World War III: Pillage and plunder

A continuation of thoughts from World War III: A status update (2014), World War III: A picture (2012), and A Stateless War (2010)

Another revolution of the same wheel

The word crisis is derived from a word meaning ‘turning point’. For all the crises we think the world has been through, there is very rarely a turn. Indeed, history can appear more like an inexorably straight path with predictable periodic bumps. The tools to effect a real change are available now, but real change would require a real direction and goals. Without these, this revolution will end as all the others eventually have, with new tyrants. – Me, World War III: A picture, 2012

It hasn’t been comparatively long since World War III: A status update, but we are already in need of another update. Not only is it now irrefutably clear that what has been billed for the last few years as a new multi-polar empire will be unabashedly a Chinese feudal empire instead, it looks almost as though it is a fait accompli and the death throes of the US empire-that-never-was may be far less than I anticipated.

China’s new puppet states suddenly include not just NAM and BRICS members but also any US allies that may have been expected to oppose their expansion, including all members of the five eyes themselves. Shell and BP trade LNG to China in exchange for nuclear plants where the UK takes the risk and China receives the energy and rail lines where safety is left to the extremely unsafe Chinese firms. China’s President demands an audience with the UK queen and she is brought forth like an aged Cleopatra, her unwillingness a trophy for the ability of the new empire to bend the old to its will. Even the US, which currently stands alone in denying the new order, has signed away far more sovereignty over their resources than most of their media will admit and their heavily IP dependent economy is very vulnerable to any changes China should choose to make to IP laws and trade agreements. The US military has changed its tone from aggression to a wish for joint exercises, a tolerance of China’s spy ships and a ‘review’ of their defence agreement with Japan.

When corporations rule the world there is no need for invasions, conquest is a simple matter of mergers, acquisitions and trade agreements. There is also no need for resistance as those who own the corporations benefit either way and will sign the deal most attractive to themselves. Those world leaders supposedly in conflict are always open to negotiate and change allegiances with each other and use their media tools to redirect the people’s hatred and fear. They meet and shake hands with each other while they are too afraid to meet or shake the hands of those we call ‘their people’.

The collapse of the former global resource mafia cartel has led to the global resource mafia gang war I outlined in 2012 and it does involve the entire world as predicted. The collapse of the former power and wealth ponzi schemes in some states have led to a decentralized governance by trade mafia which looks exactly like horizontal, egalitarian, libertarian / p2p trade economy is designed to look: survival of the strongest, most tyrannical and most violent, subjection of all who build society and care for the weak. The violence, destruction and senselessness of this gang war will ensure that what will now become a global feudal structure is welcomed as a respite. It will take little reminding of the horrors of the Islamic State, Boko Haram and all the other militias to convince people for a long time into the future that self-governance is impossible.

As the revolution(s) which brought us to a global resource cartel resulted in a far more insidious, all powerful and far reaching tyranny than the military empires it replaced, this latest revolution will convert us into a state of cattle-like product with far less free will than even the current power structure. Trade rivalries are giving way to a crushing global feudal structure which controls all resources with no rivals and tolerates no dissent.

A Dutchman, an American and an Englishman met in a castle

In 1928, the founders of Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil (now Exxon) and the future British Petroleum met and formed a secret oil cartel. By the end of the 1960s, they had been joined by four other US based companies and were known as the Seven Sisters. This powerful cartel not only controlled 85 percent of the world’s oil reserves but they dictated governance, controlled the economy and destroyed the economic and environmental life of much of the world. Along with the international banking cartel and other resource corporations they perpetuated the old trade empire and economic slavery of most of the world.

After various mergers, the old seven sisters are now British Petroleum, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell and today they control just 10 percent. According to the Financial Times, the new Seven Sisters are Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the National Iranian Oil Company, Venezuela’s PDVSA, Brazil’s Petrobras, and Malaysia’s Petronas. The move by many oil-producing states to nationalization of resources was an attempt to combat the pillage by imperial multinationals. Unfortunately, the trade economy was left intact and decentralized resource mafia remained mafia.

Those states attempting nationalization were embargoed like Iran, corrupted like Nigeria and forced to create polar security states opposing the force of the multi-nationals. The residents of these states were left with the choice of living with corruption, militarization and bad governance within their own government or protesting their governance and leaving themselves open to occupation by the multinationals. A state under siege can justify and be allowed far greater atrocities than would ever be tolerated in a free state. If the people refused either dictatorship, they found themselves in a civil war like Sudan or with the militia and human rights horrors found in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern provinces, under de facto rule by drugged boys with guns feeding off forced labour of children. The more localized the control over resources, the less expertise is available and hand dug mines in Burkina Faso and Indonesia collapse on children working with no protection or medical or environmental expertise.

The price of security is enslavement. Resources are stolen in the name of free trade, ideas are locked in imperial vaults and ‘theft’ from your own commons is criminalized. Nigeria and Brazil swap food self sufficiency for oil and biofuel money, Paraguay and Mali sell their water to corporations from states with more than plenty, Niger poisons its land to power France, and pollution, climate change, drugs and guns devastate entire populations. The multinationals run a protection racket which, when removed, leaves the people open to a shadow trade economy mafia supplied and fed by the global governments. International laws and trade agreements are used to assert legal power over people who never consented to the laws or treaties, and representative governance is used to pretend the consent of the governing is the same as the consent of the governed. Peace in a trade economy is a crushing mafia cartel.

The resource war currently raging all over the world will only get worse as the populations of Africa and India continue to soar and the already huge populations of China and India attain middle class and demand more water, meat, fuel and other luxuries. Global water use has quadrupled in the last century and seven countries, the United States, United Arab Emirates, India, United Kingdom, Egypt, China and Israel, own 60 percent of the water acquired by corporations globally. What is far worse is the precious water resources that exist, from the Guarani aquifer in South America to the Great Lakes of North America, from the Lake Chad Basin in Africa to the Aral Sea region in Central Asia, are being pillaged and polluted by corporations of other industries such as fracking, agriculture and manufacturing. Agriculture accounts for 70% of total water usage world-wide and food production is also being moved to countries which can be locked out when a water shortage appears. The borders which prevent migration by those who need food and water do not prevent pollution and resource theft by the borderless multinationals.

Water and the environment are multi-state shared resources being destroyed by a coercive structure that does not recognize commons property and uses fixed borders to lock out the repercussions of fluid pollution and pillage. The pressure caused by this destruction will and is becoming too great for those physical borders and military violence to contain. Instead of collaborating on solutions to all of the quite solvable crisis before us, the mafia in power have made the decision to let millions, if not billions, die and have invested in military and border security instead.

A current study on population growth projections finds an 80% probability that world population, now 7.2 billion, will increase to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion by 2100. Growth will occur primarily from nations which have suffered from trade pillaging, including aboriginal populations in the Americas. In the wealthy states, as well as the rapidly growing economies such as China, Brazil and India, an ‘epidemic of aging’ is projected instead.

The biggest industries of the shadow trade mafia are all genocidal. The weapons for populations to destroy each other with greater ease and the drugs to increase the violence and incapacitate effective resistance have been supplemented with the rapid growth of the human trafficking industry. People are bought and sold as products for militias, prostitution, marriage, slavery, organ trafficking and even ritual killings. People are tortured for ransom and charged for their passage as refugees. The shadow human trafficking industry is now vying with the arms industry as the top criminal industry in the world, and with the Australian government’s recent sale of refugees to Cambodia it has become openly a government activity as it always has been secretly.

There is also a global gender imbalance which has been caused by the femicidal actions of populations in China and India, the current and projected largest populations in the world, as well as other places. Since China and India are also two of the wealthiest economies, they can afford to spread their severe imbalance to other nations. More than ever in history, women are a global commodity.

The injustice and desperation experienced by those watching their families die, their homes destroyed and their resources stolen result in a natural resistance which is harnessed by rival gangs in the resource war. Any rebel movement of any skill begins to spread influence not by threats with guns but by hoarding and distribution of essential resources, creating need by hoarding then building loyalty and dependence with distribution. As long as there is a trade economy there will be rule by mafia, whether the mafia is local, national or global. There are alternatives to the trade economy and more could be developed if anyone were inclined to do so.

United States: The empire that never really was

As the world knows, the United States was once part of the British empire. As control of trade and currency replaced and supplemented military occupation, the five eyes and their associates continued to act as one, sharing policy and goals. While the United States acted as the imperial military, Canada quietly acted as the imperial resource corporation and the UK and others helped continue one cohesive empire with the illusion of sovereign national states. The transfer of the seat of control from the UK to the US made no real difference to the co-operative alliances.

The primary result of transferring control of empire from the UK to the US was it enabled a very different method of empirical control. The US constitution promoted what was billed as an extreme lack of governance in the name of ‘freedom’. This was not a real lack of governance as both the institutionalized violence and the new ownership laws enabled the mafia to take control and crush all who would build or maintain the previously existing societies. Freedom and legal protection for all who were strong enough to steal from the commons and the insistence that all were equally able to care for themselves very predictably resulted in governance by mafia. Privatization of state functions extended even to intelligence and military and soon formalized into a corporate structure free to do exactly as they wished worldwide as a free roaming mafia with no effective state ties. As Blackwater founder and current mercenary to Chinese corporations Erik Prince points out, the US was founded by militias.

Canada was formerly a resource corporation known as the Hudson’s Bay Company. There is very little difference between that former corporation and a state in which every Prime Minister for many decades was financially dependent on or actually related to the principals of Power Corporation. Canada’s laws have aided the more than 75% of the world’s resource corporations registered there to avoid legal responsibility for their human rights and environmental disasters worldwide. The governments of the five eyes have never had any claim to being nations despite their violent national rhetoric. All were set up as a resource mafia cartel to control the rival gangs.

The corporate freedoms which stripped society, governance and the commons from the people and dissociated people from their interdependent nations have also neatly packaged all control of these regions into saleable entities. These countries now have very little legal recourse against their corporate free agents being collected tidily in China’s basket, and their legal protection is less every day.

The so-called US empire may historically be seen as part of the collapse of the British empire or the transition between the British and Chinese empires, between a militarized trade empire and a global corporate feudal empire.

It is hard to imagine anything worse than the US empire with its mass assassinations by robot and cultural decay, but a worse alternative would probably include mass citizen trials and thousands of pigs floating in the drinking water. Unlike the US, China does not pretend to value individual rights or freedom above the state and is open about methods of thought reform. Neither does the Chinese ruling party dissemble about their status as the new empire or their lack of admiration for the intelligence and competence of other nations.
 Unlike the US, China has concentrated on building infrastructure globally instead of military bases, but the quality of that infrastructure has too often shown corruption and a lack of concern for human life.

The binary thinking and Good Guys vs Bad Guys narrative that has been the defining theme of corporate propaganda has many thinking that any state opposing the US empire must be a saviour. China does not oppose the US. The light rivalries between the governments of the world never put them on opposite sides. The enemy of your enemy is very much the same as them and they are both working against you. The new feudal structure also has many continuing the fantasy of a multi-polar empire, but a glance at trade agreements and foreign investment is enough to show clearly that the multi-polar feudal lords have all pledged allegiance to China. It does not matter at all where the headquarters of the empire is in any case, those holding power are all allies and none of them are going to save their natural enemies, all of those below them.

The trade economy ponzi scheme has reached its natural conclusion in the new global empire. The people most likely to overthrow Chinese or global corporate rule are not the US military or any other rival state, but the Chinese people and the people of the world. In order for this to occur, the people of the world would have to accept that no messiah will save them and see the root principles of the ponzi schemes of power and wealth that enabled the empire. Most of all, for any revolution to result in actual change, there must be a new path built with new principles.

To be continued ….

Related:

Binding Chaos
Autonomy, Diversity, Society
Releasing Chaos