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					"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 |