Who Will Dominate the World?

Tomdispatch.com has put out a pontification on the “Geopolitics of American Global Decline” by one Alfred W. McCoyon that treats as gospel the early 20th Century ideas of Halford Mackinder, an Englishman who believed that any Power seeking world domination would have to deny rivals control of the “heartland” of Eurasia. In that perspective, China is inevitably the next global hegemon.

In worshipping at the cold altar of a past age McCoyon dismisses equally Harvard’s Joseph Nye, Jr. who sees no rival in the foreseeable future to American military and socio-economic "soft power", and Henry Kissinger, whose proclaimed faith in visionary leaders extends to George W Bush who he extols for initiating the war to remake Iraq.

These varying strategic views ignore the reality that the world today is not obedient to the United States and that it is highly unlikely to bend in the future to the raw fascism of China: in fact, both those countries are victims of the true global hegemon, Uriah Heepish Britain, spreading corruption and false-flag violence to get its way in every region.

That strategy has nothing to do with Mackinder’s speculations.

It has involved a pragmatic, catch-as-catch-can transition from visible Empire to global Organized Crime under cover of the "Cold War" that Winston Churchill launched in cahoots with the American military-industrial elite in the wake of World War II. 

The American war-making elite made enormous profits from cooperating in that strategy but Britain got something far more valuable, the substance of global power.

Its mastery of a global money laundering system that became the backbone of all international organized crime gave Britain the capacity to confront and defeat America's long-standing strategic aim of a democratic world order.

British strategy in this entire effort has remained as simple as in the days of Empire: it has aimed to promote its criminal interests in trafficking dangerous drugs and exploiting the raw materials and labour of victim countries.

Its operations have been brilliantly ingenious.

"Islamic terrorists" have replaced red-coated armies as enforcers of Empire, and instead of colonial Viceroys there are international bankers paid munificent "bonuses" to collect and manage revenues in a global "black market" under London's overall supervision.

That black market is now variously valued from 30 to 60 trillion dollars (compared to current American GDP of some $16 trillion).

India, the world’s undisputed top “soft Power” through most of history, suffered a fate almost exactly parallel to that of the United States after the end of World War II: its experienced national leader was assassinated and its nationhood sabotaged.

In the Indian case, it was not an internal economic element that turned traitor but a Muslim minority provoked into frantic insecurity and kept from rebuilding fraternal ties by the deliberately created “Kashmir dispute.”

In addition, over the last seven decades Britain has manipulated the enormous corruptibility of the Indian Establishment to neutralize nationalist forces, and now, as the Vodafone case exemplifies. practically controls the vital processes of the country.

China is a non-starter in the strategic sweepstakes.

It has been an insular state confined to the eastern third of its current territories through most of history; its majority Han people have looked outward only to perceive threats and build walls; they have expanded control over other lands only under the influence of Mongol conquerors.

The extent of Chinese strategic inability can be read in its history of imported models of statehood, traditionally from India which gave its ruling Mandarins (from the Sanskrit Mantri) their world view, and then from the European netherworld of Marx and Lenin.

It is ridiculous to talk of China as a global Power when it cannot trust its own people to keep their national bearings in an uncensored Internet environment.

No discussion of the global strategic outlook can be meaningful without all this background in view.

In that perspective, it is clear that the unmitigated nightmare of global violence, corruption, crime and environmental disaster will continue unless the world is freed from Britain's underground empire.

To that end, two steps are critically important.

One, the global money laundering system must be dismantled by declaring all “tax havens” and “shell companies” illegal.

Two, all “illicit drugs” must be decriminalized, thus rendering trafficking unprofitable.

World leaders have a golden opportunity to set out these aims clearly in the post-2015 agenda they will adopt at the next session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The first draft of that document, to be discussed by governments in New York in less than a week, contains nothing on those matters.

Unless that is changed, there is little doubt that the world will continue on its violent and criminal course well into the future. 

Open Letter to UN Diplomats

Hey Guys,

I’m writing to tell you what I think of your latest “Zero Draft” of post 2015 Development Goals .

Sorry to be so blunt, but it seems to me you're trying to avoid real issues.

 Take the first sentence. “Poverty eradication is the greatest global challenge facing the world today and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.”

That sounds fine, but is it true?

Isn’t poverty just a symptom?

Of what, you ask?

Well, to begin with, of the theft of trillions of dollars from poor countries by corporations that misprice their trade flows.

Then there’s the problem that economists call “commercial wars” that spring from the “resource curse.” (Don’t you just love how economists whitewash grisly realities? It’s as if some great wizard in the sky cursed us with wars that actually result from criminal conspiracies.)

Those little wars are a major cause of extreme poverty. Take the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s one of the richest countries in the world, but also among the poorest because ever since the Europeans “scrambled for Africa” in the 19th Century, they’ve been stealing its wealth under one pretext or other (take a bow Belgian and French diplomats!).

That has happened throughout English-speaking Africa too (British diplomats take a bow!).

In Asia, the theft of resources has happened most often under cover of “Islamic terrorism” (British get the credit again), and in Latin America “Left guerrillas” and “drug lords” have been the fall guys (Americans take a bow!)

Drug trafficking needs special mention as a generator of poverty. It’s a $500 billion a year phenomenon, but most of that money goes to the same rich bankers noted earlier. If you ever wondered why Western bankers get such astronomical “bonuses,” that’s why: they keep the global criminal economy going, to the tune of anywhere between $4 trillion and $7 trillion a year.

Of course, they share it with the people who help them manage that underground economy. Every terrorist group in the world gets a cut: Al Qaeda, Taliban, Islamic Caliphate, Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army, Naxalites, Neo-Nazis; you name it, they get it. The Colombian drug cartels, the Mexican drug lords and the Central American murder squads all get funded too.

By the way, every one of those terror groups is a major producer of poverty for they make development impossible in many developing countries. The Naxalites we have in India specialize in destroying schools.

The bankers also plough much of the drug money back into other thriving businesses: producing counterfeit items in sweat shops in poor countries, environmental crime, and international trade of women and children for prostitution. The trade in counterfeit items, including medicines, now generates more returns than illicit drugs. The trade in endangered animals and body parts is a nearly $300 billion industry.

None of these “businesses” give non-criminals a living wage; all generate and sustain poverty big time.

I know you guys feel bad about all this and have just the right politically correct statements if the Press should call; but you’re also “realists” who know there’s no use wasting time on problems the rich and powerful don’t want solved, right?

So I know why your “Zero draft” is filled with noble goals like End poverty and hunger, Provide quality education for all, Attain health for all, as well as gender equality, secure water, sanitation, affordable energy, decent jobs, and so on.

Those are all issues poor countries can deal with on their own if they were free from massive theft of resources and constant economic and political subversion.

What we need the UN to do is deal with matters on which the poor have no purchase.

Those problems are not mentioned at all in your draft.

In case you are open to suggestions, here’s what I think the post-2015 Development Agenda should contain:

1. Introduction

The world stands on the cusp of a period of enormous promise. The new and emerging realities of the Information Age allow us to envisage a world in which we can make mass poverty, the threat of climate change and global environmental pollution the fading memories of a bygone era.

To realize that potential we have to deal effectively with the legacy of the Industrial era in which those issues are rooted. The first step in that process is to recognize the systemic nature of all existing global crises, including those already mentioned as well as endemic armed conflict, terrorism and rampant organized crime. They are not discrete problems and cannot be dealt with symptomatically.

The root systemic problem is a global criminal elite that rose to power during the colonial era; a meaningful post 2015 development agenda must disempower and dismantle it. The following goals are oriented to that end.

2. Goals & Implementation

A. Peace: The United Nations was meant to end war. The Security Council was created with its five “Big Power” Permanent Members to enforce action to that end. Instead, the five have become the world’s biggest arms merchants and supporters of war. Over the last six decades the five have promoted endless conflicts in poor countries that have not only killed well over a hundred million people but have drained them of wealth, blocked their development and trapped them in poverty.

To get things back on the track set by the UN Charter Development Goal #1 must be to end proxy wars in developing countries and establish a general peace by 2030.

The UN Secretariat should list all ongoing wars and create groups of independent experts to report on who is supporting them and identify the ultimate beneficiaries. The Security Council should be charged with meeting the 2030 goal and indeed, for accomplishing the larger task of general and complete disarmament. (In case you’ve forgotten, the General Assembly set the framework for such action in a 1961 resolution incorporating the McCloy-Zorin agreement between Washington and Moscow.)

B. Organized Crime: Through most of history, crime has been a local affair. It became global with colonialism and its ancillary crimes against humanity such as genocide, the slave trade and slavery.

When political decolonization set in after World War II, that criminal system disappeared “underground.” That is to say, the Big Powers that control world mass media began to pretend that it was all a deep mystery to them and that they had no control of it. The “war on drugs” is a typical outcome of such policy.

The trafficking of opium and heroin began as a “legitimate” colonial activity in the 18th Century; it was internationally recognized as a crime in 1912 but continued “underground” and became vastly more profitable as colonial Powers enlisted organized crime groups to expand markets and protect their turf.

Members of the British financial and political elite have continued to be in control globally because they run the system that launders drug money. They make obscenely large profits and spread corruption and endless violence throughout the world. Development Goal #2 must be to end all drug trafficking.

That will require ending the “war on drugs,” declaring all drugs legal, and providing them free as subscription pharmaceutical items. This will cost only a fraction of the “war on drugs” but will be far more effective: by knocking out all profit from trafficking it will remove the only reason why Organized crime is involved. Without drug pushers and their constant violence, governments can deal with the issue as one of mental and public health.

The General Assembly is set to have a special session in 2016 to focus comprehensively on the drug issue. Governments should use that session to amend the existing prohibitionist international drug Conventions and make them vehicles of the new policy.

C. Taxation: As long as there are taxes on income and profit, there will be people who cheat and honest people will always be at a disadvantage. That burden on the honest is a penalty on society as a whole. Governments should recognize that there are no police solutions to this problem; laws, regulations and enforcement agencies aimed at controlling economic forces only create more corruption. The only way to guide economic forces towards beneficial ends is by a market-driven system of incentives and punishments.

Development Goal #3 must be to abolish all taxes on personal and corporate income and profit while maintaining revenue neutrality with new imposts on immovable property.

Without taxes on income and profits there will be no incentive to hold black money; Governments should encourage all of it to surface by offering a general amnesty for those who invest their funds in long-term, profit bearing development bonds. Twinning that with the threat of prison terms for those found not to have revealed their holdings, and the offer to award all funds to informers should ensure full disclosure. These measures should make available a vast corpus of funds for development, more than enough to help all societies achieve the material goals in the current Zero Draft.

D. The Information Era: We are within a decade of having all people on the planet connected by mobile phone networks and broadband Internet. That opens the door to a range of new efficiencies in social interaction. It is not just e-governance and e-commerce, distance education and remotely administered medical care. There is spectacular potential in cloud-based data banks holding vast amounts of geospatially organized information that any smart phone can access and add to.

We are looking at the evolution of what has been called “the global brain,” with the strong possibility that a meta-consciousness will eventually emerge.

Two UN conferences in 2003 and 2005 promulgated the preliminary steps necessary for the healthy evolution of a World Information Society; it is now necessary to look farther ahead and decide on the mechanics, ethics, economics and politics of a fully interactive world.

Development Goal #4 should be to put in place by 2030 a global system to maximize the beneficial efficiencies of global connectivity.

The core effort to realize this goal should be the reform of the UN System, which is now a bureaucratic relic reflecting the brick and mortar realities of the 19th Century. The reform effort should aim to make each part of the thematically differentiated System the hub of global networks facilitating the work of a web of interconnected individuals, civil society organizations, corporations and governmental stakeholders.

C. Spiritual Development: As the world enters a new era of peace and material well-being, it will be necessary to address larger issues such as the nature of human evolution and its connection to universal realities. It will also be necessary to deal with the legacy issues of our swift ascent from barbarity manifested in attitudes such as religious intolerance, gender discrimination and abuse of other life forms.

Development Goal #5 should be an annually updated world map of spiritual progress based on the realization of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and established standards for the ethical treatment of animals.

Every country should map its own progress and discuss it publicly before submitting it to regional and global forums for comment. The UN Commissioner for Human Rights should compile the national submissions into the annual map and flag issues for discussion in the Human Rights Council.

Dear UN delegates,
I hope you do not think these goals are too unrealistic for action. They are the bare minimum if our species is to survive on a liveable planet.

Priyanka and Post 2015 Goals

Priyanka Chopra appeared yesterday at a United Nations function in Mumbai to launch the mobile phone app of the manipulative "One World Survey."

The OWS is manipulative because it pretends to be consulting people on international development priorities but actually excludes from its list of six anodyne goals all serious problems afflicting development. 

Predictably, of the six choices offered by the OWS, "the votes so far have indicated" strongest support for "better education" followed closely by "better job opportunities" and "better healthcare.

Quite oblivious to the snake oil she was peddling, Priyanka twittered prettily on about how the Survey was meant for "the most marginalized communities in India," how it was "truly groundbreaking" that with a simple phone call "people can take a virtual seat at the UN to participate in a global conversation on a road-map for the future," and how "for the first time I feel we have an opportunity at hand to think ahead, think together yet individually and have a truly impactful plan for a future without poverty and suffering."

A collection of UN local brass with truly Dickensian names (Grande, Arsenault, Pimple) chimed in appreciatively.

If anyone is able to use the phone app to write in new goals, I suggest the following:

• Make Tax havens illegal. They have drained trillions of dollars from poor countries.

• Legitimize all "illicit drugs" so as to drive organized crime out of the racket and cut the largest source of funds flowing into Tax Havens (about $500 billion annually).

• Rich countries should stop taxing the products of poor more than they do that of other affluent nations.

• Rich countries should stop paying billions of dollars in subsidies to their own farmers and thereby making it impossible for farmers in poor countries to survive.

• Rich countries should not insist that their "development aid" is spent on their own companies and supplies.

• UN documents should not lie about the causes of "resource wars" in developing countries; the truth might stop rich countries backing their corporate interests in violent conflicts that have killed millions of poor people.