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Has ‘mafia-fication’ of human society become the only available option of the corporate-led world to sustain its leadership? Yes, the modern world is fast degenerating as the ‘gangdom’ of global corporations – a world where the degenerated and highly passive mankind is ruled by the underworld. It is a fact that the market economy can rule the world only by the help of mafias which on the other hand can ultimately lead to mafias literally taking over the regimes, one by one.

 

I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.           ~ ALBERT CAMUS

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.                                                         ~ ABRAHAM LINCOLN

There was a time when corporations played a minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.              ~ WOODROW WILSON, the 28th US president.

Today the masters of mankind are multinational corporations and financial institutions, but the lesson still applies and it helps explain why the state-corporate complex is indeed a threat to freedom and in fact even survival….. What it means in effect is that elections are pretty much bought and that the buyers expect to be rewarded, and that happens all the time. ~ NOAM CHOMSKY, the present-day American philosopher (in a lecture given at the University of Toronto, April 7, 2011)

A corporation will happily bribe politicians to enact policies that will make earth uninhabitable if they think it will improve the next quarter profit by 1%.                    ~ PROF. JOEL BAKA   (author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power)

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell CONFUCIUS,  the great Chinese sage, who lived between 501 and 427 BC.

 

 

 

 frankeistine-technosphere

 

It’s been over 11 years since The Silent Takeover by Noreena Hertz was published, yet the subjects discussed have never been timelier. The book’s subtitle, “Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy”, explains the subject at hand, and ultimately asks the key question, “Have governments become obsolete, and if so, are corporations now in charge?”

We have witnessed the rise of corporate power over many centuries, and world governments have always been susceptible to bribery, manipulation and corruption, but in the past few decades the extent of this vast financial power has eclipsed the power of our elected leaders at all levels, at an alarming rate.

Today money is god, greed is king and corruption runs the game. In the new global economy, the rule of government has taken a backseat to the power of big business. Corruption has long been the staple constituent of modern economy for the corporate godfather to use it as the carrot to tame politicians and bureaucrats, and as stick, to trap unfriendly and adverse politicians and bureaucrats who remain aloof to corporate dictate. Corruption has been made an inevitable ingredient in market-led modern culture. No politicians or bureaucrats, good or bad, can escape from this crude modern dilemma. Here even corporate leaders too are no born evils. It is the prevailing corporate culture that makes them what they are and thus they too have no soft choice.

Corporations control much of the way we live, from the quality of the food on our plates to the news we consume through the media. Being baby-sited by the corporate forces, most of our political leaders – from the local village level to the international level – are becoming mere followers as they grow up more and more defenseless against the corporate forces. Politicians are fast becoming some sort of use-and-throw-away stuff in the corporate governed world today. Only the most cunning among them can survive the market juggernaut.

Today 99% people in the world, out of disgust and helplessness, shun politics or become totally passive. Democracy, as it is being practiced today, is the most misused, abused and unsuitable system of governance in a tightly wired planet of the ‘global village’ that is exclusively run on pushbuttons from behind the scene by a cartel of global corporations whose budgets and reaches are many times higher than those of even some developed nations and they, for all indent and purpose, run the nations and the world on the lines of giant companies. So much for the total corporate grip on the politics of nations that Frank Zappa said: “Politics is the entertainment branch of government.”

In truth, the partner (political) parties compete superficially and dishonestly to entertain the electorate, to maintain the aura of a democracy. Voting is a ploy of the two/three-party power elites to keep the population docile, delusional and duped. So unwittingly, voters become the co-conspirators in the grand political criminal conspiracy. As it is now, government is nothing more than a revolving door between political administrations and business. Corporate lobbyists are running the government rather than the people.

Nations are run by much less than 1% of the population; the rest 99% are just there for the ride. The presidency or the political executive in every modern nation has been for virtual sale since years and now the politicians won’t change anything or else the corporations will see to it that they are replaced. Most of our present leaders and representatives can be bought by big companies, individuals, and countries; nobody can track the money going to the lines similar to what is lately known as the Super PACs owning the American elections. In the present American political scene, Super PACs allow elections to be bought and that corporations and special interest groups can purchase any elected official that they are to govern. The secretiveness of the donations is a joke. These Super Pac lobbyists can run all the ads they want.

Propaganda has become the primary means by which the corporate leadership communicate with the rest of society. Whether selling a product, a political candidate, a law, or a war, seldom do the powerful delivery messages to the public before consulting their colleagues in the public relations industry. Corporations can buy elections. Professor David Menefee-Libey, Chair of the Pomona Politics Department, suggests that the American people have not called for an end to Super Pacs’ tactics because “a really larger portion of Americans feel really disconnected from government and public policy. They care more what’s on their iPod than who’s in the Oval Office.”

The cost to buy the presidency could be infinite. Corporations can buy unlimited amounts of airtime, billboards, and bullhorns wandering though your neighborhood. They can make sure you hear only their messages, that you’re hearing the messages of big money which limits the people’s options to candidates chosen for them by the wealthy and that it has been the power of a few wealthy corporations using big money lobbyists to keep candidates they prefer in the running.

 

2017 21 corporate degeneracy

 

Deep State-led World Has Become a War Machine—and It Has Destroyed Every ation’s Ability to Function as a Democracy

How The Globalist Elites, Comprising Just 0.025% Of The World’s Population, Fool And Rule The Rest 99.93% Humans, Including Their Leaders

 

The crumbling, predtory system of imperial globalism is run by an elitist sub-species of evil psychopaths who for centuries were pathologically born devoid of any human heart, thereby never suffering even a tinge of guilty conscience for murdering in cold blood millions and billions of innocent humans over the millennium. Though braindead now, it has not stopped them from preparing for this fateful moment in time. They’ve utilized advancing technology to their full advantage in their broken corrupt system to squeeze what’s left of the global masses’ lifeblood in order to wield absolute power and authority in today’s manifesting New World Order.

With contingency plans for enduring and surviving even a nuclear holocaust on the earth’s surface, underground bunkers, cities and cross continental tunnels have been secretly built during the post-World War II decades to accommodate continued survival of the elites comprising just .025% of the world’s population – the controlling oligarchs along with their necessary errand boys and girls running the mega-corporations and national governments on the planet.

For more than a century these globalists have been promoting their NWO eugenics plan for a sustainable earth population of about a half billion people. The UN Agenda 21 spells it all out in graphic detail. This means within the next several years they plan to kill 13 out of 14 of us 7.2 billion people currently living and breathing on this planet. For decades they’ve been busily deploying both slower, “soft kill” methods as well as their faster, “hard kill” methods to drastically reduce the world population. The hard kill scenario manifests through war and both manmade induced natural disasters as well as naturally occurring natural disasters with a recent noticeable crescendo of activity of all these cataclysmic events. 

How the 0.01 % democracy rules the world: Among the one percent Americans (of the corporate class) who are super rich that hijack American democracy, only 0.1 percent is real Americans. Further, when it comes to be the case of the whole world that is dictated by the super power democracy, the share of real contents or involvement of democracy gets again reduced. Thus, when the world is ruled by the corporate world — rather than democracy in every nation — this “rule of the people” is systematically being hijacked by the global market force in which the real share of citizen’s involvement in the true democratic process in the world comes to be less than 0.o1 percent. I have arrived at this shocking mathematics from the studies and reports of various media and writers, including the latest article, Our Nation Is in Crisis and Our Democracy under Attack, of the influential National Journal of June 2012.

Big money wins elections. Candidates who raise and spend the most money routinely win more than 90% of elections everywhere in recent years. The democracy system is rigged everywhere in the world and the people know it. 75% of Americans believe money buys results in Congress, and Congressional approval ratings are the lowest in that nation’s history. There can be no doubt the post-modern democracy no longer serves the people; it serves the interests of the 0.01% who buy it like an auction item in our corrupt elections.

Outside spending is increasingly bankrolled by anonymous funders. Nearly 90% of campaign ads aired comes from so-called “dark money” groups — shadowy ‘nonprofits’ that don’t disclose their donors. This crisis of democracy blocks change on nearly every front in the struggle to find the real problems and their solutions.

Corruption, half-truths and the corporate-controlled media

Given an interlocked media network of connections with defense and other economic sectors, big media in today’s world effectively represent the interests of corporate world. Media critic and historian Norman Solomon described the close financial and social links between the boards of large media-related corporations and foreign-policy establishment of the developed world: “One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media.” The term MIC (“Military-Industrial Complex”) is related to the phenomenon that is defined by the term corporatism   and the term Predator State. In a way this is just a more politically correct way to describe corporatism as a social system. The term corporatism is linked to Mussolini’s Italy and quite often is associated with the term “Italian fascism”.

The whole world, including the media, fully know the fact that today every sector of human world is filled with only half-truths, trumped-up stories, deceits and thus whole lies and that it is corruption that rules the roost in every sector. To understand the role which the media should be playing, such as in India, and for that matter anywhere in the world, especially in the Third World nations, we have to first understand it in the global context. 

When you open a newspaper, or switch on the television, and there’s nothing but good news, it’s time to start worrying about what they’re not telling you. Nobody likes bad news, but the world is full of it. They want your vote or your money, or for you to look the other way. Every real news is largely ignored by our media which turns a Nelson’s eye to the harsh economic realities facing upto 90 percent of our people, and instead concentrates on some beauty contests where all is glamour and show biz. Our media is largely like Queen Marie Autoinette, who when told that the people have no bread, said that they could eat cake. 

The media often diverts the attention of the people from the real issues to non-issues. In the case of India, the real issues are socio-economic, the terrible filth, pollusion and poverty in which 80% of the people are living, the massive unemployment, the price rise, lack of medical care, education, and backward social practices like caste oppression and religious fundamentalism etc. Instead of devoting most of its coverage to these issues the media focuses on non-issues like film stars and their lives, fashion parades, pop music, disco dancing, astrology, cricket, “reality” shows, etc.

On another milieu of the globally dominant media that remains the influence peddler par excellence in today’ world, it has become the real godfather or the super-government to make and unmake governments. We have today entered an era where nothing unseemly remains under wraps for long. Corruption scams are being exposed by the day. Without doubt, the brunt of this is being faced by the politicians; most of whom are scurrying around trying to cover their misdeeds.

A latest instance has happened in India (which is only the tip of the iceberg of similar stories) where one Congress MP, Jindal Steel chairman Naveen Jindal  produced as purported evidence to back his company’s claim that a news channel has been attempting to blackmail and extort money from the publicly traded company, at an unusual news conference on OCTOBER 24, 2012. He accomplished the feat by the same way the media does it SELECTIVELY – sting operation.

The story goes that Zee News (TV channel)had unearthed dirt on Jindal’s coal block allocations and had threatened to air the story of corruption. Apparently, the channel was willing to scuttle the story if Jindal agreed to a Rs 100 crore advertising deal with Zee News!. Apparently Jindal refused to pay up and instead managed to trap Zee in the middle of the extortion. Apparently, Jindal’s company recorded the meetings with the Zee News editor, Sudhir Chaudhary. The tapes exist and Jindal has filed a police complaint.

The matter has been investigated by the Broadcast Editors Association (BEA) and the editor of Zee News has been suspended from the association. This shows prima facie, that there is evidence of truth in Jindal’s assertion. However, Zee group has backed its editor and has refused to sack him.

The moot question here is not about what will happens to this editor. The moot question is why our whole media – with its entire holier-than-thou attitude – is not playing up this huge scam. Everyone knows that media is the 4th estate, the 4th pillar of democracy. If media itself is corrupt or abuses its powers, what kind of damage does it do to the democratic processes? If all media outlets ring fence the errant news channel, and prevent the flow of information to the public at large, then how can this be an ethical practice? Why is everyone trying to shield Zee? Why not expose it the way TV channels love to expose politicians? Why these double standards? Doesn’t this lead us to ask the question: are the rules different for media?

The fact is that there is as much corruption in media as there is in any other sector in the country, in the whole world. It is sad really that it is difficult to find a single place where corruption hasn’t made its presence, particularly in India. We have seen accusations being hurled at anti-corruption activists themselves – so much so that they are now being investigated by their own groups.

THE ERA OF MIDDLEMAN

Inhabiting this planet for millions of years as man and woman or, as male and female, the Homo sapiens suddenly began to develop a third category called the middleman since the beginning of what we call the modern age. While living independently as his own leader – as the crown of all Nature’s creations – for millions of years, it is only in late modern civilization that man has come to be led by somebody inferior to him, namely, the MIDDLEMEN or the market force. Among the millions of species it is only modern humans (almost 99%) work only for SELLING their service or the products of their labor.

“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell,” wrote the great Chinese sage Confucius who lived between 501 and 427 BC. Human society was, by and large, superior or what we may term as pristine/natural up to as late as the start of the 18th century, say, till the onset of Industrial Revolution. Till then, trade and professionalism were only some sort of minor or fringe group phenomena, solely confined to certain remote pockets of the globe. Such concepts and practices were considered much inferior in a world predominantly ruled by priests, kings, warriors and the people.

Today the business of every modern man is business; and his global leader, namely, America did not have had to look back ever since the 1924 American 1924 President, Calvin Coolidge, declared: “The business of America is business.”

Today there is a long hierarchy of middlemen – businessmen – as wholesaler and retailer at every stage. In the long process of seed and fertilizer collection, cultivation, harvesting, procuring, preservation, packaging, transportation and distribution in the lengthy process of which it is the very value of the food item that is to bear for the cost of the long chain of middlemen involved, a practice in which the prime concern at every stage is only the profit that not only not filters down to the real producer but also adversely affect the consumer. Therefore the end consumer commodity has to be mechanically made the maximum tantalizing product, so as to elicit the maximum cost from the end consumer, for compensating the long chain of middlemen process and over-process. All these superficial special effects and treatments on the commodity however render the end product a mere caricature of its natural original state and, in the long ordeal, rendering it literally poisonous, though it is made available in world class packages and sold with the help of very tempting advertisements. This over-process or vitiation especially of human foods alone has visibly helped another modern sector: the most thriving the medical and health care industry through the creation of hundreds of junk food induced diseases for the first time human history.

Money versus Wealth

This is the story of how greed won and commonsense lost in modern history. Nature does not make man poor; man does it by destroying Nature. In making money by destroying Nature, modern man has become the most poor in history. And this is the story of how the millions of years long Nature-dependent human evolution suddenly ended up machine-dependent and now market-dependent since the last couple of centuries. Modern synthetic wealth (industry, high technology, money etc.) is being made by converting or destroying real natural wealth like fresh air, fresh water, human values, natural immunity etc.

Today money-making has become an addiction. Here, it is enough to understand how man has come to follow what market values, what money values, what the make-belief world values or, simply, what images or the artificial trends created by the market values. Today wealth, let alone knowledge, is no more generated, only exchanged or converted in different forms – mostly synthetic, poisonous forms – thanks to industrialism and middlemanism. And the margin is always going to the middleman whose only genius (success-story) revolves around manipulations and extraction of the maximum possible margin or profit. The process having become mostly scientific and mechanical, the result is that almost all natural wealth is being fast converted into synthetic wealth – synthetic products and money that, being highly non-cyclic and non-biodegradable, glut and pollute the world today.

Today it is easy to prove that the modern methods of wealth creation actually end up in wealth destruction. Here the modus operandi is mired in hi-tech, smart conversion of natural wealth into synthetic or anti-natural wealth through smart hi-tech middlemanism. Take, for example, the mechanized agricultural practices, cooking and processing that destroy nutrition and therefore health.

The intensification of agricultural practices has led to a decline of between 25% to 75% in the levels of key mineral nutrients in farmed vegetables over the last 60 years. There has also been a rise in farmed fruit sugar levels, so much that some natural fruit juices now contain as much sugar as a fizzy drink.

If we can source quality food, our cooking methods often destroy the nutritional content. Studies show that fresh, uncooked vegetables strengthen the immune system and increase resistance to many diseases. Cabbage placed in cold water and boiled loses about 75% of its vitamin C content. Similarly fresh peas cooked for only five minutes lose 20-40% of their Thiamine content and 30-40% of their vitamin C. About 50% of vitamin E is destroyed by frying or baking food. Corruption of food crops, using chemicals fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides and the like, is another story altogether.

Tests in Spain recently measured the levels of flavonoids (a kind of antioxidant) left in fresh broccoli after it was cooked. The results show large differences in flavonoid content according to how the broccoli was prepared. The cooking methods were:

  • boiling – 66% loss
  • pressure-cooking – 53% loss of major antioxidant
  • microwaving – 97% loss of flavonoids

Scientists in Finland found that blanching and deep-freezing vegetables destroyed beneficial compounds. Blanching prior to freezing destroyed up to one-third of the vitamin C content of vegetables and more was lost in storage. The healing properties of uncooked foods are being increasingly recognised in natural cancer therapies.

The more we let food industries create what we eat the more likely we are to be at risk from diet related problems. In effect the commercial interests of food manufacturers are systematically robbing of human health, and eventually life. Biological enhancement of crops, growth hormones in milk and meat, mercury in taste/look enhancing, colorants and carcinogens in food are commonplace.

Genetically modified foods and cloning are ‘third degree methods’ against Mother Nature. These highly unnatural illusory methods only help man to count the chickens before they are hatched.

A balance between free radicals and antioxidants, as we have seen in chapter 4, is necessary for proper physiological function. The nutrition status of all people, especially in industrialized countries, has been declining since the Industrial Revolution. With the Industrial Revolution came the processing of natural foods, with the resultant reduction of lignans in the food chain. Thus in the sector of food sector alone middlemanism has created a situation where 99% of food products are defective the needs of which have been artificially created but also that these products are much damaging not only to humans and other life forms but also to Nature.

As this is the condition of the food sector, the state of affairs in the rest of the social and material sectors of modern human life is no different, if not worse. You would be surprised to know, on a detailed reckoning, that almost 90% of our problems are just myths and that 95% of our wants in the market are indeed unwants. Today man does not need almost 99% of products available in the market. Modern man is forced or humored into buying what he does not actually need; and he thus buys these by selling or spending those things that he really needs. This world produces 99% of its things that are not only redundant for man or Nature but also are ending up as poisonous or injurious to Nature and man. And, in addition, this feat is carried out by destroying or poisoning what is essentially needed, like fresh air, fresh water and organic food and fertile soil. Here it is enough to conclude that “ the fool (modern man) and his money (wealth) is soon parted.”

Both the rich and the poor are getting only poorer: And this synthetic or abstract development has other repercussions as well. At first, it may seem that, with all these market-dictated developments, the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. But, in reality, both the rich and the poor are getting only poorer that almost all modern money-making process are indeed wealth-destruction methods in essence. Today 1.6 billion people are worse off than they were 10 years ago, according to a new United Nations report. As widely reported, the world’s 358 billionaires may have more assets than the combined incomes of countries housing 45% of the world’s people. But then they, apart from having only this poisonous synthetic wealth, are also the virtual inheritors of almost all the problems that mankind faces today than they did 10 years back.

Surrounded by the dollar-hungry Third World governments and their corrupt politicians this tiny globe has been reduced to a sitting duck for these natural wealth–to–money converting clicks or projects like WTO, IMF and World Bank. They indeed broker the wholesale loot of genetic wealth and sell the flora including its inhabitants for some abstract (synthetic) wealth, in the form of dollars, pounds or share certificates. Wealth is today shrinking to its most toxic or dangerous form. Computerization, for example, has taken the bread out of human mouth by concentrating money in a few hands. The process may be compared to the black art which flourished during the middle ages.

Living in an age of image, we all tend to be overwhelmed by images and symbols rather than reality. Here we tend to generate symbols of wealth, not the real wealth and in doing so we destroy the real wealth. Thus we go on making money and more money. Here modern science enters the scene as an effective agent in the conversion of wealth into money or wealth into synthetic wealth – artificial wealth that indeed negates the real wealth.

Today thousands of varieties of consumer goods, like the synthetic textiles and clothing, are available in lakhs of colors and designs that literally glut the third world market where drinking water has not reached nearly 50% of the villages or illiteracy is above 50% among the population. Further this artificial market-sponsored practice has become instrumental in polluting environment and the already available drinking water getting poisoned because of the long multi-pronged chemical process involved.

With a long traditional and hierarchical society like China too entering the field in a big way, the global mechanization or destruction of natural wealth is nearing completion. Like a new broom sweeping clean, the hard won Chinese entry into the global market – WTO – may results in many ‘leaps forwards’ making it literally another super ‘America’ of 1.50 billion domestic consumers in an already pollution saturated tiny planet.

Today we do not have much cotton clothes but cotton-looking synthetic, plastic clothes. We do not have wooden, leather or natural fibre made utility products but similar looking plastic, synthetic products most of which are leaking out highly toxic synthetic nanoparticles and other free radicals to environment and to the wide-ranging consumers . Here we are feeding to the images of wants, to the symptoms or to the feelings of wants and not to the real wants. When we treat a pain, modern method is to treat the symptom or feeling of pain by cutting the nerve between the brain and the particular body part. The patient goes satisfied but literally untreated. Just as the plastics are injurious to health, let alone to the natural environment – all modern taste-making and image-creating materials are damaging in the long run. In short, we are in the fast process of gilding, distorting and perverting all our natural wealth. Here what is generated are symbols, images and impressions of wealth, we are feeding to the wrong wants, rather to the images of our wants, not to the real wants.

Evolution of money, as the only attraction and value, marks the fast erosion of wealth of all life forms

At every social, religious and political gatherings the world over, we regularly hear loud laments and chest beatings about what they call the erosion of age-old values in human life. The outcry grows louder and louder but the values never return; they only continue vanishing into thin air in greater measures.

Now, in order to have a glimpse of what indeed has happened to the real values and real wealth we have to understand them in their historical perspective and evolution. On a broad vision we can see a major change, a sharp reversal at the start of what we call the modern society, the mechanical society that finally handed over man to market force on a platter.

Modern (scientific) concept of wealth may be regarded as the stock of materials or provisions and the know-how to produce and duplicate them, which are expended for the mechanical (artificial) human requirements. So these are all mechanical or synthetic wealth, which have their most relevance to the mechanized society, to the mechanized man.

But there is a far greater angle to the concept of wealth which is more humane and natural and which most of the present moralist tend to favor and which had its pride of place in the pre-modern society or among the non-mechanical people of all times. And this wealth is the total stock of possessions, tangible or intangible, which have value. And as for the concept, value, this can be regarded as worth, desirability or goodness, the ideas of all of which however, generate more questions than answers, particularly at an age when modern man can identify only market or mechanical value or mechanical wealth. Compassion for the fellow being, generalized vision, diversity, spontaneity, will power, creativity, healthy environment which prompts man to ensure the healthy environment to posterity etc. are all what we can regard as real wealth and real values that existed for millions of years and which helped man evolve to higher stages of development and which made him the crown and ruler of all other creations. These characteristics may be identified as primary human traits and values. And this is the real progress or the forward mode of development or the real wealth creation.

By mid 20th century we had reached a point in this machine civilization where we could bear so little intimate contact with the messy reality of living things – as compared to the clean simplicity of machines – that we became willing to drain our values, for example, by locking up our mothers and fathers on the wholesale in old age homes. The alibi is to create a new investment opportunity in warehousing the old. What a strange thing to do with our unprecedented wealth, using it, that is, to divest ourselves of our closest human ties, getting rid of our history. In doing so a complex circle began a century earlier when we first locked our kids away in prison-resembling school – warehousing is completed.

Warehousing the young; warehousing the aged – good business, but good for what? Does it really matter or not that our parents die among strangers and our children live, penned up by strangers? Does that possibly have an effect on the quality of the lives neither old nor young that are left theoretically free of entanglements? Entanglements are, after all, the core of complete human lives; good lives are all about being entangled with each other. The assertion that isolation chambers for the young and old are an advance in human society doesn’t square with any observable reality. In the process we only barter our real wealth for the abstract synthetic wealth called money which eventually destroys everything which man really stands for.

The synthetic production of wealth is merely the conversion of natural wealth into artificial wealth like artificial techniques and products as ready-to-use solutions in which the main role is played by money being easily transferable, manageable, flexible, long conservable and, above all, highly maneuverable and ‘powerful’ – money wise. The process, however, is as destructive, inhuman, anti-Nature and inimical to the real wealth as converting the highly natural and cyclic natural petroleum into highly non-cyclic plastic and other polymer synthetic products that, by remaining non-biodegradable for thousands of years, are injurious to all life forms in Nature. The philosopher tries to get down to the most basic, simple principles. He sees people wasting material wealth, or just letting it rot, or hoarding it uselessly for the sake of purely abstract counters called dollars or pounds or francs.

From this very basic point of view, we have created a marvelous technology for the supply of goods and services with the minimum of human drudgery. Isn’t it obvious that the whole purpose of machines is to get rid of work? When you get rid of the work required for producing basic necessities, you have leisure – time for fun or for new and creative explorations and adventures. But with the characteristic blindness of those who cannot distinguish symbol from reality, we allow our machinery to put people out of work – not in the sense of being at leisure but in the sense of having no money and of having shamefacedly to accept the miserable charity of public welfare. Thus – as the rationalization of automation of industry extends – we increasingly abolish human slavery; but in penalizing the displaced slaves, in depriving them of purchasing power, the manufacturers in turn deprive themselves of outlets and markets for their products. The machines produce more and more, humans produce less and less, but the products pile up undistributed and unconsumed – literally as toxic waste – because too few can earn enough money and because even the hungriest, greediest, and most ruthless capitalist cannot consume ten pounds of butter per day.

FISHING IN TROUBLED WATERS

The secret of success of all modern ventures prompted by corporate intellect is to create as much problem for man and also in creating them in such contradictory fashion that the problem for one set of people becomes the solution of another set of people living far away. Growth and spread of deceases in the world are music to the drug manufacturing global corporations. And so is the spread of regional conflicts to the arms manufactures and arms exporters. It is the vital interest of the developed to keep the difference between the developing and the under-developed to be growing even while they try to put the latter on “developing pattern”. So it is highly in the interest of market force to keep them as much divided and separated among people and nations as they can, on the lines of ethics, belief and practice, and keeps the pots of differences always boiling. Religious and regional intolerance are on an all time high today and so is the gap between the haves and have-nots.

Practicing this popular deception for long, and the inevitable consequences and contradictions having now come to the fore, nations are today reeling under the severe impact of say, recessions, unemployment etc. at a time when products are glutting the market even as people at large gasp for the want of fresh air and water.

Humans are commodities in the empire of corporations. Ignoring hazards to agriculture, animals, humans and environment, pharmaceuticals are producing ‘crops’ for animals and humans. We are living in a world of genetic engineering where we engage in agriculture without farmers and cultivate GM trees and terminator crops. There are reports of transgenic trees spreading mercury poisoning. Genetic engineering creates viruses and bacteria that cause diseases. GM microbes and other new gm toxins loom over our food. Gene therapy spreads transgenic contamination in which risks to man is the same as those for genetic modification of plants and animals. All these ‘progresses’ are achieved by market force through abusing science and reducing scientists to bio-coolies for the industry.

A sick and suffering world is good for business: Incessant disease mongering turns the global populations into profit-generating guinea pigs for Big Pharma. What big pharmaceuticals don’t want the world to know is about synthetic drug dangers and the natural alternative medicines that could destroy their $800 billion a year empire. It is actually greed that is the “politics” behind the ongoing medical madness that literally prevents every well-intentioned people from using, or even learning about, novel and potentially helpful approaches to develop cheap and harmless treatment for many degenerative diseases such as cancer, diabetes and hypertension.

The established purpose and driving force of the pharmaceutical industry is to increase sales of pharmaceutical drugs for the present diseases and to find new diseases to market existing drugs. By this very nature, the pharmaceutical industry has no interest in preventing diseases. The eradication of any disease inevitably destroys a multi-billion dollar market of prescription drugs as a source of revenues. Therefore, pharmaceutical drugs are primarily developed to relieve symptoms, but not to cure.

If eradication therapies for diseases are discovered and developed, the pharmaceutical industry has an inherent interest to suppress, discredit and obstruct these medical breakthroughs in order to make sure that diseases continue as the very basis for a lucrative prescription drug market. The economic interest of the pharmaceutical industry itself is the main reason why no medical breakthrough has been made for the control of the most common diseases such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, heart failure, diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis, and why these diseases continue like epidemics on a worldwide scale.

Millions of people and patients around the world are defrauded twice. A major portion of their income is used up to finance the exploding profits of the pharmaceutical industry. In return, they are offered a medicine that not only does not even cure but also vitiates their health to incurable level. Today we are feeding the world of corporations. Surely, we are feeding for the ongoing biological disaster of the whole human society. Ultimately, conventional medicine will collapse upon its own blatant failures, to be replaced by a new age of medicine where disease prevention – not treatment – keeps people healthy, vibrant and productive without bankrupting society in the process.

Life becomes war: Market exists in war (competitions); man exists in peace. Therefore the interest of market is always against the interests of man. Market was under check so far as man remained the leader of human societies for millions of years. But of late human, market, with the help of science and art (commercialization), gained enough clout to rush forward far ahead of man. And the hi-tech market economy became the leader of man by commercializing everything including knowledge (science) and religion (spirituality). World wars followed and human society thus came under the leadership of businessmen who strictly followed the market pattern of development, literally, from 1924, when the then American President Calvin Coolidge declared the philosophy of his nation’s development: “The business of America is business.”

As modern proxy life is totally dependent on middlemen, and therefore on mechanization, modern deceptive concepts like shrewdness, smartness, shortcut methods and competitions have all become the norms rather than exceptions. And mechanization is all about one-up, linear processes ridden in shortcut and other stopgap methods, as we have seen in earlier chapters.

Every makeshift/shortcut method is as hypothetical as modern science and hence they are all one-up processes. As such they all indicate stiff competition which amount to an emergency situation as is the case of a bird building a nest for laying eggs, or like a society catapulting an army for fighting an enemy (an army presupposes an enemy), both of which are of, purely, temporary in nature, and never a permanent feature. But the fact that man has been mechanized to the brim means he is facing an emergency to the hilt and that, like a soldier, he is all poised to perpetuate life as a permanent war. But in the frenzied present globalizing situations, when man is jumping from one deadline to what it is another in coping with the ongoing fast life and faster changes, it is pertinent to ask as to what it is against whom man is going to fight, particularly at a time when he does not know anything other than fighting (competition) and does not have any infrastructure other than those required in the war? And tragically it is none other than another man that he is to challenge and fight.

Thus man is inevitably supposed to fight another man to the last so far as modern life is concerned. It is all about exploitation of man by man and the margin always going to the middleman who invariably keeps the pot always boiling which is what the modern mechanized society is all about today. It was simply this short delay in achieving the total mechanization of the globe that the protracted war continued this long with some sporadic local bursting now and them, here and there, ever since it started with Industrial Revolution. Now, the ‘global village’ or ‘wired globe ‘ is all poised to clear the long delay for the final crunch in a matter of say about 20 to 25 years from now.

Seeing an unprecedented industrialization taking place in modern history, the great historian, Arnold Toynbee, identified the greatest event in modern history as Industrial Revolution. Today what we see all around is that the whole human society is being wrapped in incessant middlemanism. As such, why not we can identify the era of modern history as an age of middleman revolutions which, with the help of modern science and Industrial Revolution, succeeded in catapulting the once obscure and inferior conventional trader – middleman – to the pride of place, virtually as the crown prince of modern man.

It is a fact that the whole world being reduced to be a big market and the business of man having end up as his only business are all recent history phenomena and that it has occurred towards the last period of the whole human history. During the rest 99.9% period in history, spanning millions of years, man was living by individually producing most of his requirements for his own consumption with no middleman involved. And today, in the fully commercialized world which has been in existence since about the last few centuries, it is this less than 1% of human race – business people – who control the rest 99 %. And this remote control is easily achieved through what we may describe SPECULATION or HYPOTHESIS, called MODERN SCIENCE.

Corporate and military purposes are inseparable today. Military production is largely exempt from environmental protection legislation in the name of national security. That exemption has made military production facilities the most ecologically devastated locations on Earth. Military production also requires extraction and production of the most hazardous materials known, generating the most pernicious threats to human health and environment.

The marquis weapons systems are of course weapons of mass destruction. These weapons represent the primary thrust of the developed nations’ technological trajectory. While they are marketed to civilian populations as environmental, medical and economic benefits in the form of civilian nuclear power, gene therapy, and food production enhancing pesticides, their origins in military research and application are telling. From an ecological and human health standpoint, these are the highest risk technologies currently in widespread application. Covering Earth in chemical biocides, genetically modified organisms, and strontium 90 are the combined results of the military and corporate application of these high-risk technologies, and it is a mistake to view the corporate and military applications as separable. Components of Agent Orange and Zyclon-B are regular components of our daily corporate food intake. The contaminants resulting from the production of weapons of mass destruction are some of the most persistent pollutants known to humanity. They are this generation’s legacy to our great grandchildren, and their great grandchildren – provided the world would last that long!

War and the selling of fear: Profit is the mantra of the CEO. It is the goal that embodies the motives, agendas, and actions of the modern corporation. And it is this very goal that will lead all “profit at any cost” corporations to their own self destruction. How is this so? It can be seen today that an almost psychopathic set of events have transpired and with it the rise of power and domination over world events by multinational corporations.

To enable the maximum profit the agenda of the present day corporation is to find the most exploitable, undereducated, politically powerless, and “most terrorized” people they can find to manufacture goods, provide services, and enable the profits for those that invest in this form of modern psychological slavery, physical abuse, economic domination, and “fear mongering” that is possible under a set of legal and military strategies that enables the corporations to strip the people of human rights, political power, and the abilities to act in civil disobedience to immoral and unjustified authority.

Rights of corporations versus rights of man: The growth of corporate rights, economic power and political influence has mainly been confined to the past 150 years, although the seeds of corporate domination rest in more distant mercantilist and colonial practices. However, it is undeniable that over the same period of time, the people’s democratic right to determine their economic life has been superseded by corporate interests. This consolidation of political power comes at the expense of public authority and continues to stimulate strong opposition globally. It is maintained by the neo-liberal policies being pursued on a global scale.

Far from supplying public demand, corporations actively dictate cultural habits and create demand by influencing the public mind through a sophisticated and well funded combination of research, marketing, advertising and media manipulation. The result is the subtle, but quite apparent, alignment of public and corporate interest. This cultural homogenization of society both nationally and globally is fertile ground for maximizing profit. Whilst levels of unnecessary and unsustainable consumption increase globally, corporate longevity is secured. This non consensual capitalization of the public by the wealthy few is another example of an undemocratic process resulting from excessive financial capability and political influence. The sophistication and effectiveness of advertising and marketing methods is well understood. The ubiquity of the television and the increasing number of hours it is watched, especially by children, is particularly disturbing. In the world today, watching TV has become nearly the 3rd most time consuming pastime, after sleeping and working. In the US, 75% of commercial television time and 50% of public television time is paid for by the 100 largest corporations. Projected global advertising expenditure for corporations in 2006 was over $427 billion dollars.

Corporate Personhood: Corporate lawyers established the precedent of ‘Corporate Personhood’ in US law, which granted them the same constitutional rights as ordinary people. They first began manipulating the courts perception of the Fourteenth Amendment, originally designed to protect the civil rights of slaves. They argued that ‘equal protection rights’ and ‘Due Process’ should apply to corporations as well as people, and in 1889, the supreme court bestowed these rights on corporations under the authority of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus corporations became ‘persons’. This was a major turning point, allowing corporations to use these new powers to undermine the democratic rights that the constitution originally intended to confer on citizens: the right to a republican form of government, derived exclusively from the consent of the governed.

In 1906, corporate lawyers secured Fourth Amendment Constitutional Rights for their clients, which originally protected people’s possessions from unreasonable searches. The corporations used this protection to limit health, safety and environmental investigations in corporate facilities and to keep corporate documents private. This has undermined the public’s right to proper health and safety standards and environmental protection ever since.

Corporations were also granted protection under the Fifth Amendment, preventing corporate powers from being revoked without due process. This allowed corporations to be compensated if they lose revenue from local laws designed to protect citizens.

Under the First Amendment (Freedom of Speech) corporations have been granted the right to influence legislation that is unrelated to their business. As a result corporations have infringed upon the very heart of democracy. States can no longer limit corporate advertising, even when politically motivated, or limit financial contributions to political campaigns.

The battle for control of the democratic process is being won by the corporate and political elite. The phenomenon of market forces is becoming more entrenched in every aspect of public life, even influencing our subconscious minds, conscious attitudes and behaviour. These, and other changes, have undermined the people’s right to treat corporations as subordinate, man-made entities. Corporate rights now directly compete with the public’s right to their health, safety and welfare. The courts have chosen not to address this conflict of interest and the undermining of the democratic process. They have instead allowed modern corporations to use these rights to amass greater wealth. Economic power creates political influence, a fact that, given their new protections under US law, corporations use to their full advantage.

Corporate links with the WTO as well as with the IMF and World Bank are well documented, and they continue to negotiate access to emerging markets and to secure intellectual property rights. Through the free trade agreements such as NAFTA and WTO agreements such as GATS and TRIPs, the potential for even greater corporate economic dominance is plain. Corporate rights continue to be enforced and essential common resources such as water, genetic material and knowledge are privatized, without regard for the sovereignty of developing countries.

Since the 70’s, as public objection to corporate rule and environmental degradation increased, corporations have mounted a successful campaign to increase corporate rights and win back public opinion. This initiative saw the rise of corporate sponsored law firms who fiercely defended corporate interests by, for example, opposing environmental and social standards and regulations. Such organizations were presented as ‘public interest’ groups in an attempt to equate public and corporate interests whilst masking corporate involvement. They included environmental and consumer groups that are nothing more than extensions of corporate lobbying in disguise, promoting environmental and commercial deregulation. The academic world was also targeted as corporations funded programs and research in economics and law that favoured neo-liberal ideals. The success of the public relations campaign was guaranteed by their huge financial resources and broad coalition across business groups.

Corporate subjugation of intellect: Today every system, including even religion, is in the custody of its money forces that actually what they, as the sponsors of the proverbial Judases, are doing on the intellectual front.

Over the last 75 years industry-sponsored research programs have come to dominate scientific research. A totalitarian system now exists where only scientists that adhere to the prevailing orthodoxy can receive funds to conduct research. Not only will the government not fund studies on alternative hypotheses for such vital issues like AIDS and cancer, but this stricture applies to other areas of inquiry as well.

According to Beder (2001), right wing think tanks have played a central role in promoting free market ideology onto the policy agenda throughout the English speaking world. These Think Tanks are generally established as private, tax-exempt, research & advocacy institutes, and are largely funded by foundations and the corporate sector”. Environmental policy is a sound example of their recent influence. They advocate the use of the market to allocate scarce environmental resources such as wilderness and clean air and promote the replacement of legislation with voluntary industry agreements, reinforced or newly created property rights and economic instruments.

Think Tanks, like the Institute of Public Affairs, have employed ex-government officials giving them important connections. “The interchange of personnel between think tanks and government officials is now a feature of the Australian scene” according to Beder. Conservative Think Tanks had played a major role in setting the policy agenda for the Thatcher & Blair governments in the UK.

In order to be effective, think tanks:

  • insert themselves in the networks of people who are influential in particular areas of policy.
  • organize conferences, seminars & workshops
  • publish books, briefing papers, journals & media releases for policy makers, journalists and people able to sway the policy makers
  • liaise with bureaucrats, consultants, interest groups, lobbyists etc.
  • seek to provide advice directly to government officials and to government agencies & committees via consultancies or via testimony at hearings.
  • think tank employees often become policy makers themselves, having established their credentials as a vital part of the relevant policy/issue network.

Beder points out that “in their efforts to influence and become part of the policy making process think tanks have more in common with interest groups or pressure groups than academic institutions. Nevertheless, employees of think tanks are treated by the media as independent experts and, as such, are often preferred to representatives from universities or interest groups as a source of expert opinion”.

The corporate control of modern society and human life is total: Large transnational corporations are clearly the dominant institution of our time. They’re preeminent throughout the world, especially in the Global North and its epicenter in the US. They control or greatly influence what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, how we get most of our essential services like health care and even what we’re taught in schools up to the highest levels. They create and control our sources of information and greatly influence how we think and our view of the world and them. They even now own patents on our genetic code. They also carefully craft their image and use catchy slogans to convince us of their benefit to society and the world, like: “better things for better living through chemistry”. The slogans are clever, but the truth is ugly.

Corporations also decide who will govern and how. We may think we do, but it’s not so and never was. Whereas governments are, to a large degree, bound by borders, corporations can operate in almost any country, and can therefore choose how they want to divide their assets and production facilities. And while they must adhere to the legal policies of each country, they will often play one government against the other as a means of achieving favorable economic conditions. Those national elections in most nations in the world today, especially during the last couple of decades, only looked legitimate to most people, but not to those who know and understand how the system works. Here’s how it really works. The “power elite” or privileged class, C. Wright Mills wrote about 50 years ago in his classic book by that title, are the real kings and decision makers. He wrote how corporate, government and military elites formed a trinity of power after WW II and that the “power elite” were those “who decide whatever is decided” of importance. The holy trinity Mills wrote about still exists but today in the shape of a triangle with the transnational giants clearly on top and government, the military and all other institutions of importance there to serve their interests. These corporations have become so large and dominant they run our lives and the world, and in a zero sum world and the chips that count most in their stack, they do it for their continuing gain and at our increasing expense.

MANKIND LOST ITS LEADERSHIP

Today, the world fully knows the fact that the leadership of human world has, from all indications, slipped away from humans. Only that the reigning world simply does not want to admit this reality in so many words. This book is an attempt to find out as to why and how man has, at last, lost his own leadership.

It is the shocking peculiarity of our age that today the world cannot change its course even if we consider this as the only way out to save man from the fast impending catastrophes. It is far more ironic that even the present global leader, namely America, cannot do it, despite the fact that the finest brains there and elsewhere on the planet are thinking just on that lines.

The world, including America, is not making public its growing desperation, not because that it is not having any alternate options or solutions in sight but because it simply does not have the much needed respite to do any basic salvage operation and thus to start it all over again. It mortally fears that some worse calamity may preempt the world or that some other powers waiting in the wings may take over and thus tilt the power balance during such delicate change-over. The fact that the long perpetuation of this sordid state of suspense – optionless-ness and helplessness – in recent history has led this world to such a situation that when even terrorism too has come calling and gain public acceptance as a lesser evil, this very fact is turning out to be a brutal reality staring right on the face of every thinking man. The much published and popularized ‘adventurous’ trips to moon and Mars are simply parts of the games of escapades and attempts to divert public attention from the present optionless-ness, helplessness and other humiliation that the global leadership is facing in every field.

World ruled by a cartel of sociopaths: The modern corporation, according to law professor Joel Bakan (author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power) is “singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context.” (p. 56). Here the corporation is compared to a sociopath. Bakan writes: “The sociopathic personality is irresponsible, manipulating, grandiose, lacking in empathy, has asocial tendencies, refuses to accept responsibility for actions, and cannot feel remorse….Many of the attitudes people adopt and the actions they execute when acting as corporate operatives can be characterized as psychopathic.”

From this Bakan concludes that the corporation is a “pathological” entity. This is a striking conclusion.

The so-called pathological personality in humans is well documented and includes serial killers and others who have no regard for the life and welfare of anyone but themselves. But is it really fair to label the corporation, managed and owned by normal caring and loving people, in this way?

Bakan thinks so. His argument includes the point that the corporation’s sole reason for being is to enhance the profits and power of the corporation. He shows by citing court cases that it is the duty of management to make money and that any compromise with that duty is dereliction of duty. Another point is that “corporations are designed to externalize their costs.” Fouling environment and leaving the mess for somebody else to clean up is exactly what “externalizing costs” is all about. The fact is that the market cannot function without externalizing environmental and social costs and the mega-corporations currently control just about every aspect of life on this planet.

Furthermore, corporations are amoral toward the law. . The corporation, after all, has no conscience and feels no remorse. Bakan cites 42 “major legal breaches” by General Electric between 1990 and 2001 on pages 75-79 as an example. The fines for malfeasance are usually so small relative to the gain that it’s cost effective to break the law. As for corporations regulating themselves, Bakan writes, “No one would seriously suggest that individuals should regulate themselves, that laws against murder, assault, and theft are unnecessary because people are socially responsible. Yet oddly, we are asked to believe that corporate persons – institutional psychopaths who lack any sense of moral conviction and who have the power and motivation to cause harm and devastation in the world – should be left free to govern themselves.” (p. 110). Joel Bakan further writes:”Over the last 300 years corporations have amassed such great power as to weaken governments’ ability to control them. In any other country we would call this system bribery; in America we call it freedom of speech. In the corporate world we fire employees who take money from vendors; in the political world we reelect them. Where are our heads?”

A corporation will happily bribe politicians to enact policies that will make earth uninhabitable if they think it will improve the next quarter profit by 1%. They are like children possessing super powers and no conscience or thought for the morrow. Business leaders right now are conducting massive propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming – global warming because of human interference – is a liberal hoax, and they’re succeeding. In the United States probably two-thirds of the population believes this by now. (In this connection, please refer the topic ‘Capitalism is a Social Disease’ in chapter 5 ).

Fox to guard the henhouse: Thus, we all know, the burden of proof to demonstrate that, for example, a given chemical is harmful is on the victims or the hapless mass society or the public, who often, for both financial and legal reasons, have to depend on tests and information given by the chemical companies themselves. However the environmental protection institution like American EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the supposed bane of industry, has become toothless in the face of organized opposition (and co-optation) from the industries themselves is the fundamental malady. But that is like the fox guarding the henhouse.

Four chemicals, including the dry-cleaning chemical “perc”, formaldehyde, and two pesticides, are followed through the EPA maze, with fascinating diversions to corporate law firms, PR flacks, and financial records, until the reader discovers why these dangerous chemicals are not properly regulated. Anyone who understands math knows the EPA will never adequately test the millions of chemicals now in existence – now find out the politics that explain why they can’t even properly test or regulate some of the most dangerous ones in common use all over the world.

Corporate suppression of data is now so routine that no one raises an eyebrow. In the wake of an EPA advisory panel classifying the Teflon chemical C8 (ammonium perfluorooctanoate, or PFOA) as a “likely carcinogen,” reporter Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette learned that in 1981 DuPont initiated a study to learn whether exposure to C8 caused birth defects in the children of Teflon factory workers. When the study found an excess of birth defects in the children, the study was abandoned and the results filed away without notifying the federal government. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) companies must tell the EPA when they find information “that reasonably supports the conclusion that [a chemical] presents a substantial risk of injury to health.”

The chemical companies have armies of lawyers. They have many scientists – including Nobel laureates – working directly for them, and many others in academia working indirectly through studies that they fund. They also have big-time PR firms who hammer home the message that (to quote the title of a related book) ‘Toxic Sludge is Good for You’.

Even in the few cases where a chemical actually is banned, the taxpayer then has to make up the difference. We can all be poisoned but heaven forbid that one of these huge corporations should lose a little profit. Chemical companies also resort to obfuscation, lawsuits both threatened and real, propaganda, and borderline fraud. The result is that their products continue to contaminate our air, water, and food – and our health.

SLAUGHTER TAPPING THE BUSINESS OF THE DOOMSDAY MARKET

Slaughter tapping is a familiar term among the rubber planters which means the ruthless and frenzied milking or tapping of the rubber tree when the tree becomes old and apt to be discarded or felled. Then the tapping is done by slitting the skin of the tree at as many places on the bark as from wherever the milk (blood of the tree) comes out, a process in which all precaution for the health of the tree is thrown to the winds. In short, this is a process of extracting the maximum possible profit at the minimum possible time and effort.

Today there is a deep groundswell towards a strong, cynic and pessimistic notion that the world is fast heading towards a no-win-situation from which it simply has no escape. It is on account of a number of symptoms or reasons, not just one. Many seem to convey the message that the world is un-savable, and that the worst is yet to come. The top votaries on these lines of thinking constitute the top corporate technocrats among others. Only that they consider it as an open secret and an opportunity to plunder the ‘sinking ship.’

And the worldly ‘wise’ people, the corporate forces, who always go after the winning side in the highly competitive global economic environment, automatically succumb to this sort of fleecing and other rip off – ‘slaughter tapping’ – tendencies in trade and industry, unmindful of the far-reaching grave consequences. Let’s consider just one example. Would it be wise to remove all regulations in the logging industry and allow the clear-cutting of entire forests for short-term profit gain? Should we sit back and watch entire species go extinct, as the industry disrupts nature’s food chain and threatens our future food supply and entire ecosystem? This free market model of endless growth on a finite planet is bringing about mass species extinction, mass pollution, and is certainly linked to the nihilistic value system that mortgaged the future of the planet for the instant gratification of the lucky few. In a system that demands short-term profits above all else, would the industry really regulate itself? Would COMPETITION be a good referee?

“In the past 20 years we have produced a generation who are not entrepreneurs, they are grabbers. We are told that we must open up, that trade and commerce must be totally free. Free for whom? For rogue speculators? For anarchists wanting to destroy weak countries in their crusade for open societies?”, former Malaysian Premier, Mahathir – with a swipe at speculator George Soros for Southeast Asia’s currency problems – was thus blaming the Asian businessmen who have been involved in financial scandals.

The crisis of money-destroys-wealth economy in modern society is reaching an explosive tipping point. Today modern society is passing through economic reckoning. Greece, for example, is on the brink of total insolvency and the financial crisis there is reaching an explosive tipping point.

The fact that the world today has come to admit corruption as having turned into a ‘necessary evil’ for success in any field, is a typical example of this ‘slaughter-tapping’ tendencies having reached the suicidal saturation point. As a minor phenomenon, corruption has been practiced by a microscopic percentage of low class people from time immemorial and not like today when it is practiced as a ‘genuine’ activity by all, including the top class, and in such field the very meaning and purpose of which is primarily to expose corruption, namely the mass media that do all sorts of business to cover up corruption. With corporations, media and governments growing in corruption, the world is today massively infested by dishonesty, deceit, compromised morality, and perverted, twisted language which are all signs of a culture corrupting to the lowest common denominator. A latest instance that has happened in India between Zee News TV channel and Jindal Steel chairman – the former demanding bribe for cover up and not reporting the corruption reportedly indulged in by the latter – is only the tip of the iceberg of similar stories happening anywhere in the world today.

The news that the cancer of corruption is not sparing even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the global watchdog body on nuclear energy safeguards, will indeed render all other major corruption episodes in the world as peanuts by comparison. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) with its headquarters in America is supposed to ensure regulations of the odd 450 nuclear plant operators, all over the world, including Japan (Fukushima), and to establish and maintain a strong safety culture. Then there are a number of other nuclear plants maintained by military and academic researches. This otherwise means any compromise in NRC’s role is equal to a compromise on the nuclear explosion button and the world going in flames of nuclear radiations.

Be it the reports of Indian customs officials ‘supervising’ smuggling of arms into their own country, Russian missile engineers selling highly dangerous nuclear materials to North Korea and Iran etc., the fast spreading fast-buck syndrome does not seem to spare anybody. Here the problems and crises become as a prerequisite for instant money-spinners, which soon become the means of the market forces. Hence the creation of more problems and crises turn out to be in their real interests.

With their only aim of making the maximum profit with minimum expense, the slaughter tapping forces have thrown all the hitherto lofty ethics and norms of fair play to the winds. They indulge in these smart rip off using the highly sophisticated and abstract means of science and modern art of mind-management, thanks to the growing Western monopoly of the ongoing media and communication revolution. Today even globally famous companies are ready to sell their goodwill in the market provided the sale proceeds exceed more than their market value, which they thinks they can recoup with money power thus made. Some even go broke or switch over to other business after encasing their total goodwill in the market, for example the recent case of the global power giant, Enron, going broke.

In the context of all human values having fast vanished from the fully mechanized society, and the market force having become the leader of modern world, almost all leading trends speed up towards building such a catastrophic crescendo. In the strong torrents of this global market shift it is the common man who are the worst, immediate hit – a la the soon to be discarded rubber tree – although the grave affliction affects all and sundry. As the worst hit, the common man will be sold and resold even by part, as kidney, born marrow, liver, heart and so forth, in human body transplantation market, for example.

As liberalisation and globalization go on hand-in-gloves and unabated, which naturally means liberalization of corruption on the global level, the worst affected will be the ongoing problem-solving processes. Even the severest critic of the ongoing systems does not seem to escape the fast-buck syndrome associated with the ‘liberalization’ out on the kill that is sure to ask its pounds of flesh as a prize for clinching the issue. The helplessness of even the establishment is all too obvious to face such cutting edge forces of the day as the market force, the bureaucracy, the super experts and other sophisticated vested interests like mega financiers who are all waiting in the wings to exploit even the rescue impulses, like the cunning crews plundering the sinking ship and looting the trapped passengers.

Endemic financial meltdowns: In 2010, the bankers and corporate executives at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, presented a plan to create US$100-trillion (about 700-billion Euros or 7-trillion Chinese Yuan) in new international debt. During the last decade, world debt nearly doubled from $57-trillion to $109-trillion. Banks created “toxic assets,” “mortgage derivatives,” and “default swaps” without substantial collateral to back them up. These schemes made bankers very rich, but helped collapse the world financial system 18 months ago. Public taxpayers have since bailed these bankers out with about $11-trillion in new debt. Now the financiers want more.

As some economies slightly recovered, energy prices rose to trigger inflation, slowing real recovery. Thus, the WEF bankers published “More Credit, Fewer Crises,” proposing that the world double its debt once again to $210 trillion by 2020. This debt would be over 3-times the entire world annual economy.

This debt, the printing of new money based on nothing substantial, has profound impacts on society and Nature through resource inflation, the rising costs of food and energy, conflict, fraud, and ecological destruction.

Regarding this paper “dept” and “credit”, the former director of the Greenpeace Foundation, Rex Weyler writes in his blog: “These bankers are not proposing to loan their money to the world. Rather, they propose creating new money out of thin air, likely through International Monetary Fund (IMF) “Special Drawing Rights,” a synthetic currency beyond the control of any sovereign nation. By loaning currency rights to national treasuries, the bankers create $100-trillion with a few computer keyboard strokes. Then, they loan the fabricated money, collect interest payments, and demand the principle back in real money from the debtors. It’s a lucrative scheme if you’re on the inside.”

What bankers call “Credit” the rest of world experiences as “Debt” owed to the bankers!: We can see that the current structure of international debt creates inflation, poverty, fraud, oppression, and environmental destruction. Finally, through currency and resource crises, debt fuels war. The world, while increasing debt, spends over $2-trillion each year on military and warfare, exacerbating the vicious debt cycle.

The demand for a society based on egalitarian principles continues to grow around the world as a growing number of nations and members of civil society are rejecting the neo-liberal economic model. It is clear that International consensus for change is unlikely to occur without mass public pressure. In addition, the global economy is in a very precarious state, relying on volatile financial markets and driven increasingly by commercial pressures. Many economists and analysts are predicting a global economic failure sparked by a stock market or financial collapse.

Planned obsolescence by market versus planned obsolescence by nature: There was a time once when consumer goods were built to last. Then, in the 1920s, a group of businessmen realized that the longer their product lasted, the less money they made, thus ‘Planned Obsolescence’ was born, and manufacturers have been engineering products to fail ever since. Products are often designed with a limited life and planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence would be unnecessary and non-existent in a resource-based economy.

Planned obsolescence, on the other hand, is only one of many evil tools of the market-led system that enslaves us all. We are going to be remembered as the idiot civilization from the “Ignorance Era” where we never could learn how to take care of nature, instead, we always purchased that we didn’t need and we took a blind eye on corporations practicing the art of planned obsolescence in order to keep up locked in purchasing their latest models/products. The ‘science’ behind terminator technology is not far behind to seek. The technology patent to market the terminator seed has since been bought by certain multinational companies.

However, nature is not sitting back as a silent spectator of this wanton foolery by the market force. As the planned obsolescence by market is now in opposition to planned obsolescence by nature, the ongoing species extinction is part of the planned obsolescence by nature. “Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists(Nature), and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.”, said Stewart Udall, the former Secretary of the Interior of the USA.

Note: Due to the limit of space in this print edition, some parts of this chapter under the following subtitles may please be read in the e-book edition of this book (soon to be published):

  • Profiteering has become a ‘Rightful’ Activity
  • Time-is-Money gives birth to Throw-away Society
  • Corporate Subjugation of Intellect
  • Religions as Vehicles of Market Forces
  • Market and Science Collude: Honest Science under Siege

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For buying this book: DOWNLOAD FREE & PAY LATER

To get the PDF of this 640-page book LIFE ON MELTDOWN:

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Life On Meltdown eBook (PDF)(Right Click and press Save As)

And pay 5 Dollars, if you find the book helpful.

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