A breathtakingly powerful Mafia is running away with the world as we knew it. We now have indiscriminate killings, torture and deprivation of civil rights. We have unbound aggression on countries that present an obstacle to U.S. global power. We have colossal negligence of the environment, we have an impending economic disaster (although band-aided over for the moment in order to protect Big Money, at the expense of the taxpayers) where the poor people are the first to suffer, although this fact is barely mentioned in the mainstream media. We have an erosion of the legal system and complete disregard for the Constitution.

 

The world-wide Mafia operates under the system of Neoliberalism, which means Free Trade that favors the rich countries, the corporatocracy (a coalition of government, banks, and corporations), financiers who do not see any further than multiplying their assets in a second with a stroke of the computer, and the arms industry that delivers the tools to empower this fundamentally corrupt system. The military, whose major function is to secure free access to gas, oil and other essential resources, is clearly also an important link in the project of world domination. NATO is just a U.S.-governed tool to keep Europe on its toes and do its bidding. Among the most powerful and predatory institutions founded by the rich nations, led by the United States, for reaching out to countries in financial distress are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Free trade pacts (NAFTA,CAFTA, FTAA) [1] and economic strangulation of the countries in need of help cause drastic financial crises in poverty-stricken nations. [2]

 

The Unites States is on its way to becoming a third-world country as far as the poor are concerned. In addition, the standard of living for the middle classes is deteriorating further and further. The richest country in the world has a catastrophic so-called health care system that is primarily intended to make huge profits for the private health industry (with negligent improvement in sight). Other crucial problems are the low-standard educational systems, decaying or non-existent infrastructure, a severe lack of public transportation – the last point contributing to the overuse of carbon fuels in this country. There is also less and less financial support for social institutions, such as daycare centers, libraries, art centers, leisure and cultural activities.

 

And alongside all this rot and badly lacking services there are the financial speculators and the Big Bankers who are accumulating billions in profits and bonuses and all the while real unemployment is rising to much higher numbers than is admitted by the administration.

 

The U.S. is doing nothing to combat global warming, but that issue is just one of the reasons for the breakup of the living conditions in today’s world. Obviously we have to set serious standards for the limitation of factors that lead to the hastening of the progress of  global warming. And, as usual, the United States is dragging its feet in a situation where its positive leadership would be of immense significance for saving the planet. The obscenely wealthy corporations and financiers that are the real rulers of the world are too busy counting their profits to even consider giving in to urgent environmental needs. The President and Congress have been safely bought up by Big Money, so, consequently, no positive action can be counted on from them..

 

But far from all the environmental problems of the day are due to the effects of the increase of carbon dioxide in the air, due to the millions of tons of oil, gas and coal that run the big production and the huge trucking industries.  

 

What needs to be mentioned with more emphasis than anything else is the willful neglect of the environment, where among the disastrous results are polluted water systems, foul air that we breathe in daily, polluted soil, spread of radioactive waste from multiple sources, formerly unknown diseases, allergies, asthma and cancers. In many of these catastrophic cases, action could be taken to clean up contaminated water and soil, but none is taken.

 

These severe health risks are conveniently hushed up by the Big Corporations that spew out the waste. Also in the lead of harmful corporations are the biotech companies that are ruining the environment, maybe forever, by their toxic products under totally false pretenses of solving the problem of global poverty and bringing about a new green revolution. Green indeed! There are lands made barren by long-term cultivating of the toxic products that the biotech companies, Monsanto, Syngenta et al., hype up as life savers. They produce high-risk genetically engineered seeds, pesticides and weed killers that destroy everything that gets in their way.

 

One of the most insidious products from Monsanto is recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone milk, rBGH dairy products that are not even labeled as such, even though they constitute a serious risk to people’s health. Monsanto has even tried in court to legally ban the labeling of non rBHG milk products, under the pretext that such labeling might make customers believe that rBGH milk is a health risk.[3] Yes, indeed! Anything to keep U.S. citizens from seeing through this criminal deception. One of the most appalling effects is the diseases and the cruel suffering those cows are exposed to who are given this growth hormone to make them produce larger quantities of milk.

 

There is also obviously a total absence of concern for human lives. We are all guinea pigs in a big game of looting the planet. The bio-tech companies are so hand-in-glove with politicians that it seems to be of no use for private individuals to raise their voices in protest and disgust. U.S. citizens simply don’t know what they eat.

 

“At this time, the FDA does not regulate or test GMO products and there is NO labeling to tell U.S. consumers that they're eating GM foods.

…

“Genetically engineered foods have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves over the past decade with corn and canola in an estimated 60 percent of all processed foods."[4]

 

Nevertheless, it is only by fighting fearlessly against this totally immoral and destructive system that things will ever be able to change. Congress is doing nothing. The presidential candidate Barack Obama made promises to clean up the environment, but nothing is changing.

 

Is this expansionism, killing and destruction anything new?

 

Some will say that nothing much has changed since the beginning of the expansionist colonies that became the United States of America. The United States has always exerted its self-given right to expand its territory and to aggress those nations that present a potential threat to U.S hegemony – long before the Cold War, during the Cold War and after the Cold War.

 

However, the way things look today, with the total disregard for the Constitution and for human suffering, the criminal conduct of U.S. aggressive intervention in one sovereign country after the other has opened the eyes of the world community to the enormous ambitions of the U.S. to actually own the world.

 

From the appalling callousness with which the U.S. conducts its foreign policy, the detailed new laws of limiting civil rights, most clearly as stated in the USA Patriot Act, rushed into law in the wake of 9/11. It was submitted to Congress 13 days after the attack. This Gospel of the Neocons had, however, been prepared long before 9/11. [5].

 

This first Patriot Act was reinforced in 2004 by Patriot Act II, which by some accounts gave the U.S. President dictatorial powers.[6] These Patriot Acts explicitly show a total lack of respect for domestic as well as international law and they make perfectly clear the way the United States sets itself apart from and above the rest of the world.

 

Its refusal to join the International Criminal Court as well as its lack of respect for the edicts of the International Court of Justice an of the U.N. are just symbols of the utter arrogance with which the U.S. administrations, one after the other, have shown complete contempt for international cooperation. The U.S. takes its unilateral assault on the legal rights of peoples and sovereign nations as a bureaucratic detail that just does not apply to the Empire.

 

The endgame of the rule of the Empire is now near at hand. The reckless multiple wars in progression and even the day of the beginning of aerial attacks against newly created targets is now in sight. The way the aggression is getting out-of-hand is clearly visible – at least to everyone who cares to look and listen, but obviously not to the warmongers themselves. There is clearly-voiced concern from both military and civilian quarters, but nobody in Washington seems to care.

 

The geo-political truth of the situation

 

Washington is acting as if its continued supremacy is self-evident, but the administration is standing on quicksand and the fate of the former lone superpower will one day soon be sealed. The political and military leaders can not really fail to see the coming of several other potential big powers who are not going to let Washington get away with its centuries-old hubris and its blindness to current geo-political realities. But they are digging in their heels in a last desperate attempt to fool the world into believing in their invincibility.

 

Can Washington’s megalomania really be short-sighted enough to imagine they can keep Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). [7] out of the game for power over the dwindling resources on the earth?  Can the Washington strategy of having over one thousand military bases or military installations spread all over the world actually have some real effect in keeping the emerging nations from barging into the game for the domination of the world?

 

Washington is particularly anxious to contend for the upper hand against Russia in the ‘Stans’, the Central Asia nations formerly part of the Soviet Union. It’s an ongoing power game that looks like a loser for the U.S., particularly since the foundation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Shanghai on 15 June 2001 by six countries: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. [8]

 

Ten south-eastern nations have also formed the trade pact ASEAN, which China has joined in so far as there now exists a China-Asean Free Trade Area (FTA) with common economic, strategic and political goals. It dates from November 2001 but negotiations had been under way since November 2000. [9] Does Washington still believe that they can actually own the world?

 

The countries in Central Asia that Washington is trying to dominate have always been, as most people who know anything about history have known for a long time, impossible to conquer. In order to win those wars it would first of all be necessary to make of those countries coherent nations possible to rule over with one source of power. Since they are made up of innumerable separate and independent tribes with, in many cases, a multitude of different languages, there is no one power in the world that can even begin to hold them together. Borders between those countries were arbitrarily drawn up by Britain and France, in most cases after World War I.

 

Those borders never made much sense and so the various regions continued to be run by local warlords, and central power was virtually inexistent. In both Iraq and Iran there are important minorities that always threaten to tear the countries apart. However, there are few countries in Central Asia more fragmented than Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you win over one region, you lose another and the war goes on. A guerilla war can not be won, as has been said again and again. But Washington won’t listen. The only visible results of the U.S. invasion has been increased corruption, and hugely increased culture of opium, which the Taliban had managed to limit. But the war is escalated rather than the troops pulled out.

 

In the lunatic way that is their trademark, rather than working towards uniting these countries, the United States military seems to be counting on tearing these countries apart. When there is no more effective central power, things falling apart the way it is happening now in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. seems to believe their military will march in victorious and take over the splintered and ruined nation, which is in reality just a slew of different tribes with very often a mass of different languages.

 

However, the way the Empire sees it, Afghanistan is too important a pawn in the geopolitical war to be left to itself to heal its wounds. There is, for one thing, the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline project, which the U.S. is going to profit hugely from, if they ever manage to actually dominate the area through their military and their corporations.

“The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP or TAPI) is a proposed natural gas pipeline being developed by the Asian Development Bank. The pipeline will transport Caspian Sea natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan and then to India.”

 

There is obviously also the imperative of establishing military bases in these countries, which will serve as a central point from which to reach strategic goals in that part of the world, and compete with the BRIC countries for ownership of oil and gas in Central Asia. China is daily increasing its outreach to this area as well as to resource-rich countries in Africa (e.g. Sudan) and in Latin America (e.g. Venezuela)

 

Where do drugs come into the equation?

                               

Ever since the presidency of Richard Nixon the United States has been boasting of conducting a war on drugs. The need for a war to justify the ever-continuing build-up of the military – and the enrichment of the arms industry – has been part of the reason for propagandizing this phony war. A ‘war on drugs’ sounds good. The moral United States is working on eradicating the culture of opium and heroin in Colombia, in Afghanistan, and destroying the various routes for drug distribution. In Laos, which was led by a mass of independent warlords and was scarcely a united country at all, during the Vietnam War, opium was grown massively and the warlords made a neat income from supplying the drug to the U.S. military in Vietnam.[10]

 

In Afghanistan is that the culture of opium has soared immensely since the U.S. invasion and is still increasing. Who is profiting from the sale of opium? Not just the farmers who would be starving unless they could plant and sell the drug. The U.S. military is making big money out of the trade, which pays for a big part of their operations in the country, and it is not likely that they ever tried to limit the culture.[11] The Taliban actually did manage to seriously limit the production of opium and in 2000 they banned the culture of it. Instead of subsidizing the culture of nutritious grain and other food products so as to give the farmers a chance to become independent of the lucrative culture of opium, the U.S. command has done no such thing, but instead they are themselves making huge profits.[12] And of course the U.S. military is eager to profit themselves from the easy access to the drug.

 

Based on 2003 figures, drug trafficking  constitutes "the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade." (The Independent, 29 February 2004).

 

Afghanistan and Colombia are the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy. These countries are heavily militarized. The drug trade is protected. Amply documented the CIA has played a central role in the development of both the Latin American and Asian drug triangles. 

…

There are powerful business and financial interests behind narcotics. From this standpoint, geopolitical and military control over the drug routes is as strategic as gas and oil pipelines.[13]

 

What is the long view of these wars?

 

The U.S. complex ruling system seems to actually believe, still today, that owning the world will become possible through never-ending wars. If there are no handy wars in sight, they have to be invented since they are a prerequisite for U.S world domination. I believe that one day soon we will witness the catastrophic fall over the edge of the cliff where this is leading us and the world. 

In the United States where generalities about phony ‘values’ are mouthed non-stop, democracy, freedom, family, puritan values, all equally empty, there is in reality only one value and its name is PROFIT.

 

There is a strange principle that has dominated political thinking since the beginning of unfettered capitalism – this being the absolute necessity of economic growth in order for the world to survive. What happened to the true values, the ones that are worthy of the name? The corporatocracy threw them out with their unlimited greed for profit that now dominates all economic thinking?

 

This has especially been true since Neoliberalism was born with the Chicago University economist, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics that recklessly started the rolling of the ball which has finished in nearly destroying the world. [14] The most cruel effect of this callous economic system is the forever widening gap between poor people and the rich top of the pyramid.

 

So is this the way the world ends? Or are we the people going to be able to finally stand up and scream out loud that our rights are taken away from us by this cruel system that runs on reckless greed and nothing else?

 

Notes: