Globalized commerce and finance have taken over the planet and the majority of nations are above all anxious to keep up the pace with the rest of the frightened sycophants to the Empire, anxious not to fall behind when and where the big profits are being raked in off the roulette tables. Mesdames, messieurs, faites vos jeux! Tomorrow we’ll be dead. But today, let us not be left out of the big game!
The vicious and self-destructive cult that we call Corporatism has so completely taken over the running of the world that the entire financial systems of nations have been derailed. Nations, poor or rich, are no longer allowed to govern their own people, to follow their own paths in terms of economic policies—taxation, education and welfare spending being the most critical in any national budget, for the general good of the people.
Keeping up the appearance of firmness, limiting social spending, standing strong and judgmental against an increasing number of immigrants (Untermenschen—they will just increase the burden on our already overtaxed welfare budget—so say the politicians), all these carefully staged and highly visible stands are ones that please the Corpocrats.
A gradual depletion of budgets for education and for social spending in general is taking place at a fast speed, while military and national security budgets have increased by over 100 percent in the United States since the tragic event of 9/11—that fabulous windfall for the arms and security industries. Europe, as far as military spending goes, is following in the path of the Master.
Naturally all this is cause for great self-congratulation by the corporate bosses. The governments, however, at the very same time complain about a severe lack of money (economic crisis, hold on, we’re going to sink!) for the real needs of the people. The staggering amount of wealth that is being amassed by the top 1 percent of the world’s population must be seen in the light of increasing unemployment (the jobless recovery—ha!) and austerity budgets that deprive even the middle class and, above all, the poor from living a decent life. The fairytale of golden opportunities and a good education for all, that the U.S. so proudly has been boasting about ever since its creation, is now gone. The age-old legend of living in the ‘only’ country on earth where the son of a poor farmer can become the President of the nation, where everybody has a fair chance of getting ahead, of doing better than their parents—what a dying dream! On this account, the propaganda machine has ground to a halt.
Immigration and migrations
The invasions by the hordes of Genghis Khan, the Mongols who came killing and plundering from the central steppes of inner and eastern Asia in the 13th century, seems to be a monumental show that is now taking place again—and in an even more vicious version. What brought about those former violent and successful invasions will remain a mystery forever, but hunger for power must certainly have been a major motor. As usual though, the need for fertile land and space must also have been a contributing factor (Lebensraum, it was known as by the Nazis). The Mongol Empire became, geographically, the largest empire that has ever existed in the history of the world. Is the United States aiming at repeating history, and outdoing it?
Arabic Media tells us: “Hundreds of thousands of people were put to the sword while al-Musta’sim Billah, the last Abbasid caliph [1]1, was murdered, trampled to death under foot. The Mongol (Tartar) left the countryside the way they left many other countrysides, totally ruined. While in Baghdad, Hulagu [2] deliberately destroyed what remained of Iraq’s canal headworks. The material and artistic production of centuries was swept away.”
Sound familiar? Only this time there is, in addition to the hunger for power, also the destruction of the environment that is being brought about by the greed-driven Corpocrats.
Migrations have been one of the most powerful and recurrent phenomena in the history of mankind. Because of climatic changes, land has become infertile and entire tribes or peoples have been forced to move to new lands. Drought has probably been the most common factor. Even migrations from one continent to another have been taking place and now we are aghast at the fairly limited migrations occurring in the Western world. The planet has been cut up into nation states with more or less artificial borders and migrations have become a political problem.
Industrialism is born
In the 19th century industrialism was making its first appearance. Mining got underway on a massive scale, the steam engine was made into a useful tool for greedy industrialists, railroads were built, electricity was invented, the automobile industry was born, mass production could begin and conveyor belt construction got started. People became slaves to the bosses of factories, and land owners developed the system of slavery and indented farmers, who were also often white people. Exterminating and chasing off native Americans from fertile lands went alongside the buying and cruel exploitation of African slaves. Ruthless racism was fertile in the Unites States of America from the very birth of the nation.
The 20th century saw the increased development of industrialism to levels never formerly imagined, even though workers’ organizations also came into being. Socialism lived a short life however and the Corpocrats made sure the trend started going in the opposite direction. In the 21st century industrialism has developed into Corporatism where there is no room whatever for people’s mass movements.
Big Business is cleverly giving the people some breathing room however, mainly consisting of artificial needs for entertainment and luxury. A people anesthetized by propaganda and comfortable living are far less likely to undertake militant and risky rebellions. We must be persuaded to believe that it is oxygen we are breathing, even though it’s actually polluted and often radioactive poison. We the people are being kept artificially alive while the bosses are thumbing their noses at our real needs.
Seeing the true workings of the corporation-driven world today has become a superfluous luxury. People are being deliberately perverted by entertainment and consumerism, maximizing pleasure and inventing ghastly idols and living styles. Those models are so far from natural living that it boggles the mind how anybody can actually be caught up by the false so-called values that Big Money openly or surreptitiously forces upon deluded citizens. Propaganda and advertising are deliberately creating pathological needs for entertainment and excessive consumption that are in the end going to ruin the environment along with people’s health and psychologically sound living.
The new Empire
A new Empire is born and the lust for conquering, ravaging and massacring is just as brutal, just as barbaric as any Tartar conquest in history ever was.
The New World Order under neoliberal rule is seeing to it that the already poor regions in the world are even further impoverished through the vicious treatment of their economies, using the weapons of the IMF and the World Bank. They are being forced to produce for export agricultural and other products that are not natural to their culture and to their soil. By so doing, they have to import rather than produce themselves the goods they need for their healthy survival. Age-old subsistence farming is being made away with through cruel pre-conditions when what these countries are in need of is honest economic help. A Western way of life is forced upon these victims of Neoliberalism.
Corporations such as Monsanto are contributing to the impoverishment of the soil in these regions by selling their toxic pesticides and fertilizers and by the use of their genetically engineered seeds, products that are more or less forced upon innocent farmers through the cozy relationship between the governments and the bio-tech companies. By this means, countries are made totally dependent on and increasingly dominated by the West and the Corporate Empire. The ‘help’ they are getting is truly a cup of hemlock served to each person in the land. Except, of course, to the corrupt leaders who personally profit from bending to the demands of the Empire.
Immigration is the forced outcome of Western exploitation
What is the unavoidable effect of these policies in the third world countries? Well, immigration of course. There is always the firm belief that the grass is greener on the other side of the Mediterranean—or the border, in the case of Mexico. Farmers in the poor countries first fled by the millions to the outskirts of the big cities, this migration being brought about by the collapse of the subsistence farming culture and the lure of work in the big cities. Factories were mushrooming in the third world, exploiting the cheap labor offered by these defenseless refugees from a provincial life in ever increasing poverty, victims of malnutrition and deadly diseases. What came next? Well, of course even cheaper labor was found in countries with even more desperately poor workers or unemployed masses.
There were the migrations which created the slums surrounding the big cities such as Mexico City, Jakarta, Mumbai, Manila, San Paolo, Lagos—and the list goes on. It was then at first the flight from the countryside because of poverty resulting from the increasing difficulties of subsistence farming, mainly due to the manipulations by the Western governments hand in glove with the Big Corporations. And all the while the Western governments were with superb hypocrisy preaching the messianic gospel of the ‘Free Market,’ a myth which meant that the rich were free to rob the poor.[3]Can you wonder why those poor people then tried desperately to get to the rich countries where they are not even wanted anymore? Once they were the source of the wealth of those same countries. They were welcomed because they provided cheap labor, while at the same time they were treated as dirt. Without this cheap labor the wealth that you see in the Western world today would not have been possible. But now we are showing them the door.
What changed the game? Well, it is very simple. They are not needed anymore. Work is now being outsourced to countries on the other side of the globe and immigrants are seen as a liability and not a source of income. That at least is the way lawmakers and rulers look at the situation. Immigration has become a major problem and racism is back with a vengeance.
Social cutbacks and the ubiquitous military
Now that the Corpocrats have managed to get the money sealed off from the masses and handily amassed by the trillions in the upper 1 percent of the population of the world, they feel free to go on with their game of conquest. Getting rid of the poor is their first goal. This is done by cutting back on social spending. No more ‘gifts’ to the working classes—no good schools, no child care, no unemployment benefits, no health care. Let the poor people die of AIDS, of man-made epidemics, of malnutrition. All the money that does not go to the luxuries of the super rich goes to the military and all its subsidiaries. Backing up the U.S. client states costs billions every year, millions every day [4]. The way Washington operates, it must at all costs have the support of strategic regimes all around the globe. The U.S. has hundreds of military installations in all corners of the planet, airfields, navy bases, military personnel that are just waiting for marching orders, should there be an outbreak of resistance to the Empire in a strategically important corner of the world [5].
The global war on terrorism, the spooky devil the CIA named Al Qaeda [6], became the gigantic myth that was used to justify the ‘NEED’ for the growing domination of the USA and the Corporate Empire [7]. And the ‘war on terror’ of course turned into a war on Arab nations and on Islam all over, Arab or non-Arab. I am mainly referring to the U.S. obsession with Iran, the non-Arab major enemy, which might well be replacing the widely believed myth of a once-upon-the-time Soviet threat to the safety and the supremacy of the United States and, as they prefer to see it, the safety of the Western world in general. A new cold war alongside all the hot wars going on at this time. Isn’t that just what we need?
Corporatism is killing the planet
The Empire is digging in its feet, invading and pillaging one obstinate and geo-politically important country after the other, at the same time as the people at home are deprived of their human rights, the rights to a decent livelihood and a good and secure job. One might think that this would be the sum of the horror show going on today in the world. But no, there just is no end to the damage that is wrought. The criminal takeover and destruction of the planet by the corporations stops at nothing. An additional problem is of course the rapidly progressing and deliberately ignored global warming, but this phenomenon too is most likely linked to corporate misbehavior and overconsumption.
The Corpocrats are so totally deluded by their illusion of infinite power that they also believe that the earth offers the means for infinite growth. What they do not seem to understand at all is the fact that man can never, never dominate nature. The total insanity of these men, the criminal neglect of the environment, the absolutely certain effects of the corporate malfeasance that will soon make the earth unlivable is mind-boggling and literally devastating. They go on living the high life as if there was no tomorrow. Well, there may not be a tomorrow. Unless we put the machine in reverse—right now, this very moment.
Notes:
Seven hundred fifty-one years ago today, that last redoubt of that single Muslim community was extinguished when the last Abbasid caliph was put to death by the Mongols. (in 1258)– The Abbasid dynasty of caliphs had built their capital in Baghdad.
Hulagu Khan was a Mongol ruler who conquered much of Southwest Asia (1217—8 February 1265). Under Hulagu’s leadership, the Mongols destroyed the greatest center of Islamic power, Baghdad.
On the illusion of the Free Market, see Ha-Joon Chang: ‘Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.’ Ha-Joon Chang is an outstanding Korean development economist who is currently teaching Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge.
“It costs the US military $4 million a day to prosecute war in Libya”—Newstimeworld
Historian and journalist Nick Turse explained, “What I’m relatively sure of is that there are no less than 1,077 US bases or sites in foreign countries. . . . and likely there are many more than that, we just can’t be sure.” . . .”The U.S defense budget is now about the same as military spending in all other countries combined and, since 9/11 military and security expenditure has soared by 119 percent.”—An empire of US military bases
BBC: al Qaeda Does Not Exist—Al Qaeda simply means “the base” or “the database” in reference to CIA/MI6 information on mujahedeen fighters who were funded and trained by the Western nations to fight against the USSR.
Siv O’Neall is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. Her insightful essays are republished and read worldwide. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com.
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Corporatism or survival on Earth?
Posted on July 25, 2011 by Siv O'Neall
Globalized commerce and finance have taken over the planet and the majority of nations are above all anxious to keep up the pace with the rest of the frightened sycophants to the Empire, anxious not to fall behind when and where the big profits are being raked in off the roulette tables. Mesdames, messieurs, faites vos jeux! Tomorrow we’ll be dead. But today, let us not be left out of the big game!
The vicious and self-destructive cult that we call Corporatism has so completely taken over the running of the world that the entire financial systems of nations have been derailed. Nations, poor or rich, are no longer allowed to govern their own people, to follow their own paths in terms of economic policies—taxation, education and welfare spending being the most critical in any national budget, for the general good of the people.
Keeping up the appearance of firmness, limiting social spending, standing strong and judgmental against an increasing number of immigrants (Untermenschen—they will just increase the burden on our already overtaxed welfare budget—so say the politicians), all these carefully staged and highly visible stands are ones that please the Corpocrats.
A gradual depletion of budgets for education and for social spending in general is taking place at a fast speed, while military and national security budgets have increased by over 100 percent in the United States since the tragic event of 9/11—that fabulous windfall for the arms and security industries. Europe, as far as military spending goes, is following in the path of the Master.
Naturally all this is cause for great self-congratulation by the corporate bosses. The governments, however, at the very same time complain about a severe lack of money (economic crisis, hold on, we’re going to sink!) for the real needs of the people. The staggering amount of wealth that is being amassed by the top 1 percent of the world’s population must be seen in the light of increasing unemployment (the jobless recovery—ha!) and austerity budgets that deprive even the middle class and, above all, the poor from living a decent life. The fairytale of golden opportunities and a good education for all, that the U.S. so proudly has been boasting about ever since its creation, is now gone. The age-old legend of living in the ‘only’ country on earth where the son of a poor farmer can become the President of the nation, where everybody has a fair chance of getting ahead, of doing better than their parents—what a dying dream! On this account, the propaganda machine has ground to a halt.
Immigration and migrations
The invasions by the hordes of Genghis Khan, the Mongols who came killing and plundering from the central steppes of inner and eastern Asia in the 13th century, seems to be a monumental show that is now taking place again—and in an even more vicious version. What brought about those former violent and successful invasions will remain a mystery forever, but hunger for power must certainly have been a major motor. As usual though, the need for fertile land and space must also have been a contributing factor (Lebensraum, it was known as by the Nazis). The Mongol Empire became, geographically, the largest empire that has ever existed in the history of the world. Is the United States aiming at repeating history, and outdoing it?
Arabic Media tells us: “Hundreds of thousands of people were put to the sword while al-Musta’sim Billah, the last Abbasid caliph [1]1, was murdered, trampled to death under foot. The Mongol (Tartar) left the countryside the way they left many other countrysides, totally ruined. While in Baghdad, Hulagu [2] deliberately destroyed what remained of Iraq’s canal headworks. The material and artistic production of centuries was swept away.”
Sound familiar? Only this time there is, in addition to the hunger for power, also the destruction of the environment that is being brought about by the greed-driven Corpocrats.
Migrations have been one of the most powerful and recurrent phenomena in the history of mankind. Because of climatic changes, land has become infertile and entire tribes or peoples have been forced to move to new lands. Drought has probably been the most common factor. Even migrations from one continent to another have been taking place and now we are aghast at the fairly limited migrations occurring in the Western world. The planet has been cut up into nation states with more or less artificial borders and migrations have become a political problem.
Industrialism is born
In the 19th century industrialism was making its first appearance. Mining got underway on a massive scale, the steam engine was made into a useful tool for greedy industrialists, railroads were built, electricity was invented, the automobile industry was born, mass production could begin and conveyor belt construction got started. People became slaves to the bosses of factories, and land owners developed the system of slavery and indented farmers, who were also often white people. Exterminating and chasing off native Americans from fertile lands went alongside the buying and cruel exploitation of African slaves. Ruthless racism was fertile in the Unites States of America from the very birth of the nation.
The 20th century saw the increased development of industrialism to levels never formerly imagined, even though workers’ organizations also came into being. Socialism lived a short life however and the Corpocrats made sure the trend started going in the opposite direction. In the 21st century industrialism has developed into Corporatism where there is no room whatever for people’s mass movements.
Big Business is cleverly giving the people some breathing room however, mainly consisting of artificial needs for entertainment and luxury. A people anesthetized by propaganda and comfortable living are far less likely to undertake militant and risky rebellions. We must be persuaded to believe that it is oxygen we are breathing, even though it’s actually polluted and often radioactive poison. We the people are being kept artificially alive while the bosses are thumbing their noses at our real needs.
Seeing the true workings of the corporation-driven world today has become a superfluous luxury. People are being deliberately perverted by entertainment and consumerism, maximizing pleasure and inventing ghastly idols and living styles. Those models are so far from natural living that it boggles the mind how anybody can actually be caught up by the false so-called values that Big Money openly or surreptitiously forces upon deluded citizens. Propaganda and advertising are deliberately creating pathological needs for entertainment and excessive consumption that are in the end going to ruin the environment along with people’s health and psychologically sound living.
The new Empire
A new Empire is born and the lust for conquering, ravaging and massacring is just as brutal, just as barbaric as any Tartar conquest in history ever was.
The New World Order under neoliberal rule is seeing to it that the already poor regions in the world are even further impoverished through the vicious treatment of their economies, using the weapons of the IMF and the World Bank. They are being forced to produce for export agricultural and other products that are not natural to their culture and to their soil. By so doing, they have to import rather than produce themselves the goods they need for their healthy survival. Age-old subsistence farming is being made away with through cruel pre-conditions when what these countries are in need of is honest economic help. A Western way of life is forced upon these victims of Neoliberalism.
Corporations such as Monsanto are contributing to the impoverishment of the soil in these regions by selling their toxic pesticides and fertilizers and by the use of their genetically engineered seeds, products that are more or less forced upon innocent farmers through the cozy relationship between the governments and the bio-tech companies. By this means, countries are made totally dependent on and increasingly dominated by the West and the Corporate Empire. The ‘help’ they are getting is truly a cup of hemlock served to each person in the land. Except, of course, to the corrupt leaders who personally profit from bending to the demands of the Empire.
Immigration is the forced outcome of Western exploitation
What is the unavoidable effect of these policies in the third world countries? Well, immigration of course. There is always the firm belief that the grass is greener on the other side of the Mediterranean—or the border, in the case of Mexico. Farmers in the poor countries first fled by the millions to the outskirts of the big cities, this migration being brought about by the collapse of the subsistence farming culture and the lure of work in the big cities. Factories were mushrooming in the third world, exploiting the cheap labor offered by these defenseless refugees from a provincial life in ever increasing poverty, victims of malnutrition and deadly diseases. What came next? Well, of course even cheaper labor was found in countries with even more desperately poor workers or unemployed masses.
There were the migrations which created the slums surrounding the big cities such as Mexico City, Jakarta, Mumbai, Manila, San Paolo, Lagos—and the list goes on. It was then at first the flight from the countryside because of poverty resulting from the increasing difficulties of subsistence farming, mainly due to the manipulations by the Western governments hand in glove with the Big Corporations. And all the while the Western governments were with superb hypocrisy preaching the messianic gospel of the ‘Free Market,’ a myth which meant that the rich were free to rob the poor.[3] Can you wonder why those poor people then tried desperately to get to the rich countries where they are not even wanted anymore? Once they were the source of the wealth of those same countries. They were welcomed because they provided cheap labor, while at the same time they were treated as dirt. Without this cheap labor the wealth that you see in the Western world today would not have been possible. But now we are showing them the door.
What changed the game? Well, it is very simple. They are not needed anymore. Work is now being outsourced to countries on the other side of the globe and immigrants are seen as a liability and not a source of income. That at least is the way lawmakers and rulers look at the situation. Immigration has become a major problem and racism is back with a vengeance.
Social cutbacks and the ubiquitous military
Now that the Corpocrats have managed to get the money sealed off from the masses and handily amassed by the trillions in the upper 1 percent of the population of the world, they feel free to go on with their game of conquest. Getting rid of the poor is their first goal. This is done by cutting back on social spending. No more ‘gifts’ to the working classes—no good schools, no child care, no unemployment benefits, no health care. Let the poor people die of AIDS, of man-made epidemics, of malnutrition. All the money that does not go to the luxuries of the super rich goes to the military and all its subsidiaries. Backing up the U.S. client states costs billions every year, millions every day [4]. The way Washington operates, it must at all costs have the support of strategic regimes all around the globe. The U.S. has hundreds of military installations in all corners of the planet, airfields, navy bases, military personnel that are just waiting for marching orders, should there be an outbreak of resistance to the Empire in a strategically important corner of the world [5].
The global war on terrorism, the spooky devil the CIA named Al Qaeda [6], became the gigantic myth that was used to justify the ‘NEED’ for the growing domination of the USA and the Corporate Empire [7]. And the ‘war on terror’ of course turned into a war on Arab nations and on Islam all over, Arab or non-Arab. I am mainly referring to the U.S. obsession with Iran, the non-Arab major enemy, which might well be replacing the widely believed myth of a once-upon-the-time Soviet threat to the safety and the supremacy of the United States and, as they prefer to see it, the safety of the Western world in general. A new cold war alongside all the hot wars going on at this time. Isn’t that just what we need?
Corporatism is killing the planet
The Empire is digging in its feet, invading and pillaging one obstinate and geo-politically important country after the other, at the same time as the people at home are deprived of their human rights, the rights to a decent livelihood and a good and secure job. One might think that this would be the sum of the horror show going on today in the world. But no, there just is no end to the damage that is wrought. The criminal takeover and destruction of the planet by the corporations stops at nothing. An additional problem is of course the rapidly progressing and deliberately ignored global warming, but this phenomenon too is most likely linked to corporate misbehavior and overconsumption.
The Corpocrats are so totally deluded by their illusion of infinite power that they also believe that the earth offers the means for infinite growth. What they do not seem to understand at all is the fact that man can never, never dominate nature. The total insanity of these men, the criminal neglect of the environment, the absolutely certain effects of the corporate malfeasance that will soon make the earth unlivable is mind-boggling and literally devastating. They go on living the high life as if there was no tomorrow. Well, there may not be a tomorrow. Unless we put the machine in reverse—right now, this very moment.
Notes:
Siv O’Neall is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. Her insightful essays are republished and read worldwide. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com.