The Fourth Estate, the free press, is anything but free in these days of First world financial decomposition. As all is linked in a power construct of world wide magnitude. Fed on electronically controlled capital transfer mechanisms, manipulated by "the happy few", that are as opaque as the nights in orgiastic Pompei before the Eruption; where they met to celebrate their elitist status of rich and enviable. Just like their current counterparts do in their Jet set locations around the globe.
This is not new as the whole construct of Pax Americana since "Reaganomics" inception days has been to concentrate power of the press in the hands of Media Barons, part of the feudal, First world elite; of the new supply side mantra of deregulated Thatcherism bequeathed by post industrial "big bang" on both sides of the Atlantic. The mindsets of Ronald and Margaret were two peas from the same pod!
This corporate concentration and resulting media regulatory capture became all too evident with the advent of all-powerful cable TV during the Iraq Operation Desert storm of Bush's NWO military strategy, launched in 1991.
Ted Turner and CNN iconised that new media mind set, where fake military prowess was fed to a bemused world "Only on CNN", by the likes of dragon lady on-the-spot, Christiane Amanpour, and point media war room program editor Wolf Blitzer. What CNN started as instant slanted TV media scam became generalised and even more slanted subsequently by Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV.
We were now in totally prefabricated news on an industrial scale where the message is what the media said it was, irrespective of reality in the field. The Fourth estate has thus become totally owned by the Oligarchs of this world, like Bloomberg TV. All networked in social constructs that protect economic or socio-political lobbies of ethnic bent, who are lords of the oil patch or anointed guardians of Western values on Eurasian continent. New Knight Templars of the Oligarchical age.
Regulatory capture, as with the notational corporates regulating the financial risk assets market, is now complete by the Powers that be; all devoted to privatising their profits off-shore and socialising by ricochet government held debts generated by their mad frenzy of derivative products financialisation via the banking cabal, whose nominal size is more than ten times the size of the real world economy.
All devoted to kleptocratic minded, pathologically fueled scams of privately controlled, unregulated, OTC financial trades; margin calls amongst crony, incestuous banks feeding the fires of inevitable risk asset deflation; the insidious, visible froth of the ground swell underneath churning up the financial seas to unfurl the economic tsunami in the making. Irresponsibility proclaimed like a whim and accountability abandoned like surplus swimwear on an uber-alles nudist beach.
We were now totally in imperial Rome on the MSM channels, as all the major media channels aligned themselves to the FOX generated mantra hype, all devoted to the glory of the Oligarchs. "Panem and Circenses" was now generalised worldwide. It led to the 2003 "Clash of civilizations" war on "Terror", and the concomitant hubristically fed 2001-2008 financial meltdowns based on rampant greed.
The new Rome that now emerges in the aftermath of this current ongoing capitalistic mayhem, is now draped in the tinsel shroud of central bank fiat money pumping of unlimited magnitude; fake financial economy levitation like human muscle expansion fed on steroids; it is now a hollow shell of its past power.
Covered in lies and debt. With no way out as it fabricates its own viral toxins of internal institutional decay just like ancient Rome did.
The hidden persuaders, the Mad Men, of our hubristic age have now taken over the media spin. All those who are in cognitive dissonance now risk to be labeled as "heretics" and pulled into the dragnet of repression of which the state "terrorista" legislation of the NDAA is the newest twist, as the USA administration morphs into Orwellian Big Brother State.
We have nowhere to go, those who are neither revolutionary of bend nor willing collaborators of despotic madness. The 99% of people of first world are condemned to see their life's work and their progeny's futures go up in Oligarchically manipulated debt slavery for decades to come.
We Have One Last Chance To Restore The Bill Of Rights
charles hugh smith-Welcome to the United States of Orwell, Part 4: "Consumer Protection" Just Another Federal Reserve Power Grab
charles hugh smith-The Phony "Economic Recovery," Stress and "Losing It"
where the primitive meets civilized
naive and sentimental onlooker
samedi 31 mars 2012
lundi 26 mars 2012
The Continuing Age of Social Networking and Information Revolution
Here again a walk down memory lane is useful to understand current trends :
1° The most ancient, persistent social network in Western civilization is the Jewish religion. Based purely on exclusive ethnic links and religious beliefs it has survived for over three thousand years. Today it is one of the most powerful socio-political networks, in spite of its elitist and tiny infrastructure, diaspora of ethnic affiliation, controlling the nerve centers of western civilization.
All to defend an illogical nation-state construct of new Templar kingdom, based on a debased ideology that contradicts history : Zionism. But a geo-political construct of extreme relevance to Pax Americana as it is Gendarme of western values in the Oil patch, as well as frontier outpost looking out to the Eurasian continent dominated by the new burgeoning Empires of tomorrow. Constantinople's old role, that Lebanon was destined to play after WW1 in post-Ottoman collapse but which is now a shelved project. Beirut is now replaced by Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.
An example to meditate as it all started in an arid country surrounding by the greatest Empires of that age : Babylon, Egypt and the Medes. A lost and subjugated people who considered themselves the elect of Yahweh their patriarchal God. Based on this trend setting, male predominant, dogmatic, closed system culture, they survived two thousand years of ostracism and genocide, developing in the process mechanisms of self preservation of incredible resilience and ingenuity.
2° The Roman Empire through its power construct would emulate Alexander's dream on a grander scale. It would create the most powerful political and social network that Man has known, bequeathing to humanity its Lex Romana, its latin language, its architecture and Coliseum culture, its aqueducts, its vine and olive Mediterranean traditions learned from the Greeks; its disciplined military legions and its historically minded philosophers. Most of all its Republican construct and its despotic contrary : Kaiseridée; they would both fascinate Western world to this day as means of governance.
From 325 AD onwards, the Roman Empire construct would benefit from the ideological transplantation of a heretical, jewish religion as unique transcendent culture uniting its fold. Thus codified and sanctified by its Latin church hierarchy and litany, it would disseminate the social links of Christianity wherever the Roman Empire held sway, notably in Mare Nostrum, and its surrounding crown jewel territories of Italy, gallic France, Byzantine Greece and North Africa.
The Christian faith was now the most powerful social network in the world. Its comparative advantage over the Jewish faith would be its universality. All men from all origins and walks of life could adhere to it. It had in the Latin church the first multinational corporate structure to disseminate it; as the Gregorian reforms would amply prove. Dictatus Papae however would dismember its unified preeminence tearing asunder the Holy Roman construct; as the Church and Emperor fought for political supremacy, all the while they conducted their joint venture of colonising the Holy Land during the Crusades. A venture in which they failed as they were resisted by a new social network as virulent as their own tradition; the Muslim faith, all fueled by nascent local patriotism.
3° The emergence of the Islamic faith in the arid midst of backward Arabia is another startling innovation of social networking. Mohamed, its prophet, would have retained the lessons from both the Jewish and Christian traditions before him. His religion, and its social values, would integrate in one whole, transcendent belief system whose timeline is borrowed from the earlier religions, by coupling it to social linkages based on newly pronounced divine word that were more binding. As they imposed both impassioned proselytism as offensive techniques of disseminating God's word to spread the new faith, as well coercive means of using brute force to impose it if met with resistance. Yield to God's light or perish under the sword was a novel approach for Empire building. It was universal in its call.
This social construct of transcendent religion had the imperial bend of Roman legions from day one.
It would prove very efficient. It would influence the rabid trend to militarist adventure of 'God wills it' amongst the Christian fold. A sterile and debasing fight amongst two social networks basically pushing the same ideology of patriarchal preeminence.
This trend to splinter social networks based on deviant transcendent constructs would exemplify the limits of social networking based on revelatory values. Heresies that contradicted God's given word promoted by the base culture, providing an alternative vision of divine presence, proved the poison pill of the revelatory tradition; in both Muslim and Christian faiths. As extirpating deviant heresy by violence destroyed the very foundations of the blind faith in God's universal word. When faith dies all hope dies as well, as there is no charity left once violence is the rule. Hope, faith and charity were the essence of revelatory value social construct.
4° Secular Social Constructs
Universal values were now accepted as part of the prevalent social constructs of that age. Buddha in India and Asia, Plato and Aristotle's legacy in Greece and Romanised Mediterranean region, also promoted rival social networking constructs based on different value systems. They were not based on revelatory dogma more on man's own reasoning and spiritual introspection. Logic and analysis became a powerful tool for social constructs. The secular tradition of the Greeks promoted ethical and exemplary conduct in man fueled by simple values all could relate to : Prudence, Courage, Temperance and Justice. Socrates, its founding spirit, placed truth and justice as the cardinal virtues of logical man.
The crisis of the Christian and Muslim social constructs would feed the fountain of logical philosophy and thinking during the scholastic period. The secular networks were born again during these dark ages and Man would never look back. As he had found a never ending source of intellectual growth to animate his civilization. You are what you do is now the mantra of the modern age. Not what you believe in but what you accomplish, irrespective of your beliefs.
5° The Nation-State social construct
It all came together when Rome died as cultural beacon of West and geographical and cultural identity expressed itself around a common language and territorial proximity. Divine rights now became secondary to people's will as the democratic age triumphed. We can see that the progress of Man is always based on his past failures, and by a trial and error process, now fed on fact and reason to find practical solutions to collective problems.
We are there in this modern age, where technology is now time's arrow for man's temporal realm and its downfall as well. It is a two edged sword, a Pandora's box. The key to it all stays Man and his own mind set. Good and Bad still have relevance. Life will never be an expert system developed by artificial intelligence fed humanoids, it will always require human ethics to irrigate its actions, or it will die. Armageddon is now nuclear, biological and can destroy the biosphere.
6° Internet and Facebook
The newest expression of social networking in the modern age of cloud computing and virtual linkage of human species across the globe at the click of a computerised mouse. As man's intelligence allows him to develop his potential to become and affirm his own value systems, as independent reference point outside a collective construct of traditional social networking, religious or political, in the form of the nation-state construct, we will now see social families emerging with very powerful means of persuasion based on value systems that are not ethnically, religiously or geographically specific.
This new age of transnational culture, now gone truly global at the individual level, expressed itself in the Corporate constructs of our times which control the means of production and commercialisation of the industrial and post-industrial ages. What the Corporations do today to maximise their own wealth, impoverishing concomitantly those of the common man in today's new feudal world, is the challenge that Man is now faced with.
One possible solution will be his affirmation of rival social networks, alternative power structures, that challenge the Oligarchy power structures in place today. As new, secular and social heresies, just as their spiritual forebears did with the Religious constructs of yester-year. We the people will have to nail our 95 theses of Reform to the walls of the Oligarchical palace.
We are in tipping point moments of the Capitalist Age. Our technology base, our logic systems and our ethical values are the keys to our future progress; in a construct that respects both man and his environment under dire threat by this run-away perversion of the hyper-consumer age of Pax Americana. The Prince of Machiavelli is now a true corporate shill.
Lebanon Massacre | EAM B' - ΥΔΡΟΧΟΟΣ
Global Debt Crisis | EAM B' - ΥΔΡΟΧΟΟΣ
1° The most ancient, persistent social network in Western civilization is the Jewish religion. Based purely on exclusive ethnic links and religious beliefs it has survived for over three thousand years. Today it is one of the most powerful socio-political networks, in spite of its elitist and tiny infrastructure, diaspora of ethnic affiliation, controlling the nerve centers of western civilization.
All to defend an illogical nation-state construct of new Templar kingdom, based on a debased ideology that contradicts history : Zionism. But a geo-political construct of extreme relevance to Pax Americana as it is Gendarme of western values in the Oil patch, as well as frontier outpost looking out to the Eurasian continent dominated by the new burgeoning Empires of tomorrow. Constantinople's old role, that Lebanon was destined to play after WW1 in post-Ottoman collapse but which is now a shelved project. Beirut is now replaced by Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.
An example to meditate as it all started in an arid country surrounding by the greatest Empires of that age : Babylon, Egypt and the Medes. A lost and subjugated people who considered themselves the elect of Yahweh their patriarchal God. Based on this trend setting, male predominant, dogmatic, closed system culture, they survived two thousand years of ostracism and genocide, developing in the process mechanisms of self preservation of incredible resilience and ingenuity.
2° The Roman Empire through its power construct would emulate Alexander's dream on a grander scale. It would create the most powerful political and social network that Man has known, bequeathing to humanity its Lex Romana, its latin language, its architecture and Coliseum culture, its aqueducts, its vine and olive Mediterranean traditions learned from the Greeks; its disciplined military legions and its historically minded philosophers. Most of all its Republican construct and its despotic contrary : Kaiseridée; they would both fascinate Western world to this day as means of governance.
From 325 AD onwards, the Roman Empire construct would benefit from the ideological transplantation of a heretical, jewish religion as unique transcendent culture uniting its fold. Thus codified and sanctified by its Latin church hierarchy and litany, it would disseminate the social links of Christianity wherever the Roman Empire held sway, notably in Mare Nostrum, and its surrounding crown jewel territories of Italy, gallic France, Byzantine Greece and North Africa.
The Christian faith was now the most powerful social network in the world. Its comparative advantage over the Jewish faith would be its universality. All men from all origins and walks of life could adhere to it. It had in the Latin church the first multinational corporate structure to disseminate it; as the Gregorian reforms would amply prove. Dictatus Papae however would dismember its unified preeminence tearing asunder the Holy Roman construct; as the Church and Emperor fought for political supremacy, all the while they conducted their joint venture of colonising the Holy Land during the Crusades. A venture in which they failed as they were resisted by a new social network as virulent as their own tradition; the Muslim faith, all fueled by nascent local patriotism.
3° The emergence of the Islamic faith in the arid midst of backward Arabia is another startling innovation of social networking. Mohamed, its prophet, would have retained the lessons from both the Jewish and Christian traditions before him. His religion, and its social values, would integrate in one whole, transcendent belief system whose timeline is borrowed from the earlier religions, by coupling it to social linkages based on newly pronounced divine word that were more binding. As they imposed both impassioned proselytism as offensive techniques of disseminating God's word to spread the new faith, as well coercive means of using brute force to impose it if met with resistance. Yield to God's light or perish under the sword was a novel approach for Empire building. It was universal in its call.
This social construct of transcendent religion had the imperial bend of Roman legions from day one.
It would prove very efficient. It would influence the rabid trend to militarist adventure of 'God wills it' amongst the Christian fold. A sterile and debasing fight amongst two social networks basically pushing the same ideology of patriarchal preeminence.
This trend to splinter social networks based on deviant transcendent constructs would exemplify the limits of social networking based on revelatory values. Heresies that contradicted God's given word promoted by the base culture, providing an alternative vision of divine presence, proved the poison pill of the revelatory tradition; in both Muslim and Christian faiths. As extirpating deviant heresy by violence destroyed the very foundations of the blind faith in God's universal word. When faith dies all hope dies as well, as there is no charity left once violence is the rule. Hope, faith and charity were the essence of revelatory value social construct.
4° Secular Social Constructs
Universal values were now accepted as part of the prevalent social constructs of that age. Buddha in India and Asia, Plato and Aristotle's legacy in Greece and Romanised Mediterranean region, also promoted rival social networking constructs based on different value systems. They were not based on revelatory dogma more on man's own reasoning and spiritual introspection. Logic and analysis became a powerful tool for social constructs. The secular tradition of the Greeks promoted ethical and exemplary conduct in man fueled by simple values all could relate to : Prudence, Courage, Temperance and Justice. Socrates, its founding spirit, placed truth and justice as the cardinal virtues of logical man.
The crisis of the Christian and Muslim social constructs would feed the fountain of logical philosophy and thinking during the scholastic period. The secular networks were born again during these dark ages and Man would never look back. As he had found a never ending source of intellectual growth to animate his civilization. You are what you do is now the mantra of the modern age. Not what you believe in but what you accomplish, irrespective of your beliefs.
5° The Nation-State social construct
It all came together when Rome died as cultural beacon of West and geographical and cultural identity expressed itself around a common language and territorial proximity. Divine rights now became secondary to people's will as the democratic age triumphed. We can see that the progress of Man is always based on his past failures, and by a trial and error process, now fed on fact and reason to find practical solutions to collective problems.
We are there in this modern age, where technology is now time's arrow for man's temporal realm and its downfall as well. It is a two edged sword, a Pandora's box. The key to it all stays Man and his own mind set. Good and Bad still have relevance. Life will never be an expert system developed by artificial intelligence fed humanoids, it will always require human ethics to irrigate its actions, or it will die. Armageddon is now nuclear, biological and can destroy the biosphere.
6° Internet and Facebook
The newest expression of social networking in the modern age of cloud computing and virtual linkage of human species across the globe at the click of a computerised mouse. As man's intelligence allows him to develop his potential to become and affirm his own value systems, as independent reference point outside a collective construct of traditional social networking, religious or political, in the form of the nation-state construct, we will now see social families emerging with very powerful means of persuasion based on value systems that are not ethnically, religiously or geographically specific.
This new age of transnational culture, now gone truly global at the individual level, expressed itself in the Corporate constructs of our times which control the means of production and commercialisation of the industrial and post-industrial ages. What the Corporations do today to maximise their own wealth, impoverishing concomitantly those of the common man in today's new feudal world, is the challenge that Man is now faced with.
One possible solution will be his affirmation of rival social networks, alternative power structures, that challenge the Oligarchy power structures in place today. As new, secular and social heresies, just as their spiritual forebears did with the Religious constructs of yester-year. We the people will have to nail our 95 theses of Reform to the walls of the Oligarchical palace.
We are in tipping point moments of the Capitalist Age. Our technology base, our logic systems and our ethical values are the keys to our future progress; in a construct that respects both man and his environment under dire threat by this run-away perversion of the hyper-consumer age of Pax Americana. The Prince of Machiavelli is now a true corporate shill.
Lebanon Massacre | EAM B' - ΥΔΡΟΧΟΟΣ
Global Debt Crisis | EAM B' - ΥΔΡΟΧΟΟΣ
vendredi 23 mars 2012
Living Memory and Forgotten Lessons
What has history taught us and why do we forget the lessons of the past?
The historical analysis presented here highlights two regression trends that are characteristic of our age :
1° The return of dogmatic values based on revelatory culture; religious beliefs that spread hate and exclusion in the world. This trend was chastised and curbed in Western civilization in the period of the Enlightenment, which fathered three revolutions : the British parliamentary one in 1685, the US fight for enfranchisement from colonial rule in 1776 and finally the most important, the French Revolution that changed the course of humanity. The emergence of the secular state and human rights further strengthened the cause of laicity as a legal framework; where reference to "creationist" beliefs would be severed from the realm of social-politics and political science. God had no place in deciding on the course of a nation's public choices.
This trend has abruptly come to an end in the context of Pax Americana since the Reagan/Bush years. The American administration has openly morphed into a bible inspired administration whose two pillars of foreign policy are : support of a Zionist belligerent state and of a fundamentalist minded, Muslim Wahhabist Saudi kingdom, both extremely religiously and ethnically oriented political constructs; all to protect the world's sacred energy Oil patch.
Pax Americana is now the most open supporter of the very regimes that promote obscurantism abroad as does the neo-conservative, envangelista cabal, of GWB/Clash of Civilization inspiration, now promote the same insidious, seemingly neo-fascist and authoritarian trends at home in the USA. The alignment of the Democratic party under Barack Obama to the Patriot Act and Guantanamo prison doctrines, now enhanced by the new NDAA legislation, is a chillingly alarming trend of US politics in general. We have a distinct impression that a psychopathic bend of political thinking now pervades all of US politics.
2° Concomitant with this ideological mindset shift of alarming magnitude, Pax Americana, in its strategic choices of governance, has not only compounded the financial cabal run by the TBTF banks, it has fueled its dissemination by the irresponsible print to infinity actions of the FED, all determined to levitate a distorted risk asset market of the WS casino economy based on cheap ZIRP money pumping.
This is a financial cancer that will bring down the First world economies as it betrays the very founding principles of Capitalism : Faith, confidence, transparency and accountability and finally, creative destruction of failed capital constructs through free market mechanisms. All these principles have been openly flouted by the political administration in an opaque, crony capitalistic, arbitrary and non regulatory decision making process which challenges overtly the prudential rule of law and holds nobody accountable for their criminal acts of commission and omission. Such a system of benign neglect is unsustainable as it has blatantly socialised the private debt by transferring it to the public balance sheet; allowing the private Oligarchs responsible for this criminal collusion of rampant greed to get away scot-free. All at the expense of creditor nations who source the runaway US economy based on pathologically financialised, irrational exuberance and hubristic exorbitant privilege of reserve currency status.
The signs are already visible in the Pacific rim of new, major economic actors, now moving away from the USD reserve currency status that is now strangulating the global financial markets. China, Japan, Russia, India and Brazil will do everything in their power to sever their economies from a debt ridden US/Euro financial construct, all based on petrodollar hegemony. The key to the Pax Americana construct stays the oil patch alliance between the Arab producer states, surrogates of Pax Americana, and the US economy which consumes 25% of world energy resources with 4.5% of world population.
As we see no visible signs of the major consumer economies moving away from fossil fuels in the near future, the Net land export model of oil market will strangulate economic growth worldwide. As the demands of Chindia increase, as the production of exporters decrease, as their own internal consumption explodes; all of which means that there will be less liquid fossil fuels available for USA and Europe.
This energy conundrum is the straw that will break the First world camel's back. And it will occur sooner than later. We are there and there is no way out; except the mad, irrational temptation of Armageddon. The globalised financial system and consequent power construct where 40% of the world's riches belong to 1% of the world population, on which the nation-state governments have no say and control as they are parked in off-shore havens, is the damning sign of the times; a return to Feudal order and all this implies : we are indeed in dangerous times where the four horsemen of the Apocalypse can give free reign to the worst character traits of the human kind.; social darwinism at global level.
The collapse of this system is the only salvation for mankind. But no power on earth controlled by legal governments is capable of achieving this. As the corruption of our first world institutions is so generalised and the 99% of the population can now be manipulated through regulatory capture of legal and legislative institutions of huge proportions by the 1% Oligarchical lobbies and pressure groups.
Putting thus into motion the seeds of theirs and our own collective destruction. Rome 476 AD.
If the Uterus civilization is attained then how can we spawn a new resurgence of Enlightenment?
A question to which there is no easy and apparent answer except what was implied in the previous post : a contraction of human population to a level of 1 to 2 billion inhabitants, in a totally irradiated and polluted world.
The thesis of "silent weapons" of global social engineering, if such a project exists in elitist circles, seems to lead there where all Dr Strangelove concoctions are fatally destined : Pandora's box and silent Nemesis.
Is that Pax Americana's contribution to human evolution?
Your guess is as good as mine!
But silence is never the reply of history, even if it is used by some to callously sacrifice the lambs; as power hates a vacuum and civilization is inevitably reborn.
In which case the Uterus civilization changes its safe haven; it is born elsewhere. This is the lesson of history, time and time again.
THE ONE-PERCENT’S DOCTRINE FOR THE REST OF US | ZeroHedgeArmes silencieuses pour guerres tranquilles
Guest Post: The Ascendence Of Sociopaths In US Governance | ZeroHedge
Financial Repression Kicks The Can And Our Butt
jeudi 22 mars 2012
Time's arrow : Perspectives for this century
Looking ahead, a terrifying perspective is portrayed, according to this abstract :
World Energy and Population
A Malthusian and despondent view of the future of humanity, where the predicted and projected energy crunch will have a cataclysmic effect on world population.
All the indices of our current historical trajectory point to an unsustainable model of the current Pax Americana construct. This is the conclusion of my own analysis of historical events, based on past references and analogies.
But the dire prediction proposed in this abstract is an extrapolation based on deterministic logic that has no past historical precedent. No other age and no other political system has resulted in such a retraction of the human race. But it is fair to say that the acceleration of population growth in the Twentieth century is an unprecedented event in itself, based essentially on intensive energy productive acceleration, in the five thousand year history of mankind. We are at a tipping point in industrial civilization today, this much is clear. The premise of this logic is irrefutable. But will the impetus of this regression trend take the human race collectively back to a world population of one or two billion humans? It is difficult to accept, even unimaginable, that the survival instinct of humans will not correct this reversal of a magnitude unknown since the biblical legendary inundation of Noah's Arc days; the lost continent of Atlantis in tectonic eruption or in Apocalyptical deluge.
Human endeavour and innovation have always found a way out at the price of huge sacrifice to right the wrong of civilization's meandering and destructive path, as witnessed in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, after periods of frenetic progress and population increase. Why should it be different in the 21st century?
World Energy and Population
A Malthusian and despondent view of the future of humanity, where the predicted and projected energy crunch will have a cataclysmic effect on world population.
All the indices of our current historical trajectory point to an unsustainable model of the current Pax Americana construct. This is the conclusion of my own analysis of historical events, based on past references and analogies.
But the dire prediction proposed in this abstract is an extrapolation based on deterministic logic that has no past historical precedent. No other age and no other political system has resulted in such a retraction of the human race. But it is fair to say that the acceleration of population growth in the Twentieth century is an unprecedented event in itself, based essentially on intensive energy productive acceleration, in the five thousand year history of mankind. We are at a tipping point in industrial civilization today, this much is clear. The premise of this logic is irrefutable. But will the impetus of this regression trend take the human race collectively back to a world population of one or two billion humans? It is difficult to accept, even unimaginable, that the survival instinct of humans will not correct this reversal of a magnitude unknown since the biblical legendary inundation of Noah's Arc days; the lost continent of Atlantis in tectonic eruption or in Apocalyptical deluge.
Human endeavour and innovation have always found a way out at the price of huge sacrifice to right the wrong of civilization's meandering and destructive path, as witnessed in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, after periods of frenetic progress and population increase. Why should it be different in the 21st century?
mardi 6 mars 2012
Step # 11 : Modern Age. Pax Americana. Cold War and Oil Age
Franklin Roosevelt died before he would see his life's work come to final completion. He had begun the US implication in WW2 with his famous speech after Pearl Harbour : "A day in Infamy..."
He would lead it to victory both in the Pacific, in the fight against Axis aligned Japan, as in Nazi Europe from his bases in Free French Algeria and Britain; used to launch the Normandy invasion that liberated Western Europe in May 1945. The age of Pax Americana would impose its imperium written in blood, but with the co-victors of WW2, the communist USSR, as partner and rival at the world governance table. Organised around the United Nations, FDR's parting gift to humanity to avoid Armageddon from repeating, and to the more skeptical, his tentative attempt to create and control a body of world government.
His tenure as President abruptly ended after his ambiguous conference partitioning Europe with Stalin at Yalta. It sealed the old continent's destiny for fifty years, divided into two blocks; virtually making Stalin and his Politburo successors masters of the Eurasian continent up to Berlin East. The Iron Curtain would be its inevitable outcome. As Stalin, at Potsdam Conference five months later made it very clear to FDR's successor Truman, after Hitler's Germany had surrendered; his fascist regime irredeemably destroyed, his Panzers gutted, his Reichstag in flames : "The Vatican how many divisions?"
Truman knew then that winning in Japan would not solve the problem as Soviet USSR had an irreconcilable ideology that knew no compromise with democracy and free enterprise. The Cold War race was on as the USA showed its military and technological might at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unleashing the nuclear age, Oppenheimer's toys, in their genocidal deflagrations to end the war quickly by punishing Japan so uniquely. The nuclear fusion technology, E.Teller and A. Sakharov's respective contributions to the terror impetus in its wake, achieved by both sides would make Armageddon spell its lethal legacy in megatons of destruction carried by its new heavy capacity vectors, the intercontinental ballistic missiles; Von Braun's gift to the USA as successors to his previous invention the V-2 of Nazi Germany matched by his counterpart in the USSR, S. Korolev.
The missile crisis of Cuba would end that dangerous Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) escalation, so characteristic of a new militarist mindset in the US/USSR administrations. Through a negotiated stalemate, making the hot nuclear war option recognised as unfeasible by all major nations of the UN. It would displace the military contest to the terrain of Third world fledgling nations by trying to capture the hearts and minds of the rest of the world now freed from European colonialist rule, but by other means whose message became terribly sinister. JF Kennedy's attempt to unwind the Cold War militarist stand-off would end in tragedy for his nation, by his assassination in Dallas on November 23 1963; a psychological turning point in American politics.
It would immediately lead to reinforcing the US militarist option in Third world, the legacy of the Dulles "roll back" doctrine, in the ancient French colonies of Indochina. With as casus belli a unilateral military initiative taken by the American President based on a trumped up alleged provocation.
Pax Americana had already started to impose by rule of force its will on the Third world. It all began when Maoist China emerged. The trauma of the Kuomintang defeat in 1949, allies to US, made Truman say "We've lost China..." It would see the emergence of a Military Industrial Complex (MIC) spearheaded by the CIA and Pentagon whose avowed aims would be to nip in the bud any tendency amongst emerging nations to join the Soviet bloc.
Their first concerted expression of this strategy : iconic attendees of the Bandung Conference of Non-aligned nations in 1955 would be targeted by the US administration under John Foster Dulles at State to eliminate all Third world trend to socialism. Notably as colonial France had lost Indochina, now heightening the communist influence in the region after the partition of Korea. The creation of NATO would provide a nuclear umbrella to Western Europe, stopping Soviet militarist pretensions from encroaching beyond the Yalta divide. Especially into the Near Eastern region where Turkey became the West's frontier outpost looking onto the Soviet continent, and most importantly controlling the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the first lessons of ancient history.
Where civilization began, and where it would reflourish to nourish the new world in novel ways : black gold of unimagined oil wealth.
Pax Americana, or the American vision of world hegemony had started with its "good neighbour" policy under the FDR administration. It would soon morph in the trauma of the Cold War race into arm twisting and nation building enterprise as first shown in Guatemala and Iran in 1953. It would then continue to encourage interventionist military involvement as during the Vietnam War; where it would suffer its first major setback by losing that war to Viet Cong ground based guerilla resistance.
To understand the modern age from 1945 to present times it is primordial to understand the Pax Americana construct, as perceived by its inventors and its evolution under successive US administrations. As the dominant power with the most innovative technological base and all the bountiful resources of a continent, the USA had a head start on the whole world, either recovering from the rubble of Armageddon or still entrapped in the dark ages of backward Third world mindsets; without technological infrastructure and trained human resources.
In hindsight, using the time-old measures of assessing a civilization's power construct, like for Imperial Rome of old, five criteria determine the power of a civilization to hold together its Empire :
1° Military supremacy. The USA had it in conventional arms as the victors of WW2 and as well its unmatched nuclear arsenal, as Hiroshima and the 1962 Cuban crisis had proven.
2° The money line supremacy. Bretton Woods and the USD-gold standard as world monetary system, had established that; as had the Marshal Plan and the USA's massively positive trade balance making the $ the defacto reserve currency of the world to feed the needs of all, friend and foe.
3° The independent food pipeline. The enormous wheat, corn and soya bean surpluses of the US made it the granary of the world. US aid proved vital to many struggling poor world economies.
4° The control of primary energy sources. The Oil monopoly of the Seven Sisters and the hegemony of Ford and GM motor companies made the US economic model unsurpassable, as did its chemical, electronic, motion picture, TV and consumer goods industries.
This highly concentrated liquid energy fountain of fossil origin replaced old, dirty and less efficient coal at the beginning of the 20th century, thus becoming the true black gold for modern man. It was the most vital component of the new industrial construct that would mark the supremacy of the Western model over all previous civilizations; launched on this unending adventure by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Making it the most wealthy and dynamic global, socio-cultural family the world had seen, of which the USA was uncontested leader; "Primus inter pares" amongst the community of sovereign nation-states.
5° The admission by the dominated nations that the dominant power symbolised universal progress and justice. The American dream undoubtedly did exert that fascination on the rest of the world, as iconised by the Hollywood and TV dissemination of its culture worldwide; in spite of its deeper brutal, historic traditions exemplified by its treatment of indigenous Amerindian populations and black minority citizenry, extracts of its slave and segregationist past .
Cheap energy, cheap, productive labour, capitalist technology and finance, had forged the destiny of the modern world. This complex, interconnected balance of power and its evolution would determine its fate from now on. Amongst nation-states, continents and Empires of first world construct whose three pillars were the USA, the rejuvenated European continent and industrious, inventive Japan.
In the early 1960s, at the time JF Kennedy died, the USA was the only superpower in terms of economic output. The USSR matched it in armaments but in no other domain. This alone would sound the death knell of its subsequent political demise. Europe was in the throes of reconstruction and dependent on US nuclear umbrella; two of its main economies, Germany and Italy, were vanquished domains under US military surveillance, just like Japan, now diligently involved in rebuilding its nation.
So when the Vietnam war began in 1964 under President Johnson's aegis the US reigned supreme. It would constitute a turning point in this first phase of Pax Americana. Where the Welfare state of Keynesian economics inspiration, based on consumer demand fueled by the salaries of an egalitarian middle class construct, was the world model bequeathed to Europe and Japan. To the free world as a whole, by magnanimous and expansionist America; of FDR's legacy. The US nation had been forged under FDR in a horizontal construct whose beliefs were in common man's material progress. With a political class that defended those values in a democratic framework inherited from Lincoln and Jefferson; with a republican minded legislative elected elite that upheld the rule of egalitarian laws, in a two party political system.
What the MIC and Johnson had not foreseen was that Vietnamese communist controlled guerilla resistance to their massive military invasion would prove very efficient in winning the agrarian population to their patriotic cause. In Ho Chi Minh and General Giap they had worthy military opponents of Saladin's and Mamluk calibre, like the Crusading Templars of old. And they would lose their war just like the original Templars did.
The more US colonial military might expressed itself in expeditious, desperate death squad executions of recalcitrant locals, as the infamous Operation Phoenix proved, the more the Vietcong won support to their cause. Sadly, the execution squad tactics of the CIA special forces would become a recurrent covert tactic in subsequent actions in South America under Operation Condor and later on in Iraq subsequent to operation Iraqi Freedom of 2003 war; now executed in association with privately subcontracted militia like Blackwater. It would change the perception of the heroic and selfless Soldier Ryan image of the US GI, in its militarist adventures abroad, making him a despised icon of imperialist bend. The bitter lesson of the US's hegemonial strategy over thirty years of worldwide intervention would be that Third world wars were at best pyrrhic victories and cost enormous amounts in resources to launch and sustain, resulting in small gains in terms of geopolitical governance and conquest. Napoleon's lessons were being repeated and its legacy to home nation would be as corruptive.
Not only did the Vietnam War expenditure in men and materials destroy US public morale, belief in its administration, it also destroyed the US economic preeminence in the world, concomitant with the deficit spendings of the Great Society social entitlement program unleashed by Johnson to appease the black population minority at home.
The relative decline of US power would be highlighted by its economic plight resulting in the unilateral abrogation of the Bretton Woods protocol by President Nixon in 1971, unpegging the USD convertibility from the gold exchange standard. "Our money, your problem" was the cynical summary of that monetary dictat, provoked in knee jerked fear by France's call to have converted its accumulated USD reserves, generated by a burgeoning export surplus economy, into gold denominated reserves. De Gaulle's 1965 warning of USD's "exorbitant privilege" had now come home to roost.
It would start the rush into the fiat dominated age of globalisation, whereby inflation became a redoubtable weapon to protect accumulated debt denominated in a USD currency, operating world wide transactions on a floating rate relative to all other currencies. The private US banks were now mandated to generate USD denominated fiat currency using fractional reserve banking techniques. Whereby their debt/equity ratio was not controlled as before by the FED, based on its gold exchange reserves; but was regulated by the banks themselves, on a discretionary basis, relative to their own balance sheet equity ratios. The unregulated Euro-dollar market, based in London City, exploded into a fiat money creation machine fueling world wide inflation. In all developed economies, as salaries were indexed on inflation, it created a run-away monetary spiral where more fiat denominated debt chased consumption in a booming consumerist age, fed on cheap energy imported principally from oil rich Arabia. The giant Ghawar oil field discovery had made the Saudi kingdom linchpin to world energy domination, now preeminent in proven reserves significantly surpassing those its neighbours, notably Iran.
In the context of political and ideological stalemate during the Cold War, the Marxian analysis of industrial capitalism's contradictions were becoming all the more etched out as a paradox of modern times : Marx was capitalism's best critic as Big capital's hold on the economy dominated the world political scene, all the while his philosophy proposed a solution which was worse than the evil capitalism incarnated to his eyes; the USSR was losing the Cold war precisely on the economic front. Whereas American capitalism was morphing into an imperial power all the while its economy dominated the world, making it less a solution to worldwide progress and more its dominant problem, as imposer of forced solutions against the will of the local populations. America desperately needed to come out of the Keynesian age where its imperial play fed its consumerist model at home based on deficit spending in welfare expenditure, making it more and more a slothful, inefficient, corrupt empire.
It resulted in changing the basic rules of the world industrial construct. The oil rich nations of the Middle East, concerned at seeing inflation eating into their revenues, formed an energy producer cartel called OPEC and unilaterally increased the price of liquid oil three fold during the Israel-Eygpt war of 1973. From then on the West had lost its access to cheap oil, and globalisation acquired a new sense for the developed first world. To make matters worse, the US, biggest world oil producer of those times had reached a plateau in terms of indigenous production. Peak US Oil in the mid sixties made it into a substantial net importer of crude oil by the early 1970s. All from the greatest reservoir of black gold : the Saudi/Iran/Iraq/Kuwait/UAE complex of the Middle East. Arab oil was now the key to western industrial survival, as Europe and Japan also imported all their oil requirements from the same source. The 1973 oil crisis would make that brutally clear. Arab wealth would now pave the rich capitals of first world with their gaudy riches, from Marbella to Manhattan and Belgravia, London.
Managing the Oil export relationship to Arabian sources became a vital component of Pax Americana. Nixon's parting legacy to his country, in the midst of the Watergate turmoil, would be to guaranty Saudi national sovereignty under the US's nuclear umbrella against all possible enemies; notably the USSR. In exchange for OPEC making the USD its exclusive legal tender for all oil exports to the world. The petrodollar market was born and would from then on reinsure the USD's hegemony as continued world reserve currency. Such was the inordinate wealth now generated in Oil rich Arabia that recycling petrodollars into the western economy or into fledging developing economies became an absolute necessity. The oil producers had no local economies to invest their surplus wealth in. US banks thus became the main depositories of this petrodollar wealth. Their immense financial power would create a monetary bubble and result in substantial mal-investments notably in Brazil and Mexico, provoking a huge inflation bubble that would plunge the world into financial crisis in 1979; precisely when the second oil price hike occurred, driving a nail into the weaker economies of the European world.
This crisis would provoke profound changes in the mindset of the ruling political class both in the US as in Britain; now become second home to the international financial community managing the offshore petrodolar USD and foreign currency markets.
The new ruling mantra developed in the power circles of the West was that the welfare state had to be slimmed down considerably, and power transferred to the Entrepreneurial classes of the West. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would ensure this major transformation of western economies over the decade of the 80s. The big bang deregulation of financial markets, in both Wall Street and City, would create the post-industrial revolution of the F.I.R.E economy. The supply side model of Friedman monetarism, with Alan Greenspan's initiative at the FED to make ZIRP his iconic easy money policy, to feed the investments in risk assets of stocks and bonds on WS, would be the hallmark of "Reaganomics". As it would be emulated worldwide by the integrated banking electronic networks.
The Bush Administration would push it one step further as the basis for exerting its newborn hegemony in the footsteps of its 1991 Iraqi war victory : by encouraging the outsourced model of capitalism to flower in the developing world ; hailed as the NWO of Pax Americana after the collapse of the USSR, now a bankrupt empire in ruins. All industry and intendant services were shipped abroad to docile third world partners like India and China, making international cheap labour arbitrage, rubber stamped as the new benchmark under the ground rules of globalisation, through the WTO and IMF/WB institutions.
The USA towered over the world like a colossus in this second age of Pax Americana. In the words of its official US administration ideologue, Paul Wolfowitz, harbinger of the New World Order and inquisitorial chastiser, Torquemada of this new age : all "Rogue states" that did not fall into step with US's vision of global order were the new enemy, replacing the USSR as symbols of "the Evil Axis".
The hedge funds, the junk bonds and their financial derivative successors like the CDS/CDO concoctions, as well the SPVs, would give inordinate power to the financial community world wide, now interconnected thanks to Internet, America's newly created spider's web of world wide information. Clinton's subsequent abrogation of the Glass-Steagall act allowing Citicorp to become the universal bank, now considered TBTF institution, sealed the fate of modern capitalism. Under the hubristic belief that the USA had invented the perpetual capitalistic machine, unfettered financialised capitalism would move away from the prudential, ethical, entrepreneurial business cycle model to the unabashed "greed is good" version of "bubblenomics" capitalism, all covered in purple in the belief that perpetual innovation would allow WS assets to achieve unforeseen heights in terms of monetary value, in a self fulfilling splurge of irrational exuberance.
It led first to the dot.com bubble of 2001 and later on to the greater destruction of capital formation in 2008; where the capitalist world lost its ethical compass and become land of centrally planned fiat generation to the point where it shamelessly transferred private debt to public balance sheets on a massive scale, protecting its crony capitalist class to continue their mad paper money creation binge, all concocted in a closed Oligarchy loop of opaque private OTC deals, negotiated in totally unregulated fashion, parked in off balance sheet financial vehicles; often located for hiding ill gained profits in off-shore, non fiscalised bank accounts.
The derivative markets bubble was now the pandora's box of capitalism, with central bank fed monetary inflation its bad genie; as hyperdeflation would be one day its inevitable Nemesis. In the space of thirty years Reaganomics had dug its own grave in the false belief that a fiat pumped debtor economy was sustainable in a country that held the big nuclear stick over the heads of a cowered world. Vain illusion of all Empires. Now that Chindia challenged it for preeminence, and the world's resources could not feed all their collective requirements, the writing was on the wall. The hyperconsumer model had to be abandoned as there were insurmountable resource limitations in the Earth's crust and the resultant collateral damage to ecosystems and human environment from such initiatives were incommensurable.
The world had reached a watershed in industrial development. The USA as prime world mover and initiator of global trend is now increasingly in the eye of the cyclone. Like Gulliver it is strapped down by its own mountain of debt. Something has to give as more debt could not sustain either growth or payback of previous debt all spent in a binge of cheap imports over twenty years.
We are now there today. In this first world conundrum, as not only the USA but Eurozone and Japan are totally inundated with financial debt and an industrial model which carries it own seeds of destruction as the Fukushima disaster has amply shown.
We need a new energy and industrial paradigm urgently. One that is environmentally compatible with global warming. And as a human community of over 7 billion people we don't have much time.
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908
Crisis of the U.S. Dollar System
Peak oil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Oil Drum | Global World Product Will Not Grow at 4%+ for Five Years
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He would lead it to victory both in the Pacific, in the fight against Axis aligned Japan, as in Nazi Europe from his bases in Free French Algeria and Britain; used to launch the Normandy invasion that liberated Western Europe in May 1945. The age of Pax Americana would impose its imperium written in blood, but with the co-victors of WW2, the communist USSR, as partner and rival at the world governance table. Organised around the United Nations, FDR's parting gift to humanity to avoid Armageddon from repeating, and to the more skeptical, his tentative attempt to create and control a body of world government.
His tenure as President abruptly ended after his ambiguous conference partitioning Europe with Stalin at Yalta. It sealed the old continent's destiny for fifty years, divided into two blocks; virtually making Stalin and his Politburo successors masters of the Eurasian continent up to Berlin East. The Iron Curtain would be its inevitable outcome. As Stalin, at Potsdam Conference five months later made it very clear to FDR's successor Truman, after Hitler's Germany had surrendered; his fascist regime irredeemably destroyed, his Panzers gutted, his Reichstag in flames : "The Vatican how many divisions?"
Truman knew then that winning in Japan would not solve the problem as Soviet USSR had an irreconcilable ideology that knew no compromise with democracy and free enterprise. The Cold War race was on as the USA showed its military and technological might at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unleashing the nuclear age, Oppenheimer's toys, in their genocidal deflagrations to end the war quickly by punishing Japan so uniquely. The nuclear fusion technology, E.Teller and A. Sakharov's respective contributions to the terror impetus in its wake, achieved by both sides would make Armageddon spell its lethal legacy in megatons of destruction carried by its new heavy capacity vectors, the intercontinental ballistic missiles; Von Braun's gift to the USA as successors to his previous invention the V-2 of Nazi Germany matched by his counterpart in the USSR, S. Korolev.
The missile crisis of Cuba would end that dangerous Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) escalation, so characteristic of a new militarist mindset in the US/USSR administrations. Through a negotiated stalemate, making the hot nuclear war option recognised as unfeasible by all major nations of the UN. It would displace the military contest to the terrain of Third world fledgling nations by trying to capture the hearts and minds of the rest of the world now freed from European colonialist rule, but by other means whose message became terribly sinister. JF Kennedy's attempt to unwind the Cold War militarist stand-off would end in tragedy for his nation, by his assassination in Dallas on November 23 1963; a psychological turning point in American politics.
It would immediately lead to reinforcing the US militarist option in Third world, the legacy of the Dulles "roll back" doctrine, in the ancient French colonies of Indochina. With as casus belli a unilateral military initiative taken by the American President based on a trumped up alleged provocation.
Pax Americana had already started to impose by rule of force its will on the Third world. It all began when Maoist China emerged. The trauma of the Kuomintang defeat in 1949, allies to US, made Truman say "We've lost China..." It would see the emergence of a Military Industrial Complex (MIC) spearheaded by the CIA and Pentagon whose avowed aims would be to nip in the bud any tendency amongst emerging nations to join the Soviet bloc.
Their first concerted expression of this strategy : iconic attendees of the Bandung Conference of Non-aligned nations in 1955 would be targeted by the US administration under John Foster Dulles at State to eliminate all Third world trend to socialism. Notably as colonial France had lost Indochina, now heightening the communist influence in the region after the partition of Korea. The creation of NATO would provide a nuclear umbrella to Western Europe, stopping Soviet militarist pretensions from encroaching beyond the Yalta divide. Especially into the Near Eastern region where Turkey became the West's frontier outpost looking onto the Soviet continent, and most importantly controlling the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the first lessons of ancient history.
Where civilization began, and where it would reflourish to nourish the new world in novel ways : black gold of unimagined oil wealth.
Pax Americana, or the American vision of world hegemony had started with its "good neighbour" policy under the FDR administration. It would soon morph in the trauma of the Cold War race into arm twisting and nation building enterprise as first shown in Guatemala and Iran in 1953. It would then continue to encourage interventionist military involvement as during the Vietnam War; where it would suffer its first major setback by losing that war to Viet Cong ground based guerilla resistance.
To understand the modern age from 1945 to present times it is primordial to understand the Pax Americana construct, as perceived by its inventors and its evolution under successive US administrations. As the dominant power with the most innovative technological base and all the bountiful resources of a continent, the USA had a head start on the whole world, either recovering from the rubble of Armageddon or still entrapped in the dark ages of backward Third world mindsets; without technological infrastructure and trained human resources.
In hindsight, using the time-old measures of assessing a civilization's power construct, like for Imperial Rome of old, five criteria determine the power of a civilization to hold together its Empire :
1° Military supremacy. The USA had it in conventional arms as the victors of WW2 and as well its unmatched nuclear arsenal, as Hiroshima and the 1962 Cuban crisis had proven.
2° The money line supremacy. Bretton Woods and the USD-gold standard as world monetary system, had established that; as had the Marshal Plan and the USA's massively positive trade balance making the $ the defacto reserve currency of the world to feed the needs of all, friend and foe.
3° The independent food pipeline. The enormous wheat, corn and soya bean surpluses of the US made it the granary of the world. US aid proved vital to many struggling poor world economies.
4° The control of primary energy sources. The Oil monopoly of the Seven Sisters and the hegemony of Ford and GM motor companies made the US economic model unsurpassable, as did its chemical, electronic, motion picture, TV and consumer goods industries.
This highly concentrated liquid energy fountain of fossil origin replaced old, dirty and less efficient coal at the beginning of the 20th century, thus becoming the true black gold for modern man. It was the most vital component of the new industrial construct that would mark the supremacy of the Western model over all previous civilizations; launched on this unending adventure by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Making it the most wealthy and dynamic global, socio-cultural family the world had seen, of which the USA was uncontested leader; "Primus inter pares" amongst the community of sovereign nation-states.
5° The admission by the dominated nations that the dominant power symbolised universal progress and justice. The American dream undoubtedly did exert that fascination on the rest of the world, as iconised by the Hollywood and TV dissemination of its culture worldwide; in spite of its deeper brutal, historic traditions exemplified by its treatment of indigenous Amerindian populations and black minority citizenry, extracts of its slave and segregationist past .
Cheap energy, cheap, productive labour, capitalist technology and finance, had forged the destiny of the modern world. This complex, interconnected balance of power and its evolution would determine its fate from now on. Amongst nation-states, continents and Empires of first world construct whose three pillars were the USA, the rejuvenated European continent and industrious, inventive Japan.
In the early 1960s, at the time JF Kennedy died, the USA was the only superpower in terms of economic output. The USSR matched it in armaments but in no other domain. This alone would sound the death knell of its subsequent political demise. Europe was in the throes of reconstruction and dependent on US nuclear umbrella; two of its main economies, Germany and Italy, were vanquished domains under US military surveillance, just like Japan, now diligently involved in rebuilding its nation.
So when the Vietnam war began in 1964 under President Johnson's aegis the US reigned supreme. It would constitute a turning point in this first phase of Pax Americana. Where the Welfare state of Keynesian economics inspiration, based on consumer demand fueled by the salaries of an egalitarian middle class construct, was the world model bequeathed to Europe and Japan. To the free world as a whole, by magnanimous and expansionist America; of FDR's legacy. The US nation had been forged under FDR in a horizontal construct whose beliefs were in common man's material progress. With a political class that defended those values in a democratic framework inherited from Lincoln and Jefferson; with a republican minded legislative elected elite that upheld the rule of egalitarian laws, in a two party political system.
What the MIC and Johnson had not foreseen was that Vietnamese communist controlled guerilla resistance to their massive military invasion would prove very efficient in winning the agrarian population to their patriotic cause. In Ho Chi Minh and General Giap they had worthy military opponents of Saladin's and Mamluk calibre, like the Crusading Templars of old. And they would lose their war just like the original Templars did.
The more US colonial military might expressed itself in expeditious, desperate death squad executions of recalcitrant locals, as the infamous Operation Phoenix proved, the more the Vietcong won support to their cause. Sadly, the execution squad tactics of the CIA special forces would become a recurrent covert tactic in subsequent actions in South America under Operation Condor and later on in Iraq subsequent to operation Iraqi Freedom of 2003 war; now executed in association with privately subcontracted militia like Blackwater. It would change the perception of the heroic and selfless Soldier Ryan image of the US GI, in its militarist adventures abroad, making him a despised icon of imperialist bend. The bitter lesson of the US's hegemonial strategy over thirty years of worldwide intervention would be that Third world wars were at best pyrrhic victories and cost enormous amounts in resources to launch and sustain, resulting in small gains in terms of geopolitical governance and conquest. Napoleon's lessons were being repeated and its legacy to home nation would be as corruptive.
Not only did the Vietnam War expenditure in men and materials destroy US public morale, belief in its administration, it also destroyed the US economic preeminence in the world, concomitant with the deficit spendings of the Great Society social entitlement program unleashed by Johnson to appease the black population minority at home.
The relative decline of US power would be highlighted by its economic plight resulting in the unilateral abrogation of the Bretton Woods protocol by President Nixon in 1971, unpegging the USD convertibility from the gold exchange standard. "Our money, your problem" was the cynical summary of that monetary dictat, provoked in knee jerked fear by France's call to have converted its accumulated USD reserves, generated by a burgeoning export surplus economy, into gold denominated reserves. De Gaulle's 1965 warning of USD's "exorbitant privilege" had now come home to roost.
It would start the rush into the fiat dominated age of globalisation, whereby inflation became a redoubtable weapon to protect accumulated debt denominated in a USD currency, operating world wide transactions on a floating rate relative to all other currencies. The private US banks were now mandated to generate USD denominated fiat currency using fractional reserve banking techniques. Whereby their debt/equity ratio was not controlled as before by the FED, based on its gold exchange reserves; but was regulated by the banks themselves, on a discretionary basis, relative to their own balance sheet equity ratios. The unregulated Euro-dollar market, based in London City, exploded into a fiat money creation machine fueling world wide inflation. In all developed economies, as salaries were indexed on inflation, it created a run-away monetary spiral where more fiat denominated debt chased consumption in a booming consumerist age, fed on cheap energy imported principally from oil rich Arabia. The giant Ghawar oil field discovery had made the Saudi kingdom linchpin to world energy domination, now preeminent in proven reserves significantly surpassing those its neighbours, notably Iran.
In the context of political and ideological stalemate during the Cold War, the Marxian analysis of industrial capitalism's contradictions were becoming all the more etched out as a paradox of modern times : Marx was capitalism's best critic as Big capital's hold on the economy dominated the world political scene, all the while his philosophy proposed a solution which was worse than the evil capitalism incarnated to his eyes; the USSR was losing the Cold war precisely on the economic front. Whereas American capitalism was morphing into an imperial power all the while its economy dominated the world, making it less a solution to worldwide progress and more its dominant problem, as imposer of forced solutions against the will of the local populations. America desperately needed to come out of the Keynesian age where its imperial play fed its consumerist model at home based on deficit spending in welfare expenditure, making it more and more a slothful, inefficient, corrupt empire.
It resulted in changing the basic rules of the world industrial construct. The oil rich nations of the Middle East, concerned at seeing inflation eating into their revenues, formed an energy producer cartel called OPEC and unilaterally increased the price of liquid oil three fold during the Israel-Eygpt war of 1973. From then on the West had lost its access to cheap oil, and globalisation acquired a new sense for the developed first world. To make matters worse, the US, biggest world oil producer of those times had reached a plateau in terms of indigenous production. Peak US Oil in the mid sixties made it into a substantial net importer of crude oil by the early 1970s. All from the greatest reservoir of black gold : the Saudi/Iran/Iraq/Kuwait/UAE complex of the Middle East. Arab oil was now the key to western industrial survival, as Europe and Japan also imported all their oil requirements from the same source. The 1973 oil crisis would make that brutally clear. Arab wealth would now pave the rich capitals of first world with their gaudy riches, from Marbella to Manhattan and Belgravia, London.
Managing the Oil export relationship to Arabian sources became a vital component of Pax Americana. Nixon's parting legacy to his country, in the midst of the Watergate turmoil, would be to guaranty Saudi national sovereignty under the US's nuclear umbrella against all possible enemies; notably the USSR. In exchange for OPEC making the USD its exclusive legal tender for all oil exports to the world. The petrodollar market was born and would from then on reinsure the USD's hegemony as continued world reserve currency. Such was the inordinate wealth now generated in Oil rich Arabia that recycling petrodollars into the western economy or into fledging developing economies became an absolute necessity. The oil producers had no local economies to invest their surplus wealth in. US banks thus became the main depositories of this petrodollar wealth. Their immense financial power would create a monetary bubble and result in substantial mal-investments notably in Brazil and Mexico, provoking a huge inflation bubble that would plunge the world into financial crisis in 1979; precisely when the second oil price hike occurred, driving a nail into the weaker economies of the European world.
This crisis would provoke profound changes in the mindset of the ruling political class both in the US as in Britain; now become second home to the international financial community managing the offshore petrodolar USD and foreign currency markets.
The new ruling mantra developed in the power circles of the West was that the welfare state had to be slimmed down considerably, and power transferred to the Entrepreneurial classes of the West. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would ensure this major transformation of western economies over the decade of the 80s. The big bang deregulation of financial markets, in both Wall Street and City, would create the post-industrial revolution of the F.I.R.E economy. The supply side model of Friedman monetarism, with Alan Greenspan's initiative at the FED to make ZIRP his iconic easy money policy, to feed the investments in risk assets of stocks and bonds on WS, would be the hallmark of "Reaganomics". As it would be emulated worldwide by the integrated banking electronic networks.
The Bush Administration would push it one step further as the basis for exerting its newborn hegemony in the footsteps of its 1991 Iraqi war victory : by encouraging the outsourced model of capitalism to flower in the developing world ; hailed as the NWO of Pax Americana after the collapse of the USSR, now a bankrupt empire in ruins. All industry and intendant services were shipped abroad to docile third world partners like India and China, making international cheap labour arbitrage, rubber stamped as the new benchmark under the ground rules of globalisation, through the WTO and IMF/WB institutions.
The USA towered over the world like a colossus in this second age of Pax Americana. In the words of its official US administration ideologue, Paul Wolfowitz, harbinger of the New World Order and inquisitorial chastiser, Torquemada of this new age : all "Rogue states" that did not fall into step with US's vision of global order were the new enemy, replacing the USSR as symbols of "the Evil Axis".
The hedge funds, the junk bonds and their financial derivative successors like the CDS/CDO concoctions, as well the SPVs, would give inordinate power to the financial community world wide, now interconnected thanks to Internet, America's newly created spider's web of world wide information. Clinton's subsequent abrogation of the Glass-Steagall act allowing Citicorp to become the universal bank, now considered TBTF institution, sealed the fate of modern capitalism. Under the hubristic belief that the USA had invented the perpetual capitalistic machine, unfettered financialised capitalism would move away from the prudential, ethical, entrepreneurial business cycle model to the unabashed "greed is good" version of "bubblenomics" capitalism, all covered in purple in the belief that perpetual innovation would allow WS assets to achieve unforeseen heights in terms of monetary value, in a self fulfilling splurge of irrational exuberance.
It led first to the dot.com bubble of 2001 and later on to the greater destruction of capital formation in 2008; where the capitalist world lost its ethical compass and become land of centrally planned fiat generation to the point where it shamelessly transferred private debt to public balance sheets on a massive scale, protecting its crony capitalist class to continue their mad paper money creation binge, all concocted in a closed Oligarchy loop of opaque private OTC deals, negotiated in totally unregulated fashion, parked in off balance sheet financial vehicles; often located for hiding ill gained profits in off-shore, non fiscalised bank accounts.
The derivative markets bubble was now the pandora's box of capitalism, with central bank fed monetary inflation its bad genie; as hyperdeflation would be one day its inevitable Nemesis. In the space of thirty years Reaganomics had dug its own grave in the false belief that a fiat pumped debtor economy was sustainable in a country that held the big nuclear stick over the heads of a cowered world. Vain illusion of all Empires. Now that Chindia challenged it for preeminence, and the world's resources could not feed all their collective requirements, the writing was on the wall. The hyperconsumer model had to be abandoned as there were insurmountable resource limitations in the Earth's crust and the resultant collateral damage to ecosystems and human environment from such initiatives were incommensurable.
The world had reached a watershed in industrial development. The USA as prime world mover and initiator of global trend is now increasingly in the eye of the cyclone. Like Gulliver it is strapped down by its own mountain of debt. Something has to give as more debt could not sustain either growth or payback of previous debt all spent in a binge of cheap imports over twenty years.
We are now there today. In this first world conundrum, as not only the USA but Eurozone and Japan are totally inundated with financial debt and an industrial model which carries it own seeds of destruction as the Fukushima disaster has amply shown.
We need a new energy and industrial paradigm urgently. One that is environmentally compatible with global warming. And as a human community of over 7 billion people we don't have much time.
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908
Crisis of the U.S. Dollar System
Peak oil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Oil Drum | Global World Product Will Not Grow at 4%+ for Five Years
Screen shot 2012-02-13 at 9.03.40 AM.png 1 138 × 788 pixels
dimanche 4 mars 2012
Step # 10 : Modern Age. Industrial revolution. Colonial expansion. Armageddon
In the dying embers of the French revolution and Napoleon's defeat, the Congress of Vienna laid the ground work for the diplomatic brinkmanship and balance of power play that would mark the Metternich age of Europe. As Clausewitz, the Prussian strategist, so aptly said about the past Napoleonic episode : war was now an imperial weapon to achieve diplomatic aims by other means.
It would be brilliantly put into practice by the British Empire in India as by the French in Africa and Indochina to install colonial rule on all continents; gunboat and expeditionary corps diplomacy to impose territorial gains that the victim nations in a situation of technological inferiority could hardly afford to refuse.
To fuel its appetite for industrial consumption the British Empire would expropriate in its colonies the access to raw materials; salt, cotton and tea plantations; instill a culture of opium consumption amongst the suppressed masses of China and Asia, export the negroid population from its colonies to America in profitable slave trade along with the French; all the while building its cotton ginning industries and boat yards, its coal mines and steel factories at home, in its central and northern industrial red brick regions of plebeian concentration. While its upper classes played on the fields of Eton and ruled as administrators, like the Romans of old, as perpetrators of the eternal Victorian Raj. The legacy of the East India Company was such a boon, private armies and insider trading the rage of the Corsairs who built Rule Britannia.
In the meantime, all through the nineteenth century, the conventional imperial order of brinkmanship, would allow the Industrial Revolution to create material wealth of unknown dimensions, fueled on the new miracle of coal and steel, the railways and the kerosene lamp. People benefitted in all walks of life and the romantic novel was born to distract the nation with its emphasis on the individual's personal romance in society, a fact that appealed enormously to the newly formed bourgeoisie or middle class, direct social excroissance of the mass production methods of the industrial age and of increasing world commerce and galloping demographics.
During this age of material and scientific innovation will be born in the nascent middle class a desire for intellectual emancipation fed on the romanticism and novelista trend amongst literary luminaries who will influence the culture of that age; with their realistic and romantic description of the individual's condition when faced with collective trends of industrial mechanisation of society or of continental war. Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievski along with Wagner and Nietzsche best incarnate this trend in literature and general culture. The debate will rage on in intellectual circles of that age, all caught up in organising nation-state between the conflicting values of ancient royalism and modern democracy. The Enlightenment will continue to inspire Man's desires.
Concomitant to this huge transformation of Western society on a scale never witnessed in History, will be born a realization that it gives inordinate wealth and power to a new breed of aristocracy : the Capitalist class, and that this has as inevitable consequence the pauperization of the rest of society; the proletariat working class. Such a brutal change of social structure will have huge consequences on the material standards of living. The notion of class struggle will be deeply ingrained in the European population. Its new and rabid proponent the German philosopher Karl Marx. His treatise 'Das Capital', as his previous vitriolic diatribe against the ruling class expressed in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, will mark the ages as the reference book of incessant class struggle.
When Napoleon III resurrected the Empire in France, it hurtled straight into conflict with Imperial Germany, now the powerhouse of industrial growth in Europe but with no colonial presence to feed its industries with cheap raw materials. The French debacle at Sedan faced with superior firepower thanks to the German Krupp canons, would truncate France of Alsace and Lorraine regions and lead to prolonged rancour between two neighbours; now at loggerheads as in Medieval times, fighting over Lotharingian legacy.
France's pivotal position in Europe as in Africa would lead to its eviction from Fachoda and Eastern Africa as a result of its rivalry on this continent with Kitchener's Sudan. The Nile valley would stay British axis and France's strategy to build a cross continent trunk line from Dakar to Djibouti would never materialise. Whereas Kitchener's vision to link Cape town to Cairo would nearly succeed to bulwark British Raj in Africa, of which the prize possessions are Kenya and Rhodesia.
Torn between its rivalry with Bismarck's Germany occupying its eastern flank and British intransigence in Africa, France would chose its alliance with Britain during the "entente cordiale". This would lead to bloody confrontation in the Balkans between the Franco-British-Serbian alliance opposed to Pan-German vision supporting the decaying mosaic of Austro-Hungarian Empire; where the tinder of conflict will be lit at Sarajevo in 1914.
A five year war fought over French soil will ruin all three main European economies, and its allies. France, Germany, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey will all be diminished, bled white by this brutal war which will kill twenty million inhabitants in all if we include the subsequent influenza epidemic ravaging an enfeebled populace. Its will install Germany into deep financial ruin, Turkey into imperial collapse and Russia into a social revolution which will plunge its proletarian peasantry into one party Bolshevik dictatorship; killing its ability to do anything except feed a huge war machine run on docile and under nourished peasant slave labour.
But the main victors of this collapse of European continent will be a young, burgeoning, industrialised United States of America. A nation the size of its empty continent blessed with nature's gifts in inordinate abundance on or under its soil. Now become a powerful modern state from coast to coast thanks in part to the Louisiana purchase from Napoleonic France and the subsequent conquest of the West by its pioneers. A nation whose identity had been forged in the context of a bloody Civil War opposing the agrarian and slave driven economy of South against the industrial, modernist, capitalist might of North. The North won and Lincoln's legacy would spread country wide as the American cavalry destroyed the indigenous culture of the Amerindian population, decimating them in concentration type reservation enclaves. A dark page of American history tainted its birth as Nation, a racialist trait that would persist as the black population continued to suffer from racial segregation in spite of the legacy of the Civil War. It reflected the European hypocrisy of the Colonial age, where the unscrupulous treatment of "under-developed" natives was idealised as colonial white man's burden during the Victorian age. A flagrant contradiction with the spirit of the Enlightenment, as embodied in the written articles of the Constitutions of the USA and of France, both built on the ideal of human rights; as iconised by the Statue of Liberty.
Its support of the Allies in 1917 will allow it rapidly to insert itself into world trade, benefitting greatly from the weakening of European monetary systems and European industrial production; whereas its recently created US dollar, destined to become world reserve currency, and its motor and cinema industries, will triumph all over the world. Its transport industry all based on cheap oil produced locally and the technological revolutions of country wide electrification based on coal, as the media miracle of radio and telephone networking, will push its unparalleled model into world wide pre-eminence. The American age will have arrived and a young country will celebrate its supremacy during the Jazz and Charleston Age of the roaring twenties.
Its first defeat will be that of irrational capitalistic exuberance sending its overpriced asset risk stocks plunging on Wall Street, pushing the world into deep depression and subsequently into World War a second time. With the advent of totalitarian regimes in a politically regressive and desperate Europe, decimated by its economic decline, the nations of Europe will have no other option but to go to war a second time destroying what little had been built by an exhausted and thinned out lost generation during the interim interwar years.
The age of modern art will be an expression of the individual's excessive, even narcissistic, desire to exist in the face of modern militarised massacre. The age of female emancipation and sexual affirmation will accompany Freud's astonishing discoveries in the domain of psychoanalysis.
But its most iconic expression will remain the flowering of Impressionist Art fifty years earlier. It will take nascent modern society by storm at the end of the dying century, as it symbolises the need for new horizons in a world dominated by the Taylorist mantra of --you can drive any color of car you like provided it is black-- of Henry Ford's motor car production line.
Individual subjectivity will be reborn in a society obsessed by collective industrially inspired norms.
The mechanical age will also father the extreme individualism of modern man. Existentialism will tinge his deception with the Ode to deterministic progress, now become outdated legacy of Enlightenment in the nascent twentieth century, in the face of Man's hubristic folly as manifested by his increasing impulsion to indulge in self destruction, all mobilised in robot formatted and totalitarian constructs to fight the enemy, mirror image of his own intolerant and dogmatic mindset.
This second Armageddon of a brutality never seen before will leave as indelible legacy the extermination camps of the Shoah and the nuclear annihilation of militarist Japan; ally to Fascist axis powers and destroyed by US firepower at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world will have entered into the nuclear age in the most sinister of fashions.
The age of Pax Americana will begin in this devastating situation after fifty million people, mostly civilians, will have lost their lives over six years; a truly Eurasian Armageddon, with world consequences. The age of global governance will emerge.
The European continent will have lost its strategic independence as a consequence of this thirty year nation-state conflict. A lesson to be meditated for the ages to come.
The myth of Sisyphus will resurface, as that of Pandora's box; respectively by the use of serf labour in the industrial world, all crammed into urban ghettos, and in the form of the nuclear conundrum.
Here's What The World's Leading Business Looked Like 300 Years Ago - Business Insider
Napoléon Ier - Wikipédia
Louisiana Purchase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Congress of Vienna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Victorian era - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto von Bismarck - Wikipédia
Causes of World War I - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Causes of World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It would be brilliantly put into practice by the British Empire in India as by the French in Africa and Indochina to install colonial rule on all continents; gunboat and expeditionary corps diplomacy to impose territorial gains that the victim nations in a situation of technological inferiority could hardly afford to refuse.
To fuel its appetite for industrial consumption the British Empire would expropriate in its colonies the access to raw materials; salt, cotton and tea plantations; instill a culture of opium consumption amongst the suppressed masses of China and Asia, export the negroid population from its colonies to America in profitable slave trade along with the French; all the while building its cotton ginning industries and boat yards, its coal mines and steel factories at home, in its central and northern industrial red brick regions of plebeian concentration. While its upper classes played on the fields of Eton and ruled as administrators, like the Romans of old, as perpetrators of the eternal Victorian Raj. The legacy of the East India Company was such a boon, private armies and insider trading the rage of the Corsairs who built Rule Britannia.
In the meantime, all through the nineteenth century, the conventional imperial order of brinkmanship, would allow the Industrial Revolution to create material wealth of unknown dimensions, fueled on the new miracle of coal and steel, the railways and the kerosene lamp. People benefitted in all walks of life and the romantic novel was born to distract the nation with its emphasis on the individual's personal romance in society, a fact that appealed enormously to the newly formed bourgeoisie or middle class, direct social excroissance of the mass production methods of the industrial age and of increasing world commerce and galloping demographics.
During this age of material and scientific innovation will be born in the nascent middle class a desire for intellectual emancipation fed on the romanticism and novelista trend amongst literary luminaries who will influence the culture of that age; with their realistic and romantic description of the individual's condition when faced with collective trends of industrial mechanisation of society or of continental war. Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievski along with Wagner and Nietzsche best incarnate this trend in literature and general culture. The debate will rage on in intellectual circles of that age, all caught up in organising nation-state between the conflicting values of ancient royalism and modern democracy. The Enlightenment will continue to inspire Man's desires.
Concomitant to this huge transformation of Western society on a scale never witnessed in History, will be born a realization that it gives inordinate wealth and power to a new breed of aristocracy : the Capitalist class, and that this has as inevitable consequence the pauperization of the rest of society; the proletariat working class. Such a brutal change of social structure will have huge consequences on the material standards of living. The notion of class struggle will be deeply ingrained in the European population. Its new and rabid proponent the German philosopher Karl Marx. His treatise 'Das Capital', as his previous vitriolic diatribe against the ruling class expressed in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, will mark the ages as the reference book of incessant class struggle.
When Napoleon III resurrected the Empire in France, it hurtled straight into conflict with Imperial Germany, now the powerhouse of industrial growth in Europe but with no colonial presence to feed its industries with cheap raw materials. The French debacle at Sedan faced with superior firepower thanks to the German Krupp canons, would truncate France of Alsace and Lorraine regions and lead to prolonged rancour between two neighbours; now at loggerheads as in Medieval times, fighting over Lotharingian legacy.
France's pivotal position in Europe as in Africa would lead to its eviction from Fachoda and Eastern Africa as a result of its rivalry on this continent with Kitchener's Sudan. The Nile valley would stay British axis and France's strategy to build a cross continent trunk line from Dakar to Djibouti would never materialise. Whereas Kitchener's vision to link Cape town to Cairo would nearly succeed to bulwark British Raj in Africa, of which the prize possessions are Kenya and Rhodesia.
Torn between its rivalry with Bismarck's Germany occupying its eastern flank and British intransigence in Africa, France would chose its alliance with Britain during the "entente cordiale". This would lead to bloody confrontation in the Balkans between the Franco-British-Serbian alliance opposed to Pan-German vision supporting the decaying mosaic of Austro-Hungarian Empire; where the tinder of conflict will be lit at Sarajevo in 1914.
A five year war fought over French soil will ruin all three main European economies, and its allies. France, Germany, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey will all be diminished, bled white by this brutal war which will kill twenty million inhabitants in all if we include the subsequent influenza epidemic ravaging an enfeebled populace. Its will install Germany into deep financial ruin, Turkey into imperial collapse and Russia into a social revolution which will plunge its proletarian peasantry into one party Bolshevik dictatorship; killing its ability to do anything except feed a huge war machine run on docile and under nourished peasant slave labour.
But the main victors of this collapse of European continent will be a young, burgeoning, industrialised United States of America. A nation the size of its empty continent blessed with nature's gifts in inordinate abundance on or under its soil. Now become a powerful modern state from coast to coast thanks in part to the Louisiana purchase from Napoleonic France and the subsequent conquest of the West by its pioneers. A nation whose identity had been forged in the context of a bloody Civil War opposing the agrarian and slave driven economy of South against the industrial, modernist, capitalist might of North. The North won and Lincoln's legacy would spread country wide as the American cavalry destroyed the indigenous culture of the Amerindian population, decimating them in concentration type reservation enclaves. A dark page of American history tainted its birth as Nation, a racialist trait that would persist as the black population continued to suffer from racial segregation in spite of the legacy of the Civil War. It reflected the European hypocrisy of the Colonial age, where the unscrupulous treatment of "under-developed" natives was idealised as colonial white man's burden during the Victorian age. A flagrant contradiction with the spirit of the Enlightenment, as embodied in the written articles of the Constitutions of the USA and of France, both built on the ideal of human rights; as iconised by the Statue of Liberty.
Its support of the Allies in 1917 will allow it rapidly to insert itself into world trade, benefitting greatly from the weakening of European monetary systems and European industrial production; whereas its recently created US dollar, destined to become world reserve currency, and its motor and cinema industries, will triumph all over the world. Its transport industry all based on cheap oil produced locally and the technological revolutions of country wide electrification based on coal, as the media miracle of radio and telephone networking, will push its unparalleled model into world wide pre-eminence. The American age will have arrived and a young country will celebrate its supremacy during the Jazz and Charleston Age of the roaring twenties.
Its first defeat will be that of irrational capitalistic exuberance sending its overpriced asset risk stocks plunging on Wall Street, pushing the world into deep depression and subsequently into World War a second time. With the advent of totalitarian regimes in a politically regressive and desperate Europe, decimated by its economic decline, the nations of Europe will have no other option but to go to war a second time destroying what little had been built by an exhausted and thinned out lost generation during the interim interwar years.
The age of modern art will be an expression of the individual's excessive, even narcissistic, desire to exist in the face of modern militarised massacre. The age of female emancipation and sexual affirmation will accompany Freud's astonishing discoveries in the domain of psychoanalysis.
But its most iconic expression will remain the flowering of Impressionist Art fifty years earlier. It will take nascent modern society by storm at the end of the dying century, as it symbolises the need for new horizons in a world dominated by the Taylorist mantra of --you can drive any color of car you like provided it is black-- of Henry Ford's motor car production line.
Individual subjectivity will be reborn in a society obsessed by collective industrially inspired norms.
The mechanical age will also father the extreme individualism of modern man. Existentialism will tinge his deception with the Ode to deterministic progress, now become outdated legacy of Enlightenment in the nascent twentieth century, in the face of Man's hubristic folly as manifested by his increasing impulsion to indulge in self destruction, all mobilised in robot formatted and totalitarian constructs to fight the enemy, mirror image of his own intolerant and dogmatic mindset.
This second Armageddon of a brutality never seen before will leave as indelible legacy the extermination camps of the Shoah and the nuclear annihilation of militarist Japan; ally to Fascist axis powers and destroyed by US firepower at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world will have entered into the nuclear age in the most sinister of fashions.
The age of Pax Americana will begin in this devastating situation after fifty million people, mostly civilians, will have lost their lives over six years; a truly Eurasian Armageddon, with world consequences. The age of global governance will emerge.
The European continent will have lost its strategic independence as a consequence of this thirty year nation-state conflict. A lesson to be meditated for the ages to come.
The myth of Sisyphus will resurface, as that of Pandora's box; respectively by the use of serf labour in the industrial world, all crammed into urban ghettos, and in the form of the nuclear conundrum.
Napoléon Ier - Wikipédia
Louisiana Purchase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Congress of Vienna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Victorian era - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto von Bismarck - Wikipédia
Causes of World War I - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Causes of World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
jeudi 23 février 2012
Step # 9 : Modern Age : Religious War. Monarchy Reform. Revolution
Martin Luther's Reformist legacy to Europe would not achieve its aims in a context of peaceful evolution. A social construct based on the two swords of society; Feudal Order and Latin Church would fight to defend hereditary rights in the face of change; with extreme violence, disseminating it's bloody aftermath in all major nations of Europe, from northerly Sweden to southernly Spain; master of the world and scion of catholic orthodoxy exemplified by the Spanish Inquisition, now state religion.
But the forces of change would inevitably impose this transformation of continental society. On populations now sensitive to a political construct of nation-state and to monarchial leadership. Whose divine rights depended no more on a monolithic, spiritual social construct that had lost its purity and whose Vicar was now contested on half the continent; but on the will of the people of each nation.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 would consecrate the end of the feudal age, of religious wars, and the official emergence of the nation-state in Europe. Cardinal Richelieu's masterpiece of diplomacy would posthumously start the century of French domination. After his demise, under the control of successor Mazarin, who would as an added measure destroy the feudal powers of French Aristocracy during the Fronde, making French royalty an absolutist construct. Without a system of checks and balances as practiced by the rival English nation, all too aware of Norman king's power on their lands since Magna Carta days. It would seal the dissension of Franco-British rivalry in the following centuries.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 would consecrate the end of the feudal age, of religious wars, and the official emergence of the nation-state in Europe. Cardinal Richelieu's masterpiece of diplomacy would posthumously start the century of French domination. After his demise, under the control of successor Mazarin, who would as an added measure destroy the feudal powers of French Aristocracy during the Fronde, making French royalty an absolutist construct. Without a system of checks and balances as practiced by the rival English nation, all too aware of Norman king's power on their lands since Magna Carta days. It would seal the dissension of Franco-British rivalry in the following centuries.
Joan of Arc, initiator of this national sentiment during the Hundred year War in France, would now bear valiant sons in all nation-states. Over the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the power of imperial hold would flow from Catholic and regressive Spain, all hidebound by its Inquisitorial and Conquistador orders, to reformist France under Henry IV, most populous European nation; promulgating his conciliatory Edit of Nantes, new blueprint for the coming age, that would put an end to religious wars on French soil. It would liberate the nation's energies to achieve an intense period of nation building over fifty years that would make France the paramount cultural and political beacon of Europe and of the world, under Cardinal Richelieu and then King Louis XIV; the sun king.
His reign would be one of imperial consolidation evolving later on, under the spell of absolutist illusion, into a destructive cycle of paranoid delusion resulting in undoing what had previously been achieved with such painstaking effort against the will of the Feudal Order, now decimated and cowered into a coterie of fawning courtiers. Louis XIV would revoke the Edit of Nantes, thus oblige France's most talented entrepreneurs of Huguenot protestant bend to flee their native land. He would wage war on all his neighbours in a costly campaign that would ruin the economy of France and curtail its cultural influence, as his military defeats in front of the Augsburg League and during the war of the Spanish succession would allow English pre-eminence to neutralise French influence in political matters, notably in the Low countries and Rhineland regions.
His reign would be one of imperial consolidation evolving later on, under the spell of absolutist illusion, into a destructive cycle of paranoid delusion resulting in undoing what had previously been achieved with such painstaking effort against the will of the Feudal Order, now decimated and cowered into a coterie of fawning courtiers. Louis XIV would revoke the Edit of Nantes, thus oblige France's most talented entrepreneurs of Huguenot protestant bend to flee their native land. He would wage war on all his neighbours in a costly campaign that would ruin the economy of France and curtail its cultural influence, as his military defeats in front of the Augsburg League and during the war of the Spanish succession would allow English pre-eminence to neutralise French influence in political matters, notably in the Low countries and Rhineland regions.
Having ruined the economy of France, his successors, after his inordinately long reign, would find it difficult to match English mastery of the seas and implantation of colonies both in the New World as in India. The age of British colonisation of the world would begin, as French influence abroad would be limited by the Seven years war; where their presence both in Canada, in India as in the Indian Ocean would be severely restricted. Along with Spain and Portugal, France would be eliminated as a naval power and its colonial ambitions to capture land and procure slave labour would be curtailed for more than a century.
The cultural legacy of national awareness amongst the European people would express itself by renewing Greece's ancient passion for the arts, literature and philosophy. After Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch of the Renaissance Age, the new masters of literature would be a never ending list of luminaries : Shakespeare and Marlowe in England; Montaigne, Molière, Corneille, and Racine in France, Cervantes in Spain; for Philosophy : Spinoza, Descartes; for Science : Galileo and Newton.
Now that the Europeans had languages, culture and artifacts of war, they were fueled by the discoveries of science to heights unknown. Their ambitions for world domination expressed itself as each nation rivaled with the other for world hegemony. It would lead to intercontinental wars notably between France and England, now become United Kingdom of its small island.
Their political ambitions forged the social construct of national societies. Built by the Tudors in England during the sixteenth century, the King severed his relationship to Latin church, nominally assuming leadership of the Reformist Anglican church, making England beacon of commercial innovation thanks to its Corsair sea captains; all covered with the glory of defeating the Spanish Armada. No foreign invasion would henceforth extinguish its national impetus. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the liberal traditions inherited from the Magna Carta pushed the English nation to first behead its king, then to impose a constitutional change through peaceful transition, from absolutist state to parliamentary democracy, with a symbolic king as head of state. The English revolution would be remarkable in its imagination for balancing power between the people and its ruling elites; but the onus would stay in the hands of the upper classes, who would create their wealth based on the colonial adventure, thanks to England's maritime pre-eminence, making the East India Company the successors to Venice and Genoa of the Medieval Age. Britannia ruled the waves and drained the produce of its newly discovered continents under its imperial colonial yoke to its under-resourced and cold isle.
For France, the other burgeoning rival nation state, the transition to people's government would be violent, as the ancient hold of both Royalty and the now subservient Clergy to the absolutist construct, relic of old Kaiseridée, would be total. It would take the bankruptcy of the nation resulting from the speculation of its monetary fiat system, conceived by the Scotsman Law, as well the profligate spending of Louis XV, it's despotic king, to bring down the monarchial system.
The French revolution in the wake of a century of war-making and spendthrift absolutist governance, where the people's third estate would be totally absent from all decision making, would mark the political scene by its violence, the initiation of open class warfare, a novelty to Modern times.
Danton's Republican construct would be a model for the new century as it relayed the values brought back to France by the Marquis de Lafayette, when he had fought as liberator of the American colony from the British yoke beside George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and its newly written Constitution of 1787 would inspire France's revolutionary transformation to republic. But the seeds of violence and statist regime change leading to the Terror would curtail its transformation of France into a stable and appeased democratic country. The ascension of a militarist dictatorship under Napoleon I, ambitious conqueror of Caesar's dimension, would leave a trail of blood across the European continent during his fifteen year reign. Man of incredible brilliance he would mark both the destiny of his country by his administrative skills as he would mark the destiny of his Continent by the sterile and vain brilliance of his military strategy and conquests. His Moscow moment would be the turning point of his career. From then on he would lose all; and France with it its continental supremacy forever onwards.
The British Empire, in coalition with Prussia would triumph at Waterloo, as it had done previously alone on the seas at Trafalgar to defeat Napoleon's hegemonial ambitions. The resulting new European order would be established at Vienna, under the diplomacy of Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, laying the stable foundations of peace and uneasy truce between burgeoning imperial ambitions amongst nation-states; a situation that would finally fester into European Armageddon a century later.
This awareness of people's individual rights would be the fruit of a new philosophy that had matured in Europe based on the progress of human spirit and knowledge; positivist belief in Man's own ability to think for himself without relying on revelatory, God given references and traditionally instilled superstition. The age of Enlightenment would free man's mind from centuries of ingrained prejudice inculcated both by the Clerical order as by the Feudal order. It would be the iconic moment of European political and social transformation as it influenced the advent of the secular and scientific age.
Its main harbingers would be Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Montesquieu in France; Kant in Germany, relayed by the flowering of the German language under Goethe and exalted by the music of Beethoven. Also on a similar footing by Locke, Adam Smith and Ricardo in England, authors of treatises that glorified individual initiative and freedom, notably in the economic domain. The basis for political freedom of the individual, exemplified in the Rights of Man, and economic freedom exemplified in the Wealth of Nations, would set the tone for human progress for the century to come. All devoted to the Industrial revolution, the most impressive transformation of human society ever undertaken thanks to capitalistic means of production, based on mechanization and technological innovation.
Peace of Westphalia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nine Years' War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
War of the Spanish Succession - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Georges Jacques Danton - Wikipédia
French Revolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The cultural legacy of national awareness amongst the European people would express itself by renewing Greece's ancient passion for the arts, literature and philosophy. After Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch of the Renaissance Age, the new masters of literature would be a never ending list of luminaries : Shakespeare and Marlowe in England; Montaigne, Molière, Corneille, and Racine in France, Cervantes in Spain; for Philosophy : Spinoza, Descartes; for Science : Galileo and Newton.
Now that the Europeans had languages, culture and artifacts of war, they were fueled by the discoveries of science to heights unknown. Their ambitions for world domination expressed itself as each nation rivaled with the other for world hegemony. It would lead to intercontinental wars notably between France and England, now become United Kingdom of its small island.
Their political ambitions forged the social construct of national societies. Built by the Tudors in England during the sixteenth century, the King severed his relationship to Latin church, nominally assuming leadership of the Reformist Anglican church, making England beacon of commercial innovation thanks to its Corsair sea captains; all covered with the glory of defeating the Spanish Armada. No foreign invasion would henceforth extinguish its national impetus. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the liberal traditions inherited from the Magna Carta pushed the English nation to first behead its king, then to impose a constitutional change through peaceful transition, from absolutist state to parliamentary democracy, with a symbolic king as head of state. The English revolution would be remarkable in its imagination for balancing power between the people and its ruling elites; but the onus would stay in the hands of the upper classes, who would create their wealth based on the colonial adventure, thanks to England's maritime pre-eminence, making the East India Company the successors to Venice and Genoa of the Medieval Age. Britannia ruled the waves and drained the produce of its newly discovered continents under its imperial colonial yoke to its under-resourced and cold isle.
For France, the other burgeoning rival nation state, the transition to people's government would be violent, as the ancient hold of both Royalty and the now subservient Clergy to the absolutist construct, relic of old Kaiseridée, would be total. It would take the bankruptcy of the nation resulting from the speculation of its monetary fiat system, conceived by the Scotsman Law, as well the profligate spending of Louis XV, it's despotic king, to bring down the monarchial system.
The French revolution in the wake of a century of war-making and spendthrift absolutist governance, where the people's third estate would be totally absent from all decision making, would mark the political scene by its violence, the initiation of open class warfare, a novelty to Modern times.
Danton's Republican construct would be a model for the new century as it relayed the values brought back to France by the Marquis de Lafayette, when he had fought as liberator of the American colony from the British yoke beside George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and its newly written Constitution of 1787 would inspire France's revolutionary transformation to republic. But the seeds of violence and statist regime change leading to the Terror would curtail its transformation of France into a stable and appeased democratic country. The ascension of a militarist dictatorship under Napoleon I, ambitious conqueror of Caesar's dimension, would leave a trail of blood across the European continent during his fifteen year reign. Man of incredible brilliance he would mark both the destiny of his country by his administrative skills as he would mark the destiny of his Continent by the sterile and vain brilliance of his military strategy and conquests. His Moscow moment would be the turning point of his career. From then on he would lose all; and France with it its continental supremacy forever onwards.
The British Empire, in coalition with Prussia would triumph at Waterloo, as it had done previously alone on the seas at Trafalgar to defeat Napoleon's hegemonial ambitions. The resulting new European order would be established at Vienna, under the diplomacy of Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, laying the stable foundations of peace and uneasy truce between burgeoning imperial ambitions amongst nation-states; a situation that would finally fester into European Armageddon a century later.
This awareness of people's individual rights would be the fruit of a new philosophy that had matured in Europe based on the progress of human spirit and knowledge; positivist belief in Man's own ability to think for himself without relying on revelatory, God given references and traditionally instilled superstition. The age of Enlightenment would free man's mind from centuries of ingrained prejudice inculcated both by the Clerical order as by the Feudal order. It would be the iconic moment of European political and social transformation as it influenced the advent of the secular and scientific age.
Its main harbingers would be Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Montesquieu in France; Kant in Germany, relayed by the flowering of the German language under Goethe and exalted by the music of Beethoven. Also on a similar footing by Locke, Adam Smith and Ricardo in England, authors of treatises that glorified individual initiative and freedom, notably in the economic domain. The basis for political freedom of the individual, exemplified in the Rights of Man, and economic freedom exemplified in the Wealth of Nations, would set the tone for human progress for the century to come. All devoted to the Industrial revolution, the most impressive transformation of human society ever undertaken thanks to capitalistic means of production, based on mechanization and technological innovation.
Peace of Westphalia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nine Years' War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
War of the Spanish Succession - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Georges Jacques Danton - Wikipédia
French Revolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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