Part 2 Theory of Manufactured Deficits
Recent history has been the profitable ground of plutocrats.
The history of specialization, surplus and deficits has deep roots.
With control of floating currency in the hands of powerful bankers, money can be kept in short supply to encourage people into debt and then slavery to that debt. Debt can come from many ways, from student loans, car loans, home loans and credit cards. The end result is the same. Most people are in debt in the developed nations. In fact the whole of the developed nations are deep in debt and stand at the edge of a major financial catastrophe, some of it already manifested, but even this can be manipulated by the wealthy and powerful as has happened historically. The financier of 18th and 19th century Britain, Rothschild made a huge fortune when the news of Napoleon’s win at Waterloo collapsed the market. Rothschild promptly bought everything for pennies on the dollar before the real news of Napoleon’s loss reached the ears of the people. By then prices soared and Rothschild became so rich that the family directed the course of the British Empire around the world. A financial catastrophe for everyone turned into a financial boon for the Rothschild family and with that they built the empire at everyone else expense. Here is an example of early disaster capitalism. Since then it has evolved to an exact science that only a few control and most are unaware of. Today, many people are in deep debt and can lose everything at the drop of a top hat over some manufactured crisis. Something like this happened with the sub-prime loans to home owners in the US. Many people lost their homes and the banks gained all the homes, monies paid in monthly instalments on mortgages and land. All of this was orchestrated on the artificial deficit of the money supply. There is plenty of money to finance wars and nothing for the poor, who no longer have a social safety net in many regions of the developed world. Meanwhile, trillions are simply taken out of the tax payers pocket to bail out banks and corporations in mega-welfare for the rich.
With diseases of malnutrition and those caused by anti-biotic resistant super-bugs prevalent, medical science as we know it comes to the rescue; or does it. It was the wonder of miracle drugs and techniques that brought us ultimately to where we stand today, back to the conditions of the 19th century where there were no known cures for diseases like tuberculosis. Some people suggest that some diseases such as we have today like AIDS are a product of military experimentation for the purposes of war and population control. The claim is not unfounded considering that diseases like tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, measles and the common cold were deliberately spread to the peoples of the first nations by the conquering Europeans. This was germ warfare on a mass scale and helped to clear the land for the settlers. AIDS spreading in Africa is decimating the population so severely that some countries have already collapsed due to loss of the productive population. Is there a parallel? Some would say that there is and certainly the fact that capital needs expansion space and raw resources available only in Africa would fill the conditions. The one problem with biological warfare is that to effectively perpetrate it, you must have protection for yourself by enhanced immunity or a cure. There is no known cure for AIDS, but there are expensive treatments. If you want to live, you’re going to have to pay dearly, even if the end result is a life of virtual hell. There are, of course many other disease for which doctors and the drugging medical profession can placate with their nasty nostrums if the price is right. There is MRSI, born out of the overuse of anti-biotics in the hospital and factory farms. All the old standards are back with a vengeance too like the flu, cholera, TB and some new ones too like Marbourg, E-Bola, H1N1 and West Nile virus. We are perched on the edge of another precipice for which most of us will pay one way or another. Good health will come only with extreme care, pure pluck of luck or position of wealth and power. Most of humanity is already sentenced to death.
We have long had the technology to run industry and vehicles by means other than fossil fuel. Why is this not being done? The reason stretches back to the roots of the industrial revolution when steam was generated by using coal or wood and later oil. Prior to that, power came from water or muscle power of people or draft animals. At that time there was no thought for pollution or global warming due to greenhouse gasses. Even though there were killer fogs of smog in London during the 19th century due to the use of low grade coal, its use was continued. There was little thought for wind, solar or geothermal power sources. Across the English Channel, the Dutch were using wind to draw water from the land in order to have below sea level farm land behind dikes. The Dutch never used steam power to pump away water in the early days; it was all done by wind power. The use of fossil fuels continued into the 20th century because by then it was well established and a profitable industry had been already set up and underway for a century. Once established, it was difficult to compete, even for new industries with new ways of doing the same jobs. People on the bottom, forced off the land for various reasons found themselves in collieries mining coal or some other desperate under paying, unhealthy and dangerous work. Coal and oil became highly profitable. When new ways were found to do the same jobs, the establishment didn’t want to lose their source of income, so by means of politics, legal pressure or outright manipulation, these wealthy owners made sure things stayed the way they are. That continued from then to now and despite increasing awareness of what fossil fuels are doing, the use of them continues in an ever escalating pace. As demand goes up and supply shrinks, the prices go up and this impacts everything shipped by ship, plane, train or truck. Carbon taxes only exacerbate the problem to the poor. Instead of encouraging alternative ways of doing the same work, we get carbon taxes that further enrich the powerful. As a matter of fact, despite all the green propaganda by the state, huge pipelines exist and new ones are being built to extract oil and gas from Canada (Alberta and BC) in increasing quantity all the way to Texas for refining.
An example in the history of alternative power being circumvented by established companies stands out in the early 20th century. Nikola Tesla developed a method for the wireless transmission of electrical power. Before you think impossible, consider the remote control and the cell phone, both inspired from Tesla’s concepts. Tesla managed to construct a tower, funded by J.P. Morgan, a wealthy electric power tycoon. When J. P. Morgan figured out what the tower could do and realized that it threatened his income from selling electrical power, he fired Tesla and had the tower demolished. This stands as a clear historical example of manipulating resources and manufacturing a deficit in order to profit thereby. As a result, we are a wired society, dependant on the whims of electrical power magnates who can turn on and off our power at their whim and jack up prices due to increased fossil fuel and nuclear energy costs. Further, with global warming an established fact, they can sell us on green technology, getting us to cut back without changing their own policies and even denying global warming despite the obvious climate evidence. All this time we could have been using Tesla’s concepts linked to geo-thermal, wind or solar generation and wirelessly sent at low cost; but for the intervention of greed and wealthy interests manipulating us for their own profit through manufactured deficit.
Approximately three quarters of the planet is covered with water and yet we have a water shortage due to mismanagement and misuse.Fresh wateris in acute shortage in many areas of the world and this is being exacerbated by climactic change and a mushrooming population. The bottled water craze and companies that manufacture soft drinks contribute to the problem by taking what little water there is and shipping it halfway around the world. Other regions like Canada have a super abundance of fresh water. Plans are being considered and pursued to pipeline fresh water out of Canada to the US. This disparity between regions is what fuels wars as surely as oil resources does in other regions like the Middle East. Although the US and Canada are not at war, Israel and other Middle East nations are on the brink of war over water resources. With climate change, some areas drying up and others are being inundated. It’s either too little or too much. All this creates desperation for water, whether for growing food, drinking or other uses, such as we have in the developed world for washing clothes, cars, streets, watering lawns, mega farms in deserts or for sewage management. The developed nations consume much more water per person than do the developing nations per-capita. There is no equitable balance and seeming little desire or progress in this area. When fresh water is in short supply, we ship in bottled water, gobbling up fossil fuel in the process, exacerbating the climate crisis with more greenhouse gasses. Huge systems are built to transport fresh water, mainly from Canada into the US. These systems need to be built and maintained with current technology using fossil fuels. With global climate changes, water distribution by nature is shifting, primarily with more rain on the coasts and less in the interiors of continents. All of this is opportune for manufacturing profitable opportunity due to local deficits. Bottled or shipped water will increase in price due to rising costs of fossil fuels and carbon taxes.
Disaster profiteering is something of a new kid in get wealthy schemes, but it relies at its base, the same formula of manipulated or manufactured deficits. In fact a new term has been coined for it; disaster capitalism. This was pioneered in Chicago by Milton Friedman and his followers and it shaped the Reagan and Bush years to the present day. Huge numbers of people suffer in disasters, whether man made or natural. In a world of shrinking and filled markets, something must intervene to create new markets or to allow that necessary expansion space for capital to grow into greater profit. Wars and natural disasters come to the rescue of capitalism when markets have no more growing space. If you have no new market, find or create new ones opportunistically as the theory of profit dictates. War destroys old markets and creates an opening for a new market via redevelopment. A natural catastrophe has the same effect as a war, i.e., destroying that what exists which then must be redeveloped at the expense of the region affected. In both cases, private interests displace millions of locals for the profit of a handful of people. Two notable examples stand out, the catastrophe of the Malaysian tsunami and the results of hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. The destruction created by these natural events created open markets for capitalist industrial expansion via redeveloping the devastated areas allowing CEOs to renew profits. Everything was privatized including the schools and hospitals. This displaced poor were never allowed to return. This was profiteering based upon exploiting the misery of the inhabitants of these disaster zones. Even with that, the poor of both disasters are still waiting for help, but aren’t getting any because of their poverty.
One of the greatest tragedies is manufactured ignorance. This may seem like a contradictory statement as we live in an age of increasing knowledge. But who does this knowledge serve and who is allowed real knowledge without interference and censorship? Who are given pseudo knowledge in the place of the real thing? Knowledge is an evolving thing and our remote ancestors had intimate knowledge of nature including the sky, the seasons, the land, animals and plants. They were one with nature and an integral; part thereof. Early religion was all nature based. They needed that in order to survive. However, with the advent of agriculture, there was a surplus and the development of non-agricultural pursuits and specialization. Purity of knowledge remained as long as the first generation persisted. Those born after this time into paths other than those directly tied to the land forgot the old ways. As civilization developed and intensified with ever increasing specialization, forgetfulness of the old ways increased just behind new developments. This reached a point where those who specialized in military pursuits produced individuals of such power, they did nothing but luxuriate in indolence. These folks grew in no way but wealth, power and contempt for those still tied to the land. Politics grew out of this and with it manufacturing of mass ignorance through censorship. Today in the most developed regions, the people are the most ignorant; as capable as a new born baby of surviving in the wilds should civilization collapse. Nor are the people of the most developed, civilized regions given knowledge that is based on truth, high science and rooted in nature. They are given the type of knowledge that will make them obedient and good consumers of capitalist products. They are given fantasy, games, sports and sham religion. There is a constant high profile verbal and image war between opposite camps of every discipline that serves to confuse. This is all a form of control.
This phenomenon happens quickly, sometimes in the span of a single generation. That which one generation knows like the back of their hand is unknown to the next one. This fact was proven when natives were forced from their parents and culture into the schools of the conquerors to receive religious oriented training in parochial schools. They quickly lost all contact with the ways of their parents and the old ways died out swiftly. They could no longer function within the context of nature as their parents and grandparents had done before them. They were now dependant upon their new proxy parents, the priests and settlers in the form of the European church and state, both of whom proved to be unwilling to support them in basic fundamental issues. The end of this is that the later generations were forced into reserves to live in squalor and misery with little opportunity to live the new life imposed forcibly upon them. Specialized knowledge is not something like an instinct that is inborn. It is something acquired in youth and is not directly transmissible except by properly educating in the early years of life. This fact can be demonstrated with animals raised in captivity and then are released into the wild. The released animal does not survive because it has not learned the skills to fend for itself, having been fed in captivity by humans, an alien species to their natural way of life. Extend this idea into the human sphere. If no training occurs, then the newly born remain virtually as babies, unable to fend for themselves even unto old age. Capitalism constantly changes the way things are done in order to keep the profits flowing. The result is that millions end up on the street to be absorbed by crime or to resort to begging because they know no other way. In the third world or developing nations, this problem is more extreme, which means many people are too poor to survive no matter how they struggle to survive. All the prior knowledge has been removed and lost in the cruelest form of censorship. We live in an era where children are intimately familiar with computers, while their grandparents are stone ignorant. Meanwhile, grandparents are familiar with things of which their grandchildren are stone ignorant. Neither displays much interest in the others world of experience and learning except on rare occasion. Knowledge today is another consumer product that will cost heavily if you wish to advance in the bourgeois system. A modern student can acquire a $100,000 debt to finance learning that keeps them in line to the banks until middle age. Knowledge that is given out today is what is permitted by the rulers and often subject to censorship. The ruling class does not care as long as they keep their wealth and power. In fact, all types of knowledge, true or phony, is used as a control on the rest of the population.
People forced into cities and mines are educated to best perform the tasks allotted them and little else. They are brought up to believe in sham religions, devoid of real spirituality. The basic things the rulers take as granted as their right to enjoy, are described as sinful for anyone else and subject to punishment from terror gods and enforced by police state tactics whether from theocracies or secular governments. Yet the people pursue these same activities provided for them by profiteers and gangsters. Within this context there is a lot of confusion and illusion. Without guidance, they continue as confused unless someone shows them the deficiency of their ways. If nature were to do it through a catastrophe, where they suddenly had to rely on themselves, most would fail utterly, because they lack the proper knowledge. The poor are left to suffer and die and those who can pay up will receive help. This fact too is exploited through disaster capitalism.
All of this is unnecessary, so why is it happening? It is happening because it is profitable. Money can be made from shortages, actual or manufactured. With shortages come opportunities for profitable wars. With wealth comes power to direct the courses of everyone’s life on the planet and history itself.