The European Union appears as the negation of the history of the European continent, which over time has always been an archipelago of cultural and linguistic particularities and pluralities; the same ones that, following a topos that tenaciously runs from Machiavelli to the Montesquieu of The Spirit of the Laws, constitute the specific difference that distinguishes the Europe of multiple states and freedoms in the plural from Asian “despotism.”
From this perspective, the European Union is nothing more than the post-1989 implementation of the globalization project, based on the autocratic primacy of the market, on the homologation of humanity under the banner of the commodity form and on the moralistic imperialism of Atlantist traction deployed against governments not yet globalized. Thus understood, the European Union is the implementation in the old continent of the McDonaldization of society described by George Ritzer.
This project—which in essence is posed as the “suicide of Europe”—aims at the integral Americanization of the European space through the unconditional imposition of the transoceanic subculture of unlimited consumption, the deconstruction of the social model of economy with state intervention, the individualistic privatization of society, and the eradication of any identity other than the free-market creed of the financialized economy.
The repeatedly claimed possibility of a “sovereign Europe” cannot become a reality through the European Union which, as it is designed, is governed by the double fundamentum of the de-sovereignization of the economy and socio-political Americanization. In this light, the various theses of those—such as Antonio Negri and Etienne Balibar, among others—who have sought to see in the European Union a means of developing an alternative democratic policy to American global neoliberalism (it was precisely in order to imitate and implement it that the so-called “European integration” took place under the tutelage of the ECB) reveal its true nature as a mirage.
By its essence, the European Union as “passive revolution” (Gramsci), as “neutralization” (Schmitt) and as the triumph of capital after the strife of the twentieth century, is presented as the victory of the transatlantic monocultural project of a Europe inserted into the global market without borders, without nations, without traditions, without cultures, without limitations, in which the intrinsic reification of “the American way of life” is destined to be replicated also in a new “European way of life.”
Depoliticization, mediated by the annihilation of democratic sovereign states, advances in parallel with the Americanization of the old continent, that is to say, with the imposition on the peoples of Europe of the atomized model of unlimited competitiveness, typical of the imperialist thalassocracy of the Stars and Stripes of the Atlantic Leviathan.
There is nothing strange, then, that what Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, related to the American reality, where the state, already at that time, acted as “an external institution for the protection of property” and moved by the purpose of fostering “a society having its origin in individuals understood as atoms” similar and competitive, is increasingly occurring in the old continent.
The secret of the “European dictatorship” is hidden in the private and transnational currency called the Euro—true and authentic pillar of liberalism as a method of government—which makes devaluations and public investments impossible, with the obvious consequence that the only way to recover competitiveness is the “internal devaluation;” that is, the devaluation of wages (a measure entirely consistent with the massacre of classes typical of the post-1989 scenario). The latter, complemented by the persistent policies developed under the slogan of cuts in public spending and “waste”—that is how social rights are contemptuously apostrophized in the liberal neo-liberal language—provokes social genocides to the detriment of the peoples, the workers and the middleclass, and to the benefit of the unintelligent expertocracy and the unelected technocrats coming from the mists of Brussels and the International Monetary Fund.
Once again, far from being a neutral mediator of commercial exchange, the Euro acts as a method of liberal government; or, if Luciano Gallino’s image is preferred, as a “straitjacket” to prevent social policies in favor of the classes that live from their work. In other words, it emerges as a deflationary mechanism devised ad hoc to prevent nation-states from financing themselves by minting money or issuing bonds guaranteed by a State Bank—weighed down by such restrictions, states are forced to bow to the market, de facto recognizing its superiority.
As Carlo Galli states, “the Euro was an objective openly pursued by the elites as an ‘external support’ to limit the economic sovereignty of Parliament, preventing ‘social drift.'” Its aim is, in all respects, the destruction of the old European model of state-moderated capitalism, replaced by the American type of savage privatizations and the suppression of any residue of the welfare state. Herein lies the essence of the Euro as a “threat to the future of Europe,” according to Joseph Stiglitz’s icastic (and unequivocal) formula.
In this respect, it is not at all surprising that among the most fervent supporters of the subtraction of the monopoly of currency from the national states appears von Hayek, the tutelary numen of liberalism, the champion of the ruling class. The latter, in view of the triumph of the Market over the State, of Capital over Labor and of Economics over Politics, expressly proposes the denationalization of currency. More specifically, he suggests “withdrawing from the state the monopoly on currency and replacing it by a competition between private banks supplying money in exactly the same way as any other enterprise supplies goods or services.”
Hayek’s teleological orientation is well known. It coincides with the neutralization of democratic control of the capitalist economy by the state. In a rigorously syllogistic way, if it is necessary to annul democratic control, and the latter is based on the sovereignty of the state, which in turn implies national sovereignty over the currency as its essential moment, the consequence is very clear: it is necessary to de-sovereignize the currency in order to be able, in this way, to proceed to the de-democratization of control over the economy.
A miniature paradigm of the liberal open society, the European Union has turned into reality this syllogism developed, moreover with commendable clarity, by von Hayek. And in order to conceal its own profoundly anti-democratic status (marktkonforme Demokratie, according to the oxymoronic expression used by the German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel), it must continually devise, using the intellectual class mediating consensus, formulas and narratives to reassure the European peoples and the dominated classes, so that the latter, more solito, will meekly accept their own subordination.
In this, the rhetoric of the everlasting fight against red and black totalitarianisms, elevated by the order of discourse to ever latent threats to the “democratic” space of the European Union as totalitarian management, plays a leading role—as a non plus ultra of mass distraction: with the not too subtle consequence of the recurrent appeal to the logical fallacy, hegemonic in the public discourse (journalistic, academic, television and radio), according to which any critic of the European integration would be, by the mere fact of being so, a Nazi in pectore. Applying Orwell’s prophecy, “the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it” for the sake of the sanctification of the existing order.
To put this whole process into practice, the new mental order, managed by the administrators of consensus and the masters of discourse, is essential—with the extravagant “verbal hygiene” they impose, it becomes impossible even to name the contradictions that surface everywhere. Following the teachings of Jacques Ellul’s Histoire de la propagande, “propaganda must be total” and must employ all the means at its disposal, assuming also the cynical assertion, difficult to refute, that it is always easier to deceive man than to make him understand that he has been deceived.
As Gustave Le Bon had already shown in his The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)—initiating a line of thought destined to be developed by Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)—the power of words does not depend on their meaning, but on the images they are capable of arousing. They dispense the user from the fatigue of reflection and, with a limited stock of formulas, prefigure the order of thought, discourse and imagination.
Le Bon ventures to argue that the men of power rename with popular, or at any rate inoffensive, names, realities that with their original denominations were detested by the multitudes. And he insists on the premises of repetition and contagion. On the one hand, infinitely repeated, falsehood passes for truth and infiltrates the minds of the masses, reshaping them. On the other hand, ideas exert a power of contagion over the masses, analogous to that of “microbes”—the image is Le Bon’s. These considerations can, by extension, be applied to the new mental order of the politically correct and ethically corrupt single thought, which has turned the European Union into a monotheistic religion—the Europeanist cosmopolitanism which, with its specific “anti-religion of the single currency,” considers any possible return to the state dimension a “capital sin.” With Nietzsche’s syntax, through the integral mediatization of the real managed by the hegemonic pole, “the real world ended up becoming a fable” (die wahre Welt endlich zur Fabel wurde).
In this way transformed, thanks to the intellectual priesthood, into an unreflective automatism of thought, even the welfare function, developed during the late twentieth century by the sovereign and democratic national state, which was the concrete arena in which the class conflict took place and the instrument through which social policies for the benefit of the working classes were made possible, is irresponsibly omitted once again. Also forgotten is the fact that, paradoxical as it may seem at first sight, the intuition of an integration of the European nations within the framework of a supranational union of German traction was conceived, in one of its earliest and most emphatic formulations, by the National Socialists themselves; that is, by the authors of the totalitarianism from which, by the irony of history, the Eurocrats in Brussels claim to protect the old continent.
In 1943, for example, Hitler himself aspired to overcome the disorder of the divided small nations which is what he expressly defined as “the anachronistic division of Europe into individual states,” in order to bring about the creation of the Grossraum of a united Europe with German hegemony. And even Hermann Göring, president of the Reichstag, had presented, in 1940, a plan for “the large-scale economic unification of Europe;” and this “with a view to the creation of a European monetary union” (sic!).
Naturally, the above is not intended to support the absurd and unfounded thesis that the Brussels bureaucrats are today the direct continuators of the Nazi project. They are, sic et simpliciter, the leaders of the new glamorous totalitarianism of the markets, concentrated on the figure of economic violence. It is simply a matter of challenging the locus communis according to which anyone who does not adhere, unthinkingly and immediately, to the ideal of European integration under the sign of the single currency is automatically considered a Nazi.
As we have already stressed on other occasions, the rejection of the European Union model starts, at least in our case, from the Marxian perspective of the emancipation of the universal human from capitalist contradictions, of which the European Union itself constitutes one of its maximum expressions.
Diego Fusaro is professor of History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].
Featured: Deserter, by Tomasz Alen Kopera; painted in 2004.
In May 2023 the Government of Ukraine and Vice-President Philipp Hildebrand of the US company BlackRock Financial Market Advisory signed an agreement, on the creation of the Ukrainian Development Fund (UDF), a financial institution for the reconstruction of the country.
Together with Vanguard, Black-Rock is the world’s leading firm. Both investment funds manage a total of 17 trillion (in the European sense of the term, i.e., $17 trillion), a sum equivalent to the entire GDP of the European Union.
The collaboration of Zelensky’s government with BlackRock began in September 2022, when The New York Times reported on the negotiations of the Ukrainian president with the head of the company, Larry Fink, on the creation of a certain reconstruction fund.
The signing parties followed the provisions of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in November 2022 by the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine and BlackRock. Specifically, the fund will mobilize capital to carry out the reconstruction of the country focusing on sectors such as energy, infrastructure, agriculture, industry and information technology (IT).
Some experts believe that Kiev intends to repay its debts in this way, making Ukraine the property of transnational capital. In reality, it will put an end to the total sale of the Ukrainian state’s main assets: from its black lands to its electricity grids, including international aid funds. The list of Ukrainian assets includes securities of the following companies: Metinvest, DTEK (energy), MJP (agriculture), Naftogaz, Ukrainian Railways, Ukravtodor and Ukrenergo.
It will also manage the Ukrainian public debt which, according to the country’s Ministry of Finance, at the end of March reached $119.9 billion, or 78% of its GDP at the end of 2022.
As Vladimir Vasilyev points out, BlackRock’s involvement seems logical:
In the event of Ukraine’s bankruptcy, the problem of debt servicing and management of remaining assets will arise, and then BlackRock’s functions will come to the fore. At present, reliance on financial leverage is probably the most effective method of external management. This practice even served as the basis for the Marshall Plan in terms of Germany’s debt obligations.
BlackRock, Inc. is the first company in the world to lead a new, more monopolistic and long-term capitalism. Its value as of January 1, 2023 reached 8.594 trillion dollars, which is approximately equivalent to the sum of the GDP of Germany and France.
BlackRock is an effect of the tendencies of capitalism: tendency to capital accumulation, financialization and monopoly. It was selected by the US Federal Reserve (central bank) for the financial stimulus program and to manage the system of bailouts—which means QE4 (quantitative easing) and to “help” the Fed to buy billions of dollars in bonds and securities to sustain the companies that dominate the world capitalist economy, as well as to “stabilize the bond market,” one of the most important instruments of monetary policy.
“Quantitative easing” is the label used when the Federal Reserve buys debt directly issued by the U.S. Treasury or mortgage-backed debt that is secured in some way against default by the federal government.
This is not the only peculiarity, however, as BlackRock wields immense political influence around the world. It is the leading creditor of the debt of the Global South—for example, its role in the Argentine debt crisis and its heavy hand in renegotiating it.
Not only is it a shareholder in major financial and pharmaceutical companies, military-industrial giants and media corporations, former top BlackRock officials often move on to positions in the White House. In the Joe Biden administration, there are now three: Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, Treasury’s senior advisor on economic issues related to Russia and Ukraine, Eric van Nostrand, and Mike Pyle, senior economic advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Brian Deese served as director of the U.S. National Economic Council until February 2023. Thomas Donilon, president of BlackRock’s research arm, was a longtime national security advisor to Barack Obama, while his brother Mike was chief strategist on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and was later named a senior advisor in his administration. BlackRock’s senior executives include several retired CIA officers; and the company itself finances the In-Q-Tel venture capital fund set up by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Corruption in Ukraine Matters
According to reports from Kiev, the implementation of the agreement involves officials accused of corruption on several occasions: the former head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Valeria Gontareva, the former head of the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine (a US citizen), Natalia Yaresko and, of course, the promoter of George Soros’ interests in Ukraine, Viktor Pinchuk, a billionaire who has managed to avoid “de-oligarchization,” son-in-law of the second Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma.
The piece that completes the puzzle is the origin of the money with which the Ukrainian government will pay to BlackRock for advisory service—whose globalist agenda is not that of the Missionaries of Charity. The answer—from the taxes of the Western democracies: from the American taxpayers, who already in 2022 have defrayed the Ukrainian military effort by 13 billion dollars, and from the increase of military spending to 2% of GDP in the general budgets of the EU countries.
Juan López Páez writes from Spain. This article appears through the kind courtesy of El Manifiesto.
France is in a bad way: inflation is out of control, credit rates are soaring, real estate is at a standstill, and, as if to rub our noses in our negligence, our financial rating has just been downgraded to AA- by a major American agency. This downgrade is not anecdotal. It reflects the reality of the deterioration of our public accounts, further increases our dependence on the United States and the threat of a default on our abysmal debt, and deepens our credibility deficit, and therefore our international usefulness. This warning shot can only paralyze even more our residual capacity to push the boundaries, by using a discourse of reason and intelligence in the face of the disaster of the Western attitude in the conflict in Ukraine. I will be told that this is a false problem because we will still have to have the courage.
In the United States, the insanity of the self-enclosure of American neoconservatives in a permanent military escalation against Moscow has precipitated the total destruction of the Ukrainian state and territory and increased the risk of a slippery slope, threatening the whole of Europe. However, the open hatred of Russia, the successful daydream of its annihilation and dismemberment are openly expressed.
Western media, confined in ignorance and arrogance, have become the pathetic echo chambers of a delirious propaganda, and have no credibility. We have returned to the worst hours of McCarthyism or worse, of fascism of thought, of slander and denunciation. This bouquet of indignity stinks, but it is constantly thrown in our faces, certainly in an increasingly ridiculous and desperate way—because the curtain and the masks are falling before recalcitrant reality.
However, American rage and now panic still seek to perpetuate the fantasy of a coming “victory,” the contours of which we have obviously never bothered to define. What does it mean to “win” the war in Ukraine? No Clue. No vision in this area. As for winning the peace, we don’t want it. What a horror! How to make peace with Vladimir Putin?!!! it seems impossible to voluntary hemiplegics stuck in their sandbox rhetoric who only think of humiliating a “systemic enemy” and are doing rain dances (or rather against the rain and the mud that make their last-chance tanks get stuck) to ward off the inevitable. It is thus the headlong rush in the inexpiable hatred of the Russian… until the last Ukrainian.
The dizziness is so great in the face of the abyss that we no longer know what to do but to press the gas pedal of the military and strategic rout and sink into a hateful and hopeless insanity. This hatred is spreading and infusing everywhere in Europe, especially among our vassalized and/or stipendiary “elites,” who are also caught up in this tragic trap that they pretend to ignore. However, the military fiasco has been unequivocal for months already. Even the “Mainstream media” are beginning, by order or via opportune leaks, to let the implacable truth filter through—about the military reality on the ground, about the chain of desertions of the unfortunate young Ukrainians picked up in the streets and thrown by force into the “Russian meat grinder,” about the real losses, about the structural incapacity of the NATO forces to provide Ukraine with the quantity, rhythm and quality to be able to pretend to withhold the shock, and even less to reverse the balance of power against Russia.
Certainly, in the Pentagon as well as among the European staffs, it has been known for months that the die is cast and the bet is lost. Only the Poles and the Baltic states are left to push the issue. But they don’t want to wake up, and they continue to flood Ukraine with weapons (most of them diverted) and heaps of money to ensure the “great counter-offensive”—in summer… or in autumn—with the appearance of a last stand, the anticipated failure of which will serve to demonstrate that “the camp of the Good” has done everything it could, but that Ukraine has not been able to defeat Russia (as if it could!) and that it is necessary “to get rid of Russia”) and that “to save Ukraine and its people” (amply sacrificed for two years) we must finally resolve to negotiate with Moscow. No doubt, not with a president Zelensky charred by his extremism and more and more threatened by his ultra-right entourage with openly fascist overtones. Our moral dereliction is total but here again, we deny it. We support at arm’s length (since 2014), with an unabashed cynicism, a clique at the antipodes of the values we crow about, to foment and lead this superfluous “proxy war.”
Unfortunately, it is still the “Neocons” in the White House, the CIA, the NSA and the State Department who are calling the shots in Washington. And they will not admit that Russia has won and will not collapse, either militarily or economically. On the contrary. Its hypersonic weapons are unrivalled at the moment; it has been able to anticipate and avoid the sanctions trap; its economy has held up; its people still overwhelmingly support the military response to the NATO military threat on its borders. Above all, it now makes common cause with China. Admittedly, this is an alliance that is at least apparently unbalanced. But it is a vital alliance, no matter what. A tactical and strategic convergence of interests.
President Xi is rubbing his hands, setting himself up as a substitute pole of financial and political stability and even offering himself as a peacemaker (Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement, 12-point plan, etc.). He gathers his new flock, a disparate herd of strays in need of protection who can no longer stand the American Master and his cowboy practices. A massive gathering. No less than 19 countries are now crowding at the door of the BRICS+, a real “counter-G7.” A gigantic integration process is taking shape from this welcomed and variable geographical core, around the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), OPEC+ and by extension, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). All of this is for the benefit of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the imperative fortification of its Central and West Asian Economic Corridor, but also the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) that will link Russia and Iran to India. The financial instruments of this gigantic integration, the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) and the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, are already very active.
It is tragic but perfectly clear: we are our own gravediggers. It is our pathological anti-Russianism and our warmongering in Ukraine, to provoke Moscow in the hope of bogging it down and separating it from Europe forever, which have accelerated the great seesaw of the world, the emergence of an all-embracing and reassuring multilateral structure capable of bringing down the hegemony of the dollar, and which threaten Europe with an even more serious financial economic crisis than that of 2008.
In France, of course, people are acting as if nothing has happened. We are “surprised” by the downgrading of our financial rating, while all the indicators have been glaring red on both sides of the Atlantic for months already, and the first banking shocks in the United States as well as in Germany and Switzerland were hastily suppressed. Can we avoid a major and systemic crisis by treating it with contempt? This seems doubtful. In any case, the 2024 presidential election in Washington is looking bad for the Democratic camp. Donald Trump may well win again, despite the wall of cases and accusations against him. He has a thick hide. And then, Bill Clinton’s famous 1992 advisor James Carville’s verdict will kick in again: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Americans are not so much concerned about the “unprovoked” aggression of Ukraine or the victory of democracy in the world as they are about their wallets and the increasing fragility of their dollar, whose dominance is eroding at a rapid rate. In its anti-Russian curse, Washington indeed committed a cardinal error by freezing, in a totally arbitrary way, once again, the $300 billion of Russian assets in the spring of 2022. A bad decision. Many nations understood right away that it could be their turn tomorrow. This demonstration of power was the last straw in an already full burden of resentment and fury at Washington’s leonine methods of sanctions and the legal extraterritoriality of “American rules.” This is far more than Russia, Iran or unfortunate Syria, whose ordeal is never ending.
No one can stand this “Rules based World Order” any longer. Everyone has understood that only America decrees these famous “rules” and modifies them according to its own interests. The principles contained in the imperfect United Nations Charter are much more protective. The dollar is no longer what it once was, a guarantee of stability. It now embodies uncertainty and pure domination. Yet international trade cannot do without security and stability. The freezing of Russian assets has given the signal for a chain of defiance in many countries, which have understood that they must now protect themselves from Washington’s dictates and therefore look to the new Sino-Russian pole. Not to align themselves, but to balance their dependencies according to subjects or sectors. This is the era of “poly-alignment”—that is, the end of Cold War-style alignment and the return to grace of non-alignment—of which France should know how to be the leader.
The figures are indisputable: the dollar’s share of global reserves has fallen from 73% in 2001 to 55% in 2021 and—47% in 2022. The acceleration over the last 20 years has been considerable. Without an urgent correction, which presupposes a drastic change of foot on the part of the United States in its behavior towards the rest of the world, the fall is likely to continue. 70% of trade between Russia and China is now conducted in Yuan or Rubles. Russia and India trade in rupees, the CIPS (Chinese interbank system which is an alternative to SWIFT) is working at full speed. Total Energies and its Chinese counterpart CNOOC have just signed a gas agreement—in Yuan! Not for love of China. Because it is a question of survival for the company, because pragmatism is better for business than dogmatism, and because ideology is bringing down the Western economy.
The world is multipolar and we can no longer pretend to ignore it. The IMF recognizes that the five BRICS alone contribute 32.1% of world growth, compared to 29.9% for the G7 countries. And there are still 19 candidates waiting to join BRICS. The close cooperation between Moscow and Riyadh is also a bad omen for America. It allows Russia to balance its strategic cooperation with Iran, and strengthens the hand of Vladimir Putin and that of MBS in their battle against Washington on oil prices. The BRICS have on their side all the commodities and natural resources of the world and are now openly challenging the only domination left to the G7 countries—that of finance.
Behind all these facts, there is a “subtext,” a reality that we should grasp before the boomerang hits our European economies too hard and China, beyond its effort to escape, thanks to the BIS, from the American domination of the seas and maritime transport routes to Europe, comes to nurture a more offensive dream of power. This reality is that the current revolution in world geopolitics corresponds to a necessary rebalancing of relations between states. There will be clashes, crises and conflicts in the coming years, but we are in a phase of restoration after the decline of the American hegemon, which has become unsustainable and no longer corresponds to the reality of the geopolitical and geo-economic field of forces.
Our planet needs appeasement, stability, respect, the re-establishment of a form of formal equality and in any case of real equity between its members, large or small. People will say that I am angelic. I think that this is the primary motivation of countries and entire regions of the globe that want to develop and refuse this zero-sum game that America thought it could impose ad vitam aeternam. This is true for the powers of the Middle East (Iran, Syria, Libya), which must emerge from the doldrums, for Africa, which sees vast opportunities in this opening of the game, and for Latin America, which is in the process of relegating the Monroe Doctrine to oblivion. Finally, this is true for Asia itself, which is showing signs of fear and circumspection in the face of the new Chinese target of American bellicosity, provoked by martial declarations (Taiwan). Only the EU seems to live in a bubble—which no longer protects it. It does not seem to see that everything has changed, that it is located on the Eurasian continent which is a land of opportunities towards which it must project itself with vigilance but without fear.
Europe’s future does not lie in a radical break with Russia or an alignment with Beijing. It is not even more in a consented vassalization to Washington, which after Ukraine, already has the ambition to throw NATO (which really has nothing left of a regional defensive alliance) into the waters of the China Sea. What for? To feed the American military-industrial complex? To further the destabilization and fragmentation of the world? How do these objectives serve our national, economic and security interests? Europe must, as I have been saying for years, finally emerge from its strategic infancy and learn to walk with its head held high. Without crutches or leashes.
The American neoconservatives have put not only America but also Europe in great danger. It is high time to put an end to this madness and to hasten the conclusion of a ceasefire in Ukraine and a lasting rebuilding of security in Europe. The Ukrainian people, the security of the whole of Europe, the Western economy and our peoples deserve it. It is in everyone’s interest. What are we waiting for?
Caroline Galactéros is the creator and director of the think tank GéoPragma, which is dedicated to realistic geopolitics. She has a PhD in political science and is seminar head at the Ecole de guerre. She also holds the rank of colonel in the operational reserves of the French army. This article comes to us through the kind courtesy of GéoPragma.
The foundation of turbo-capitalism is consistent with the neo-liberal vision that Foucault condensed in the formula of government not “of the markets” but “for the markets”. In von Hayek’s language, the government and the state have properly only one task, which is not to “produce certain services or goods for the consumption of citizens, but rather to control that the mechanism regulating the production of goods and services is kept in operation.”
Right and left, subsumed under capital, now share the same neoliberal economic vision, following the banner of free market fundamentalism, consisting in the simultaneous reduction of the state and government to the status of mere servants of the market. Adherence to the dogma of free cannibalism, as the free market might best be defined, is the claim of the economic right that has become so widespread that it has been transfigured into Weltbild, the ubiquitously shared “image of the world.” Essentially it coincides with the “freedom to send each other to ruin”—according to Fichte’s definition in The Closed Commercial State—and with the suppression of any external limitation to the power of the strongest (ius sive potentia).
If Keynesianism can be understood lato sensu as the attempt to place capitalism at the service of the social ends established by politics, it can be rightly affirmed that, on the contrary, neoliberalism marks the historical epochal transition from an economic policy with a Keynesian basis to one with a Hayekian matrix: social justice and market justice will no longer coexist, for the only one that will survive is market justice, converted—in fulfillment of Thrasymachus’ theorem expressed in the Republic (338c)—into “the right of the strongest,” τὸ τοῦ κρείτττονος συμφέρον. According to Hayek’s canonical view, the concept of social justice is, from the neoliberal point of view, a mere “empty and meaningless” ens imaginationis.
As Harvey points out in his Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), this perspective originates in the right quadrant and particularly in theorists such as von Hayek and von Mises, later finding its operational strongholds in Reagan and Thatcher. The general idea, explains Harvey, is that of a deregulation of the market, judged capable of regulating itself; a deregulation through which the economy becomes superiorem non recognoscens and the de-sovereignized State becomes a mere “policeman” who watches over the markets and defends them when necessary. The neoliberal ordo has reinvented the State with an anti-Keynesian function, as an “armed guard” of the disorderly order of competitiveness and as the ultimate guarantor of the interests of the borderless neoliberal oligarchic bloc and its hegemony.
The neoliberal State intervenes in the economy; but—this is the novelty—it is structured in such a way that it can be managed unidirectionally by the cosmopolitan elite for its own benefit, thanks to the overturning of the relationship between politics and economics; and this, in a range that extends from the bailouts with public money of banks and private companies (with the redefinition of the State as an immense insurance company, issuing policies for the benefit of the cynical wolves of Wall Street) to the police repression of protest movements led by the national-popular Servant against the globalist order (from the G8 of Genoa in 2001, to the French plazas with the yellow vests in 2019).
The disavowal of politics by the market is being completed by the gradual erosion of the basis of legitimacy of the democratic state and its social foundations, which were the result of the Keynesian compromise between the political and the economic: politics must now be subjected to a subordinate role, unable to interfere in the economy, acting exclusively as its servant and its “bodyguard.” This is what we propose to call “the neoliberal depoliticization of the economy.” In its essence, the Keynesian compromise was the delicate device constructed to redistribute wealth from top to bottom and thus guarantee an acceptable balance between democracy and capitalism. Since the end of real socialism and with the absolute subsumption of the left under capital, the gradual decomposition of the welfare state has continued in its main determinations (from pensions to compensation, from pregnancy to illness), all evidently incompatible with the “challenges” of competitiveness without borders, id est, with the requirement to produce as much as possible, at the lowest possible price.
Connected with the vertical reorganization of the balance of power made possible by the triumph of the techno-capitalist paradigm in 1989, de-democratization is based, as noted above, on de-sovereignization and, together, on supra-nationalization, that is, on the displacement of the center of power from the dimension of democratic sovereign states to post-democratic transnational entities. As Costanzo Preve emphasizes, “the ‘public’ political decision is emptied and rendered marginal through its ‘private’ transfer to the great centers of the financial oligarchies,” with the consequent transition from national parliaments to private boards of directors. By this route, which is legitimized as a liberation from the belligerence of national States and which, in reality, aims at the neutralization of democratic sovereignty (which implies citizenship and representation) and the convergent strengthening of the cosmopolitan financial oligarchy “for superfluous peoples,” the disjunction between the devices of popular representation and decisions of a macroeconomic nature is achieved. The economy becomes depoliticized as it is increasingly freed from democratic control, just as politics—or what we continue to call it—becomes “economicized,” insofar as it becomes simple followership of the economic interests of the dominant groups (“business committee of the dominant classes”, to borrow Marx’s formula). L’etat c’est moi is today the formula no longer pronounced by the king, but by the neoliberal oligarchic class as a whole.
The tax reliefs implemented by the liberal governance for the benefit of the lords of capital are also inscribed in this horizon of meaning, among others, in coherence with the undemonstrated motivation, according to which they originate generalized increases in the levels of employment and income. The stateless “hoods of finance”—as Federico Caffè called them—and the borderless capital giants are, in fact, tax evaders according to the law—the e-commerce giants, for example, pay a tax of about 3%–while the middle and working classes suffer a fiscal hyper-pressure that, in fact, represents a permanent expropriation.
From an examination of the balances of power of turbo-capitalism it is clear that “market” not only does not rhyme with “democracy,” but proceeds by emptying its content and eroding its spaces. Herein lies the true essence of the post-1989 “Second Restoration,” as Badiou called it in The Century: victorious capital takes all. And it goes on the offensive, de-sovereignizing the national states as the last bastions of resistance to the domination of the global economy, attacking the middle and working classes and deconstructing the spaces of the still perfectible noucentische democracies.
Increasingly, especially since the 1990s, neoliberal governance has debased electoral democracy in the name of expertise—and that “expertise” to which they refer is never that of the workers and the national-popular masses, but, on the contrary, coincides with the exclusive expertise of the “technicians,” as they are piously called, using an anodyne and falsely super partes term, the bankers and top managers. This was pioneered by Frank Fischer in Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise (1990). According to the order of liberal discourse, the power to decide will not be vested in the sovereign people (which is, after all, another way of saying “democracy”), but in the “committee”—or task force—of “experts,” i.e., bankers and top managers. In other words, beyond the glassy theater of appearances, it is the economy, the market and the ruling class who really decide, and in a way that is anything but democratic. And it is also for this reason that neoliberalism can also be understood as the hijacking of common experience through expertise.
As has already been recalled, even with regard to the aversion to the people as a sovereign subject (crystallized in the category of “populism”), the new left and the neoliberal oligarchic bloc create a system. And such an involution is synthesized in the following formula—since the people do not have the capacity to decide and choose, it is necessary to annul them, so that without the people—and here comes the paradox—democracy can function better. It was as a result of the conclusions drawn in The Crisis of Democracy: Report On the Governability of Democracies, the 1975 study jointly prepared by Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki, commissioned by the “Trilateral Commission”—that the dominant groups have been searching for new conceptual tools to govern the people by regenerating the “just distance” between above and below, threatened at that stage by the growing democratic participation and by the not yet fully anesthetized critical capacity of the subaltern classes.
The reduction of trade union power, the piloted reduction of popular participation in political life and the spread of generalized apathy, openly appeared as some of the privileged strategies for the vertical readjustment of the balance of power. The very devaluation of the people as an essential part of democratic life has been, to an ever-increasing extent after 1989, the high point of this post-democratic reorganization characteristic of neoliberalism.
Diego Fusaro is professor of History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].
Featured: Capitalism, by Jack Andriano; painted in 2020.
Although it is puerile to try to predict the long-term effects of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, it seems reasonable to presume that we are at the doorstep of a different reality, which will transform international politics to extremes that we can barely intuit, but from which we cannot exclude an “every man for himself” in Europe, as soon as the shock waves of war reach the voter’s pocketbook.
All in all, the lack of unity of Western societies, and the disorientation and lack of purpose conveyed by their leaders contrast with the will to power and international affirmation shown by the new international players, so that, even if we are able to avoid a warlike conflagration that could well be the last, it makes it very difficult to shake off the suspicion that we are crossing the threshold of a new era, which is the second death of the world of yesterday.
Few things symbolized that world better than the dominance of the US dollar, which even in these days of change more than a currency, continues to be the axis around which US commercial, security and cultural affairs revolve at the global level, to the point that there has been a direct cardinality between the financial and military leadership of America at the global level over the last 100 years, but especially since the time of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
In order to understand this better, and at the same time to understand the incentives of the emerging powers to undermine this monetary hegemony, it is necessary to review the chronology that has led to the US dollar having a dominant role in the world economy, for which it is necessary to go back to the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, agreed upon by the Allies, shortly before the end of the Second World War, whereby most Western and assimilated economies fixed their exchange rates to the value of the US dollar, whose value was backed by its parity with US gold reserves, thus putting an end to the Gold Standard, which had been in force since the 19th century, more or less as conceived by David Hume in 1752.
The Bretton Woods system was a transitional formula to allow a certain degree of financial openness at world level, providing greater accessibility and exchange rate certainty to the foreign exchange market, dominated by the large international banks. However, at the beginning of the 1970s, the system showed its limitations because of the fact that the economic expansion of the incipient globalization demanded more dollars than the US gold reserves could support.
Faced with this situation, the Smithsonian Agreement was put in place, under the umbrella of the OECD, creating a system in which currencies could operate freely, floating within a 2% tolerance margin, both up and down. In other words, the widespread adoption of fiat money took place, i.e., backed by faith in the stability and strength of the economy of the issuing bank’s country.
For decades, and by far the only one with the depth and liquidity of its capital markets, supported by the robustness of its political institutions and its economic weight, the US dollar became the safe haven currency for all purposes, which led to the enormous US capacity to finance itself through the placement of sovereign bonds—or, in other words, to borrow in a currency whose issue and exchange rate it controls: the US finances its astronomical deficit thanks to the demand for dollars by other countries—in which third countries deposit part of their foreign investment and the central banks their foreign exchange reserves. The US finances its astronomical deficit thanks to the demand for dollars by other countries, in which third countries deposit part of their foreign investment and central banks their foreign exchange reserves. No other nation has this capacity, which enables the US to use financial sanctions (e.g., seizure of dollar-denominated financial assets) against other states asymmetrically, i.e., without the slightest possibility of the affected country responding reciprocally to the punitive measures inflicted on it. Similarly, the United States has at its disposal tools such as the Foreign Assets Control Act of the Treasury Office, with which it imposes sanctions on individuals and legal entities that are not under US jurisdiction, something which, at the very least, calls into consideration questions of legitimacy, sovereignty and legal security.
These sanctions have a scope that goes beyond the mere direct damage caused to the sanctioned party, since their effect extends indirectly as a consequence of the reluctance of third parties to do business with sanctioned entities and countries for fear of being sanctioned or hindered in turn when dealing with US financial entities, which makes the US dollar a powerful instrument of international economic coercion. It is not surprising then that the emerging powers of the new order in the making are struggling to mitigate the US ability to use its monetary muscle as an instrument of foreign policy.
After all, the dominance of the US dollar as a reserve currency is ultimately more a symptom than a cause, since if the central banks of third countries had fewer US dollar assets, the differences in the exchange rate or interest rates of the US dollar would be marginal. Nevertheless, the percentage of national reserves in US dollars and their preponderance in foreign exchange trade has hardly shown any signs of erosion, despite the emergence of the euro and the substantial growth of China in this century, even in spite of the exorbitant US current account and fiscal deficit already mentioned, so that the coercive capacity of the US currency remains intact.
Although attempts by other economic powers to rid themselves of this sword of Damocles have yielded modest results to date (e.g., the creation by France, Germany and the United Kingdom of INSTEX, an alternative to SWIFT, the American electronic banking system; the launch by China of the Shanghai hydrocarbon futures market, the redenomination in euros of the intergovernmental contracts of the partners of the European Union, or the aforementioned purchase and sale agreement without dollars between Russia and India), the realities of the new polycentric world scenario make it inevitable that the relative weight of each of the emerging blocs will achieve strategic autonomy in the financial arena, so that a sustained increase in multilateral efforts to erode the hegemony of the US dollar, and with it, the monopoly of unarmed coercion, is to be expected. All this, in short, will be the epitaph of the prosperity that liberal democracies enjoyed since the end of World War II, being the fruit of the analysis carried out by Western political elites in the face of the communist threat, which concluded that the main threat to liberal democracy was unemployment.
This led to the promotion of common policies orchestrated to keep unemployment levels below 5%. In practice, this meant virtually full employment and a providential welfare state capable of combining Keynesian policies with the beneficial inclusion in the system of the remaining five percent of the population that could not be integrated into the labor market. And it is here that internal contradictions begin to develop.
As argued by Michał Kalecki in the 1940s, once a situation of full employment is reached, the incentives for workers to stay in the same job are drastically reduced, forcing the recruitment and retention of employees to be incentivized through wage increases.
This, in turn, leads companies to raise the prices of their products and services. In other words, creating inflation and contracting debt in order to grow. This is precisely the dynamic into which the advanced democracies entered—the higher the levels of employment, the higher the levels of inflation. This was evident in the 1950s and 1960s, a period in which a scenario was reached in which inequality levels were at historic lows, thanks to the containment of corporate profits and the cushioning of the burden of debt through inflation.
Of course, this induced inflation actually meant a tax on the returns of investors and lenders who saw their returns restricted and thus diminished. To all this, both companies and financial institutions reacted by promoting a new economic paradigm in which full employment took a back seat to the benefit of price stability, which inevitably led to the induction of unemployment as a corrective measure to the inflationary dynamics described above.
This led to strict wage control, resulting in the dominance of a creditor’s market, creating the fiction of inflationary stagnation, coupled with investment-stimulated, debt-based productivity growth that in real terms only benefited the providers of capital. Of course, this model was not sustainable, and so the 2008 crisis forced central banks to turn the printing presses on full blast to inject paper money into an economy that once again suffered from internal contradictions, accentuated by a lack of monetary liquidity. Once again, returns on capital were at rock bottom, but this time due to deflation caused by virtually negative interest rates, placing working people in an unsustainable situation in the face of a precarious and volatile labor market, disproportionate levels of incremental indebtedness and systemic wage restraint.
All this brings us to 2017, a time when citizens inadvertently discovered the power that the vote gives them to kick monetarism in the shin of liberal democracy, a symptom of the disaffection of large sectors of the working population, which suffers from a limited formal education and resents the effects of globalization on their way of life at work, forcing them into a de facto alienation that is easily exploited by populist movements which pick up on the loss of social dignity and respect that is perceived by those who do not benefit from globalization. For several decades, there was the illusion that such frameworks as Giddens’ Third Way could achieve a political equilibrium based on a mixed economy, and thus take the initiative to overcome the crisis into which Western social democracy was plunged by the implosion of the Soviet bloc.
In practice, this attempt ended up being the West’s swan song, embodied by Clinton and Blair’s devil’s bargain with the capital markets and financial products, such as subprime mortgages that catalyzed the collapse of the banking system in 2007, and served to incubate the popular response that emerged from the ideological collapse of the social democratic parties that should have known how to contain the desperation of the victims of the crisis by channeling, in a positive way, the disaffection with a system that they no longer found relevant beyond a welfare function that tends to paternalism and manipulation, thus eroding the dignity of workers who abhor not being useful to society. These social sectors end up, in the absence of suggestive alternatives, withdrawing from the labor market and from social life in general, subsisting on public aid that only succeeds in cementing their conviction of being a burden on a society that does without them. Few tears will be shed at the funeral of the American dollar.
Santiago Mondejar Flores is a consultant, lecturer and columnist on geopolitics and international political economy. This article appears courtesy ofPosmodernia.
Featured: Peace, by J.S. Pughe, illustration published in Puck, v. 57, no. 1465 (March 29, 1905).
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its partners in the “enlarged” West architectures (EU, NATO, G7 and some OECD/G20 countries) have been remarkably united in their support of Kyiv, but they have been much less successful at getting others to join their cause, especially in the so-called “global South” (mainly MENA/Africa, Latin America, South Asia countries). Governments and populations across the developing world express more and more vocally their objections against this narrative underlining the double standards and hypocrisy, about decades of neglect of the issues most important to them, about the mounting costs of the war and of sharpening geopolitical tensions. So, the support to Moscow appears to be more a sign of intolerance vis-à-vis US (and the Western-like states and system) than an ideological alignment with Russia, with some significant exceptions (e. g. Belarus, DPRK, Eritrea, Nicaragua).
This situation is window of opportunity for China, which looks to consolidate her penetration in the international system. Beijing had already set up, since a few years, several initiatives and architectures like BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), focused on building a network of client states. In the past, superpowers, and mid-size powers as well, used trade tariffs and coerced allies and enemies to achieve their geopolitical ends, creating tensions and leading to confrontations, like the trade policy of the US against Japan before WWII which exasperated Tokyo and facilitated the path to conflict.
In large part, companies, and not countries, are now the focus of China’s campaign to regain leverage over the West and keep open the door for a flush of trade, and reduce the tensions about critical raw material and products. China has paused its economic coercion of countries and commenced another one against firms. With new tactic, but same objective in order to achieve long-time political goals such as building domestic technological capabilities or the acceptance of its policies about “one China” (read absorb Taiwan) or ease the criticism over the internal contestation in Tibet, Sinkiang/East Turkestan, Hong Kong, religious minorities. But the growing Russian weakness on the Ukrainian frontline allows China to increase her influence inside BRICS (initially BRIC, gathering Brazil, Russia, India and China established in 2006, formalized in 2009 and with the adhesion of South Africa in 2011, and renamed BRICS). This group of states worked to transform BRICS in an architecture more than a diplomatic conference and now appear close to a major turning point (or another step).
However, it is useful to analyse the approach of the founders and their views for the future of BRICS. Russia and China have the same one, using it as tool to face the “other side” (the Western economic and security system), but their magnitude is different. If before the war in Ukraine, the two (Moscow and Beijing) could be considered not so unbalanced, the poor political and military performances of Russia, changed the scene and China emerged as the real power and Putin looks more and more as junior partner of Xi Jinping. As consequences of it, BRICS seems to be transformed on the stage of the more assertive (and effective?) of Chinese assault on the world. For Moscow, BRICS is a tool that may help to re-propose herself as an alternate pool of attraction against the (above-mentioned) pro Western architecture/s.
For India, South Africa and Brazil, even with different extent and magnitude, BRICS is a space of maneuver for their own autonomous policies, monetize their cooperation with the pro-Western side, keep a dedicated channel of communication and trade (this especially true for India) with China and Russia.
As of now, despite the intrinsic weakness of the Chinese economy and society, Beijing is now the real leading pusher for the enlargement of the BRICS, and in parallel of it as part of the main assault line to the backbone of the US-led influence over the world which runs on the dollar (the euro currency would be a secondary target, the pound and Swiss franc are not considered challenges for China in this field) and the influence of Washington in the management of the world affairs, establishing a new world wide currency.
As above-mentioned, BRICS has an informal character, as yet. There is no funding charter, it does not work with a fixed secretariat nor does it have any funds to finance its activities. But slowly, and not fully reported and analysed, BRICS is on the way to set it up.
The first tool of the BRICS-led architecture is the New Development Bank, established in 2012 with a founding capital of 100 US$ Billions and with the aim of mobilizing resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in BRICS and other emerging market economies and developing countries, “complementing the efforts of multilateral and regional financial institutions for global growth and development.” In 2021, NDB enlarged its membership and admitted Bangladesh, Egypt, UAE and Uruguay as its new members and it is led by the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, designated at this position on the month of April of this year. Now?
The announced summit of BRICS for August in South Africa (according to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, country chairing the group in 2023, the summit will have the theme: “BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development, and Inclusive Multilateralism.”) it is announced as a critical moment of the project to undermine the Western dominance (or influence) over the world. One of the keys of this meeting, as announced by the galaxy of pro-Beijing/Moscow media sources, it is the enlargement of the membership of BRICS and, in parallel, the launch of a new currency for the group and show off for other potential members.
China leading the development process of a new currency, to overrule the US dollar dominance and become a top currency for buying and trading worldwide. Even if it is presented as a collective initiative, in reality this is a solo project given that the only economy that has the capacity (and willingness) to setting up this currency mechanism is China. Russia, despite the unexpected positive performances of the ruble facing the Western sanctions, has not the capabilities to be the leader (or even co-leader) of the initiative.
On the best of the options, Moscow could be a minor partner of the new financial system and nothing more. India is not interested to lead it and wants to keep an autonomous space and is reluctant to have the major financial burden of this initiative may bring. Brazil and South Africa are even weaker than Russia under this perspective and out of the machinery. They, like Russia, could participate with minoritarian shares and showing the international façade of it.
According to the pro-Beijing/Moscow sources, talks will likely progress throughout this upcoming summit, with other countries outside of BRICS looking to join in. Allegedly, a total of 24 nations (but the reported number is reportedly increasing) are now looking to build a strategic alliance that will challenge the US dollar’s decades-long role as the world’s reserve currency. According to a South African diplomat, a long list of nations is now looking to join in; 13 countries that have formally asked to join while an additional six countries that have informally requested to be part of the alliance. The group of known newcomers includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, Argentina, the UAE, Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, Indonesia, two unnamed nations from East Africa and one from West Africa. Additional details are likely (or allegedly) to emerge by the summer.
The timing of the project of the expansion of the BRICS, the anti-Western narrative of its members (regardless of current members, potential members and allies), the repeated visits by top Russian and Chinese diplomats to Africa and other regions of the global South, etc., indicate that Beijing and Moscow target those countries as platform for their geopolitics, economy and diplomacy push. Thirty years ago, the multipolar global system, despite the collapse of USSR, did not emerge as a reality and was replaced by a US-led Western hegemony. Now, this system is more and more challenged by the growth of China as global competitor, re-proposing a newly designed bi-polarism. Functional to the establishment of a bi-polar world, where China hope to lead the alternate poles, Beijing needs to set up a collection of client states, possibly bound up with strong financial ties. In this project Russia would play an essential role as junior partner and decoy, calling the attention and hostility of West for the aggression against Ukraine and dragging political, financial and military resources and distracting (at least trying to) their concerns about the dynamics ongoing in the Indo-Pacific macro-region and elsewhere.
The project of a new currency, is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges facing the BRICS is their ability to expand their membership base while maintaining their current growth.”
BRICS group of states, with the current membership, is already the world’s largest GDP, contributing 31.5% of global GDP, ahead of the G7, which contributes 30.7% (the lion share is in the hand of China and India).
The attraction of a new BRICS-led international currency is based on another aspect of the growing hostility, in the so-called global South (but not only there), for the policies of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), which formally part of the UN system, are perceived as US tool to dominate the policies of many countries. These two institutions are known for stipulating their monetary support to countries, especially in the global South, always with tight (and tighter now) political conditions focused on tough budgetary adjustment policies, the privatization of public services and the opening of markets for foreign (especially western) investors. To these harsh terms, IMF and WB, more recently started to add conditions of the defense and promotion of human rights and democracy, and acceptance of migrant waves (the last is very recent and its operate in cooperation with UNHCR and IOM). So, under these circumstances, the struggle for build alternative tools to the IMF and the WB is political, understanding that the global South requires, like or not, a different political agenda in terms of reject of attempted external intromissions and/or controlling local economies.
However, a BRICS-issued currency still has a long path beyond and will holds many questions and difficulties (technical and political, more than purely political, which are already important). The first, is which currency will be used. As above mentioned, for different reasons, the most probable would the Chinese yuan/renminbi, which is already the 5th most traded currency as of April 2022, while rubles, rupees, rand and real will (or better, would) play a minor, if not purely symbolic role.
With many powerful countries backing it and looking for an alternative to the US Dollar, the upcoming BRICS Summit could be a major stepping stone towards De-dollarization and one of the most important steps of the world policy after Bretton Wood conference. It is the call for the BRICS to derive an integrating scheme that goes beyond the exclusively economic, although at the official base is the principle of an economic alternative to present leading institutions in the world.
The Chinese-led project would face a stiff resistance from the US, which are really worried to lose the economical hegemony (and political influence) and multiplied the initiatives and contacts with the potential, disclosed or not, adherents to the BRICS in order to disrupt the project and antagonize the equivalent size powers, like India, against Beijing as major antagonist.
The Dark Side of the Moon
A dozen poor countries are facing economic instability and even collapse under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign loans, much of them from the world’s biggest and most unforgiving government lender, China. Those countries, the most indebted to China—e.g., Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia, Laos and Mongolia—have found paying back that debt is consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue needed to keep schools open, provide electricity and pay for food and fuel. And it’s draining foreign currency reserves these countries use to pay interest on those loans, leaving some with just months before that money is gone. This is originated by the stubborn resistance of Beijing to forgive debt and the extreme secrecy about the amount and terms of the loans. Zambia and Sri Lanka, are already in default, with serious impact on the domestic stability with political and public turmoil, exhaustion of currencies reserves, rise of costs and inflation.
In Pakistan, the textile industry sector has been shut down because the country has too much foreign debt and can’t afford to keep the electricity on and machines running, while Kenyan government stopped to pay the salaries to the civil servants in order to save cash to pay foreign loans.
The persistence of this tough line from Beijing will originate more defaults and will impact negatively on the perspective of the credibility of a financial system, alternate to the US dollar, hegemonized by Beijing. Zambia, which borrowed billions of dollars from Chinese state-owned banks to build dams, railways and roads, boosting the country economy but also raised foreign interest payments cutting deeply any public expenditure. Countries like Zambia, Pakistan and Congo-Brazzaville and other countries, like Indonesia, Laos, Uganda in the past, even, with tough conditions, from IMF, WB (and regional development banks and countries) got deals to forgive some debt.
All of it is roiling domestic politics and upending strategic alliances. In March, heavily indebted Honduras cited “financial pressures” in its decision to establish formal diplomatic ties to China and sever those with Taiwan. Chine firmly rejected the allegations to strangles its clients and underlined that has forgiven 23 no-interest loans to African countries; however independent sources stated that these actions are focused to very older loans and less than 5% of the total that was lent.
The future, as usual in the international relations is uncertain, and in this time, more than ever. The described picture shows that the ambitions of several actors would worsening the fate of minor and/or weak partners.
Enrico Magnani, PhD is a retired UN officer who specializes in military history, politico-military affairs, peacekeeping and stability operations. (The opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations). This paper was presented at the 53rd Conference of the Consortium of the Revolutionary Era, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, 2-4 February 2023.
The destruction of the element that Rudolf Otto defines as the tremendum, that is, that perception of the sovereign majesty of the divine that generates in man a feeling of creatural finitude, is indispensable for the unfolding of the absolute subjectivism coessential to the will to power and its presupposition of man as an omnipotent and limitless entity. For this reason—Otto explains—the sacred is the authentic mirum, since it shows the “totally other” (Ganz-Anderes), sending back to a different and superior dimension, with respect to that of only human things. The sacred—Otto writes—coincides with the “the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.” The seductive, as well as treacherous, promise of the serpent—eritis sicut dii—allows us to fully understand how the most desacralizing power, that is, capital, pretends to become more and more similar to God, as omnipotent, unlimited, inscrutable, above everything and everyone. In this meaning, the θέωσις, the “divine becoming” thus emerges as a figure of the unlimited and of pride, quite distinct from the deitas theorized by Eckhart.
At the mercy of techno-scientific Prometheism, and an order of things in which “sudden gains/pride and immoderation have generated” (Inferno, XVI, 72-74), man ceases to recognize himself imago Dei and pretends to be himself Deus-homohomini Deus, with the syntax of the Feuerbach of The Essence of Christianity—in the fulfillment of the ancient temptation of the serpent. Herein lies the arrogant boldness of the man who wants to elevate himself “Who opposeth, and is lifted up above all that is called God, or that is worshipped, so that he sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself as if he were God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4).
Prevailing over the entire horizon, prefiguring ever new disasters of instrumental reason, is the Promethean will of human self-management of the world with no further links to transcendence and, at this point, guided only by the nihilistic logic of the will to power of the planetary technocracy. The biblical image of Noah’s Ark, which saves the living in the name of God, is contrasted with the Titanic, as an image of unbridled technology and Promethean imperialism, which causes the whole world to sink under the deceptive promise of its liberation.
In the reified spaces of techno-form civilization, there are no longer the limits of the φύσις of the Greeks or of the Christian God—in the age of the ἄπειρον, of the “unlimited” elevated to the only horizon of meaning, there survives exclusively the factual limit, id est, the limit that the uncontainable techno-scientific power finds every time in front of itself and that it punctually surpasses, in order to be able to fully deploy all its premises and its promises. The technoscientific Gestell, the “dominant system” of Technik in the sense clarified by Heidegger, does not promote a horizon of meaning, nor does it open scenarios of salvation and truth—it simply grows without limitation. And it does so by surpassing all limits and by self-empowering itself without end. It emerges, therefore, fully justifying the fear of Zeus, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, when Zeus fears that man, thanks to the power of τέχνη, can become self-sufficient and autonomously obtain that which previously he could only hope to achieve through prayer and submission to divine power.
As Emanuele Severino has shown, if technique is the condition for the implementation of any end, it follows that not hindering the progress and development of technique becomes the true ultimate end, in the absence of which no other can be implemented. So, following Severino’s syntax, with the decline of truth there remains in the field only technique, i.e., the open space of the forces of becoming, whose confrontation is ultimately decided by its power and certainly not by its truth. In addition to this, the techno-capitalist system reduces the world to the limits of calculating reason, so that what cannot be calculated, measured, possessed and manipulated is, eo ipso, considered as non-existent. The logic of the plus ultra, founding of techno-capital, is determined in the ethical and religious sphere according to the aforementioned figure of the violation of all that is inviolable, which presupposes achieving the neutralization of God as a symbol of the vόμος. The libertarian instance of the Enlightenment is reversed in its opposite, as already evidenced in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung. The annihilation of every taboo, of every law and of every limit, gives rise to the new taboo of life that is sufficient unto itself.
Freedom without limits; or rather—more properly—the anomic caprice and the “infinite evil” of self-referential and deregulated growth, precipitates into the slavery of the compulsion to transgression and the violation of all that is inviolable; hence into the falsely emancipatory imperative that prescribes enjoyment without impediment or delay, aiming only at individual self-interest and the unreflective rage of growth as an end in itself. In this way, calculating reason—the “arid life of the intellect” of which the young Hegel wrote—sets itself up as the judge that distinguishes what is real from what is not real, what is meaningful from what is meaningless, what is valuable from what is worthless. To allow techno-capitalism to develop without limits of any kind, be they material or immaterial—this sounds like one of the most implausible definitions that could be postulated of the regressive myth of progress, civilization’s unreflective cult of integral reification, whose members are increasingly converted, Heidegger emphasized, into mere “priests of technics” and simple apostles of capital’s march of claritate in claritatem.
To provoke the disjunction of Desire with the Law, so that the former can develop without limits and inhibitions, according to the figure of that violation of all that is inviolable on which rests the essence of the absolute chrematistic system as metaphysics of the unlimited, is one of the falsely emancipatory cornerstones of the disordered order of the civilization of the markets. It is what was already glimpsed in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “But then, I ask, what will become of man, without God and without future life? Is everything then permitted, everything lawful?” Tod Gottes points to the fulfillment of nihilism as a process of devaluation of values and the twilight of the foundations. It coincides with the “transvaluation of all values,” the Umwertung aller Werte enunciated by Nietzsche.
The nihilism of the death of God seems to be concretized in four decisive determinations, which trace the contours of the epoch of the existing anomic society of the evaporated father post mortem Dei:
on the ontological level, if God is dead, then “everything is possible,” as marketing strategists keep repeating endlessly and as the mechanics of the technical reduction of being to an exploitable depth reveal;
on the strictly moral level, if God is dead, then everything is permitted and no figure of the Law survives;
his means, therefore, that everything is indifferent and equivalent, without a hierarchical rank or an order of values, in the triumph of a generalized relativism by which everything becomes relative in the form of commodity (the “dictatorship of relativism” thematized by Ratzinger);
at both the moral and ontological levels, if God is dead and everything is possible and permitted, it follows that every limit, every simulacrum of the Law and every barrier are, as such, an evil to be overthrown and a limit to be violated and surpassed.
The death of God as the dissolution of every order of values and truth (Nietzsche) and as the evaporation of the very idea of the father (Lacan) is, for this very reason, coherent with the dynamics of development of capital absolutus—in the globalized perimeters of the total and totalitarian market society everything is licit, subject to there always being more and more, and to the availability of the corresponding exchange value, elevated to a new monotheistic divinity. The desertification of transcendence and the depopulation of heaven are coessential to the dynamics of the absolutization of the mercantilized plane of immanence, whose most appropriate figurative expression seems to be identified by the desert, as Salvatore Natoli has suggested.
On the basis of what has been underlined by Heidegger and by Hölderlin, the epoch of economic nihilism corresponds to a Weltnacht in which darkness is so dominant that it makes it impossible to see the situation of misery into which those of us who find ourselves living in the epoch of the fled gods have fallen:
“The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default” (Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?” “What are Poets for?“).
The death of God announced by Nietzsche and evoked by Heidegger corresponds, in effect, to that complete nihilistic de-divinization of the world that produces the loss of meaning and finality, of unity and horizon. The ongoing de-divinization—which, with the Hegel of the Phenomenology, we could also understand as a “depopulation of heaven” (Entvölkerung des Himmel)—corresponds to the emptying of all meaning and of all ulteriority with respect to the capitalist market, which has become the exclusive horizon—capitalist mono-mundane immanentization dissolves any point of reference other than the commodity form, before which everything becomes relative. Things and men, more and more interchangeable, cease to be “gathered” in a framework of meaning. And they are projected, as isolated and unconnected fragments, into the dark infinite space of the global market, hypostatized in the sole sense of petrified universal history.
With Heidegger’s syntax, the “splendor of God” as a value of values and as a symbol of symbols has been extinguished and, with it, the very idea of a sense of the flow of universal history and of a meaning that exceeds mere exchange value. Everything wanders in the cosmic void of fragmentation and global precariousness, ready to be manipulated by the will to power of infinite growth and the déraison de la raison économique. Following Pasolini’s analysis, this is the essence of the new “Power that no longer knows what to make of Church, Homeland, Family”—and that, moreover, must neutralize them as so many obstacles to its own self-realization.
The death of God corresponds to the post-metaphysical nihilistic relativism proper to the unlimited extension of the commodity form elevated to the only horizon of meaning and to the unlimited will to power of technical endeavor. According to the teaching we draw from Weber and his considerations on the Protestantische Ethik, a fully functioning capitalism no longer needs the superstructural system—the “mantle” over its shoulders, in Weberian grammar—that was initially indispensable to it. Taking the discourse beyond Weber, it must precisely discard it, given that now the absence of that powerful support of meaning is as vital as its presence was before.
Post-metaphysical consumerist relativism prevents the recognition of the veritative figure of limits (ethical, religious, philosophical). And, with synergic movement, it empowers the infinite tastes of liberalized consumption, and detached from any perspective of value. Along with that, it draws a reified landscape of monads exercising their will of unlimited consumerist power, free to do whatever they want, as long as they do not violate the will of power of others and, ça va sans dire, as long as they have the corresponding exchange value.
The fanaticism of economics cannot withstand the axiological, veritative and transformative power of philosophy. It is founded, instead, on the power of technoscience, which serves it to produce always new commodities and new gadgets destined to increase the valorization of value. Compulsive consumerism itself, which has become the ordinary lifestyle of the inhabitant of the integrally reified cosmopolis, is nothing more than the subjective reverberation of the techno-capitalist paradigm and its fundamental structure.
The new techno-capitalist power, in Pasolini’s words “is no longer satisfied with a ‘man who consumes,’ but pretends that no other ideologies than that of consumption are conceivable.” It allows the permissiveness of “a neo-secular hedonism, blindly oblivious to any humanist value” to prevail ubiquitously and without any free zones. The new power, with respect to which nothing else is going to be anarchic, does not accept the existence of entities that are not so in the form of merchandise and exchange value: “Power,” Pasolini explains, “has decided to be permissive because only a permissive society can be a consumer society.” Man himself, reduced to the rank of consumer, ends up being himself consumed by the techno-capitalist apparatus.
Diego Fusaro is professor of History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].
Featured: Untitled, by Zdzisław Beksiński; painted in 1978.
For more than 30 years, Mikko Paunio has studied the new-old nature pantheism that was born in the UN framework, with its partners the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum. This religion has largely replaced Christianity in Western countries. Nature pantheism specifically draws from the “wisdom” of theosophy, which is based on the esotericism and occultism of the world’s most famous con artist, Madame Blavatsky, who claimed to have discovered the “lost truth” that unites world religions.
Many Christians around the world have been worried about the rise of nature pantheism for decades and have harshly criticized church fathers who have stumbled into the new religion, such as the Pope. As an agnostic and a former long-term social democrat, Mr. Paunio finds myself in allegiance with these Christians, because these Christians do not mix faith and reality like nature believers do.
This is the story of how the wacko Temple overlords of Davos (the WEF) took over the world and how the coming winter’s trials, arising from Europe’s green energy reality, and how the trials will trash these wackos’ Great Environment Narrative.
This article was originally given on October 1, 2022, as a commissioned presentation in Finnish, at Mediapolis Tampere, in a Symposium entitled, “Salattu valta”[“Occult Power”].
Esotericists Participate in Social Discussions Covertly, Lest their Hoax-Thinking be Revealed
In the mid-1980s, I did my doctoral dissertation on vaccination compliance and vaccination coverage in the MMR project. The MMR project eliminated measles, mumps and rubella from Finland. In the last part of my dissertation, we sent a letter to the parents of 70,000 unvaccinated children, in which we detailed the aforementioned diseases and their public health significance. Within a week, Helsingin Sanomat (Finland’s The Guardian) published a letter to the editor written by an unknown lady stating that the MMR vaccination is unnecessary, because recent studies have shown that tenderness towards children raises antibodies against these diseases. A few years later, I sat on the Helsinki Health Board as a social democrat politician with the husband of the woman in question, among others. Both he and his wife were esotericists and occultists and had adopted the cult of Rudolf Steiner i.e., Anthroposophy. Later I found out that the author of the letter has translated a large amount of German anthroposophical medical literature into Finnish, including crystal, zone, aroma, and other homeopathy-like therapies. In effect, the occultists have very well positioned themselves—not only in Finland but in the whole world—and that their influence is enormous, considering that in my dissertation I showed that their share of parents was only one tenth of one percent.
Occultists always operate surreptitiously, i.e., they rarely reveal in public their real beliefs, because the justifications for their policy recommendations are so irrational that it is better to be silent about them. However, they make mistakes in the public sphere from time to time, which eventually turns the public against them. Helsingin Sanomat’s readers never got to know the background and motives behind the letter.
The Thinking of Occultists is Based on Nonsense Dressed up as Science
The Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner, who died in 1926, saw a vision in one of his inner-space flights, and told about his vision in his 1910 lecture in Hamburg, “Natural and Accidental Illness in Relationship to Karma;” that it is favourable, in terms of an individual’s soul journey, that the body contracts measles during childhood. Due to the extremely high contagiousness of measles, it has had an even greater influence in reducing the size of the populations in the history of mankind than the more deadly smallpox, which was less contagious and occurred later and less frequently in life than measles. The aforementioned letter-writer’s whimsical beliefs and their background caught my attention, as a measles expert, and which led to a decades-long interest in the irrational thinking of occultists and the social dangers associated with it.
According to historian Anna Bramwell, a third of the Nazi inner circle were anthroposophists and that greenness was an essential part of the Nazi ideology (Figure 1). A representative figure of the Nazi faction, August Haussleiter, in the first party congress of the German Greens, was chosen to its first presidium. During the party conference in Offenbach in 1979 Haussleiter crafted the politically significant green operational theses (ecology, social, grassroot democracy, non-violence) , which the Finnish Greens copied into their own programs as such, as did other green parties around the world.
Figure 1. August Haussleiter (right), a representative of the Nazi faction, in the first meeting, in 1979, in Offenbach, of The Greens, became the chairman of the German Green Party along with Petra Kelly and Herbert Norman. Haussleiter wrote the politically significant green operational theses (ecology, social, grass root democracy, non-violence), which the Finnish Greens, along with other Green parties around the world, also copied into their programs as such. (From Mikko Paunio’s newest book,Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.
Anthroposophy is often promoted as being science, even though it is nonsense. In what follows, I will cover a lot of things, the essence of which is that ultimately global agendas based on esotericism and occultism or, more simply, the new nature pantheism, are nuts and therefore socially dangerous. Thus, for example, the policy demand of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, which it has imposed on itself i.e., carbon neutrality by 2030, is ultimately cruel and unethical, as I will show.
The Environmental Policies of the UN, the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum are Esoteric Nonsense
The justifications of the UN and the World Economic Forum’s anti-enlightenment global policies, aimed at subjugating people, are dressed in the form of science, even though they are based on esotericism and the occult and are therefore only the irrational thinking of fools. The central tenets of environment, i.e., climate change and loss of nature, have been credibly dressed in the form of science with the help of the mainstream media. However, the key actors of the World Economic Forum have made big mistakes over the past few years, which will ultimately compromise their pseudo-science narrative of doom and gloom.
Back in 1991, in my first book, Vihreä valhe [The Green Lie], I made the observation that a large part of the activists of the neo-Malthusian Green anti science movement were attracted to anthroposophy or the more original occult thought, i.e., theosophy. Member of the European Parliament and Vice President of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala (Green League) was, for example, the long-time editorial secretary of the theosophical magazine Ruusu Risti, and Pekka Haavisto (Green League) and Finland’s current foreign minister—who has admitted that he was fascinated by Rudolf Steiner’s The Gospel of St John, a work that has nothing to do—despite its name—with Christianity. Anthroposophy separated from Theosophy about 120 years ago, forming its own occultist sect.
Esoteric: Personal. Occult: Hidden or Secret
What is esotericism and occultism? Esoteric means personal, which was described by the singer Pekka Streng, who died young, in his song “Inside me, I found the gate” from 1970. Divinity is in man himself, which can be found through contemplation and meditation with inner-space flights. As an agnostic and as a secular person, I find myself on the same front with devout Christians, because these Christians don’t mix religion and reality like the WEF occultists do, and because I believe these wacko temple overlords are very dangerous folks.
The origin of the emerging nature pantheism, can be found in the esoteric fabrications of the world’s most famous deceiver ever, Madame Blavatsky, at the latter half of the 19th century, although esotericism has itself a long history dating back to the Kabbalah. Blavatsky lied that she had been to Tibet and had found the long-lost truth there with the help of local gurus. With the help of her truths, she held spiritualistic sessions for people who lost their loved ones, where they contacted the other side, or did masterful eye-rolling tricks, believing that she was capable of miracles. She was finally caught when a professional British magician named John Maskelyne exposed Madame’s tricks to the whole world in 1912 with his book The Fraud of Modern “Theosophy” Exposed: A Brief History of the Greatest Imposture Ever Perpetrated Under the Cloak of Religion. However, the hype sold and many Finnish artists were also in love with Madame Blavatsky, such as Akseli Gallen Kallela.
The Covert Influence of Esotericists
When I was a young medical researcher, I became one of the secretaries of the Prime Minister’s Energy Committee in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in Finland. I myself and the other secretaries had to read an endless handwritten stream-of-consciousness from a committee member called Pentti Malaska, professor of future studies at Turku University of Economics and Business. He was later revealed to have been an occultist. Malaska was also Finland’s Mr. Club of Rome, in the Finnish Chapter of the Club of Rome. In the early 1990s, Malaska had almost an unlimited access to Finnish mainstream media as an energy policy expert, and he was perhaps the most central player when the new 5th nuclear power plant crashed in 1993 in a parliamentary vote. All his handwritten antinuclear comments were nonsensical and useless to us secretaries when we wrote a report to support the conclusions of the Energy Committee released in 1988. The final report of the committee laid the foundations so that Finland decided to accelerate her nuclear program in 2002, despite heavy antinuclear campaigning by the Green League and its allies.
The Wacko Ideas of Well-Known Finnish Futurists
Pentti Malaska, who passed away in 2012, was the chairman of the World Future Research Association in the 1990s. He spoke in 1997 at the association’s Brisbane meeting in Australia. In his speech, he predicted, for example, the emergence of a non-carbon-based new machine Man and made a forecast that the Internet will become the revolutionizing quantum brain of global consciousness. In dressing this theosophical esotericism in new transhumanist patterns and clothes, Pentti Malaska’s fellow esotericist and self-professed economist Paul Wildman, who has been involved in the UN future research programs, further developed Malaska’s ideas by quoting Malaska on a transhumanist platform.
Figure 2. The UN and Finland’s future research is a sandbox for occult mystics. (Figure is from Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.
Wildman created four new machine-human categories for transhumanists which, according to Wildman, they come from outer space: 1) Etorgs, 2) Macrorgs, 3) MVorgs and 4) Psyorgs. Etorgs are lizard-like human-hostile extraterrestrial organisms known from Hollywood films, i.e., classic UFOs, Macrorgs are perhaps even galactic life entities according to the Gaia theory, which classifies the Earth as a living organism. MVorgs are apparently micro-life forms, born from bits of consciousness, and finally Psyorgs are angels, draculas and the like, born from the existence of non-material consciousness. Let us remember that Rudolf Steiner presented the true spiritual order of the world, which included angels, seraphim, cherubim, luciferic spirits, astral storms and etheric bodies.
The current dominant religion of Western industrialized countries, i.e., nature pantheism is based on esotericism and occultism, and has been promoted in the Club of Rome, the World Economic Forum and in the UN for decades.
Nature pantheism, which has become a political state religion in Western countries, has had a strong hold from the beginning, in the UN framework of sustainable development and its supporting partners, such as the World Economic Forum or the Club of Rome.
The movement that led to the current neo-Malthusian green dystopian development got a major kick-off by the Club of Rome with the famous 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, which predicted world destruction (Figure 3). The founder of the Club of Rome, the wealthy Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei, was an occultist and esotericist. For this reason, it is not at all surprising that esotericism has been rampant in the Finnish section of Club of Rome, whose many members have been awarded Aurelio Peccei medals.
Aurelio Peccei, Theosophist
Aurelio Peccei’s 1977 book, The Human Quality, reveals his worldview based on Theosophy and the discovery of the inner self, like the songwriter Pekka Streng. According to Peccei’s understanding, the crisis of humanity is related to man’s inability to understand his role in a changed world. We are neither psychologically nor functionally adapted to life in our new demanding role. According to Peccei, the Achilles heel of humanity is finding a place in a renewed world. For Peccei, the solution to global problems can be found inside man and not outside him. The change that takes place from within a benevolent, albeit destructively behaving person and the spiritualization of his human image, contains the keys to the solution.
Figure 3. The founder of the Club of Rome, an Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei, was a theosophist, who had stumbled upon Madame Blavatsky’s hoax. (From Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.
The new humanism was enough for Peccei, unlike his close collaborator, Ervin Laszlo, who in his careless enthusiasm for transhumanism got sidetracked and eventually had to found his own club. No worries, because this promoter of humbug was later chosen to become scientific advisor to the Director-General of the UN Educational and Scientific Organization, UNESCO. Peccei’s new humanism promoted the distribution of wealth from north to south, in the name of world peace. He also emphasized reducing the powers of states and transferring it to supranational bodies such as the UN. Peccei envisioned a new kind of governing system for the whole world and considered the sovereignty of states to be a big problem. He strongly believed that the surrounding reality forced a person’s inner change and salvation; but he believed that the inner change of a person would take decades before the masses would be taught to live as well-behaving citizens in the Global Empire of Man dreamed up by Peccei.
From the beginning, the World Economic Forum committed itself to promoting the neo-Malthusian environmental agenda as a partner of the United Nations, idealizing poverty and borrowing ideas from the Club of Rome.
Klaus Schwab, the current head of the World Economic Forum, founded his organization on the recommendation of Henry Kissinger, the economic Nobel laureate John Kenneth Galbraith and the real Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, in 1971, apparently partly relying on CIA grants already in the mid-1960s, according to investigative journalist John Vedmore in his recent long article, “Dr. Klaus Schwab or: How the CFR Taught Me to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The original purpose of the WEF was to secure US hegemony in Western Europe.
Early on, Klaus Schwab recruited the by far ever most influential unelected UN environment official, Maurice Strong, a wealthy, un-educated Canadian industrialist (1929–2015), to head the WEF foundation. Maurice Strong was THE central figure in pushing forward the sustainable development agenda since the UN’s first environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972 (Figure 4). He was also an inveterate occultist and esotericist.
Figure 4. The UN’s most influential unelected environment official Maurice Strong, who died in 2015, was appointed as director of the WEF Foundation early on. He was an inveterate occultist and esotericist. He acquired one million dollars from the UN food for oil program meant for the children of Iraq without consequences. (From Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.
Baca Grande: The Wizard’s Big Mistake
The actual slip-up happened in 1990, when a Canadian journalist named Daniel Wood got to spend a week at the home of Maurice Strong and his wife Hanne on the Baca Grande farm in the state of Colorado, USA. Wood wrote a long essay about the visit in the Canada West magazine, entitled, “The Wizard of Baca Grande.” It turned out that Strong and his wife had bought the Baca Grande farm in the southern part of the state of Colorado in 1978 and had built a nature pantheistic sanctuary of all the religions of the world, i.e., Theosophy, in this once one of the largest ranches in the USA. Wood describes what he saw: “All over the landscape there are signs of this latest utopian settlement: a sophisticated Catholic Carmelite monastery; A $175,000 solar-powered Hindu temple; a remarkable mustard-yellow hut; an underground Zen Buddhist center combined with organic gardens; a house containing crystals” used in therapy by anthroposophists, etc.
The most amazing things were revealed in the conversations held for a whole week. Like Peccei, Strong considered that the most important frontline in correcting development was the competition between the innermost of human beings’ and the cosmos. But that was just the warm-up. The article revealed that in the early days, when Strong was walking on Baca Grande with a journalist named Bill Moyers, they had seen a sage bush spontaneously flare up in front of them. This, according to Wood, was a divine omen to Strong that Baca Grande would have an important role in saving the planet. According to Wood, Strong also mischievously developed a game in his mind, in which he would use mercenaries to kidnap the participants of the Davos Economic Forum and hold them hostage and end the planet’s “consumption party.” He doesn’t have to do this anymore, because the top leaders of corporate life have decided—though forced by community SDG directives in the European Union—in their passion for responsibility to stop people’s consumption parties and join hands with the WEF in a joint world management project against the rest of us. Strong’s widow Hanne is a mysticist who imagines herself to be a born-again Indian. Maurice Strong used a middleman to acquire $1 million from money meant for Iraqi children and avoided prison, unlike his middleman.
Global Politics of the Day via Klaus Schwab’s 2016 Big Mistake
Well, now the table is set for a more day-specific discussion, but before that, we’ll glance to 2016, when Klaus Schwab made a really big mistake. In January 2016, he appeared in a television interview with RTS Suisse in Switzerland, where he openly revealed his crazy esoteric occultism.
Anyone can watch that interview with Klaus Schwab because it has been published by so many YouTube channels or on TikTok. In it, Klaus Schwab tells how the microchipping of humanity will begin in ten years. At the beginning of the interview, Schwab says that microchips are first placed in people’s clothes, then under the skin and in the brain, and finally with the help of microchips implanted in the brain, people can be connected to the digital world, i.e., the Internet. According to Schwab, this creates a fusion of the physical, digital and biological worlds.
The interviewer asked to understand Schwab’s thoughts that “we are without feelings naturally connected to the digital world like this?” Schwab replies: “Yes, you speak and say, I want to connect with everyone now.” He continued: “First, we have personalized bots, and I saw Mr. Zuckerberg predicting that by the end of this year we will have such a robot serving him as a butler.” Interviewer: “Like in Downton Abbey, will we have personal butlers and servants or slaves in the future?” Schwab: “Yes, but there is a difference. This AI-equipped servant learns and is thus your intellectual partner in addition to providing physical assistance.”
Everything that Schwab mentioned on Swiss TV in 2016 is simply unethical science fiction. No such technology exists, nor will it ever exist. It’s just a cranky old man’s cranky thinking based on inner-space flights and ideas derived from occult rituals.
Klaus Schwab’s First Lieutenant Yuval Harari’s Big Mistakes, and His Science Façade Created by the WEF
Before I discuss the errors or slip-ups of Klaus Schwab’s top lieutenant, Yuval Harari, I will give an example of how the WEF deliberately created a fake natural science CV for Yuval Harari, who is actually a historian (Figure 5). The profile of globally super popular Yuval Harari, an Israeli thinker, can be found on the WEF website. In it, Harari’s natural science backdrops have been carefully crafted and displayed on the WEF website. He has been made to appear knowledgeable about the natural sciences by mentioning that he has written for the world’s leading natural science publication, Nature.
Figure 5. Yuval Harari is Klaus Schwab’s “first lieutenant” and a transhumanist and irresponsible science populist and storyteller, Figure according to critique directed at him in July 2022. Here he is giving a TED-X lecture in London, which has over nine million views, and counting on Youtube.
My surprise was great, because he actually has an article in Nature, which is titled, “Reboot for the AI revolution.” When writing to the science community, he does not tell the fantastic story he told in the spring of 2020 on the BBC’s Hard Talk and CBS’s 60-Minutes programs that the elite have microchipped people with vaccinations in order to get them under surveillance and under the control of mighty people. Of course, no such technology exists except in the wet-dreams of esotericists, or as they now call themselves, “transhumanists.” If Harari had written in Nature the same lines of thought as given in the aforementioned TV appearances, they would never have been published in Nature, and if they had been published, he would have received a tsunami of letters to the editor. Harari’s Nature article is just flat-out artificial intelligence hype, which everyone can get to know easily by Googling it. In his Nature article, he doesn’t get any closer to Schwab’s and his own fantastical ideas than this:
“So computers could come to solve problems and even analyze human emotions much better than humans, without ever developing emotions.”
In the fashionable WEF or TED-X seminars, to journalists and politicians and to the general public, and in the aforementioned TV programs, Harari delves into the nonsensical—that the scientific problems of microchipping by vaccinations to organize mass surveillance of citizens have been solved with the huge advances in science. When writing to the scientific community in Nature he does not come closer than this to his fantastic storytelling to politicians, journalists and the general public:
“The challenges posed by the integration of information technology and biotechnology in the 21st century are undoubtedly greater than the challenges posed by steam engines, railways, electricity and fossil fuels.”
In the last sentence of the essay, he then aligns with his master and his master’s ideas of doom and gloom:
“Given the enormous destructive power of our modern civilization, we cannot afford failed models, world wars and bloody revolutions. We have to do better this time.”
Klaus Schwab: It is Important to Connect People’s Brains with the internet
In many YouTube videos, Schwab’s comments on the EU Commission’s microchip initiative to Ursula von der Leyen at the WEF 2022 Davos meeting can be found. Schwab emphasized that it is important to create a connection between the human brain and the digital world.
I am not at all surprised that tens if not even hundreds of millions of people now believe that the elite are planning something sinister for the ordinary people who have, for example, refused Covid vaccinations for “reasonable” reasons. One also has to wonder that such recklessness insanity effectively has also infested mainstream media and the politicians in power.
Through Klaus Schwab’s Young Leaders program, the WEF has infiltrated Finland’s cabinet, as the current Prime Minister and Finance Minister are now students in the program (Figure 6).
Figure 6.The Prime Minister of Finland (left) and the Minister of Finance (right) of Finland as student at Klaus Schwab’s Young Leaders program. Photo: Finnish parliament website.
On February 1, 2022, prominent Scottish social media journalist James Melville tweeted with a photo: “So we invade governments,”
Here is Klaus Schwab, in 2017, discussing how the WEF has penetrated the governments of various countries with the help of its Young Leaders—such as Justin Trudeau.
As mentioned, both of Finland’s top young politicians have been selected to attend Klaus Schwab’s training: the World Economic Forum’s Young Leaders program. The length of the training program is five years, after which they are accepted as alumni in this elite group of influencers of WEF. According to Wikipedia, there are 800 WEFs Young Leaders around the world.
The Circular Economy: The Downfall of Modern Industrial Society
Real Clear Energy, a prominent American energy policy discussion outlet, approached me in August and asked me to write a story of Finland’s alleged circular economy miracle and what is meant by the concept of circular economy. With this article, I proved how the World Economic Forum used Finland’s Innovation Fund SITRA and at the time Vice-President of the EU Commission Jyrki Katainen to promote Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset project, both in the EU and worldwide.
In 2016, SITRA, which is subordinate to the Finnish Parliament, delivered a fabricated report on Finland’s circular economy miracle and created the current circular economy concept for the World Economic Forum, which is harmful to the environment, to human health and the economy. By exploiting this concept, the European Union Commission made presentations to the EU legislators, e.g., the green finance taxonomy regulation, Jyrki Katainen’s circular economy package and the massive Fit for 55 climate package, which is still mainly in the hands of EU legislators, and which ultimately will lead to Soviet-style five-year planning and the downfall of modern industrial society.
The 2016 Report of SITRA on Finland’s 21st Century Circular Economy Miracle was Fake News
For 20 years, I have written more than a hundred official evaluations and comments on EU Commission’s waste legislation initiatives and its implementation in an EU member state. I have witnessed from my vantage point the bankruptcy of Finland’s circular economy and green waste policy in the 21st century, and how the forces behind rational waste policy finally got their way and a comprehensive municipal and industrial solid waste incineration plant network was built in Finland similar to that in Denmark and Sweden. This network is currently operating at maximum capacity due to the energy shortages caused by the green policies aggravated by the war in Ukraine. All that remains of Finland’s circular economy are smoking ruins. However, it will has to be faked because of the binding but unenforceable utopian circular economy legislation inspired by Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.
How the Scenarios of the Globalists will Collapse in the Coming Winter
Thanks to the unconditional support given to them by the mainstream media, WEF’s insane global policies that are meant to impoverish us and aggravate environmental problems, have gained ground in all Western institutions, including protestant churches and the Catholic Church (Figure 7). For example, the Pope announced in his 2015 green Laudato Si encyclical that he had joined the crackpot temple overlords of WEF.
Figure 7. Eco-Pope Francis signed the green Laudato Si Encyclical in 2015. The Pope made a brilliant move to make himself an identity politician, which turned eyes from the Church’s horrific pedophile scandal and made him immune to scandals: “Brilliant idea, identity politician. No pedophile problems.” (From Paunio’s newest book, Hourulan väen ilmastovallankumous [Climate Revolution by the Nuthouse Folks], 2019). Cartoon Credit: Mika Rantanen.
The war against energy production launched by the Club of Rome in 1972 will have its grim final show this winter. This owes to Vladimir Putin’s successful attempts to pay for anti-fossil fuel campaigns in Europe in the 2010s and after Joe Biden came to power also in the US. These prevented fossil energy investments. Just 15 years ago, Europe produced more natural gas than Russia. This winter, Europe is completely at the mercy of Russia, because defenseless Europe, took the decision to impose energy sanctions on Russia.
The aforementioned big mistakes of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari, combined with the political turmoil during the coming winter, will undermine the dominance of the crackpot temple overlords and their lackeys. Cold and hunger can make people see through the lies of the environment narrative that the current mainstream media brings home to us every day. The earth’s climate is not recklessly changing and we are not threatened by nature-loss.
The whole world has begun to wake up to the WEF’s scandals of which the mainstream media is still silent and about all the appalling stories—which tells us a lot.
TikTok has a bunch of selected video clips about Schwab’s dreams to microchip the brains of the rest of us and to connect us to the internet. Above Schwab’s microchip TikTok microchip quotes it reads “29.5M views” (it is 64.5 million, and counting).
As far as I know, Finland’s responsible media have not told the Finns that Schwab has bragged that he chooses young politicians to join the WEF in order to gain influence. Finland’s mainstream media have also not told that Klaus Schwab wants to microchip the brains of our people so that he can monitor, control and influence our mental movements.
No such microchip technology exists and the reason why Schwab tells such lies is because of his own esoteric and occult interests.
The 2022 Davos Meeting Discussed Taking Away People’s Cars and Forcing Them to Eat Bugs
Why doesn’t Helsingin Sanomat (Finland’s The Guardian) and Yleisradio (Finland’s BBC) report on Klaus Schwab’s irrational beliefs, but otherwise report comprehensively how climate change is being discussed at the World Economic Forum? In my opinion, this irrefutably proves that the mainstream media is tuned against us ordinary people. Last spring’s WEF meeting discussed how to take people’s cars away and how to force them to eat bugs. Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto (Green League) and Minister of Transport and Communications Timo Harakka (Social Democrat) represented the State of Finland at Davos.
The Mainstream Media is Against Us the People
Why has Helsingin Sanomat and Yleisradio been silent about Yuval Harari’s irresponsible and nonsensical talk of microchipping people with vaccinations, even though such microchips do not exist. They are just the wild wet-dreams of the esoteric occult sect, the transhumanists, rampant in the upper echelons of the World Economic Forum. Harari’s writings have recently been harshly criticized in Current Affairs in July this year with notably few if any follow-up stories. Harari’s ideas were described briefly as irresponsible scientific populism in the newspaper called Tekniikka ja Talous also in Finland.
We the people can get the evidence of the genuine WEF “secret” society of wacko Temple overlords easily with the click of a mouse and by googling. However, we are accused in mainstream media of being “conspiracy theorists” when we wonder about the weirdness of the WEF. In the summer, my brother and I bought t-shirts from the US, that read: “Give us new conspiracies, because the old ones have come true.” There is nothing secret in WEF’s “secret” alliance against us, the people than the fact that the mainstream western media wants to keep the WEF a secret from us ordinary people, which of course will never happen.
The WEF’s Cruel Human Experiment in Sri Lanka
I’m not surprised that hundreds of millions of people think the elite are planning something sinister for us and have thus refused Covid-19 vaccinations for “common sense” reasons. One also has to wonder that the strange WEF hype infects the mainstream media and the politicians in power.
A good friend of mine sent me a link to the 2016 Sri Lanka Economic Forum website. The economic forum in question was one of the regional forums of the World Economic Forum, where George Soros and other actors of the global economy planned the green inclusive sustainable development of Sri Lanka, which—as it turned out—was neither. The academic profile of the meeting was polished, e.g., by engaging Harvard University in the meeting and inviting climate change activist, money printing advocate and economic Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz to be the speaker. The inclusive vision of the meeting extended to 2023, when manna was supposed to rain from the sky in Sri Lanka and macroeconomic stability was supposed to prevail.
In 2019, newly elected Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa—whose political party is described as socially right-wing and economically left-wing—unveiled a grand “Green New Deal” and his vision for Sri Lanka. In many respects, it resembles the European Union’s Great Reset, i.e., the aforementioned community legislation enacted and still to be enacted, which the European Central Bank has supported by printing money. The Sri Lankan Disaster was ultimately caused by the policy directed through the UN and the WEF, which has aimed to steer countries towards meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development so-called SDG goals.
For several years, I have written essays and reports and given presentations in English about the destructiveness of these SDG policies, especially for the poorest countries, based on my work in the World Bank. Particularly destructive is the SDG6 policy, from which the letter H, for “hygiene,” has been dropped. Promoting hygiene, as was done in rich countries during the past century, made it possible to eradicate intergenerational under nutrition, which is a devastating public health problem in poor countries, and now affects 800 million people. Hygiene promotion does not suit those who believe in Malthusian ideas and nature pantheism, because it would require the extension of electricity and water supply to billions of poor people.
Sri Lanka’s Green Transition Reminiscent of the EU and US Green Transitions or Build Back Better Policies
The main cause of the massive disaster was the complete greening of Sri Lankan agriculture. At the beginning of March 2022, the catastrophic consequences of this greening were updated on the pages of Foreign Policy, i.e., four months before the final collapse. It appears from this article that in April 2021, Rajapaksa’s government implemented its green government program and banned the imports and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides nationwide and ordered the country’s two million farmers to switch to organic farming. The program was called “a vision of splendor and prosperity,” just as now in the EU we are being sold the Fit for 55 Climate Package and the absurd regulations of the circular economy with the promise of an open and brilliant future.
After seven months of absurdity, Rajapaksa’s government had to back down on the green agricultural policy, but permanent damage had already been caused to food security and Sri Lanka had to buy expensive rice from the world market, which contributed to the macroeconomic crisis. At the end of last June, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) visited the country. During the visit, future reforms were agreed upon, with which the collapsed macroeconomic stability will be restored with a loan granted by the IMF. Yuval Harari’s “Useless People”
The catastrophic events in Sri Lanka and the involvement of the WEF in creating this cruel human experiment have made many people wonder, what the ultimate goals of the world’s power elite really are? Now many commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Yuval Harari has spoken and written a lot about useless people. Conspiracy theorists and devout Christians in the US have had an unfriendly eye for a long time on the mysterious Georgia Guidestones, built in 1980, with writing in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and Russian, as well as Babylonian, classical Greek, Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian. These writings were meant for the people after the end of the world, which was labelled as the future Age of Reason. The stone was destroyed by blowing it up last July. Its first wisdom read:
“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”
We the People Need to Wake Up—and Fast!
I don’t come from a religious family, but from a family that has supported social democrats for three generations. After a long and varied consideration, I made the decision to join the Finns Party, because in recent years the far left thinking has become anti-democratic and finally has become so repulsive that I resigned from Finland’s Social Democratic Party in January 2021, after having paying membership fees since 1977. I have a long career as a skeptical researcher. Science is not a faith but fundamentally based on doubts and questions. I have come to the conclusion that democracies and nation states are threatened with destruction—if the citizens do not wake up to protest the supremacy of these insane temple overlords. I’m sure that next winter’s trials resulting from decades of green energy policies and the revelation of the stupidity of the WEF’s idiots to an ever-wider group of people, even by force with the help of social media, will lead to an awakening.
We the people, ordinary workers and entrepreneurs who love their country and family, must wake up to defend enlightenment, freedom and modern society. Only the pursuit of the good, starting from one’s own starting points, can displace these human experiments conducted from abroad. Finland, as a society in its own right and as historically dominated by other nations, is now a solid platform for some kind of crazy experiments, unless our decision makers are aware of the enormous dangers associated with them.
Mikko Paunio, MD, MHS is Adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki, Department of Public Health. This article comes from a presentation in Finnish in Tampere (Mediapolis), given on October 1, 2022, at a seminar called “Salattu valta” (“Occult power”) which was organized by Jäävuori (Iceberg). The title of the original presentation was, “WEF: nuoret johtajat ja Klaus Schwabin ohjailu” (“The Young Global Leaders and Klaus Schwab’s Steering”).
The Atlantic region is characterized by economic space, where the virtual financial economy is practiced, born from unbacked Dollars issued by the FED to cover the U.S. trade deficit that has existed since 1971. The high talents that govern American finance have forgotten the main economic discovery of Adam Smith: that the source of wealth is Labor. Labor reproducing useful goods or services. Well said.
The unlimited issuance of inorganic money by States has created a mass of money much greater than the Gross World Product that circulates through the financial markets with total independence of the flow of international trade in goods and services. In 1818, the famous Genevan economist Charles Sismondi, the true continuator of Adam Smith, had already discovered that excess of money in the markets created over-investment, which in turn created over-production, with which he explained the periodic bubble crises that shake the Anglo-American capitalist economies.
These bubbles come from a hallucination of the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Say, a hallucination endorsed by David Ricardo, the greatest theorist of Anglo-American-style capitalism. Say’s nonsense says that all production creates its own market, for which it is necessary to resort to Dumping, which characterizes Anglo-American export trade. In the 19th century, dumping of British textiles in India; in the 20th century, dumping of subsidized agricultural products (cotton) by the United States on international stock exchanges and on the markets of developing countries. Dumping favored by the waiver of safeguards and countervailing tariffs against unfair trade implemented by the United States in its “Regional Free Trade Agreements.” It is no coincidence that the economic world based on the dollar coincides with the world of NATO which seeks to remedy the collapse of its financial economy based on virtual money by seizing Russia’s resources.
It is also no coincidence that the BRICS group is made up of countries that stand out as players in the Real Economy, which produces goods and services that come from useful labor, which, as Adam Smith discovered, is the original source of wealth.
A recent report published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) points out that six years after the outbreak of the global crisis, global economic growth remains low: 2.5 percent in 2014. According to the authors of the report, attempts to return to traditional business practices could not and cannot eliminate the root causes of the crisis. The financial sector continues to prevail over the real economy, wages as a percentage of GDP are steadily declining, and there is growing inequality in the distribution of wealth and income within and between countries.
The cause of economic disparity between classes and nations is still there—which is the issuance of money that does not come from productive activity but from debt and credit created with a keystroke.
The financial economy since 1971 is a parasite of the real economy and parasites kill each other to survive.
This article appears through the kind courtesy of El Manifesto.
Featured: 60s Harvest, by Steven Binks; painted in 1997.
Supposedly, “Goal 8” of the 2030 Agenda aims to combat inequality and promote sustained economic growth. The reference to this sustainable growth quickly ties in with the dogmas of the green and gender agenda.
Social and Inclusive Growth
Growth must be inclusive, i.e., positive discrimination of women (and LGTB collectives and the alphabet crew that follows) must preside over economic policy, because “Goal 5” states as a goal: “Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels.” In Spain, the new Equality Plan, devised by Irene Montero and her troupe, will receive 20,319 million euros from the budget, which obviously comes out of the pockets of the middle classes. Despite the rhetorical boasts of more taxes for the rich, the harsh reality is that the largest body of taxpayers belongs to the middle class, which, according to data relating to the last decade, contributed 54.4% of the State’s total income. The rich, those who have more than 150,000 euros of declared income per year, are only 0.24% of the population, and it is the companies, together with the middle class, who bear the tax burden on which public spending is based.
Spain is the country that has increased its tax burden the most during 2020. Tax reforms and the impact of the coronavirus crisis have increased the indicator by 1.9%. We now have a tax burden of 36.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), more than three points above the average of the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which remains at 33.5%. This increase in the tax burden is closely linked to the increase in public spending, but does not translate into a substantial improvement in public services. The ideological spending on gender policies sponsored by Agenda 2030 means the waste of 10% of tax revenue. A 10% that impoverishes the middle classes and reduces the competitiveness of Spanish companies.
The trompe l’oeil of feminism 2030, masks the harsh reality that today an ordinary household needs two salaries to be part of the middle class, while in the past it was enough with only one salary. This is the real wage gap. To sustain this set-up that puts capitalist production before the family, and prevents each household from having a comfortable and stable source of income, under the label of inclusive policies, abortion, low birth rates and alternative families are encouraged; which, as in Sweden, lead to growing old in utter loneliness. And these policies, as the communist Pasolini sourly criticized in his day, are the ones defended by the good little boys of the new left.
Sustainable Climate Development
Worse still are the climate policies that Agenda 2030 sponsors in its Goal 13. The apocalyptic discourse of the UN aims to intimidate the population into accepting its global governance policies without complaint: “Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and its adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development… The survival of many societies, and of the biological support systems of the planet, is at risk.”
The UN has dared to use a hysterical teenager like Greta Thunberg to spread its climate sophistry: “We need drastic and immediate annual cuts in emissions as the world has never seen before… People in power can continue to live in their bubble full of fantasies, such as eternal growth.” The climate ideology serves to justify anything, as we have seen with the intervention of Gustavo Petro before the UN General Assembly this September: “Cocaine causes minimal deaths and coal and oil can extinguish humanity.” This is not the extravagance of an ultra-left-wing Ibero-American leader, the former member of the terrorist group Movimiento 19 de Abril, is merely endorsing the postulates of the UN, which, through its Secretary General António Guterres, warns us: “Either we stop our addiction to fossils or it will stop us. Stop brutalizing biodiversity, stop committing suicide with carbon, stop treating nature like a toilet.”
Well, under this umbrella of nonsense, a decarbonization policy has been imposed throughout Europe that has led us to the current energy disaster.
To begin with, there is no scientific consensus on the causes and consequences of climate change. In contrast to the IPCC, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which points to humans and their economic activity as directly responsible for climate change, there is another platform of scientists (ICSC, the International Climate Science Coalition) that denies that there is any empirical evidence to prove this hypothesis. And if there is no consensus on the causes, there is even less consensus on the consequences. The IPCC itself has changed its forecasts over the last few years. The truth is that predicting what the climate variation will be in 50 years and its effects on life on Earth is more of a guessing exercise than a scientific certainty, no matter how much the UN, large corporations and mass media sell the opposite to us.
What is undisputed is that the very expensive economic and environmental measures aimed at limiting CO2 emissions in Europe are absurd. The European Union as a whole emits 2,724 million tons of CO2 per year, while China emits 10,065 million tons, India 2,654 million tons and Russia 1,711 million tons. None of these three countries will sacrifice their economies to reduce their emissions. So, we Europeans are, in colloquial parlance, the hangers-on in this whole global warming racket. Reaching 2050 with an emissions cut of around 85 or 95% would cost us Europeans as a whole some 9,699 euros of annual per capita income. Naturally, the distribution of this drop in living standards would not affect everyone equally. Once again, the middle class would be the hardest hit.
It is clear that rising energy costs are putting many SMEs on the brink of being unable to maintain their businesses. But far from giving priority to the real crisis that we are suffering today, (last August 22nd, the market price of natural gas traded on the German THE (Trading Hub Europe) was quoted 1000% higher than a year ago)—the UN keeps insisting on the Race to Zero campaign to eliminate fossil fuels, justifying these measures in the supposed climate crisis of tomorrow. Ursula von der Leyen has just announced that the European Union will not rectify the mistake and will remain stubborn in following the goals of the Agenda 2030, because what we must do is “strive to accelerate the transition away from all imported fuels and develop self-sufficient green technology systems.” It matters little that the gas supply cut-off due to the sanctions imposed on Russia has put the truth on the table and shown that the technological development of renewable energies is still far from being able to produce cheap and sufficient energy to cover all the needs of homes and businesses.
We are not going to analyze the report of the Rand Corporation, the most powerful think tank in the United States, on the double purpose of harming Russia and the Europeans themselves with the economic sanctions imposed by the European Union as a result of the conflict with Ukraine. What is clear is that even the dimmest person is capable of understanding that when the cost of energy skyrockets due to its high cost, producing more at the cheapest possible price helps to reduce this price increase. But the recipe that the European Union is trying to give us is not to recover coal energy production due to the extraordinary circumstances we are going through (it is true that in Spain we could never do so because “smart” Sánchez has blown up the thermal power plants), or at least to give priority to nuclear energy with the same emphasis as renewable energies, rather than collecting “more than 140,000 million euros” in extra funds for governments to pass on to consumers with financial problems. In Germany, however, they have had to put up 8 billion euros to rescue the energy company Uniper. That is to say, the European Union’s stubborn stance on energy matters means higher tariffs for consumers and more taxes, which, of course, will end up being paid by the usual people, the middle classes and SMEs. Nor does it seem very adventurous to say that the famous ecological transition of Agenda 2030 has driven an energy policy that can only be described as a “real plague” for Europe.
Economic Degrowth
In view of the situation that exposes the scam of the green transition, which despite the fact that between 2009 and 2019, as recognized by the UN itself, has invested a whopping 2.6 trillion dollars in renewable energies, without having had the slightest capacity to alleviate the current energy crisis, a new doctrine is emerging to defraud public opinion and advance in the establishment of the new world governance.
Economic growth is incompatible with the already excessive consumption of resources, energy and waste generation, which especially in the higher income countries, i.e., in the West, is causing the problems of ecological unsustainability. This is the new movement to justify the impoverishment of Western societies that is causing the climate policy of Agenda 2030. In another turn of the screw, every day more and more voices are heard from the “progressives” in favor of what is already known as “post-growth,” the theory that tells us that the world must abandon the idea that economies must continue to grow, because growth in itself is harmful.
This theory uses two arguments to convince us that being poorer will make us happier. “You will own and you will be happy,” the Davos Forum announced at its annual meeting in 2020. Of course, as you can well imagine, those who preach this have no intention of getting poorer or seeing their standard of living decrease. As with the communists when it comes to distribution, it is the others who must decrease or have nothing to be happy.
The First Argument is Ecological
Unlimited economic growth is responsible for the planet becoming uninhabitable. “Resource depletion and pollution are starting to set limits, and we need to talk about it,” announced Richard Heinberg, American ecologist and university professor (how could we not). “Supplies are running out, and even if we didn’t have to address the problem of war, it would still happen.” Again, the apocalyptic threat. It is not new; since the 18th century, several variants and versions of Malthusianism have been telling us that the earth’s resources will not be enough to support the growing population. In the 1970s, using Hubbert’s peak theory, we were told that oil reserves would be exhausted by the beginning of the 21st century. Today, when that future has arrived, what is exhausting is the drumbeat to stop using fossil fuels.
Now it turns out that what is incompatible is living “within environmental limits” and maintaining the welfare state of advanced societies. The recipe of the ideologues of degrowth is that the richest countries should apply the Goals of the Agenda 2030 to the hilt and collect more taxes to invest in a greener economy, move forward without ley-up in the energy transition to stop using oil and coal, end carbon emissions and embark on a social engineering operation to change the “chip” of an excessively consumerist population to convince them that impoverishment is necessary to be happy. “Decrease to survive,” because in order to keep our economies growing we would be depleting resources and destroying nature.
Of course, it is a lie that there is a risk of depletion of our resource reserves. There are raw materials, energy sources and crops, which together with technological advances, are enough to keep humanity growing. The crisis we are experiencing, the energy shortages we are suffering, the inflation we are experiencing, have political causes, not eco-planetary ones. Nor is it true that economic growth is the enemy of the environment. It is precisely in those advanced economies of the West where there is more respect for the environment and more measures for the care of nature. The West is blamed, but if we look at the list of the 10 most polluting countries in the world, China appears as the most prominent, followed far behind by the United States, India and Russia. Among these 10 countries, only one European country appears, Germany, in seventh position.
The reality is that economic growth encourages concern for the environment; and, thanks to this growth, advanced societies are increasingly demanding environmentally friendly policies from their leaders. The fact that Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mongolia and Afghanistan are among the most polluted countries in the world indicates that in developing countries, where economic growth is in deficit, there is no such concern for the environment. We are certainly not going to hide the fact that the extraction of raw materials in the third world to feed the growth of the most advanced economies leaves much to be desired in terms of labor rights and care for the environment, but the solution does not lie in the degrowth of advanced societies, but in the growth of backward societies, until a strong middle class is established in them, which, as has happened in the West, demands and promotes policies of stability, which first achieve social improvements and then restore and care for the environment in their production processes.
It is not precisely the same people who have largely caused the current energy crisis by their obsessive fight against carbon emissions, who should now be giving lessons, which, in the end, are nothing more than a flight forward in their hasty and irresponsible green energy transition policies.
The Second Argument is Social
The consumerism on which the Western growth model is based alienates the individual and exacerbates inequalities. The increase in economic wealth would not in itself guarantee an improvement in social objectives, a categorically false assertion that is often found among post-Marxist authors. The generation of wealth results in a higher standard of living for all social strata, as is shown by the per capita income figure, which has increased tenfold between 1750 and 2000. However, inequalities have also decreased, since if we look at the Gini index, which calculates the distribution of income among the entire population and ranges from zero (perfect equality of income between individuals) to one hundred (maximum inequality, in which all income is held by one individual), it has fallen by eight points worldwide. This is clearly not a spectacular advance; inequalities continue to be particularly glaring in the Third World; but also throughout the West and in many emerging countries, the decline is evident. Moreover, the poverty rate in the world has fallen by 80% from 1970 to the present day. No one will deny here that large capitalist corporations benefit from growth, ostensibly increasing their bottom line; but no one with a minimum of intellectual honesty can deny that it contributes significantly to the enlargement of the middle classes, progressively incorporating the poorest into their ranks. Authentic sustainable growth must guarantee this social mobility and promote economic, fiscal and labor policies that seek to expand the middle classes.
From the Great Reset to the Great Impoverishment
Maslow’s famous Pyramid theory defines a hierarchy of human needs and argues that as people satisfy their most basic needs, they develop higher needs and desires. In short, when growth is generated, when more wealth is made available to people and their lower subsistence needs are met, social progress is driven. On the contrary, degrowth is a regressive force that prevents the development of the individual and the satisfaction of his higher needs, pushing him to focus on satisfying his most basic needs.
This is the Great Reset they have in store for us. The pillar of prosperity in Western societies is the middle class. Its growth stagnated in Europe in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; and the pandemic coupled with the current inflationary crisis is reducing it by leaps and bounds. Middle-class households’ consumer spending, especially on energy, has risen much faster than their incomes. At the same time, their taxes and social contributions, far from decreasing, are increasing every day, because the policies of Agenda 2030 do not loosen spending, especially in the green transition, and demand more resources in social aid to cover the enormous damage they are causing to the lower classes.
The supporters of degrowth are in luck—the purchasing power of the Western middle classes, according to various economic analysts, will decrease by 25% due to the consequences of the pandemic, inflation and the energy crisis. It will be this reduction in demand that will succeed in curbing inflation over the next few years. The result will be a society with more inequality and less middle class—the globalist elites will achieve their desired degrowth and the dependence of large masses of population on the State. A State disconnected from the national community and dominated by large capitalist corporations and a socialist-style bureaucracy. In addition, technological advances will soon make possible a social control that Orwell or Huxley only vaguely dared imagine.
The Ministry of Social Rights and Agenda 2030 has just launched an institutional publicity campaign for Agenda 2030 under the slogan “Enough dystopias. Let’s re-imagine a better future.” That better future, thanks to the elimination of the middle classes with their critical spirit, their initiative and their freedom, will not only be a mass society, saturated with media messages that build an artificial narrative from above, as Jean Baudrillard denounced, but thanks to the virtual reality that will soon reach us, it will allow a daily life disconnected from the true reality, which will erase any threat of dissidence. A better future is certainly on the horizon… for the elites who aspire to world governance.
Mateo Requesens is a judge in Spain. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].
