The Post-Bush Regime: A Prognosis, was published last Dec. 27th:
In that article, I offered a collection of scenarios based on various trends, and based on the apparent motivations of those predators who sit at the center of the webs of power. One of the main scenarios was about the globalization of African-style famine – brought about intentionally, primarily by the creation of a lucrative market for biofuels. I had no idea that only five months later that scenario would be all over the mass media. Events are unfolding more quickly and decisively than I imagined. Of course the intentional part is not found in the mass media, but the globalization of famine is now a recognized crisis, and biofuels – though not being abandoned or cut back – are now at least controversial.
In these past five months a brand new media theme has emerged around food and starvation. We are now reminded regularly that food prices are rising beyond what many in the global South can afford, and that there is little hope of reversing this trend. Food riots are breaking out and the UN is calling for an urgent response from the international community. Some Southern nations are banning the export of certain foodstuffs, and some Northern governments are pledging help of various kinds. Editorials are taking sides in the biofuels debate. As Sherlock Holmes would say to Dr. Watson at the beginning of each investigation – the game is afoot!
One of the things I've noticed about the mass media is that it carries only a few themes at a time. There's always one main theme – a kind of hypnotic focus point – which right now is the US Democratic Primaries, and in the past has been anything from a hostage crisis to a celebrity murder trial. The main theme can be vacuous in content; it needs only to take up a lot of news airtime, and keep people glued to their sets. And then there are always a few secondary themes being carried as well, with interruptions from time to time for natural disasters.
The secondary themes are highly selective. World-shaking events are going on all the time that mainstream TV never mentions. Things like genocide in East Timor – which went on for decades invisibly, and then suddenly it was in our face just when an intervention required justification. That is to say, secondary themes are selected for a purpose. What they are telling us is less important than why we are being told. We can find the news itself much more reliably in other places, mostly online. When they bring a theme to our mainstream attention, that means it is important to them that we view that scenario in certain ways. In other words, they are preparing us for things to come, getting us to frame our thinking in such a way as to be able to accept what we might not otherwise accept.
"Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
I got forty red white and blue shoe strings
And a thousand telephones that don't ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things
And Louie the King said let me think for a minute son
And he said yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61."
—Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Highway 61 is a rather direct allusion to Highway 66, which is the most famous cross-country US highway. That then leads to a somewhat more comprehensive allusion, to the Madison-Avenue empowered American mass media, which also goes from coast-to-coast, and which can sell anything at all to the masses – not only telephones that don't ring, but wars that don't make sense, buildings that collapse at free-fall speed, concentration camps, and torture. Why are they taking global famine down to Highway 61? Why has it become a media theme? What are they selling us this time?
I think it is very clear that we are being prepared for a massive global holocaust, and the evidence I have seen for this is now much stronger than it was five months ago. There are two kinds of evidence. One kind of evidence is about the hunger crisis itself, and the various conditions forcing that crisis. The other kind of evidence comes from the nature of the interventions that are being planned and announced, to alleviate the crisis.
As regards the crisis itself, is now clear that Project Holocaust has been part of the globalization agenda from the very beginning. Chossudovsky seems to have a very good grasp of this, and his recent article articulates his thinking very well, with his usual thorough documentation:
Global Famine, by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8877
http://tinyurl.com/5vqjhe
I'm also drawing on a number of other articles that I've posted to the newslog archives ( http://groups.google.com/group/newslog/topics). I will continue to post ongoing developments to newslog under the theme, Project Holocaust.
This project – this war on the poor – has come as a multi-pronged assault. Perhaps the most effective prong of the assault has been upon the food-production infrastructure throughout the South. Everywhere self-sufficient local food arrangements were systematically destroyed, either by IMF conditions attached to loans, or by manipulations of global markets. A debt-ridden South was forced over the past two decades into a situation where it has to import its food at prices dictated by the global marketplace, and pay for that food by exporting whatever it can, at prices also determined by the global marketplace.
This systematic restructuring of global food production and distribution patterns amounted to putting a noose around the necks of all the poor people throughout the South, and to some extent in the North as well – a noose that can be tightened at any time, simply by manipulating the global market price of various commodities. And as Chossudovsky, Engdahl, and others bring to our attention, the noose is now being systematically tightened, through a variety of manipulations that are both numerous and cumulative.
The same folks who choreographed for us the subprime mortgage crisis, are now choreographing a hyped-up speculative marketplace in energy futures and food futures. Food and energy prices are being bid upwards, and this upward surge has nothing to do with supply and demand in a resource sense. It is not about peak oil, overpopulation, or lagging food production. Instead it is about the exploitation of fears of those things. Just as anticipation of increasing value spurred the housing bubble, so anticipation of scarcity spurs the rise in resource prices.
Fears of scarcity create a speculative market for resource futures. The ensuing speculation fulfills the fears, by making resources unaffordable to millions in the South. When it is thus demonstrated that the fears are real, the upward bidding then gets even more intense – a self-propelled upward spiral of death, orchestrated by elite predators poised in their financial webs. The upward spiral is still in its early days, and soon it will be billions who can no longer afford to eat.
Another of the manipulations is of course the promotion of biofuels, justified by that same fear of scarcity. Peak oil has been taken down to Highway 61, and we were thereby sold an energy solution that doesn't save energy. It takes more energy to produce biofuels than they later yield as fuels – energy in the form of tractor fuel, petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, transport to and from the production site, etc. etc. While not adding to our fuel supplies, biofuels do add very directly to rising food prices. Every acre shifted to biofuel production takes an acre away from food production. When the EU and the US mandate quotas for biofuels – eg, every gallon sold must contain 10% biofuels – that represents a sharp tug on the nooses around the necks of everyone in the South. And the tightness hurts even before the biofuels go into production, because the anticipation of biofuels is already accelerating the upward speculative bidding of prices for food and energy.
All of these manipulations are cumulative and mutually reinforcing. Rising energy prices, for example, add directly to rising food prices, because modern food-production methods are very energy intensive. So the poor are hit twice by energy prices rises, once if they use fuel directly, and again in the market price of food.
As regards the crisis itself, the evidence is clear. Massive famine is inevitable as long as these economic forces continue to operate. And down on Highway 61, on our media waves, these forces are being presented to us as being inevitable. After the newscaster shows you pictures of food riots, he then bemoans the fact that prices are expected to rise even higher. The will of the market is the same as a force of nature – there is nothing that be done about it. In this way the status of financial elites has been raised to the level of gods – whatever they arrange is accepted as being inevitable. This is probably the single biggest scam that has ever been sold down on Highway 61. In early chiefdoms, the chiefs declared themselves to be gods, and people had to bow down before them if they wanted their heads to remain on their necks. Later we had the divine right of kings, and the divine validity of church doctrine. Now we have gods all over again – what Tom Wolfe called the masters of the universe – whose names are so holy that they are never spoken.
Let us now consider the evidence for Project Holocaust that emerges from the nature of the interventions that are being announced, purportedly to alleviate the crisis. In a word, the interventions all amount to more of the same. More indebtedness by the South, as loans are made available for additional energy-intensive agricultural projects. More dependence on direct food aid from the North, when it is well known that rising prices are rapidly decreasing the rate at which direct aid can be supplied. Our leaders' plans for putting out the fires of hunger is to pour gasoline on the fires! We should not be surprised by this. From that same web of control, the same predator elites who arrange financial matters also groom our political leaders throughout their careers, and mold the media treatment of those careers as they see fit. When the master says jump, every political leader in the West answers, "how high?"
Large areas of the global South have been systematically turned into extermination camps, and the process of extermination – the final solution to the crisis of capitalist growth – is now beginning on its planned course. The food crisis has been brought down to Highway 61, as a new media theme, and we are being programmed to accept starvation as being inevitable, and to applaud solutions that can only make the problem worse. Joseph Goebbels would be amazed at the progress that has been made in propaganda since his day. And Heinrich Himmler would be amazed at the increased efficiency of modern methods, "You don't need to run the camp trains, you only need to halt the food trains, very clever!"
The sophistication of the modern propaganda machine – this matrix reality – is truly awesome. Keep in mind that this hunger theme is a secondary theme in the media, not a main theme. We'll get episodic reports of famines, just as we do today from Africa and Burma, but our attention will always be focused on some main theme – anything from elections to scandals to olympics to global warming to 'terrorism'. By such means we are led by the nose down the garden path to genocide, fascism, a continual state of war, impoverishment, disenfranchisement, and soon martial law. None of us need any longer wonder why good Germans stood by while Nazism and the Holocaust were in full swing, we need only ask ourselves the same question.
rkm
http ://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7693
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