—they are always the intruders.

American GIs are told to kill whenever something moves and they seem to do so with great gusto. Of course, they have very carefully been indoctrinated to see non-Americans as cannon fodder, soulless subhuman beings who are better off dead.

And, maybe most important of all in the eyes of the people, their own God is far superior to the God of the invaded people. The Other religion is by definition uncivilized and evil. And so the Other is also uncivilized and evil. What they see as the only civilized religion with a God who favors their own civilized country is unquestionably the free pass they need to invade and kill indiscriminately. Reason doesn’t enter into the equation.

Whenever the people of a nation—always an inferior nation of course, a subculture—takes matters in their own hands and rebels against a dictator, Washington gets in behind the scene and sorts things out so that in the end the country gets back to the same subservient status as was the rule before the rebellion. The client state is back in service to the U.S. Empire and the Corporatocracy, back to serve the insatiable hunger of the Empire for increased profit and world domination. Power is a key word. Power to make everything their own, power to kill indiscriminately, power to grab anything that glitters.

They don’t get it

Oil makes the world go round. There is just no way the Corpocrats are going to realize that there just is not enough oil and other resources to go on with life as it was before the world began to change. Global warming and the overextension of the earth’s resources have made the end of life as we know it a certainty that is just around the bend.

The ruts have been worn deep and the predators have heavy vehicles that make it seemingly impossible to get out of those ruts. Instead they dig themselves in forever more deeply. It is the flight forward (in French: ‘la fuite en avant’ = digging oneself in deeper), when the world should instead be turning back, looking for new solutions for the earth to continue to be the home to plants, animals and human beings. Just close your eyes and go on digging for that black gold under the surface of the earth until the whole earth crumbles and you yourself are caught inside the earthquake!

The one percent of the people on earth who lives in almost unimaginable luxury—do they know what fate the poor in the world are subjected to? Of course they know. They know just as well as you and I know. They just couldn’t care less. They consider this way of things perfectly normal. It is, to them, the just way of the division of wealth—and poverty. It’s just that justice is a non-word in the world of today. The obscenely wealthy are dancing cold-bloodedly at the top of the world while poor children live in almost unbelievable squalor all over the five continents, children who are weeping when they have to go to bed hungry. Thousands and thousands of children are dying every day from malnutrition [1]. Who cares? Certainly not the people who are ruining the earth at their expense.

Also, hideous diseases like Noma affect malnourished children and adults in many parts of the world—in Africa more than elsewhere, but also in Asia and South America. [2] Estimates claim that 80—90 percent of noma cases die from the disease. In a world as flush with money as ours, such a disease should not be allowed to exist, since it has been proved to be directly linked to malnutrition. And don’t even mention the words ‘economic crisis.’ We should all know by now that this crisis along with the rise in food prices [3] were brought about by speculation in order to further enrich the already super-rich. It was MEANT TO HAPPEN! Don’t be a fool! We know perfectly well where the money is.

So let’s go back to the 1 percent of the super-rich. What purpose does their enormous wealth serve? There is heavy-handed, non-stop propaganda going that is trying to make us believe that concentrating the wealth in a tidy group of obscenely wealthy people is necessary to keep the global economy going, to keep the corporations healthy so that more jobs can be created. Oh yes, the trickle-down theory! Of course—how could I forget? But jobs? What jobs? Where are they, those jobs? In India, China, Taiwan, Korea. (Come work in Singapore, says an ad.)

Behind this curtain of make-believe trickle-down of wealth, there is the greed that pushes the corporations into ever-increasing plunder of Third-World nations. Anything goes, not in order to save the poor in the world but to increase the profits of the Corporations.

We live in a finite world

Profit equals Progress in the minds of the Corpocrats. But the resources of the planet are finite and the time has come—in fact it is long past—for progress to become obsolete. It’s simply not progress we need. We need to go into reverse.

Monster agribusiness is making family farming an economic dead-end. Farmers just don’t make both ends meet and the days of sustainable small farming are gone.

Small businesses are being squeezed out because of giant businesses like Walmart, Carrefour, MacDonald, and others, that are devouring the market. These international retail giants and fast food monsters will, for instance, very likely soon make their way into the Indian market, a country that, more than most other countries I have ever known, thrives on small businesses with very little overhead costs [4]. The result will be more unemployment, further flight into the already huge slums surrounding the big cities.

It’s not only the economic effects of the monstrous spreading of these giants that are causing enormous damage to cultures all over the world. It’s also the complete remake of civilizations, and a centuries-old image of a country is now being sacrificed on the altar of greed. Nothing can possibly be expected to stand still, but this artificial and destructive invasion of Western huge businesses (and along with them consumerism and the rest of their gamut of Western and ‘civilized’ values) into the Third World, almost overnight, is as shocking to a sane mind as any other world-wide destructive change the Corporatocracy has wrought. It’s the modern-day plague that will do away with the only natural way of life on earth, which is the conservation of different cultures that fit into the mold of the regions where they have their roots.

The bio-tech industry, Monsanto, Cargill, Syngenta, Bunge, et al. are all set on owning the world’s food supply, destroying organic agriculture and millennia-old biodiversity. Their patented genetically engineered seeds are ruining the natural farming for foods and cotton that have been grown with great success for millennia. This invasion of bio-tech products into farming is having the most disastrous effects on the Indian way of life. Thousands of Indian farmers have committed suicide because of debts to the seed and pesticide manufacturers that had driven them to bankruptcy.[5]

In an article, entitled ‘Corporate Agriculture Is to Blame for the Hundreds of Thousands of Farmer Suicides in India,’ Tara Lohan writes in an interview with Alternet:

“Vandana Shiva [6] says industrial agriculture has left Indian farmers indebted and destitute, and explains how to stem the tide of suicides. [7]

“Rapid increase in indebtedness is at the root of farmers’ taking their lives,” she wrote recently. “Debt is a reflection of a negative economy. Two factors have transformed agriculture from a positive economy into a negative economy for peasants: the rising of costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalization.”

“In 1998, the World Bank’s structural-adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta,” Shiva wrote. “The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm-saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds, which need fertilizers and pesticides and cannot be saved. . . . The shift from saved seed to corporate monopoly of the seed supply also represents a shift from biodiversity to monoculture in agriculture.”

Putting the machine in reverse

The neoconservatives knew well what they were getting the world into when they were planning their diabolical scheme of what they chose to call ‘free trade’ and globalization and what Milton Friedman and his Chicago boys called neo-liberalism. What it really meant was the invasion of the Empire and the Multinationals into all the nooks and corners of the world that would prove profitable for the West. It simply meant devouring the third world countries for the profit of the Corporations who were going to rule the planet.

We want to take a giant step backwards, get back to the days of sustainable and biological farming, back to the days when foods were not shipped across the planet, back to the days when local businesses provided work for people and also provided the products to sell to the community, back to the days when trucking and the military were not consuming the energy that is needed for peaceful and local purposes.

We want to leave behind us the artificial global economy, created from greed and the military-financial drive for power and world-wide domination. The hydra is getting very close to ruining us and the entire planet.

Who will kill the hydra?

Notes:

1. “Every day about 100,000 people die of malnutrition, Jean Ziegler warned ahead of World Food Day on Sunday. “The right to food is a human right,” stated the special rapporteur, who will present his full report to the UN in New York on October 27. . . . The chronic lack of food in sub-Saharan Africa is particularly worrying, he said. Over a third of the region’s population is now considered malnourished, with numbers of underfed soaring from 88 million in 1999 to 200 million in 2001.” Malnutrition killing 100,000 a day: UN (October 15, 2005)

2. ‘NOMA—The Face of Poverty’—By Siv O’Neall. Axis of Logic

3. ‘How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis’

4. ‘Retail giants Walmart, Carrefour likely to enter Indian market’

5. ‘From the Suicide Economy to Living Economies’

“ . . . nearly 200,000 Indian farmers, many of them cotton growers, [have committed] suicide since 1997”

6. Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., is a physicist, environmentalist, feminist, science policy advocate and director of Navdanya, a Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.

7. ‘Corporate Agriculture Is to Blame for the Hundreds of Thousands of Farmer Suicides in India’

Siv O’Neall is an Axis of Logic columnist, where this essay first appeared, and is based in France. Her insightful essays are republished and read worldwide. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com.