"OLIGARCHICAL MALTHUSIANISM THEN AND NOW

From 9/11 to "peak oil" is a dangerous leap, and from "peak oil" to population reduction is more dangerous still. Because oligarchs have always held humanity in general in contempt, they have from time immemorial exhibited the outlook which has, during the last 200 years, been called Malthusian. Back among the early Greeks, one school of thought explained the Trojan War as necessary to remove the weight of the masses of mankind which were oppressing the breast of Mother Earth. Together with the axiomatic notion of overpopulation has gone a profound hostility to science and technology, especially because of their egalitarian effects. During the time of Thucydides in Athens, the writer called the Old Oligarch complained that the high-tech Athenian navy was helping the plebs to achieve upward mobility, while the equally high-tech long walls between Athens and Piraeus kept the armies of oligarchical Sparta at bay. During the agony of the Roman Empire, the decrees of the Emperor Diocletian in effect banned technological progress by making it illegal to alter the equipment and property of any guild. During the decline of the Venetian Empire, the decadent Giammaria Grtes (1713- 1798) elaborated the notion that the earth had an absolute and unalterable maximum carrying capacity, which he set at 3 billion persons. Ortes was the original from which the English Reverend Thomas Malthus copied. Malthus' well-known contention that population increases geometrically while food supply increases arithmetically stands in contradiction with thousands of years of successful human development. Malthus' real interest, it should be remembered, was to convince capitalists that they had to pay to maintain a numerous state church made up of people like himself, whose consumption would make sure that no crises of overproduction occurred. This was Malthus' notorious slogan, "The church with a capacious maw is best." Malthus was in turn the key to the bankruptcy of Darwin, who based himself on the greedy prelate. There is no doubt about evolution, but Darwin is a completely separate kettle of fish, especially his wayward thesis about the "blind watchmaker," meaning that the universe is a totally random process. The present writer agrees rather with Leibniz's view of a least action universe which has a definite in-built tendency towards greater order, greater energy organization, and greater development.

The fatal flaw of Keynesian economics is that they are based on Malthusian premises: there is a surplus which has to be consumed, and Keynes is unable to distinguish between productive and parasitical ways of doing this. In more recent times, the Malthusian outlook has been promoted with great success by the sinister Club of Rome, founded by Alexander King and Aurelio Peccei. The Club of Rome sponsored that infamous hoax, the 1968 Meadows and Forrester Limits to Growth. This fraudulent study took a snapshot of the then-known reserves of the main industrial commodities, and then simply extrapolated when these would be gone, based on the current rate of consumption. Almost forty years later, not one of these dire predictions has come to pass, and known reserves of many raw materials are greater than they were in 1968.

In 1971-1973, the long period of world economic expansion associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt's Bretton Woods system and postwar economic reconstruction came to an end in a series of monetary crises that destroyed the most successful monetary arrangement the world had ever seen. Since 1971-73, long-term economic growth in the main industrial countries has been cut in half: from about 5% per year to about 2.5% per year. This, plus the later push for deindustrialization, is the main reason why living standards in the US have declined by about 50% over the same period, and the costs of essential services like health care and education have gone into the ionosphere. After 1971-73, we are no longer dealing with a normal economy, but with an increasingly sick one.

THE FAKE OIL SHOCKS OF THE 1970s

Building on the lies of the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth, Wall Street, the City of London, and the Federal Reserve, backed by the Seven Sisters Anglo-American oil cartel, decided to jack up the price of oil to save the dollar while making western Europe and Japan foot the bill. This cynical maneuver was associated with Henry Kissinger's Kippur War in the Middle East of October 1973. After the hostilities began, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced an Arab oil boycott. In late December 1973, the OPEC speeches had become the pretext for a 400% increase in the price of oil carried out by banks and speculators in the commodity trading pits of New York and Chicago. OPEC was blamed, but OPEC was never the real cartel. OPEC was largely a Potemkin cartel. The real cartel were the Seven Sisters. Without the connivance of the Seven Sisters and their Royal Dutch Shell/British Petroleum leadership, none of OPEC's antics could have been made to stick. In reality, there had been no reduction in oil deliveries to the US. In December 1973, oil-bearing supertankers of the leading oil companies were put into a holding pattern on the high seas because storage facilities were already full to bursting with crude. But that did not stop greedy speculators from bidding up the price.

The plan for the entire exercise had been provided by Lord Victor Rothschild, the sometime head of a think tank attached to Royal Dutch Shell, the dominant force within the Seven Sisters oil cartel. The operation had been discussed at a meeting of the self-styled Bilderberger Group of finance oligarchs held at Saltsjobaden, Sweden on May 11-13, 1973. The effect of the oil price hike was to create a massive artificial demand for US dollars, thus effectively saving the greenback from a short-term collapse which would have ended its role as a reserve currency, and would have also ended the ability of US-UK finance to loot the world using this mechanism. In particular, if the posted price of oil were no longer expressed in dollars, then New York and London would no longer exercise de facto control over the oil reserves of the world. The 1973 oil crisis, followed by petrodollar recycling from the OPEC countries to David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, kept the dollar in demand and thus prevented it from being dumped. Of course, the world paid the price for all this wizardry in the form of the deepest recession since World War II.

In 1978-79, Carter and Brzezinski, acting in the service of Brzezinski's lunatic thesis that Islamic fundamentalism was the greatest bulwark against Soviet communism, toppled the regime of the Shah of Iran. In line with this project, the U.S. also made sure that the Shah was replaced by Khomeini, who embodied the negation in toto of modern civilization. Having done so well on the fake 1973-74 oil crisis, the New York and London finance oligarchs decided to repeat the operation, this time using the spectre of Khomeini's self-styled Islamic revolution. This time prices went up by another 200%. When 1979 was over, it emerged that world oil production had not fallen, but the prices stayed up anyway. The 1979 doubling had more dramatic economic effects than the 1973 quadrupling, since the world economy was much weaker by 1979.

CHENEY WANTS $100 A BARREL OIL

When we see a book like Paul Roberts' The End of Oil being hyped by Lou Dobbs on CNN, accompanied by a barrage of articles in the controlled corporate media on this same line, we can see that an Anglo-American consensus in favor of $100 per barrel oil is developing. The rationale is not hard to find, and has little to do with geological facts: the US dollar is once again in terminal crisis, and oil at $100 per barrel would create a new wave of artificial demand, making the dollar a little more attractive for oil producers and others, and perhaps staving off for a few more years the end of its reserve currency and posted price status. It is reported that the center of the agitation for $100 a barrel oil is, not surprisingly, the Vice Presidential office of Dick Cheney, managed by the ruthless neocon operative Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby.

As far as the substantive argument about oil reserves is concerned, it is clear that oil should be used less and less as a fuel, and employed rather for petrochemicals. It is also clear that the internal combustion engine is now a technology that is more than 100 years old, and is due to be replaced. However, it is also clear that a growing world population and, hopefully, increased levels of world economic development will require greater energy sources. Every fixed array of human technology in world history has always defined certain components of the biosphere as usable resources, with the inevitable corollary that these resources would one day be exhausted. Under such conditions, the great imperative of human evolution cannot be retrenchment and austerity, but rather innovation, invention, discovery, and progress. If existing energy sources are insufficient, then science will have to find new ones, without ideological preclusions. Solar energy gathered outside the ionosphere in earth orbit might be one future solution. The one thing we must not do is to leap from a rising oil price to coerced population reduction, since that represents the core program of the Malthusian Anglo-American oligarchy, and has been in place as a policy goal since Kissinger's infamous NSSM 200 [2] and the Global 2000/Global Futures campaigns of the Muskie State Department under the disastrous Carter administration.

The pervasive oil and raw material grabs of today's world suggest nothing more than world economic breakdown and imminent world war. In 1941, Japan's main war aim was to secure the oil of the Dutch East Indies. Hitler's panzer divisions in Operation Barbarossa were pointed towards Baku, which was Stalin's oil aorta. Stalin's own attack plan aimed at Ploesti in Romania, Germany's sole source of oil. Each of these plans sought to deny oil to an adversary and procure it for their authors as a means of winning a war. Much the same dynamic is afoot today, partially under the cover of "peak oil.""

-- "9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA," by Webster Griffin Tarpley