Oil, Agriculture and Imperialism: Averting the Fast-Track to Armageddon?

Any article that illuminates the shadows of global, predatory capitalism is laudable. To understand the interdependence of practiced financial hegemony, all parts and parcels must be discovered. It is there, that the comprehensive abilities of even the most intellectual minds are overwhelmed. It is always a special treat to receive proof that there are indeed Human Beings who can see through the entirety of the scheme. Allow me to respond to a few paragraphs directly.

One might wonder who is Bolton, or anyone in the US, to dictate and engineer what the future of another sovereign state should be.

Unfortunately, since we are all sitting in the exact same boat, which looks more and more like the Titanic every day, the people in question are not only dictating and engineering the future of another sovereign state, but the fate of Planet Earth as a whole. These people ar not only responsible for what illegal actions they directly perpetrate, but also for the forced reactions of their ‘adversaries’. The best example is the artificial creation of Cold War I and now Cold War II. The US and its vassals have actively created a threat to subdue the entire planet and convert it to the degenerated version of what goes for progress. At that, they have forced a response by those who they were threatening with overthrow, invasion and assimilation. The US is directly responsible for
the suppression of the evolution of humanity to the next level. Hundreds of trillions of dollars were wasted in hot and cold wars since 1945, when the US decided it will go for the entire planet – based on the delusion that it is its ‘God’ given right to do so. Only the US knows hoe to spend this planet. It is therefore responsible for the greatest damage done to Earth.

Unfortunately for humanity and all life on the planet, the US deems it necessary to attempt to prolong its (declining) hegemony and the age of oil.

This ties together with the ‘God’ given right to do as the US pleases. This deep sitting delusion has been programmed into the minds of the masses, to a degree where the masses are actually destroying their very own and the future of their offspring. Only – if at all – a major catastrophe in the US that will be attributed to the American way of destruction has the potential to awaken the population. This is also the Achilles heel of the US Hegemony. The awakening of the population has to be avoided by all means. The present state of the US society shows to what degree this policy is successful.

We must move away from militarism and resource-gabbing conflicts by reorganising economies so that nations live within their environmental means. We must maximise human well-being while actively shrinking out consumption levels and our ecological footprint.

As I have stated many times before, we are witnessing our own evolution. At that, it matters not if we ascend, or descend into extinction. In a very apt way, it can be said that “It is up to us what will become of us” as humanity. There are no judges around – despite what religious fanatics allege. Earth is the vehicle for wo/mankind to utilize for ascension. As it stands, we as a collective, have utterly neglected to give our vehicle the tender love and care it requires to transport us to the next level. Militarism is the weakness of the individual towards a perceived threat. It can be collectivized and converted into a trillion dollar military industrial surveillance complex. Wasting funds necessary to continue to exist as species. Militarism is an invention by those profiting from it – that includes those who work in an arm factory instead of manufacturing greenhouses. As John Lennon also stated, there are no problems, there are only solutions. Human ingenuity can overcome all obstacles – our continued presence on Planet Earth is proof for that. Alan Watts once said that the problem is not the system. It is the people we allow to occupy the system. For Bolton et al, the wellbeing of each member of mankind plays no role whatsoever. These folks are egotistic to the degree of psychosis.

We need to place greater emphasis on producing food rooted in the principles of localisation, self-reliance, (carbon sequestrating) regenerative agriculture and (political) agroecology and to acknowledge the need to regard the commons (soil, water, seeds, land, forests, other natural resources, etc) as genuine democratically controlled common wealth.

It is actually quite simple to achieve that. Solutions already exist. Vertical, organic agriculture is already spreading. Sure, to corporate Fascism the implementation of solutions that enable people to be self-reliant, self-sufficient, healthy and happy is an existential threat. Fascism is the principles of “Whoever is not with us is against us”, “Do as I say, not as I do” and “If I can’t have, neither can you” (as in torched Earth). The best antidote to Fascism is the (Re-)Nationalization of public utilities and resources. One is reminded of the wisdom of the Indian Nation that once populated the North American continent:

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”

Thank You again for the light in Your article.

I love Colin’s articles. If we are going to avert Armageddon, I feel we need to develop a secular bootstrap ‘Grand Unified Theory’ of our Earth system dynamics. The reductive, materialist, separate socio-geographic (nation state; regional bloc; hemispheric), and isolated systems (separate political spheres – ‘the economy’; ‘the environment’; ’employment’; ‘healthcare’; etc) views that we have been applying to geopolitics have yielded only partial insights. I feel we need to take a metaphoric ‘blue marble’ space-eye view of relational, integral, dialectic, interactional systems …toward a non-partisan Dynamic Earth Systems Theory.

Much of the theory has been formulated over the past century, it only remains to be collated and recognised. The ‘Three Ecologies’ of mind, economy, and environment are symbiotic and trialectic – a perturbation in one (that radical butterfly exercising its wings) ripples through and reverberates the entire system.

Hall and Klitgaard have produced the thesis linking the environment to the economy in “Energy and the Wealth of Nations”. As their subtitle suggests: this is toward a biophysical economics. If we accept that wars are, if not wholly, but substantially market and resource driven – and that the ideology is substantially a propagandic cover story for the justification and legitimation of this …then the underlying reasons are governed by biophysical limitation due to overconsumption. The underlying factor is malignant growthism. The countervailing factor is the diminishing quality (including, but not necessarily limited by, quantity) of natural resources.

https://www.springer.com/la/book/9781441993984#otherversion=9781441993977

Another major factor is debt. An economic subsystem (a country, or corporation, for instance) can mimic the effects of declining EROI (the statistical measure of diminishing quality – expressed as a ratio) by debt funding and monetising debt. The limitation is that at least the debt repayments have to be met by tangible growth – which is limited by biophysical resource consumption. As more and more capital is needed to extract resources (principally hydrocarbon resources) – less and less becomes available for societal needs (EROIsoc) …including debt management. Ignoring the underlying EROI risks the Ponzification of economics – which, for many countries, including the UK – is exactly where we are. The past is a poor, indeed misleading, measure of the future. The arrows of time and entropy point one way only.

Dr Tim Morgan and Gail Tverberg have pioneered this form of surplus energy accounting. The future looks bleak, only if we think it will be a continual prosperity trip like the past. And we all know who pocketed the bulk of the profit, don’t we? That’s the point. Living standards are set to decline as EROIsoc declines. Who will tighten their grip on power to maintain the Lion’s share? Neoliberalism/neoconservatism/imperialism/sub-imperialism/austerity/pauperisation/peripheralisation/dehumanisation/overconsumption/debt are all accounted for by the meta-dynamics of EROI. In the root of the root analysis: trying to get more out of less is our core psychological problem – it is a biophysical impossibility. The ecocidal solution is to re-apply the same dynamics hoping for a differing result.

https://www.harriman-house.com/lifeaftergrowth2

Look at the supermarket shelves, Apples from New Zealand, 10,000 miles away. How crazy is that? If those apples got air miles they’d be going on holiday to the Bahamas.

The system of agriculture being imposed on the world, GM, Monsanto, Glyphosate and the like, is intended to kill off 85% of humanity by slow poisoning and low fertility. This would leave enough people for the 0.1% to have all the servants, personal trainers, personal rabbis, and sex slaves they need, particularly with automation making most of the 99.9% surplus to requirements.

The history of foreign intervention by the U.S. goes back more than mere decades, to the mid-1850s. The Californian gold rush of 1848 called for a (relatively) fast and safe transport route for prospectors and their gold from coast to coast, in a time before transcontinental railroad. Two such alternative transit routes ran through Central America, cutting travel time considerably like the 19th century equivalent of wormholes, and soon proved very profitable. The Nicaragua route was monopolised by America’s first robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt. The other ran through the Panama region of the newly independent Republic of New Granada. It wasn’t long before Nicaraguans and Panamanians attempted to compete with the U.S. transport companies running in their own country, if not take them over entirely. The U.S. decided that such uppity business aspirations needed to be punished.

In 1854 the U.S. Navy bombarded San Juan del Norte in Nicaragua on behalf of Vanderbilt. A year later, with the approval of U.S. President Franklin Pierce, American filibuster William Walker invaded Nicaragua and installed himself as President. Walker, however, went off-script in true freebooter fashion and appropriated Vanderbilt’s Nicaraguan assets for himself. Vanderbilt retaliated by financing neighbouring countries to carry out a successful counter-coup against Walker in 1857.

In 1856 the so-called “Watermelon War” broke out in Panama City, a riot that started as a brawl between a drunk U.S. traveller refusing to pay 5 cents to a local salesman for his slice of watermelon. Things quickly escalated, resulting in the deaths of 15 gringos and 2 Panamanians. A decade earlier, the U.S. and New Granada has signed a treaty, allowing the U.S. to intervene to guarantee the neutrality of the region for the safeguarding of U.S. transit rights. While this originally had meant protection against foreign involvement (in particular by the colonial Spanish), the Watermelon War changed U.S. interpretation of the treaty to include domestic disturbances, and in that same year U.S. troops unlawfully invaded the Panama region of New Granada. U.S. demands for reparations were ridiculously high, not only financial but also territorial (foreshadowing the later Panama Canal Zone), leading one to suspect that the watermelon incident was a deliberate provocation waged for colonial gain.

Thank the Lord, there are still people around, like this author who will speak truth to power. Individuals with this desire to save the Earth are few and far between.

“US National Security Advisor John Bolton has more or less admitted that the ongoing destabilisation of Venezuela is about grabbing its oil.”
I wouldn’t take everything that Bolton said as gospel. Not only is he a liar of some notoriety but he is not very bright. Shrewd and cunning, no doubt but shallow and ill informed.
Oil is certainly an important factor here. But the US already has considerable control over it and always has done so. And Chavez’s nationalisation programme has left the basic system intact. The oil industry is still controlled by the country’s enemies.
Which is why Venezuela’s economy is in such a bad state- all the wealth has been bled off, in one way or another and there has been virtually no local capital formation.
Curiously enough Trinidad’s Oliver C Cox the pioneering economic historian of capitalism and imperialism uses Venezuela, in 1951, as a, literally, text book example of countries exploited by imperialism. And in almost seventy years surprisingly little has changed. The profits from the sale of crude oil and the royalties have returned to the country in the form of salaries and wages, firstly to the tiny number of locals employed in the industry and secondly to government employees. There is almost no investment in Venezuelan industry, consumer goods and food are largely imported and savings are sent abroad to buy US securities and invest in more dynamic industrial economies.
The department store shelves which Dr Cox described as being filled with imported goods are now supermarkets whose proprietors, intent on preserving the status quo ante, starve of goods.
The fault is entirely the imperialists’ they are wrecking the economy in order to prevent the ‘revolution’ that the author suggests has taken place,. In fact it hasn’t. There has been enormous change, almost all of it to the advantage of the long neglected masses, the poor. But there has been no revolution: politically the institution of a real democratic system makes it possible but the overshadowing power of property and the wealthy agents of imperialism is largely untouched. They can be outvoted, but they still control the media and much else on the commanding heights of the economy.
That is what cannot last: the corrupt power of the oligarchs and the conscious actions of the masses intent on securing their own interests are in contradiction.