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Albert Einstein:

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Posts tonen met het label kernenergie. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label kernenergie. Alle posts tonen

zaterdag 2 september 2023

Bilderbergconferenties, de petrodollar, de oliecrisis en 'de anti-kernenergie lobby uit onverdachte hoek'

(On the top right hand side of this page you can choose for a translation in the language of your choice in Google Translate)

 

William Engdahl heeft een boek gepubliceerd met de titel 'A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order' uit dit boek heeft hij een hoofdstuk genomen waarin hij onder andere beschrijft wie er verantwoordelijk was voor de Yom Kippoer oorlog (voorbereid door de VS en Groot-Brittannië), de daarna en daaraan gelinkte oliecrisis, het loslaten van de goudstandaard voor de dollar, het ontstaan van de petrodollar, andere smerige handelingen van Nixon en Kissinger, de macht van de Bilderbergconferenties, plus het verzet tegen kernenergie.


 

Wat betreft de laatste, dus verzet tegen kernenergie is het duidelijk dat Engdahl dat verzet onzin vindt. Het verzet tegen deze vorm van energie zou vooral ontstaan zijn bij de directies van een aantal oliemaatschappijen, die bovendien een flink aantal regeringen in hun zak hadden (en hebben) en zouden daardoor aan de wieg van de anti-kernenergielobby hebben gestaan. Uiteraard kan je je daar van alles bij voorstellen, immers met de vooruitzichten in de 50er en 60er jaren dat kernenergie een wondermiddel was voor elektriciteitsopwekking, zou daarmee tegelijkertijd een fiks deel van de winsten te niet worden gedaan, de enorme winsten die de oliemaffia maakte.

Echter daar valt nog wel het één en ander op aan te merken, zeker als je ziet dat de jeugd, de studenten en de arbeiders in de 60er en 70er jaren zich niet meer zo makkelijk als schapen lieten leiden door de oudere generaties en 'het wettig gezag'. Het verzet tegen de atoombom is daarna gelinkt aan het verzet tegen kernenergie. Bovendien zag men destijds dat ongelukken met kerncentrales zoals het eerste grote ongeluk in een kerncentrale, die in de centrale van Windscale (later vanwege dat ongeluk omgedoopt tot: Sellafield) onder het tapijt werden geschoven. Voorts zag men niet alleen dat kernenergie werd misbruikt om kernwapens van te maken, maar ook dat door de productie van kernenergie het gebruikte water voor koeling in open wateren werd geloosd, waarbij organisaties als Greenpeace bij de punten waar dit in zee of rivieren terechtkomt teveel radioactiviteit meten, voorts vonden en vinden er dan nog 'kleine ongelukjes' plaats waarbij de centrales radioactief stoom ventileren op de buitenlucht..... Niet vreemd dan ook dat in de omgeving van kerncentrales (niet zelden) een sterk verhoogd aantal kankers was en is te vinden onder omwonenden.....

Ook de grote hoeveelheden radioactiviteit, die grotere ongelukken in het milieu terechtkwamen, verontrustten velen en dat volkomen terecht..... Zie wat dat betreft ook de leugen dat de 1,3 miljoen ton radioactief besmet water, die men in het Japanse Fukushima in de oceaan wil lozen geen gevaar vormt voor mens en milieu (1,3 miljoen ton >> daarvoor moet je achter de 5 nullen van die 1,3 miljoen ton nog eens 3 nullen plakken, immers een ton is 1.000 liter of 1.000 kilo, ofwel het gaat hier om 1.300.000.000 liter radioactief besmet water, in spreektaal: 1,3 miljard liter......). Ik zal hier later nog een bericht over brengen, waarin door deskundigen duidelijk wordt gemaakt dat ook het water dat men daar wil lozen een gevaar vormt voor mens, zeeleven en de rest van het milieu.

Intussen heeft de kernenergie-industrie een machtige lobby gevormd, niet alleen van degenen die deze manier van energie opwekken zaligmakend vinden, maar bijvoorbeeld ook van bedrijven die bij de bouw worden betrokken, zo heeft de bouwmaffia er alle belang bij dat er bijvoorbeeld in Nederland nieuwe kerncentrales worden gebouwd..... Alleen al het feit dat verzekeringsmaatschappijen kerncentrales niet willen verzekeren zou voor een ieder het teken moeten zijn om te stoppen met deze frankensteinwetenschap..... Niet voor niets dat men het aantal ernstige ziekten na een ongeval met een kerncentrale voor het overgrote deel uit de media houdt >> niets mag de wil tot het bouwen van kerncentrales in de weg staan..... 

Het afbreken van kerncentrales is nog een heel stuk kostbaarder dan de bouw daarvan, vandaar ook dat men deze ondingen liever laat staan. Om de veiligheid van mensen te kunnen garanderen zou men veilige en bewaakte opslag van kernafval en de gebouwen van kerncentrales honderden zo niet duizenden jaren moeten kunnen garanderen en dat is totaal onmogelijk zoals je zal begrijpen, dus stop met de bouw van deze ondingen en het gebruik daarvan..... 

Dat men in Nederland weer kerncentrales wil bouwen geeft ten overvloede aan dat de politiek schijt heeft aan de gezondheid van de burgers, niet voor niets ook dat de kabinetten Rutte zo enorm hebben bezuinigd op de gezondheidszorg dan wel dat hebben toegestaan aan de misdadige zorgverzekeraars die al heel wat ziekenhuizen hebben laten sluiten, vanwege een gebrek aan winstmaken..... (waarbij men zegt dat het sluiten van ziekenhuizen efficiëntie in de hand zal werken.... ha! ha! ha! de oplichters!!) Hoe heeft men ooit durven opperen dat de gezondheidszorg winst moet opleveren, dat moeten wel speciale inhumane, neoliberale psychopathische ploerten zijn geweest!!

Bij de totaal onverantwoorde bezuinigingen op de gezondheidszorg is een fiks aantal partijen betrokken geweest van de PVV tot de PvdA en alles daartussen in. Wat niet wil zeggen dat de PvdA een links partij is, het is een neoliberale partij die zelfs in de oppositie voor meer dan 94% meestemt met de wetsvoorstellen en akkoord gaat met andere zaken van het zittende kabinet. Het zal me niet verbazen als PvdA/GroenLinks, mocht deze coalitie werkelijk een kabinet kunnen vormen na de volgende verkiezingen aanstaande november, niet zal tornen aan de bouw van de kerncentrales. Vergeet niet dat EU grofgraaier en PvdA leugenaar Timmermans jarenlang heeft samengewerkt met zijn partijcollega en oplichter Samsom, die nog vlak voor de ramp met de kerncentrale van Fukushima stelde dat hij achter kernenergieopwekking stond, om dat onmiddellijk in te trekken nadat die ramp een feit was.....

Wat mij vooral opviel in het hieronder weergegeven artikel van Engdahl is de rol van de Bilderbergconferenties, volgens aartsleugenaar Rutte, godbetert 'onze premier', zijn deze samenkomsten niets anders zijn dan praatclubjes, echter Engdahl bewijst wat mij betreft dat deze club van schoften grote invloed hebben in de westerse maatschappijen en dat men daar de 'politieke koers' uitzet voor de toekomstige jaren, zoals de wens om de wereldbevolking fiks uit te dunnen.... (al wisten velen van ons dat allang) Logisch ook, zoals ik al vaker aangaf op deze plek: als deze Bilderbergconferenties alleen maar praatclubjes vormen >> waarom mag er dan niet worden geopenbaard over wat er wordt besproken?? 

'Journalisten' die mogen deelnemen aan de Bilderbergconferenties moeten alvorens toegang te krijgen beloven dat ze er niets over zullen publiceren dan wel zeggen >> deze zogenaamde journalisten moeten zich de oren van de kop en de ogen uit diezelfde kop schamen.....

Ach ja, het overgrote deel van de journalisten die werken voor de reguliere westerse (massa-) media is intussen gecorrumpeerd en deze figuren hebben dan ook niets meer te maken met objectieve en onafhankelijke berichtgeving, wat zover gaat dat men vanuit die beroepsgroep de gelauwerde onderzoeksjournalist Julian Assange heeft gedemoniseerd en dat in veel gevallen nog doet..... Het demoniseren van NB hun collega Julian die gvd al meer dan 4,5 jaar in isolatiefolter zit voor het openbaren van de waarheid >> het publiceren van vreselijke oorlogsmisdaden begaan door het terreurleger van de VS...... Dezelfde VS die nu het Internationaal Strafhof (International Criminal Court >> ICC) onder druk zet om Putin en anderen in Rusland te vervolgen voor.... oorlogsmisdaden!!! Volgens zeggen zouden bovendien veel journalisten in de VS werken voor de CIA en de NSA.... (het is wel zeker dat dit ook in andere westerse landen een feit is)

Gezien de berichtgeving in de reguliere westerse media over de oorlog van de NAVO onder leiding van de VS tegen Rusland, een oorlog die in Oekraïne wordt uitgevochten, kan je niet anders dan de conclusie trekken dat die media in de zak zitten van de geheime diensten, de politieke lobbyisten van de VS en de NAVO (wat betreft Nederland zijn dat de figuren uit de regering en ons parlement), de wapenfabrikanten en de rechtse denktanks, zoals die in Nederland >> HCSS en Clingendael, als ik me niet vergis beiden gefinancierd met ons belastinggeld..... (HCSS >> Den Haag Centrum voor Strategische Studies [ha! ha! de naam is al een leugen], in het Engels >> The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies)

Overigens hebben diezelfde media al vanaf de eerste oorlog van de VS tegen Irak laten zien dat ze niets meer met onafhankelijke journalistiek te maken hebben, vandaar ook dat ze al jaren hebben geschreeuwd om censuur op de sociale media, daar men op die plek nog wel onafhankelijke journalistiek kan vinden...... Dezelfde media waar men de reguliere media de les leest over hun afhankelijke berichtgeving, zo zijn deze media ofwel staatsmedia, dan wel media die worden bekostigd door grote reclamemakers als Albert Heijn en waarbij het overgrote deel van de niet-staatsmedia in het bezit zijn van plutocraten die bijvoorbeeld belang hebben bij oorlog vanwege hun aandelenportefeuilles in de wapenindustrie, of wat dat je van aandelenportefeuilles in de farmaceutische maffia >> zie wat dat betreft de volkomen eenzijdige berichtgeving in die media ten tijde van de Coronacrisis (overigens men blijft in die media hameren op de veiligheid van vaccins en over de doeltreffendheid van de PCR-test en de flutthuistesten, terwijl zowel de vaccins als de testen (en de mondmaskers) al op zoveel manieren onderuit zijn gehaald, maar ja de winsten voor die plutocraten over de aandelen farmacie waren dan ook overweldigend......)

Lees het artikel van Engdahl en als over mijn schrijven: vorm je eigen mening!!


(als je het Engels niet machtig bent, zet dan de tekst om in Nederlands met behulp van Google translate dat je rechts bovenaan deze pagina ziet staan, eerst door in het menu op Engels te klikken, waarna je weer kan klikken op die vertaalapp, waarna je dan bovenaan in het menu Nederlands ziet staan, klik daarop en de hele tekst staat in het Nederlands, de vertaling is van een redelijk goede kwaliteit.)

Saudi Arabia and the Hidden Petrodollar Origins

F. William Engdahl info@williamengdahl.com via aweber.com

 

Hello Dear Readers,

 

Recently the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, along with UAE, joined BRICS, a group of nations increasingly at odds with a heavy-handed US foreign policy. The true significance of the move cannot be appreciated without knowing the actual background of how in the early 1970’s Washington coerced Saudi Arabia and OPEC to sell their oil to the world for dollars and dollars only. That is now beginning to change and the consequences are huge for the world geopolitical and economic configuration. 

 

The following selection from my international bestselling book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,  goes into the largely hidden history of the 1973 oil shock and the behind-the-scenes actions of Washington and Wall Street to secure the dollar with world trade in oil. From 1971 to 1975 Washington went from a gold-backed dollar system to essentially a petroleum-backed dollar, the so-called petrodollar. It was all done via control of Saudi Arabia and OPEC oil sales in dollars only. It was ingenious, and enormously destructive to world economic development. 


 

If you haven’t yet done so, please also consider support for my online voice. The relentless censorship of the Internet and social media by the private corporate social media companies since the 2020 covid fake pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, is alarming and damaging and can only be compared with book burnings in the Germany of the 1930s, or the Medieval Inquisitions with torture of heretics.

 

I thank you again for your interest and support,

 

William Engdahl
www.williamengdahl.com

 

 

 

Reader Reviews of A Century of War:

 

★★★★★  "Shocking - read this to learn how the world really operates” - Utah Blaine

★★★★★  “This book will change the way you view the world”  - Guy Denutte

★★★★★  " MUST READ” -       g-the-amateur

★★★★★  “Full spectrum research !“ - Rev4u

★★★★★  “Read this book!“ - Charles Guiliani

★★★★★  “A must read for long term investors“ - Ahmed M. Alrayes

★★★★★  “A treasure house of Geo-Political information.“ - R. King

 

 

© F. William Engdahl    CHAPTER NINE:

 

Running the world economy in reverse: Who made the 1970's oil shocks? 

 

Nixon pulls the plug

By the end of President Richard Nixon's first year in office, 1969, the U.S. economy had again gone into recession. In order to combat the downturn, U.S. interest rates by 1970 were sharply lowered. As a consequence of the falling interest rates, speculative ‘hot money’ began once more to leave the dollar in record amounts, seeking higher short-term profit in Europe and elsewhere.

 

One result of by now almost decade-long American refusal to devalue the dollar, and her reluctance to take serious action to control the huge unregulated Eurodollar market, was an increasingly unstable short-term currency speculation. As most of the world's bankers well knew, King Canute could pretend to hold the waves back for only so long. 

 

As a result of Nixon's expansionary domestic U.S. monetary policy in 1970, the capital inflows of the previous year reversed, and the U.S. incurred a net capital outflow of $6.5 billions. But, as U.S. recession persisted, as interest rates continued to drop into 1971, and money supply to expand, these outflows reached then-huge dimensions, totaling $20 billions. Then, in May of 1971, the United States recorded its first monthly trade deficit as well, triggering a virtual international panic sell-off of the U.S. dollar. The situation was indeed becoming desperate. 

 

By 1971 U.S. official gold reserves represented less than one quarter of her official liabilities, meaning that theoretically if all foreign dollar holders demanded gold instead, Washington would have been unable to comply without drastic measures. 1

 

The Wall Street establishment had persuaded President Nixon to abandon fruitless efforts to hold the dollar against a flood of international demand to redeem for gold. But, unfortunately, they did not want the required dollar devaluation against gold which had been intensely sought for almost a decade. 

 

On August 15, 1971 Nixon took the advice of a close circle of key advisers which included his chief Budget adviser, George Shultz, and a policy group then at the Treasury Department including Paul Volcker, and Jack F. Bennett, who later went on to become a director of Exxon. That sunny quiet August day, in a move which rocked the world, the President of the United States announced formal suspension of dollar convertibility into gold, effectively putting the world fully onto a dollar standard with no gold backing, and by this, unilaterally ripping apart the central provision of the 1944 Bretton Woods system. No longer could foreign holders of U.S. dollars redeem their paper for U.S. gold reserves.

 

Nixon's unilateral action was reaffirmed in protracted international talks that December in Washington, between the leading European governments, Japan and a few others, which resulted in a bad compromise known as the Smithsonian Agreement. With an exaggeration which exceeded even that of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon announced after the Smithsonian talks, that they were, ‘the conclusion of the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world.’ The U.S. had formally devalued the dollar a mere 8 percent against gold, placing gold at $38/fine ounce instead of the long-standing $35, hardly the 100 percent devaluation being asked by allied countries. The agreement also officially permitted a band of currency value fluctuation of 2.25 percent instead of the original 1 percent of the IMF Bretton Woods rules. 

 

By declaring to world dollar holders their paper would no longer be redeemed for gold, Nixon ‘pulled the plug’ on the world economy, setting into motion a series of events which was to rock the world as never before. Within weeks, confidence in the Smithsonian agreement had begun to collapse. 

 

De Gaulle's defiance of Washington in April 1968 on the issue of gold and adhering to the rules of Bretton Woods, had not been sufficient to force through the badly needed reordering of the international monetary system, but it had sufficiently poisoned the well of Washington's ill-conceived IMF Special Drawing Rights scheme to cover over the problems of the dollar. 

 

The suspension of gold redemption and the resulting international ‘floating exchange rates’ of the early 1970's solved nothing. It only bought some time.

 

An eminently workable solution would have been for the U.S. to set the dollar to a more realistic level. From France, de Gaulle's former economic adviser, Jacques Rueff, continued to plead for a $70/oz. gold price, instead of the $35 level the U.S. unsuccessfully defended. This would calm world speculation and allow the U.S. to redeem her destabilizing Eurodollars balances abroad, without plunging the domestic U.S. economy into any severe chaos, Rueff argued. If done right, it could have given a tremendous spur to U.S. industry as its exports would cost less in foreign currency. American industrial interests would again have predominated over financial voices in U.S. policy circles. But reason was not to prevail. 

 

The Wall Street rationale was that the power of their financial domain must be untouched, even if at expense of economic production or American national prosperity.

 

Gold itself has little intrinsic value. It has certain industrial uses. But historically, because of its scarcity, it has served as a standard of value against which different nations have fixed the terms of their trade and therefore their currencies. When Nixon decided no longer to honor U.S. currency obligations in gold, he opened the floodgates to a worldwide Las Vegas speculation binge of a dimension never before experienced in history. Instead of calibrating long-term economic affairs to fixed standards of exchange, after August 1971 world trade was simply another arena of speculation on which direction various currencies would fluctuate.

 

The real architects of the Nixon strategy were in the influential City of London merchant banks. Sir Siegmund Warburg, Edmond de Rothschild, Jocelyn Hambro and others, saw a golden opportunity in Nixon's dissolution of the Bretton Woods gold standard the summer of 1971. London was once again to become a major center of world finance, and again on ‘borrowed money,’ this time with American Eurodollars.

 

After August 1971, dominant U.S. policy, under White House National Security Adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, was to control, not to develop, economies throughout the world. U.S. policy officials began proudly calling themselves ‘neo-Malthusians.’ Population reduction in developing nations, rather than technology transfer and industrial growth strategies, began to be the dominating priority during the 1970s, yet another throwback to nineteenth-century British colonial thinking. How this transformation took place we shall soon see.

 

The ineffective basis of the Smithsonian Agreement led to further deterioration into 1972, as massive capital flows again left the dollar for Japan and Europe, until February 12, 1973 when Nixon finally announced a second devaluation of the dollar, of 10 percent against gold, pricing gold where it remains to this day for the Federal Reserve, at $42.22/ounce. 

 

At this point all the major world currencies began a process of what was called the ‘managed float.’ Between February and March of 1973, the value of the U.S. dollar against the German Deutschmark dropped another 40 percent. Permanent instability had been introduced into world monetary affairs in a way not seen since the early 1930's. But this time strategists in New York, Washington and the City of London were preparing an unexpected surprise to regain the upper hand and recover from the devastating loss of the monetary pillar of their system. 

 

An unusual meeting in Saltsjoebaden

The design behind Nixon's August 15, 1971 dollar strategy did not emerge until October 1973, more than two years later, and even then, few persons outside a handful of insiders grasped the connection. The August 1971 de-monetization of the dollar was used by the London-New York financial establishment to buy precious time, while policy insiders prepared a bold new monetarist design, a ‘paradigm shift’ as some preferred to term it. Certain influential voices in the Anglo-American financial establishment had devised a strategy to create again a strong dollar, and once again to increase their relative political power in the world, just when it appeared they were in decisive rout. 

 

In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the dollar still vivid, a group of 84 of the world's top financial and political insiders met at the secluded island resort of the Swedish Wallenberg banking family, at Saltsjoebaden, Sweden. This gathering of Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg Group, heard an American participant outline a ‘scenario’ for an imminent 400 percent increase in OPEC petroleum revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjoebaden meeting was not to prevent the expected oil price shock, but rather, plan how to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petro-dollar flows.’

 

The American speaker to the Bilderberg on “Atlantic-Japanese Energy Policy” was clear enough. After stating the prospect that future world oil needs would be supplied by a small number of Middle East producing countries, the speaker declared, prophetically: ‘The cost of these oil imports would rise tremendously, with difficult implications for the balance of payments of consuming countries. Serious problems would be caused by unprecedented foreign exchange accumulations of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.’ The speaker added, ‘A complete change was underway in the political, strategic and power relationships between the oil producing, importing and home countries of international oil companies and national oil companies of producing and importing countries.’ He then projected an OPEC Middle East oil revenue rise, which would translate into just over 400 percent, the same level Kissinger was soon to demand of the Shah.

 

Present at Saltsjoebaden that May were Robert O. Anderson of Atlantic Richfield Oil Co.; Lord Greenhill, chairman of British Petroleum; Sir Eric Roll of S.G. Warburg, creator of Eurobonds; George Ball of Lehman Brothers investment bank, and the man who some ten years earlier as Assistant Secretary of State, told his banker friend Siegmund Warburg to develop London's Eurodollar market; David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank; Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man soon to be President Carter's National Security Adviser; Italy's Gianni Agnelli and Germany's Otto Wolff von Amerongen among others. Henry Kissinger had been a regular participant at the Bilderberg gatherings. 2

 

The Bilderberg annual meetings were first begun, in utmost secrecy, in May, 1954 by an anglophile group which included George Ball, David Rockefeller, Dr. Joseph Retinger, Holland's Prince Bernhard, George C. McGhee (then of the U.S. State Department and later a senior executive of Mobil Oil). Named for the place of their first gathering, the Hotel de Bilderberg near Arnheim, the annual Bilderberg meetings gathered top elites of Europe and America for secret deliberations and policy discussion. Consensus was then ‘shaped’ in subsequent press comments and media coverage, but never with reference to the secret Bilderberg talks themselves. This Bilderberg process has been one of the most effective vehicles of postwar Anglo-American policy-shaping.

 

What the powerful men grouped around Bilderberg had evidently decided that May, was to launch a colossal assault against industrial growth in the world, in order to tilt the balance of power back to the advantage of Anglo-American financial interests, and the dollar. In order to do this, they determined to use their most prized weapon--control of the world's oil flows. Bilderberg policy was to trigger a global oil embargo, in order to force a dramatic increase in world oil prices. Since 1945, world oil trade had by international custom been priced in dollars as American oil companies dominated the postwar market. A sharp sudden increase in the world price of oil, therefore, meant an equally dramatic increase in world demand for U.S. dollars to pay for that necessary oil.

 

Never in history had such a small circle of interests, centered in London and New York, controlled so much of the entire world's economic destiny. The Anglo-American financial establishment had resolved to use their oil power in a manner no one could imagine possible. The very outrageousness of their scheme was to their advantage, they clearly reckoned. 

 

Kissinger's Yom Kippur oil shock

On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, igniting what became known as the ‘Yom Kippur’ war. Contrary to popular impression, the ‘Yom Kippur’ war was not the simple result of miscalculation, blunder or an Arab decision to launch a military strike against the state of Israel. The entire events surrounding outbreak of the October war were secretly orchestrated by Washington and London, using the powerful diplomatic secret channels developed by Nixon's White House National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger.

 

Kissinger effectively controlled the Israeli policy response through his intimate relation with Israel's Washington ambassador, Simcha Dinitz. As well, Kissinger cultivated channels to the Egyptian and Syrian side. His method was simply to misrepresent to each party the critical elements of the other, ensuring the war and its subsequent Arab oil embargo. 

 

U.S. intelligence reports including intercepted communications from Arab officials confirming the buildup for war, were firmly suppressed by Kissinger, who was by then Nixon's intelligence ‘czar.’ The war and its aftermath, Kissinger's infamous ‘shuttle diplomacy,’ were scripted in Washington, along the precise lines of the Bilderberg deliberations of the previous May in Saltsjoebaden, some six months before outbreak of the war. Arab oil-producing nations were to be the scapegoat for the coming rage of the world, while the Anglo-American interests responsible, stood quietly in the background. 3

 

In mid-October 1973 the German Government of Chancellor Willy Brandt told the U.S. Ambassador to Bonn that Germany was neutral in the Middle East conflict, and would not permit the U.S. to resupply Israel from German military bases. With an ominous foreboding of similar exchanges which would occur some 17 years later, on October 30, 1973 Nixon sent Chancellor Brandt a sharply worded protest note, most probably drafted by Kissinger:

 

     ‘We recognize that the Europeans are more dependent upon Arab oil than we, but we disagree that your vulnerability is decreased by disassociating yourselves from us on a matter of this importance...You note that this crisis was not a case of common responsibility for the Alliance, and that military supplies for Israel were for purposes which are not part of alliance responsibility. I do not believe we can draw such a fine line...’ 4

 

Washington would not permit Germany to declare its neutrality in the Mideast conflict. But, significantly, Britain was allowed to clearly state its neutrality, thus avoiding the impact of the Arab oil embargo. Once again London had maneuvered itself skillfully around an international crisis it had been instrumental in precipitating. 

 

One enormous consequence of the ensuing 400 percent rise in OPEC oil prices was that investments of hundreds of millions of dollars by British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and other Anglo-American petroleum concerns in the risky North Sea could produce oil at a profit. It is a curious fact of the time that the profitability of these new North Sea oil fields was not at all secure until after Kissinger's oil shock. Of course, this could have only been a fortuitous coincidence. Or was it?

 

By October 16, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, following a meeting on oil price in Vienna, had raised their price by a then-staggering 70 percent, from $3.01/barrel to $5.11. That same day, the members of the Arab OPEC countries, citing the U.S. support for Israel in the Mideast war, declared an embargo on all oil sales to the United States and Netherlands--the major oil port of Western Europe. 

 

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Algeria announced on October 17, 1973 that they would cut their production below the September level by 5 percent for October and an additional 5 percent per month, ‘until Israeli withdrawal is completed from the whole Arab territories occupied in June 1967 and the legal rights of the Palestinian people are restored.’ The world's first ‘oil shock,’ or as the Japanese termed it, ‘Oil Shokku’ was underway. 

 

Significantly, the oil crisis hit full force just as the President of the United States was becoming personally embroiled in what came to be called the ‘Watergate affair,’ leaving Henry Kissinger as de facto President, running U.S. policy during the crisis in late 1973. 

 

When the Nixon White House sent a senior official to the U.S. Treasury in 1974 order to devise a strategy to force OPEC into lowering the oil price, he was bluntly turned away. In a memo the official stated, ‘It was the banking leaders who swept aside this advice and pressed for a ‘recycling’ program to accommodate to higher oil prices. This was the fatal decision...’ 

 

The U.S. Treasury, under Secretary Jack Bennett, the man who helped steer Nixon's fateful August 1971 dollar policy, had established a secret accord with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, SAMA, an agreement finalized in a February 1975 memo from U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary Jack F. Bennett to Secretary of State Kissinger. Under the terms of the agreement, the huge new Saudi oil revenue windfall was to be invested in significant sums into financing the U.S. government deficits. A young Wall Street investment banker with the leading Eurobond firm of White Weld & Co. based in London, by the name of David Mulford, was sent to Saudi Arabia to become the principal ‘investment adviser’ to SAMA, to guide the Saudi petrodollar investments to the correct banks, naturally in London and New York. The Bilderberg scheme was operating fully as planned. 5

 

Kissinger, already firmly in control of all U.S. intelligence estimates as Nixon's all-powerful National Security Adviser, secured control of U.S. foreign policy as well, persuading Nixon to name him Secretary of State in the weeks just prior to outbreak of the October Yom Kippur war. Kissinger, symptomatic of his central role in events, retained both titles as head of the White House National Security Council and as Secretary of State, something no individual had done before or after him. No other single person during the last months of the Nixon presidency wielded as much absolute power as did Henry Kissinger. To add insult to injury, Kissinger was given the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. 

 

Following a meeting in Teheran on January 1, 1974, yet a second price increase of more than 100 percent more was added, bringing OPEC benchmark oil prices to $11.65. This was done on the surprising demand by the Shah of Iran, who had been secretly told to do so by Henry Kissinger. 

 

The Shah had only months earlier opposed the OPEC increase to $3.01 for fear this would force Western exporters to charge more for the industrial equipment the Shah sought to import for Iran's ambitious industrialization. Washington and Western support for Israel in the October war had fed OPEC anger at the meetings. And Kissinger's own State Department had not even been informed of Kissinger's secret machinations with the Shah. 6

 

From 1949 until the end of 1970, Middle East crude oil prices had averaged approximately $1.90/barrel. They had risen to $3.01 in early 1973, the time of the fateful Saltsjoebaden meeting of the Bilderberg group which discussed an imminent 400 percent future rise in OPEC's price. By January 1974 that 400 percent increase was fait accompli. 

 

The economic impact of the oil shock

The social impact of the oil embargo on the United States in late 1973 could be described as panic. All throughout 1972 and early 1973, the large multinational oil companies, led by Exxon, had pursued a curious policy of creating short domestic supply of crude oil, allowed to do so under a series of odd decisions made by President Nixon on advice of his aides. When the embargo then hit in November 1973, therefore, the impact could not have been more dramatic. At the time, the White House was responsible for control of U.S. oil imports under provisions of a 1959 U.S. Trade Agreements Act. 

 

In January 1973, Nixon had appointed then-Treasury Secretary George Shultz to be the Assistant to the President for Economic Affairs as well. Shultz oversaw White House oil import policy in this post. His Deputy Treasury Secretary, William E. Simon, a former Wall Street bond trader, was made chairman of the important Oil Policy Committee which determined U.S. oil import supply in the critical months leading up to the October embargo.

 

In February 1973, Nixon was persuaded to set up a special ‘energy triumvirate’ which included Shultz, White House aide John Ehrlichman, and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, to be known as the White House Special Energy Committee. The scene was quietly being set for the Bilderberg plan, though almost no one in Washington or elsewhere realized the fact. Domestic U.S. stocks of crude oil by October 1973, were already at alarmingly low levels. The OPEC embargo triggered a gasoline buying panic among the public, calls for rationing, endless gas lines and a sharp economic recession. 7

 

The most severe impact of the oil crisis hit the United States' largest city, New York. In December 1974, nine of the world's most powerful bankers, led by David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and the London-New York investment bank, Lazard Freres, told the Mayor of New York, an old-line machine politician named Abraham Beame, that unless he turned over control of the city's huge pension funds to a committee of the banks, called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the banks and their influential friends in the media would ensure financial ruin to the city. Not surprisingly, the overpowered Mayor capitulated, New York City was forced to slash spending for roadways, bridges, hospitals and schools in order to service their bank debt, and to lay off tens of thousands of city workers. The nation's greatest city was turned into a scrap heap beginning then. Felix Rohatyn, of Lazard Freres, became head of the new bankers' collection agency, dubbed by the press as ‘Big MAC.’

 

In Western Europe the shock of the oil price rise and the embargo on supplies was equally dramatic. From Britain to the Continent, country after country felt the effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930's. Bankruptcies and unemployment rose to alarming levels across Europe. 

 

Germany's government imposed an emergency ban on Sunday driving, in a desperate effort to save imported oil costs. By June 1974 the oil crisis effects had contributed to the dramatic collapse of Germany's Herstatt-Bank and a crisis in the D-mark as a result. As Germany's imported oil costs increased by a staggering 17 billion D-marks in 1974, with half a million people reckoned to be unemployed because of the oil shock and its effects, inflation levels reached an alarming 8 percent. The shock effects of a sudden 400 percent increase in the price of Germany's basic energy feedstock were devastating to industry, transport, and agriculture. Keystone industries such as steel, shipbuilding, and chemicals all went into a deep crisis at this time as a result of the oil shock. 

 

Willy Brandt's government was effectively defeated by the domestic impact of the oil crisis, as much as by the Stasi affair revelations against his close adviser, Guenther Guillaume. By May 1974 Brandt had offered his resignation to Bundespresident Heinemann, who then appointed Helmut Schmidt Chancellor. Most governments across Europe fell in this period, victim to the consequences of the oil shock on their economies. 

 

But the economic impact on the developing economies of the world--for at this time they still could be rightly called developing, rather than the fatalistic Third World designation so in vogue today--the impact of an overnight price increase of 400 percent in their primary energy source was staggering. The vast majority of the world's less-developed economies, without significant domestic oil resources, were suddenly confronted with an unexpected and unpayable 400 percent increase in costs of energy imports, to say nothing of costs chemicals and fertilizers for agriculture derived from petroleum. During this time, commentators began speaking of ‘triage,’ the wartime idea of survival of the fittest, and introduced the vocabulary of ‘Third World’ and ‘Fourth World’ (the non-OPEC countries). 

 

India in 1973 had a positive balance of trade, a healthy situation for a developing economy. By 1974, India had total foreign exchange reserves of $629 millions with which to pay--in dollars--an annual oil import bill of almost double that or $1,241 million. Sudan, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand and throughout Africa and Latin America country after country was faced in 1974 with gaping deficits in their balance of payments. As a whole, developing countries in 1974 incurred a total trade deficit of $35 billions according to the IMF, a colossal sum in that day, and, not surprisingly, a deficit precisely 4 times as large as in 1973, or just in proportion to the oil price increase. 

 

Following the several years of strong industrial and trade growth of the early 1970's, the severe drop in industrial activity throughout the world economy in 1974-75 was greater than any such decline since the war. 

 

But while Kissinger's 1973 oil shock had a devastating impact on world industrial growth, it had an enormous benefit for certain established interests--the major New York and London banks, and the Seven Sister oil multinationals of the U.S. and Britain. Exxon replaced General Motors as the largest American corporation in gross revenues by 1974. Her sisters were not far behind, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and Gulf. 

 

The bulk of OPEC dollar revenues, Kissinger's ‘recycled petrodollars,’ was deposited with the leading banks of London and New York, the banks which dealt in dollars as well as international oil trade. Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank, all enjoyed the windfall profits of the oil shock. We shall later see how they recycled their ‘petro-dollars’ during the 1970's, and how it set the stage for the great debt crisis of the 1980's. 8

 

Taking the bloom off the 'nuclear rose'

One principal concern of the authors of the 400 percent oil price increase, was how to ensure their drastic action did not drive the world to accelerate an already strong trend towards construction of a far more efficient and ultimately less expensive alternative energy source--nuclear electricity generation.

 

Kissinger's former dean at Harvard and his boss when Kissinger briefly served as a consultant to John Kennedy's National Security Council was McGeorge Bundy. Bundy left the White House in 1966 in order to play a critical role in shaping the domestic policy of the United States as president of the largest private foundation, the Ford Foundation. By December 1971 Bundy had established a major new project for the foundation, the Energy Policy Project under direction of S. David Freeman, with an impressive $4 million checkbook, and a three year time limit. Precisely in the midst of debate during the 1974 oil shock, Bundy's Ford study, titled, ‘A Time to Choose: America's Energy Future,’ was released, in order to shape the public debate in the critical time of the oil crisis. 

 

For the first time in American establishment circles the fraudulent thesis was proclaimed that, ‘Energy growth and economic growth can be uncoupled; they are not Siamese twins.’ Freeman's study advocated bizarre and demonstrably inefficient ‘alternative’ energy sources such as windpower, solar reflectors and burning recycled waste. The Ford report made a strong attack on nuclear energy, arguing that the technologies involved could theoretically be used to make nuclear bombs. ‘The fuel itself or one of the byproducts, plutonium, can be used directly or processed into the material for nuclear bombs or explosive devices,’ they asserted. 

 

The Ford study correctly noted that the principal competitor to the hegemony of petroleum in the future was nuclear energy, warning against the ‘very rapidity with which nuclear power is spreading in all parts of the world and by development of new nuclear technologies, most notably the fast breeder reactors and the centrifuge method of enriching uranium.’ The framework of the U.S. financial establishment's anti-nuclear ‘green’ assault had been defined by Bundy's project. 9

 

By the early 1970's nuclear technology had clearly established itself as the preferred future choice for efficient electric generation, vastly more efficient (and environmentally friendly) than either oil or coal. At the time of the oil shock, the European Community was already well into a major nuclear development program. Plans of member governments as of 1975 called for completion of between 160 and 200 new nuclear plants across Continental Europe by 1985. 

 

In 1975, the Schmidt government in Germany, reacting rationally to the implications of the 1974 oil shock, passed a program which called for an added 42 GigaWatts of German nuclear plant capacity, for a total of approximately 45 percent of German total electricity demand by 1985, a program exceeded in the EC only by France's, which projected 45 GigaWatts new nuclear capacity by 1985. Italy's Industry Minister Carlo Donat Cattin in the fall of 1975, instructed Italy's nuclear companies, ENEL and CNEN to draw up plans for construction of some 20 nuclear plants for completion by the early 1980's. Even Spain, just then emerging from four decades of Franco rule, had a program calling for construction of 20 nuclear plants by 1983. A typical 1 GigaWatt nuclear facility is generally sufficient to supply all electricity requirements for a modern industrial city of one million people. 

 

The rapidly growing nuclear industries of Europe, especially France and Germany, were beginning for the first time to emerge as competent rivals to American domination of the nuclear export market by the time of the 1974 oil shock. France had secured a Letter of Intent from the Shah of Iran, as had Germany's KWU, to build a total of four nuclear reactors in Iran, while France had signed with Pakistan's Bhutto government to create a modern nuclear infrastructure in that country. Negotiations also reached a successful conclusion in February 1976, between the German government and Brazil, for cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy which included German construction of eight nuclear reactors as well as facilities for reprocessing and enrichment of Uranium reactor fuel. German and French nuclear companies, with full support of their governments, entered in this period into negotiations with select developing sector countries, fully in the spirit of Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace declaration. 

 

Clearly, the Anglo-American energy grip, based on their tight control of the world's major energy source, petroleum, was threatened if these quite feasible programs went ahead. 

 

Nuclear energy represented in the postwar period precisely the same quality of higher technological level, which oil had been over coal when Lord Fisher and Winston Churchill argued at the end of the last century for Britain's navy to convert to oil from coal. The major difference was that Britain and her cousins in the United States in the 1970's, held the grip on world oil supplies. World nuclear technology threatened to open unbounded energy possibilities, especially if plans for commercial nuclear fast breeders were realized, as well as thermonuclear fusion. 

 

In the immediate wake of the 1974 oil shock, two industry organizations were established, both based significantly enough in London. In early 1975 an informal semi-secret group was established, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, or 'London Club' as it was known. The group included Britain, the US, Canada together with France, Germany, Japan and the USSR. It was an initial Anglo-American effort to secure self-restraint on nuclear export. It was complemented in May 1975 by formation of another secretive organization which grouped the world's major suppliers of nuclear uranium fuel, the London 'Uranium Institute,' dominated by traditional British regions including Canada, Australia, South Africa and the UK. These ‘inside’ organizations were necessary but by no means sufficient for the Anglo-American interests to contain the nuclear ‘threat’ in the early 1970's. 

 

As one prominent anti-nuclear American from the Aspen Institute put their problem, ‘We must take the bloom off the 'nuclear rose.'‘ And take it off they did. 

 

Developing the Anglo-American green agenda

It was not exactly accidental that a growing part of the population in Western Europe, especially in Germany, following the oil shock recession of 1974-5, began talking for the first time in the postwar period about ‘limits to growth,’ or threats to the environment, and began to question their faith in the principle of industrial growth and technological progress. Very few people realized the extent to which their new ‘opinions’ were being carefully manipulated from the top by a network established by the same Anglo-American finance and industry circles behind the Saltsjoebaden oil shock strategy. 

 

Beginning the 1970's an awesome propaganda offensive was launched from select Anglo-American think-tanks and journals, intended to shape a new ‘limits to growth’ agenda, which would insure the ‘success’ of the dramatic oil shock strategy. The American oilman present at the May 1973 Saltsjoebaden meeting of the Bilderberg group, Robert O. Anderson, was a central figure in the implementation of the ensuing Anglo-American ecology agenda. It was to become one of the most successful frauds in history. 

 

Anderson and his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. funneled millions of dollars through their Atlantic Richfield Foundation into select organizations to target nuclear energy. One of the prime beneficiaries of Anderson's largesse was a group called Friends of the Earth, which was organized in this time with a $200,000 grant from Anderson. One of the earliest targets of Anderson's Friends of the Earth was to finance an assault on the German nuclear industry, through such anti-nuclear actions as the anti-Brockdorf demonstrations in 1976, led by Friends of the Earth leader Holger Strohm. Friends of the Earth French director was the Paris partner of the Rockefeller family law firm, Coudert Brothers, one Brice LaLonde, who in 1989 became Mitterrand's Environment Minister. It was Friends of the Earth which was used to block a major Japan-Australia uranium supply agreement. In November 1974 Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka came to Canberra to meet Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The two made a commitment potentially worth billions of dollars, for Australia to supply Japan's needs for future uranium ore and enter a joint project to develop uranium enrichment technology. British uranium mining giant, Rio Tinto Zinc, secretly deployed Friends of the Earth in Australia to mobilize opposition to the pending Japanese agreement, resulting some months later in the fall of Whitlam's government. Friends of the Earth had ‘friends’ in very high places in London and Washington. 

 

But Robert O. Anderson's major vehicle to spread the new ‘limits to growth’ ideology among American and European establishment circles, was his Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. With Anderson as Chairman, and Atlantic Richfield head Thornton Bradshaw as vice-chairman, the Aspen Institute was a major financial conduit in the early 1970's for creation of the establishment's new anti-nuclear agenda. 

 

Among the better-known trustees of Aspen at this time were World Bank President and the man who ran the Vietnam war, Robert S. McNamara. Lord Bullock of Oxford University and Richard Gardner, an anglophile American economist who later was U.S. Ambassador to Italy, and Wall Street banker, Russell Peterson of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb Inc., were among the carefully selected trustees of Aspen at this time, as were EXXON board member Jack G. Clarke, Gulf Oil's Jerry McAfee, Mobil Oil director George C. McGhee, the former State Department official who was present in 1954 at the founding meeting of the Bilderberg group. Involved with Anderson's Aspen as well from this early period, was Hamburg's Die Zeit publisher Marion Countess Doenhoff, as well as former Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and High Commissioner to Germany, John J. McCloy. 

 

Robert O. Anderson brought in Joseph Slater from McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation to serve as Aspen's president. It was indeed a close-knit family in the Anglo-American establishment of the early 1970's. The initial project Slater launched at Aspen was the preparation of an international organizational offensive against industrial growth and especially nuclear energy, using the auspices (and the money) of the United Nations. Slater secured support of Sweden's UN Ambassador Sverker Aastrom, who steered through the UN a proposal, over strenuous objections from developing countries, for an international conference on the environment. 

 

From the outset, the June 1972 Stockholm United Nations' Conference on the Environment was run by operatives of Anderson's Aspen Institute. Aspen board member, Maurice Strong, a Canadian oilman from Petro-Canada, chaired the Stockholm conference. Aspen as well provided financing to create under UN auspices, an international zero-growth network called the International Institute for Environment and Development, whose board included Robert O. Anderson, Robert McNamara, Strong and British Labour Party's Roy Jenkins. The new organization immediately produced a book, ‘Only One Earth,’ by Rockefeller University associate Rene Dubos and British malthusian Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson). The International Chambers of Commerce were persuaded at this time as well to sponsor Maurice Strong and other Aspen figures in seminars targeting international businessmen on the emerging new environmentalist ideology.

 

The Stockholm 1972 conference created the necessary international organizational and publicity infrastructure such that by the time of the Kissinger oil shock of 1973-4, a massive anti-nuclear propaganda offensive could be launched, with the added assistance of millions of dollars readily available from oil-linked channels of the Atlantic Richfield Company, the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund and other such elite Anglo-American establishment circles. Among the groups which were funded by these people in this time were organizations including the ultra-elitist World Wildlife Fund whose chairman was the Bilderberg's Prince Bernhard, and later Royal Dutch Shell's John Loudon. (10). 

 

Indicative of this financial establishment's overwhelming influence in the American and British media, is the fact that during this period, no public outcry was launched to investigate the probable conflict of interest involved in Robert O. Anderson's well-financed anti-nuclear offensive, and the fact that his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. was one of the major beneficiaries from the 1974 price increase of oil. Anderson's ARCO had invested tens millions of dollars into high-risk oil infrastructure in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay and Britain's North Sea, together with Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell and the other Seven Sisters.

 

Had the 1974 oil shock not raised the market price of oil to $11.65/barrel or thereabouts, Anderson's, as well as British Petroleum and Exxon and the others' investments in the North Sea and Alaska would have brought financial ruin. To ensure a friendly press voice in Britain, Anderson at this time purchased ownership of the London Observer. Virtually no one asked if Anderson and his influential friends might have known in advance that Kissinger would create the conditions for a 400 percent oil price rise. 11

 

Not to leave any zero growth stone unturned, Robert O. Anderson also contributed significant funds to a project initiated by the Rockefeller family at the Rockefeller's estate at Bellagio, Italy with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. This Club of Rome, and the U.S. Association of the Club of Rome, in 1972 gave widespread publicity to their publication of a scientifically fraudulent computer simulation prepared by Dennis Meadows and Jay Forrester, titled, ‘Limits to Growth.’ Adding modern computer graphics to the discredited essay of Malthus, Meadows and Forrester insisted that the world would soon perish for lack of adequate energy, food and other resources. As did Malthus, they chose to ignore the impact of technological progress on improving the human condition. Their message was one of unmitigated gloom and cultural pessimism. 

 

One of the most targeted countries for this new Anglo-American anti-nuclear offensive in this time was Germany. While France's nuclear program was equally if not more ambitious, Germany was deemed an area where Anglo-American intelligence assets had greater likelihood of success given their history in the postwar occupation of the Federal Republic. Almost as soon as the ink had dried on the Schmidt government's 1975 nuclear development program, an offensive was launched. 

 

A key operative in this new project was to be was a young woman whose mother was German and stepfather American and who had lived in the U.S. until 1970, working for U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, among other things. Petra K. Kelly had developed close ties in her U.S. years to one of the principal new Anglo-American anti-nuclear organizations created by McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Natural resources Defense Council included Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson) and Laurance Rockefeller among its board at the time. In Germany, Kelly began organizing legal assaults against construction of the German nuclear program during the mid-1970's, resulting in costly delays and eventual large cuts in the entire German nuclear plan. 

 

Population control becomes US 'national security'

In 1798 an obscure English clergyman, professor of political economy in the employ of the British East India Company's East India College at Haileybury, was given instant fame by his English sponsors for his ‘Essay on the Principle of Population.’ The essay itself was a scientific fraud, plagiarized largely from a Venetian attack on the positive population theory of American Benjamin Franklin. 

 

The Venetian attack on Franklin's essay had been written by Giammaria Ortes in 1774. Malthus' adaptation of Ortes' ‘theory’ was refined with a facade of mathematical legitimacy which he called the ‘law of geometric progression,’ which held that human populations invariably expanded geometrically, while the means of subsistence were arithmetically limited or linear. The flaw in Malthus' argument, as demonstrated irrefutably by the spectacular growth of civilization, technology and agriculture productivity since 1798, was Malthus' deliberate ignoring of the contribution of advances in science and technology to dramatically improve such factors as crop yields, labor productivity and such. 12

 

By the mid-1970's, indicative of the effectiveness of the new propaganda onslaught from the Anglo-American establishment, American government officials were openly boasting in public press conferences that they were committed ‘neo-Malthusians,’ something for which they would have been laughed out of office a mere decade or so earlier. But nowhere did the new embrace of British malthusian economics in the United States show itself more brutally than in Kissinger's National Security Council. 

 

On April 24, 1974, in the midst of the oil crisis, White House National Security adviser, Henry Alfred Kissinger, issued a National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), on the subject of ‘Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.’ It was directed to all cabinet secretaries, the military Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the CIA and other key agencies. On October 16, 1975, on Kissinger's urging, President Gerald Ford issued a memorandum confirming the need for ‘U.S. leadership in world population matters,’ based on the contents of the classified NSSM 200 document. The document made malthusianism, for the first time in American history, an explicit item of security policy of the government of the United States. More bitter the irony, was the fact that it was initiated by a German-born Jew. Even during the Nazi years government officials in Germany were more guarded about officially espousing such goals.

 

NSSM 200 argued that population expansion in select developing countries which also contain key strategic resources necessary to the U.S. economy, posed potential U.S. ‘national security threats.’ The study warned that under pressure from an expanding domestic population, countries with needed raw materials will tend to demand better prices and higher terms of trade for their exports to the United States. In this context, the NSSM 200 identified a target list of 13 countries singled out as ‘strategic targets’ for U.S. efforts at population control. The list, drawn up in 1974, no doubt, as with all other major decisions of Kissinger, also involving close consultation with the British Foreign Office, is instructive.

 

Kissinger explicitly stated in the memorandum, ‘how much more efficient expenditures for population control might be than (would be funds for) raising production through direct investments in additional irrigation and power projects and factories.’ British 19th century Imperialism could have expressed it no better. By the middle 1970's the government of the United States, with this secret policy declaration, had committed itself to an agenda which would contribute to its own economic demise as well as untold famine, misery and unnecessary death throughout the developing sector. The 13 target countries named by Kissinger's study were Brazil, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia. 13 

 

Footnotes:

 

(1) Argy, Victor. ‘The Postwar International Money Crisis.’ George Allen & Unwin. London, 1981.  

   

(2) ‘Saltsjoebaden Conference.’ Bilderberg meetings, 11-13 May, 1973. The author obtained an original copy of the official discussion from this meeting. Normally confidential, the document was bought in a Paris used bookstore, apparently coming from the library of a member. In a September, 2000 private conversation, H.E. Sheikh Yaki Yamani told the author about his conversation with the Shah of Iran in early 1974. When Yamani, on instructions from the Saudi King, asked the Shah why Iran demanded such a large OPEC price increase, the Shah replied, ‘For the answer to your question, I suggest you go to Washington and ask Henry Kissinger.’ The agenda for the 1973 Bilderberg meeting was prepared by Robert Murphy, the man who in 1922 as U.S. Consul in Munich, first met Adolf Hitler and sent back favorable recommendations to his superiors in Washington. Murphy later shaped U.S. policy in postwar Germany as Political Adviser. Walter Levy, who delivered the Saltsjoebaden energy report, was intimately tied to the fortunes of big oil. In 1948 as oil economist for the Marshall Plan Economic Co-operation Administration, Levy had tried to block a government inquiry into charges the oil companies were overcharging.       

 

(3) Golan, Matti. ‘The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger: Step-by-step diplomacy in the Middle East.’ New York. Bantam Books Inc., 1976.     

 

(4) Kissinger, Henry A. ‘Years of Upheaval.’ Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1982.     

 

(5) Memorandum reproduced in ‘International Currency Review.’ Vol. 20, # 6. January 1991. London. p. 45.         

 

(6) Akins, James. Private conversations regarding his tenure as Director of Fuels & Energy Office of U.S. State Department at that time, later Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.     

 

(7) Goodwin, Craufurd D., et al. ‘Energy Policy in Perspective.’ Washington D.C., The Brookings Institution, 1981.     

 

(8) For a revealing view of the intimate inter-relation of Kissinger and the British Foreign Office during the entire period of the early 1970's oil shock, it is useful to cite a section from a remarkably frank address given by Kissinger on May 10, 1982 before the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Following several minutes of effusive praise for the two centuries of skillful British ‘balance of power’ diplomacy, Kissinger then approvingly cites the postwar U.S.-British ‘special relationship,’ adding, ‘Our postwar diplomatic history is littered with Anglo-American 'arrangements' and 'understandings,' sometimes on crucial issues, never put into formal documents...The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never before practiced between sovereign nations. In my period in office, the British played seminal role in certain American bilateral negotiations...In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department...’ Kissinger then cites as example, his U.S. negotiations over the future of Rhodesia: ‘In my negotiations over Rhodesia, I worked from a British draft with British spelling even when I did not fully grasp the distinction between a working paper and a Cabinet-approved document. The practice of collaboration thrives to our day...’ --  Kissinger, Henry A. ‘Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy.’ Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, London. May 10, 1982.

(9) Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project. ‘A Time to choose: America's Energy Future.’ Ballinger Publishing Co. Cambridge Massachusetts. 1974.     

 

(10) In June 1973, on the personal initiative of Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller, an influential new international organization, largely built on the foundation of the Bilderberg group, was established. It was called the Trilateral Commission, and its first executive director was Bilderberg attendee Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Trilateral Commission attempted for the first time in postwar Anglo-American history to draw Japanese finance and business elites into the Anglo-American policy consensus formation. In 1976 Henry Kissinger changes places with Brzezinski as Trilateral director while Brzezinski assumed Kissinger's job as National Security Adviser to the new President Jimmy Carter, himself a member of the semi-secret Trilateral Commission group as were many of his key cabinet secretaries.   

 

(11) The background for this part is the result of extensive interview and corporate industry research by the author over a more than 16-year period.   

 

(12) For a critique of Malthus' economics, see List, Friedrich, ‘The National System of Political Economy,’ Augustus M. Kelley reprint, New Jersey. 1977  

     

(13) National Security Study Memorandum 200. ‘Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.’ U.S. National Archives. December 10, 1974.

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maandag 25 juli 2022

De mensheid blind en doof gedwongen op weg naar de apocalyps

Baerbock, de Duitse minister van buitenlandse zaken en lid van politieke partij Bündnis 90/Die Grünen >> meestal aangeduid als Die Grünen (vergelijkbaar met onze volksverlakkerspartij GroenLinks), liet vorige week weten dat de klimaatverandering de ernstigste bedreiging is voor de mensheid, eerder zei deze dweil dat Rusland de grootste bedreiging was voor de westerse mens..... Terwijl Baerbock achter de maatregelen staat die het kabinet Scholz heeft genomen vanwege het westers uiterst hypocriete gebruik van sancties tegen Rusland en waardoor het westen zichzelf ongelofelijk op de duivelse staart trapt.... Maatregelen als het langer openhouden van kolencentrales en zelfs bruinkoolcentrales, voorts de planning van een grote LNG terminal voor allesbehalve duurzaam gas uit de Golfstaten en de VS en zelfs het openhouden van kerncentrales zou nu bespreekbaar zijn in sommige onderdelen van Die Grünen, al houdt de leiding die boot vooralsnog af, echter de vraag is hoelang dat zal worden volgehouden......  (LNG is vergeleken met aardgas uit Rusland duizend keer meer vervuilend*)

Onbegrijpelijke brutaliteit van Baerbock dat ze ondanks het voorgaande durft te zeggen dat de klimaatverandering de grootste vijand van de mens is en tegelijkertijd achter het verder verrampeneren van het klimaat staat >> hoe vals, doortrapt en hypocriet kan een mens zijn, wat een enorme volksverlakker!!! (hetzelfde geldt overigens voor de Duitse premier Scholz ook hij liet weten dat de klimaatverandering de grootste dreiging is voor de mensheid terwijl zijn kabinet zoals gezegd akkoord is gegaan met maatregelen die de klimaatverandering nog verder aanjagen......)

Niet dat het in de rest van het westen anders is, het westen: de hoofdverantwoordelijke voor de relatief zeer snelle klimaatverandering en alle gevolgen van dien, gevolgen die vooral in de arme landen al vele tienduizenden doden hebben geëist door weergerelateerde rampen terwijl deze landen het minst hebben bijgedragen aan de klimaatverandering..... Niet voor niets ook dat de eerste klimaatvluchtelingen juist uit die landen komen, vluchtelingen die men in het westen smerig genoeg durft aan te duiden als gelukszoekers...... Alsof jij en ik op onze handen zouden gaan zitten als we wisten dat bij niet vluchten onze kinderen en wijzelf het loodje zullen leggen...... 

Daarover gesproken het op de handen zitten terwijl het nemen van actie tegen de klimaatverandering nu al zou moeten worden genomen, wat zeg ik die hadden we al 20 jaar geleden moeten nemen, maar zoals gewoonlijk zijn de woorden over de klimaatverandering van westerse politici totaal in tegenspraak met de daden die ze laten zien..... Neem oorlogsmisdadiger Joe Biden, de VS president, ook deze leugenachtige slang liet weten dat de klimaatverandering de ernstigste vijand is van de mensheid, terwijl hij nu al meer vergunningen heeft afgegeven voor het boren naar olie dan Trump in 4 jaar tijd!! Verder is de VS de op 1 na grootste steenkoolexporteur ter wereld, nog net voorafgegaan door het zo door weergerelateerde rampen getroffen Australië dat per dag meer dan 1 miljoen ton steenkool exporteert..... Ook bouwt de VS kolencentrales in arme landen, zoals de al gebouwde zeer grote centrale in Bangladesh en dat aan de rand van een groot natuurreservaat, de Sundarbarns, de vergunning daarvoor werd afgegeven door oorlogsmisdadiger en Nobelprijs voor de Vrede winnaar Obama en Joe Biden, destijds vicepresident...... 

ExImSundarbans_v1_FB.png

Het enorme leger van de VS met meer dan 800 militaire bases over de wereld is naast het deze eeuw vermoorden van meer dan 5 miljoen mensen in illegale oorlogen, 1 van de grootste veroorzakers voor het steeds sneller toenemen van de klimaatverandering.....

Het artikel dat Chris Hedges gisteren plaatste heeft de titel gekregen: 'The Dawn of the Apocalyps' ('De dageraad van de Apocalyps'), hierin betoogt hij dat we al decennia geleden zijn gewaarschuwd dat we op een dodenmars zijn vanwege de klimaatverandering, terwijl de machtigen ons vanachter beetpakken en ons gewelddadig naar voren duwen in de richting van het uitsterven van mens en dier. (zo is 'ons koningshuis' grootaandeelhouder van Shell en verdient daarmee aan vernielen van ons aller thuis de aarde en aan het uitsterven van dier en mens)

Hedges wijst op het feit dat flinke delen van Europa in brand staan, waarbij hij een paar voorbeelden noemt van bosbranden in Zuid-Europa, maar waarbij je ook de immer weer oplaaiende bosbranden in Siberië moet rekenen, branden die bovengronds stoppen vanwege de winter, maar die  ondergronds doorgaan en tegen de zomer weer grootschalig oplaaien...... De branden daar zijn een nog veel grotere aanjager van de klimaatverandering dan die in andere delen van Europa (terwijl het grootste deel van Siberië in Azië ligt), niet alleen vanwege de enorme hitte die daarbij wordt geproduceerd, of door de gigantische uitstoot van CO2, maar juist daar de permafrost door die branden steeds verder ontdooit, waarbij een vreselijk grote hoeveelheid methaangas vrijkomt, een 80 keer zo sterk broeikasgas dan CO2..... (wat dat betreft is het kleine Nederland een onevenredig grote aanjager van de klimaatverandering door de doodsindustrie die men 'intensieve veehouderij' noemt, dit daar de 600 miljoen dieren [!!!] die hier op jaarbasis worden gehouden en die voor het grootste deel hier worden vermoord, een enorme hoeveelheid methaangas uitstoten....)

Hedges noemt in zijn artikel alle gevolgen of beter gezegd weergerelateerde verschijnselen die gepaard gaan met de klimaatverandering, dus niet alleen bosbranden, maar ook grote droogte in diverse delen van de wereld, die steeds grotere gebieden onbewoonbaar maken, dit door de hitte die alle records slaan en die ook het leven in de steden daar steeds moeilijke maken, immers de steden zijn voor het overgrote deel nog veel heter dan het platteland.... Dan zijn er door de stijging van de temperatuur steeds vaker gebieden die met grote wateroverlast te maken hebben en waarbij jaarlijks steeds meer mensen om het leven komen (zie wat dat betreft ook de overstromingen die vorig jaar een deel van Europa troffen zoals die in Duitsland na onophoudelijk zware regenval)..... 

Door de stijging van de temperatuur ontdooien steeds meer gletsjers en grote delen van het ijs op de Noord- en Zuidpool (ook daar het afsmelten van gletsjers), daarmee stijgt de zeewaterspiegel op een niveau dat 3 keer sneller gaat dan eerder werd voorspeld en waardoor nog meer delen van de wereld onbewoonbaar worden en daadwerkelijk al zijn..... Ook de orkanen die flinke delen van de wereld treffen worden steeds heftiger en eisen over de laatste decennia gezien steeds meer doden en zijn bovendien verantwoordelijk voor vernietiging van kapitaal en het onderuitgaan van de economie in vele (alweer vaak arme) landen.....

Zelfs het op grote schaal uitsterven van diersoorten zorgt er niet voor dat de machtige staten actie ondernemen en waar diersoorten uitsterven staat ook het leven van de mens op het spel, waar het gebrek aan actie ondernemen tegen de klimaatverandering zal zorgen voor een aantal doden die die van nazi-Duitsland en het fascistische Japan in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (WOII), plus die van het Stalin regime in de Sovjet-Unie en dat van Mao in China ver zullen overtreffen..... Uiteraard zal dit tot vluchtelingenstromen leiden die het best kunnen worden aangeduid als een gigantische volksverhuizing die het westen met alle macht zal proberen tegen te houden, hoeveel slachtoffers dat ook zal eisen >> 'een mooi voorbeeld' is het niet willen redden door de EU-lidstaten van vluchtelingen uit de Middellandse- en Egeïsche Zee, waar jaarlijks duizenden mensen moeten zijn verdronken, gezien het aantal aangetroffen getelde doden (immers veel doden worden niet aangetroffen als de gammele scheepjes en rubberboten buiten zicht zijn vergaan en dat moeten er behoorlijk wat zijn, zo is het over 2021 zeker dat er 1.864 mensen zijn verdronken in de Middellandse Zee, waarbij men het woord 'tenminste' gebruikt.....) En dan noemt men mensen hier slachtoffer als die te maken hebben met vertragingen bij hun vakantievlucht of bij terugkomst van de oorden die ze hebben bezocht...... (te ziek voor woorden!!)

Lees het (mooie) schrijven van Chris Hedges die veel dieper op de materie ingaat en zegt het voort, de tijd voor actie is nu en niet over 8, 15 of 28 jaar zoals de westerse landen hebben afgesproken en zelfs voor die 'doeljaren' treft men al veel te weinig actie...... Zoals ook Hedges stelt vrees ik dat alleen een grote opstand de klimaatverandering nog enigszins kan afremmen.... Terecht ook merkt Hedges op dat de milieugroepen die stellen dat de klimaatverandering is te stoppen, in feite de boel voorliegen, deze verandering is ten eerste allang bezig en ten tweede is deze zoals gezegd niet te stoppen, hooguit kan deze afgeremd worden en ondanks alles is dat van het grootste belang, hoe minder er gebeurt, des te meer dodelijke slachtoffers er zullen zijn te betreuren!!! De grote vervuilende bedrijven moeten worden aangepakt en als de overheden dat niet doen en dat doen ze op zeker niet, immers de neoliberale westerse regeringen functioneren over het algemeen als lobbyisten voor die bedrijven, zullen de westerse bevolkingen dit moeten doen >> niet goedschiks dan maar kwaadschiks!!

Voor de klimaatsceptici zou ik nog willen opmerken dat door de luchtvervuiling jaarlijks 8,3 miljoen mensen jaren eerder overlijden en dat meestal na een akelig ziekbed, alleen in Nederland overlijden jaarlijks 18.000 mensen door langdurige inademing van auto-uitstoot en dat evenzo na meestal een naar ziekbed..... (en reken maar dat daar ook een fiks tal rokers tussen zitten, die men bij aantreffen van kanker in de longen meerekent bij de doden ten gevolge van roken en dat zijn er op jaarbasis 20.000.....) Daarnaast hebben de oliemaatschappijen, Total, Exxon en Shell al in de 70er en 80er jaren van de vorige eeuw na uitvoerig onderzoek geconcludeerd dat de relatief snelle klimaatverandering wordt veroorzaakt door de verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen!!! Iets dat ze hebben weggestopt in een diepe donkere kluis en waar ze zogenaamde wetenschappers hebben betaald om te ontkennen wat ze zelf hadden geconcludeerd...... Zeker deze 3 oliemaatschappijen zouden strafrechtelijk moeten worden vervolgd door het Internationaal Strafhof (ICC), daar ze willens en wetens zijn doorgegaan met het vernielen van de aarde en het verpesten van de luchtkwaliteit waardoor miljoenen mensen zijn omgekomen!!

Tot slot wil ik nog opmerken dat we wellicht in het geheel niet in een weergerelateerde apocalyps terecht zullen komen, daar de westerse machthebbers nu al met nucleair vuur spelen door machinaties tegen de wereld kernmachten Rusland en China die wellicht zullen eindigen in een nucleaire apocalyps...... (en dat geholpen door de westerse reguliere media met hun oneindige anti-Russische en Cinese propaganda, media die alle onafhankelijkheid al lang en breed zijn kwijtgeraakt)


(On the top right hand side of this page you can choose for a translation in the language of your choice: choose 'Engels' [english] so you can recognise your own language [the Google translation is first in dutch, a language most people don't understand, while on the other hand most people recognise there language translated in english])

(als je het Engels niet machtig bent, zet dan de tekst in Google translate eerst om in het Engels door in het menu op Engels te klikken, waarna je weer kan klikken op die vertaalapp en je bovenaan in het menu Nederlands ziet staan, klik daarop en de hele tekst staat in het Nederlands, de vertaling is van een redelijk goede kwaliteit.)

 

The Dawn of the Apocalypse

We were warned for decades about the death march we are on because of global warming. And yet, the global ruling class continues to frog-march us towards extinction.


Our Climate Future - by Mr. Fish

 

The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities issued the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million people in China enduring a scorching heat wave along with severe flooding and landslides across large swathes of southern China. Dozens of people have died. Millions of Chinese have been displaced. Economic losses run into the billions of yuan. Droughts in Africa, which have destroyed crops, killed livestock and forced many to flee their homes, are creating a potential famine in the Horn of Africa. More than 100 million people in the United States are under heat alerts in more than two dozen states from temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s and low 100s. Wildfires have destroyed thousands of acres in California. More than 73 percent of New Mexico is suffering from an “extreme” or “severe” drought. Thousands of people had to flee from a fast-moving brush fire near Yosemite National Park on Saturday and 2,000 homes and businesses lost power. 

It is not as if we were not warned. It is not as if we lacked scientific evidence. It is not as if we could not see the steady ecological degeneration and species extinction. And yet, we did not act. The result will be mass death with victims dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism, Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined. The desperate response is to burn more coal, especially with the soaring cost of natural gas and oil, and extend the life of nuclear power plants to sustain the economy and produce cool air. It is a self-defeating response. Joe Biden has approved more new oil drilling permits than Donald Trump. Once the power outages begin, as in India, the heat waves will exact a grim toll. 

“Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires,” U.N Secretary General António Guterres told ministers from 40 countries meeting to discuss the climate crisis on July 18. “No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.”

“We have a choice,” he added. “Collective action or collective suicide.”

The Anthropocene Age – the age of humans, which has caused extinctions of plant and animal species and the pollution of the soil, air and oceans – is accelerating. Sea levels are rising three times faster than predicted. The arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. Even if we stop carbon emissions today – we have already reached 419 parts per million – carbon dioxide concentrations will continue to climb to as high as 550 ppm because of heat trapped in the oceans. Global temperatures, even in the most optimistic of scenarios, will rise for at least another century. This assumes we confront this crisis. The earth is becoming inhospitable to most life.

The average global temperature has risen by about 1.1 Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1880. We are approaching a tipping point of 2 degrees Celsius when the biosphere will become so degraded nothing can save us. 

The ruling class for decades denied the reality of the climate crisis or acknowledged the crisis and did nothing. We sleepwalked into catastrophe. Record heat waves. Monster droughts. Shifts in rainfall patterns. Declining crop yields. The melting of the polar ice caps and glaciers resulting in sea level rise. Flooding. Wildfires. Pandemics. The breakdown of supply chains. Mass migrations. Expanding deserts. The acidification of the oceans that extinguishes sea life, the food source for billions of people. Feedback loops will see one environmental catastrophe worsen another environmental catastrophe. The breakdown will be nonlinear. These are the harbingers of the future. 

Social coercion and the rule of law will disintegrate. This is taking place in many parts of the global south. A ruthless security and surveillance apparatus, along with heavily militarized police, will turn industrial nations into climate fortresses to keep out refugees and prevent uprisings by an increasingly desperate public. The ruling oligarchs will retreat to protected compounds where they will have access to services and amenities, including food, water and medical care, denied to the rest of us. 

Voting, lobbying, petitioning, donating to environmental lobby groups, divestment campaigns and protesting to force the global ruling class to address the climate catastrophe proved no more effective than scrofula victims’ superstitious appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal touch. In 1900 the burning of fossil fuel – mostly coal – produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. That number had risen threefold by 1950. Today the level is 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the last 60 years the increase in CO2 was an estimated 100 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age. 

The last time the earth’s temperature rose 4 degrees Celsius, the polar ice caps did not exist and the seas were hundreds of feet above their current levels. 

You can watch my two-part interview with Roger Hallam, the co-founder of the resistance group Extinction Rebellion, on the climate emergency here and here

There are three mathematical models for the future: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere. This third scenario is dependent on an immediate halt to the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet to end the animal agriculture industry – almost as large a contributor to greenhouse gasses as the fossil fuel industry – greening the deserts and restoring rainforests. 

We knew for decades what harnessing a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum would do to the climate. As early as the 1930s British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar suggested that increased CO2 was warming the planet. In the late 1970s into the 1980s, scientists at companies such as Exxon and Shell determined that the burning of fossil fuels was contributing to rising global temperature. 

“[T]here is concern among some scientific groups that once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible and little could be done to correct the situation in the short term,” a 1982 internal briefing for Exxon’s management noted.

NASA’s Dr. James Hansen told the U.S. Senate in 1988 that the buildup of CO2 and other gasses were behind the rise in heat. 

But by 1989 Exxon, Shell and other fossil fuel corporations decided the risks to their profits from major curbs in fossil fuel extraction and consumption was unacceptable. They invested in heavy lobbying and funding of faux research and propaganda campaigns to discredit the science on the climate emergency.

Christian Parenti in his book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence quotes from “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” a 2007 report produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, writes in the report’s final section:

In a world that sees two meter sea level rise, with continued flooding ahead, it will take extraordinary effort for the United States, or indeed any country, to look beyond its own salvation. All of the ways in which human beings have dealt with natural disasters in the past…could come together in one conflagration: rage at government’s inability to deal with the abrupt and unpredictable crises; religious fervor, perhaps even a dramatic rise in millennial end-of-day cults; hostility and violence towards migrants and minority groups, at a time of demographic change and increased global migration; intra-and interstate conflict over resources, particularly food and fresh water. Altruism and generosity would likely be blunted.

The profits from fossil fuels, and the lifestyle the burning of fossil fuels afforded to the privileged on the planet, overroad a rational response. The failure is homicidal.

Clive Hamilton in his Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.”

“But accepting intellectually is not the same as accepting emotionally the possibility that the world as we know it is headed for a horrible end,” Hamilton writes. “It’s the same with our own deaths; we all ‘accept’ that we will die, but it is only when death is imminent that we confront the true meaning of our mortality.”

Environmental campaigners, from The Sierra Club to 350.org, woefully misread the global ruling class, believing they could be pressured or convinced to carry out the seismic reconfigurations to halt the descent into a climate hell. These environmental organizations believed in empowering people through hope, even if the hope was based on a lie. They were unable or unwilling to speak the truth. These climate “Pollyannas,” as Hamilton calls them, “adopt the same tactic as doom-mongers, but in reverse. Instead of taking a very small risk of disaster and exaggerating it, they take a very high risk of disaster and minimize it.”

Humans have inhabited cities and states for 6,000 years, “a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress. The myriad of civilizations built over these 6,000 years have all decayed and collapsed, most through a thoughtless depletion of the natural resources that sustained them. 

The latest iteration of global civilization was dominated by Europeans, who used industrial warfare and genocide to control much of the planet. Europeans and Euro-Americans launched a 500-year-long global rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities, the caretakers of the environment for thousands of years – that stood in the way. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution two and a half centuries ago, has become a curse, a death sentence. 

Anthropologists, including Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies, Charles L. Redman in Human Impact on Ancient Environments and Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. Civilizations, as Tainter writes, are “fragile, impermanent things.” Collapse, he writes, “is a recurrent feature of human societies.”

This time the whole planet will go down. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new peoples to subjugate or new civilizations to replace the old. We will have used up the world’s resources, leaving the planet as desolate as the final days of a denuded Easter Island.

Collapse comes throughout human history to complex societies not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. 

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writes in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of Tragedy.

The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation or use of fossil fuels, lead to disaster in the long run. This is what Wright calls the “progress trap.” 

“We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion,” Wright notes, “that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature.”

The U.S. military, intent on dominating the globe, is the single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gasses, according to a report from Brown University. This is the same military that has designated global warming a “threat multiplier” and “an accelerant of instability or conflict.”

The powerlessness many will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist beliefs in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. The Christian right provides a haven for this magical thinking. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the later part of the 19th century as the buffalo herds and the remaining tribes faced extermination. The Ghost Dance held out the hope that all the horrors of white civilization — the railroads, the murderous cavalry units, the timber merchants, the mine speculators, the hated tribal agencies, the barbed wire, the machine guns, even the white man himself — would disappear. Our psychological hard wiring is no different.

The greatest existential crisis of our time is to at once be willing to accept the bleakness before us and resist. The global ruling class has forfeited its legitimacy and credibility. It must be replaced. This will require sustained mass civil disobedience, such as those mounted by Extinction Rebellion, to drive the global rulers from power. Once the rulers see us as a real threat they will become vicious, even barbaric, in their efforts to cling to their positions of privilege and power. We may not succeed in halting the death march, but let those who come after us, especially our children, say we tried.

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* Hier een deel uit een bericht dat ik gisteren plaatste ('Europese Commissie overweegt genetisch gemanipuleerd voedsel toe te staan: de weg naar CETA en TTIP'):  Gas of beter gezegd LNG, wordt door de Europese Commissie als duurzame energie neergezet, puur en alleen daar deze commissie achter de enorme anti-Russische propaganda staat en dat zelfs promoot..... Gas dat vanuit Rusland wordt aangevoerd is 1.000 keer te prefereren boven  LNG,  daar de laatste vooral zal moeten worden aangevoerd uit de VS en de Golfstaten, waarbij de export van LNG uit de Golfstaten duurzamer dan die uit de VS..... Het omzetten van aardgas naar LNG is een milieuvervuilend proces, waarbij methaangas vrijkomt, een 80 keer zo sterk broeikasgas dan CO2..... De geproduceerde LNG moet dan ook nog eens worden vervoerd met uiterst vervuilende tankers naar Europa.... LNG uit de VS is al helemaal de dood in de pot, dit gas wordt middels fracken verkregen (schaliegas), waarbij grote hoeveelheden methaangas vrijkomen en waarbij gebruik wordt gemaakt van (ook kankerverwekkende) chemicaliën gemengd met water om dat gas te kunnen winnen..... Het uiterst gevaarlijk vervuilde water dat overblijft na fracken mag vrijelijk worden geloosd op open water, een vorm van subsidie die de VS overheid geeft aan de oliemaatschappijen, immers als die maatschappijen dat water eerst zouden moeten reinigen zou de prijs per kubieke meter gas enorm stijgen..... Echter volgens de Europese Commissie is LNG dus duurzaam......

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Zie ook: 'Het houden van moedervarkens tussen stangen, een vreselijke marteling, moet anno 2022 eindelijk worden verboden' (en zie de links in dat bericht naar artikelen over de vreselijke dierenmishandeling in de intensieve veehouderij!!)

'D66 zet definitief valsgroene masker af en is als EU lidstaten blij met de oorlog in Oekraïne: de weg naar duurzame energie is verlaten' (en zie de links in dat bericht naar meer artrikelen over kernenergie!!)

'Oekraïne: westerse proxyoorlog tegen Rusland toont nog eens aan dat politici lak hebben aan luchtvervuiling, volksgezondheid en armoede' (en zie de links in dat bericht naar meer artikelen over de Russische inval in Oekraïne!!)

'Greenpeace stelt dat de klimaatverandering is te stoppen ha! ha! ha! ha!'

'Temperatuur in West-Noorwegen en Moskou dik boven het gemiddelde'

'CDA wenst geen EU 'green deal' en 'klimaatambassadeur' de Boer weet niet waar hij over spreekt'   

'Frits Böttcher een 'klimaatsceptische wetenschapper' die zich liet betalen door o.a. Shell, KLM en AkzoNobel' (!!!!)

'Australië: steenkoollobby werkt samen met de regering nog veel meer bosbranden in de hand

'Boris Johnson (Britse premier) 'schrapt alle buitenlandse investeringen in steenkool', tegelijkertijd investeert de staat in fossiele brandstoffen

'Het 'groenwassen' van de scheepvaart, of hoe autoriteiten doorgaan met het verkankeren van de aarde'

'De wereld van astroturf: professionele leugenaars die de belangen van grote vervuilers e.d. promoten' 

'Australische bosbranden: 500 miljoen dieren dood en een rookpluim die groter is dan Europa' Intussen (juli 2022) wordt het aantal dieren dat omkwam bij de bosbranden na ondezoek geschat op 3 miljard...

'Vliegreizen vanaf Schiphol goedkoper dan die vanaf Duitse vliegvelden' (en zie de links in dat bericht over de Nederlandse vliegvelden en luchtvaart)          

'Scott Morrison (premier Australië) moest bezoek aan door bosbrand getroffen gebied afbreken en vertrok met de staart tussen de benen'

'Australië staat in brand terwijl de regering milieuactivisten straft voor het zich uitspreken tegen de oorzaken van de klimaatverandering' (voor meer berichten over de bosbranden in Australië, zie de links in dat bericht)

'Australië staat olieboringen toe in de Grote Australische Bocht, inclusief seismische ontploffingen

'Duitsland stelt CO2  belasting op € 25,-- in plaats van € 10,-- >> heibel in de deelstaten' (terwijl die € 25,-- per ton CO2 een veel te lage belasting is...)

'Remco de Boer ('klimaatambassadeur') wil de Nederlandse kolencentrales openhouden'

'Filipijnen geen orkaanseizoen, maar het jaarrond tropische cyclonen'

'BP stelt in milieuplan dat een olieramp op zee goed is voor de lokale economie..........'

'Australië slaat alarm over koraalriffen........ AUW!!!'

'Australië geeft toestemming tot uitbaten enorm grote kolenmijn'

'Redt het Groot Barrièrerif, zet uw handtekening a.u.b.!'

'Het Groot Barrièrerif, dreigt te worden gesloopt voor een grote kolenhaven........'

'Australië heeft VN gedwongen een passage uit een klimaatrapportage te verwijderen...........'

'Leard Forest: grootste kolenmijn ooit dreigt gerealiseerd te worden in dit vele duizenden jaren oude Australisch bos......... '

'Australië exporteert dagelijks één miljoen ton steenkool, dit i.h.k.v. de klimaatverandering en de afgelopen klimaattop........' (daar wordt jaarlijks nog eens 10 miljoen ton aan toegevoegd....)

'Coca-Cola betaalt wetenschappers om haar producten te promoten en voor weerleggen kritiek......'

'Shell, ExxonMobil en andere oliemaatschappijen gaan 180 miljard dollar investeren in plasticproductie.........'

'Bas Heijne weet, geenszins 'onbehagelijk', niet wat te denken van de klimaatverandering....... OEI!!!'

'ExxonMobil vervolgd voor 'misleiding...' Nou zeg maar het op grote schaal bedonderen van de kluit!!'

'Shell was al in 1989 overtuigd van klimaatverandering.............'

'Exxon lobbyist (politicus) dagvaardt milieugroepen voor kennis bij Exxon over klimaatverandering.......' (ongelofelijk ook.....)
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Voor de klimaatsceptici: 'Nederlander leeft 13 maanden korter door luchtvervuiling, dat zijn meer dan 260.000 mensenlevens' Uit dit bericht blijkt dat er veel meer mensen dan de door de regering en anti-rook lobbyisten aangehouden 12.000 mensen jaren eerder overlijden, zelfs meer dan de door overheid eerder aangehouden 18.000 vroegtijdige overlijdens (al blijf ik dat laatste aantal aanhouden) Lullig genoeg overlijden er werkelijk mensen vele jaren eerder doordat zij bijvoorbeeld longkanker hebben opgelopen door langdurige auto-uitstoot inademing en dan gaat het om mensen die nooit hebben gerookt, ofwel ook onder de rokers kunnen er longkankers zijn ontstaan niet door het roken maar door de uitlaatgassen van auto's..... (zo rookt een flink deel van de beroepschauffeurs....)

'Sluipmoordenaar: verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen heeft in 2018 wereldwijd de dood veroorzaakt van 8.7 miljoen mensen' Het jaargemiddelde is 8,3 miljoen, vergelijk dat eens met de oversterfte door COVID in meer dan 2 jaar tijd, t.w. 6,3 miljoen doden en dan niet vergeten dat een groot aantal doden onterecht werden aangemerkt als COVID-doden!!

'Longartsen tegen gebruik van dieselbrandstof' Buitenlandse longartsen wel te verstaan.....

'Hartklachten ook door lage niveau's van luchtvervuiling.....'

'Luchtvervuiling veroorzaakt naast long- en luchtwegklachten, ook psychische aandoeningen bij kinderen

'Luchtvervuiling en de geestelijke gezondheid van kinderen (2)'

'Nederlandse lucht nog vuiler dan eerder gedacht.....'

'De meting van de luchtkwaliteit in de EU wordt eindelijk bijgesteld naar meer gezonde niveaus' Was dat maar waar: lees het bericht!!