Table of Contents
LIVING WITH THE DISEASE: HOW I CAME TO RECOGNIZE THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISM
I first began to recognize the hallmark characteristics of a cancer invasion at the macro level after long personal experience of the micro disease. My beloved wife and mother of our four children, a smoker before knowledge of its effects, lost her life to an anaplastic cancer. Many years later I experienced far milder cancer twice – in each case overcome by detecting the blindly multiplying growths early on, and deploying all the resources available to eliminate them. My resources have included independent neuro-cellular immune recognition by yogic method joined to exact science. No training can be more vivid in comprehension of cancer’s covert establishment, rampant growth, and method of erasure. With visible tumours, attention to the cancer’s invasive lesions can be conveyed to the bloodstream as nail-digs to begin – the most difficult steps being cellular recognition and exact attack by the immune-system repertoire. The capacity of the body to recognize and to fight the disease is normally miraculous. I always deployed the standard protocol of experimental and control conditions to confirm results.
My own learning has also included years of discussions with oncologists and serious study of advanced cancer science. There is no macro science of cancer, but on the micro level of the disease there are electron-microscope photographs of cancer-cell interactions with surrounding cell communities and exact medical reports of the immune recognition process. The generic properties of cancer invasion and immune response are not disputed. At the highest level of abstraction, cancer’s unregulated self-multiplication is the key to the disease, and aggressive elimination of it the key to cure. The nature of cancer growth as devoid of committed life-function while attacking, depriving and destroying all life-organization to multiply itself is an incarnate evil which is not remotely applicable to right-wing usages of the term which project cancer properties onto the resisting poor – a reverse meaning.
There is no mistaking the true nature of a cancer system at micro or macro levels. Its unmitigated attacks on healthy life-tissue and circulation pathways and uncontrolled growth to metastases across the life-host invading and depredating it at every opportunity to multiply is all too clear. But it is missed at the macro level of life-organization – the object of this study. But first there were years of system diagnosis, perpetual testing against facts, and observations of ever more connections and correlations coming together towards a unified explanatory model. In the simplest terms, the immune system recognizes malignant cancer’s unlimited multiplication of rogue cells, enables exact marker seizures by macrophage cells from the rogue cells for display to the surrounding cell community, and triggers through chemical reactions a life-system response of already timelessly evolved anti-cancer T-cells into preventative action. These ‘killer T-cells’ produced in the thymus-gland exactly enact immune system response. They surround the deformed and dysfunctional rogue cells and tumour masses, perforate and dismantle them with patrolling macrophages following in to dine on and clean up the mess.
The attacked host thereby reduces and eliminates the mutant and cellular growth predating its life by its out-of-control multiplication, resource-hijacking invasion, and aggressive spread everywhere it can opportunistically invade. Unlike the rush of blood to a site of infection or trauma which is antiseptic and short-lived and perhaps the precursor to cancer, it evolves out of constant stress reaction to successfully mutate, avoid detection, and suppress immune-reaction cells to multiply itself uncontrollably against all regulators keeping them bounded to serve life-functions. Malignant cancer’s one and only behaviour is to aggressively divide, multiply, spread and invade without inhibition to feed on the life-system whose resources it captures for its own proliferation without limit or barrier to its runaway growth. The sole resolution is sustained and non-stop intervention so that only limited and self-replacing cellular reproduction is permitted to continue in contributory functions for the life-host.
The more a cancer sequence of self-multiplication invades and breaks past normal confining borders without strict selecting out of its invasive disorder, the worse the threat is to any life-host. A social level of immune system response has in fact evolved to select out what attacks it from within – the subject of Chapter 4 – but with many more vulnerabilities than the evolved human organism because its defence system is rule-constructed instead of gene-transmitted. The rules have not been tested over millions of years to detect and eliminate any unregulated growth. Thus deadly system mutations may develop with no regulators to stop it, or – as has happened in the money-sequence cancer – deregulation of the rules that could stop it. This has been a primary mutation of the global cancer system, along with thousands of new rules to protect only the multiplication of the transnational money-sequences themselves.1
From what has been explained, we can see that the explanatory frame of cancer growth applies to both micro and macro levels of life-organization. Indeed what were before anomalous, chaotic and unconnected phenomena fall into place with this unifying explanatory framework. No other model can decode the full pattern. In the beginning, I analysed the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of deregulation and militant invasion of human rights and other societies as analogous to 1930s fascism.2 I do not now reject that analysis which has become well known. Yet as more and more new and shocking policy turns came one after another in overwhelming succession throwing the societies and body politics into increasing life-insecurity, helplessness and confusion, something more sinister was diagnosed to be at work. In fascism, public sectors were not reversed and privatized as by corporate money-sequence globalization, but productively extended in industrial ways like the people’s car (volkswagen). More deeply, fascism was overtly recognizable with its mutant doctrine and repudiation of law and was responded to as a visible threat to human evolution and civilization. The mutating and globalizing system decades later was neither. It was and remains masked as a ‘free market’ system – a false representation exposed in Chapter 3 and throughout this study.
Gradually the pieces fell into place as the system continued to mutate with all the hallmark characteristics of a pathological pattern more insidious and systemically destructive of organic, social and ecological life-organization than any prior historical threat to humanity.
CONNECTING THE MULTIPLE PATHWAYS OF ATTACK ON SOCIAL LIFE-ORGANIZATION
Consider now all the phenomena of attack on social life-organization that surged out of the Reagan-Thatcher turn. The symptoms have become amnesiac now, normalized, almost as if the world has always been this way. But in fact they display a growing system cancer in which responsible government and life-protective institutions have been overrun by a deregulated system of self-multiplying money-sequences now ruling the world.
The inner logic of what has happened is intuitively clear, but undefined – a reversal of history and centuries of social reforms for democratic accountability and the life security of peoples. As one reflects upon each of the phenomena, observe that the reversal continues more than ever – never-ending attacks on public sectors and social services that enable the lives of society’s members; targeted destruction of trade unions and political oppositions; increasingly deregulated multiplication of money circuits without life-function; perpetual dismantling of productive systems and firings of workforces for quick profit; limitless private enrichment at others’ expense represented as natural and divine design; sustained abolition of regulations against press and media monopolies; denunciation of all public regulation of money capital and corporations; militant repudiation of environmental protections as forest, soil and fish stock resources are strip-mined; cumulative incapacity to tell the difference between universal life-necessities and toxic junk products; and non-stop reduction of taxation of private and corporate profits as public wealth is simultaneously converted to serve them directly.
Invasion and spread of the cancer system relied from the late 1970s on a highly financed private movement to redirect cultural, academic and political norms to Orwellian-named ‘conservative causes’; installation of death-squad dictatorships and organized terror as ruling state policy across Latin America; globalizing institution of universal rights solely for transnational corporations; an historically new depredation and plundering of societies and regions by once criminal private-money attacks on sovereign currencies and capital exits as absolute rights; and perpetually compounding private bank debts from 1982 on through Latin America, East Europe and South-East Asia to the countries of the European Union today.
All of these phenomena have became so familiar they have dissolved into normality, and the cancer pattern joining them has remained unseen in the West. Explanations like ‘vast greed’ and ‘moral bankruptcy’, in contrast, do not explain anything about the surrounding system selecting for them. The atomic-methods of moral and decision theory are agent-relative and block out the ruling system within which choices are made. Postmodern positions deny the very possibility of unified explanation. For one reason or another, the most ancient question of thinking humanity and science – what connects all these phenomena into the form regulating all? – is blinkered out.
Explaining the Deep Structure of Global Economic Collapse and Recovery
A privileged money party within the capitalist class has certainly reaped boundless new rights and private payoffs. But this undoubted pattern itself needs explanation. The productivity account of economic rule common to both Marxism and Capitalism has been reversed in reality. Society’s scarce means of life have been increasingly destroyed rather than produced over 25 years. Even the industrial infrastructures of the First World have more and more abandoned while ecosystems and resources are cumulatively disabled. As for life-enabling goods and real quality of life, they have been progressively degraded as an increasing world majority has been relentlessly dispossessed. It is no longer only surplus value being extracted, but a degeneration and wasting of productive capital and goods themselves. Yet as with all the signals of the emergent cancer system, all have been masked by aggregate money-value gains.
One after another the crises of reproduction of human and planetary life themselves have come. The most evident of these has been societies’ economies collapsing under ‘debt crises’, ‘currency attacks’ and ‘capital flights’. But these too have not been named in principle – private money-sequence attacks on sovereign societies by massively leveraged money demand that has little legal-tender backing only to multiply themselves. Disemployment of people in the tens of millions, currencies devalued so that basic means of life are no longer affordable, and – most systematically – perpetual private bank debts and compound-interest servicing and casino speculation have been destroying productive function with no creative outcome for three decades.
The economies of Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Poland went under between 1982 and 1990, and Brazil and Argentina collapsed again at the turn of the twenty-first century. The most important lesson of recovery was still ignored even after it happened. These societies saved their peoples by leaving International Monetary Fund (IMF) financial control and the cancer system with spectacular productive success ever since the first edition of this book was published. Yet the cause-effect, failure-success pattern might as well not have occurred so far as official recognition by what is still called ‘the Free World’.
Before the Latin American liberation began by responsible self government of the economy, the transnational money-sequence system had simply spread. There were the 1997–98 Asian meltdown of former ‘miracle economies’ – as Mexico and Argentina were once called before they collapsed – in Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea. Even more revealingly, as the state systems of the Eastern European societies and the Soviet Union were restructured in the mode of the global capitalist experiment, they collapsed in the most monumental economic reversal in history.
Yet the failed world experiment remains unnamed. Instead an Orwellian mask of ‘market freedom and democracy’ sustains certitude of success against facts. A drunk triumphalism of privatizing money-sequence rule has continued since 1991 in invading, occupying and depredating the mixed-economy societies of hundreds of millions of people across the globe, and now the US and Europe themselves in the prolonged fall of what was once Western civilization.
Thus not one shift in ruling paradigm or policy imposition has resulted over 25 years of imposed disasters. The USSR, which once held the developed West in fear of its superpower capabilities, technological and scientific advances and universal literacy, health care and food, has collapsed beyond any apparent possibility of economic recovery.3 Yet however gigantic the economic and ecological catastrophes, the self-multiplying feeding cycles on societies’ unprotected resources, markets, public sectors, labour forces, and life-support systems have continued. A drunk infallibilism rules. The system failures have been repeated so often the mind loses track. Diagnosis has to move beyond ‘failed global experiment’ (a concept that itself is blocked out) and ‘neo-liberal catastrophe’ (current in self-liberating Latin America) to the only framework of meaning which is adequate to the scope of derangement.
Beyond the Shock Doctrine: The Meta-Programme of the Global Cancer System
There has been a long tradition since Marx of recognizing ‘bloodsucking capital’ with ample documentation of 16-hour days of even children strapped to the mechanism of pumping more money out of them. Turning private money into more money begins at a system level by consuming workers’ lives, and the format continues today in nineteenth-century form in ‘free trade zones’. The multiple pathways and degenerate trends will be defined in the next section. Most visible have been armed attacks on defenceless social alternatives which have been amply documented in their brutality. But unnoticed has been the nature of the ultimate system mutation – mass destruction of productive forces to ensure only parasitic money-sequence growth and multiplication, the opposite of ‘increased productivity’ or ‘creative destruction’.
Naomi Klein’s investigative work, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, provides superb documentation of the mutation without explaining it.4 The ‘shock doctrine’ she demonstrates only expresses the cancer system at dramatic turning points of invasion and murderous dispossession – specifically by construction of economic crises to force ‘free market’ capitalism on overwhelmed populations. Yet the cancer system goes deeper and wider than this. As we will see ahead in comprehensive account of its modes of invasion, occupation and destruction of life-organization on all planes, there are so many claw-holds of depredatory growth through natural and social life-hosts that only a cancer model can comprehend the full spectrum of degenerate spread and despoliation. There is a pervasive movement of normalized invasion and occupation which market shock treatments punctuate. The more insidious everyday normality is: (i) to infiltrate and grow money-sequences through individual, social and ecological life-hosts (ii) to maximally multiply them to more through ever more channels and domains (iii) without any productive life-function (iv) while societies fail to recognize or respond to the hollowing out at all levels (v) however great the destruction of life-capacities and support systems becomes on all planes. The most basic human and ecological life-requirements are thus normally overridden to increase transnational private money-sequencing through them.
There is No Such Thing as Society: Destruction of Social Life-Organization to Grow Transnational Money-Sequences
The identifying marker of the generic cancer system is perpetual private money-sequence movement into social infrastructures serving citizens’ lives – not only by mass-murder coups and terror from Chile to Iraq over 30 years, but by an ever-advancing routine defunding, deregulation and privatization of social life means, protections and support systems that never stops. Decoded beneath the unending pretexts of ‘innovations’, ‘new efficiencies’, and ‘cost savings’, one law rules. Public funds are made the means to grow private transnational money-sequences. Corporate money-sequence gains, not life-supports, are the driver. Margaret Thatcher (quoting F.A. Hayek) opens the doors to the cancer stage of capitalism when she famously says ‘there is no such thing as society’. The ruling code is thereby released from all accountability to society by simply denying that any society exists. When Hayek’s incubus goes on to say, ‘there is only the market’ (he says ‘extended capitalism’), they again manifest the mutant code without recognition. What is undeciphered by even critics is that this version of ‘the free market’ means only private money freely sequencing to maximally more money by money-sequence investors with no required life-function: formally: $ → AasM → $1-2-3 → n : where AasM = All as Means.5
Yet this underlying code is no more consciously realized than the syntax which the man-in-the-street speaks without knowing it. Deregulated and free from all barriers, it is mass-homicidal by its nature. Thus General Pinochet – with US military, financial and doctrinal support – murders the unarmed elected President of Chile and tortures and kills tens of thousands of innocent and socially conscientious people to enforce ‘market reforms’. Every move reverses democratic self-government on behalf of a better life for the Chilean people. The unstated taboo the people broke was to stand against continued foreign money-sequence exploitation called ‘freedom’. In Indonesia in 1965, the mass murder of those standing for such an alternative was by orchestrated fundamentalist mobs and CIA kill-lists of ‘communists’ with little US-corporate gain. In Chile the destruction of social life-organization was more exactly structured to liquidate a gradualist and near-unanimously self-governing popular government. In such ways evolving social life-organization is converted to transnational money-sequencing by built-in social terror. None recognized the carcinogenic mutation in motion. Yet one of the best indicators was already manifesting – the counter-productive onslaught in every dimension. Chile never recovered its real standard of living. As Klein reports, unemployment escalated from 3 per cent to up to 25 per cent and, as reported to me directly by workers, those who had jobs might well have to have three at once and live in a bed hosting three people in shifts. A new and directly life-serving productive development was also violently obliterated – barrio rebuilding of urban slums by the inhabitants themselves with materials provided by the government. It was not ‘creative destruction’. The mass-murderous system had no creative or productive function. Rather it destroyed creative life-functions and the people leading and organizing them. All that was served was foreign corporate money-sequencing to more by terrorist armed force and despoliation. In fact, Chile has never recovered. It never regained the universally life-enabling economic organization it was developing ahead of most of the world. A telling example profiles the scope of the reversal of social life-organization. Long after General Pinochet is gone from Chile, extractive money-sequences spread deeper into the remaining life-ground – increasingly chopping, infesting and mono-cropping Chile’s biodiverse forests supporting the lives of 600,000 Mapuche people with resisters named as ‘terrorists’.6
Naomi Klein tells the shock-treatment side brilliantly, but the deep-structural destruction of new productive development of universal life-necessities like homes, food and education beyond the limits of capitalism is not recognized – the ultimate line of life-meaning. While Nobel economist Milton Friedman who co-planned the social genocide is exposed in a murderous market fanaticism, the destruction of Chile’s non-violent, constructive and democratic advance of life-means provision for its people is forgotten. Long before the mass-murder coup and systematic torture of the peaceful, defenceless and democratic government and its social leadership is enacted, Henry Kissinger says ‘The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on – and precedent value for – other parts of the world, especially Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own place in it.’7 Social genocide is the ‘clean slate’ solution.
‘Freedom’ and ‘growth’ are declared, but the reverse of both are imposed in elaboration of the cancer code of $ → AasM → $1-2-3 → n. In the cancer code, all life-hosts become disposable means to multiplying transnational money-sequences which are freer the more social life-organization is eliminated. Klein reports without deconstruction what Friedman says to Pinochet after the butchery of Chile’s social organization. His words express the money-sequence code in characteristic ambiguity: ‘The major error [of the Chilean people] was … to believe that it is possible to do good with other people’s money’ (p. 545). The decoded meaning is: money must never be used to serve anyone but its private possessors to have more. There are two entailments. The first is that a social order that requires taxes on the rich to achieve the social good is ‘enslavement’ of them (still a ‘libertarian’ slogan). The second is that foreign ‘investment’ (that is, absentee money-sequences exploiting Chile’s resources and markets) is ‘other people’s money’ which has been ‘expropriated’ by lost profits (a central plank of world trade decrees since). The freedom to sequence private money to multiply more through other societies’ life-support systems now moves against productive development itself. If societies are destroyed by the process, ‘they must remake themselves to be more competitive’: that is, to eliminate all life, labour, government and regulatory barriers to foreign money-sequencing through them.
The Chile experiment tested the model. After 1980, the invasion and occupation was led, by the Thatcher-Reagan turn, into death-squad dictatorships as normal in Latin America, and public-sector stripping as routine in the First World. Beginning in 1988, thousands of transnational decrees simply overrode legislatures by treaty declaration. It was called ‘Free Trade’, as always the reversal of reality. In fact, there was no freedom for anyone or anything but transnational corporate money-sequences to profit without going through any negotiations with sovereign governments and democratic processes. Foreign corporate occupation of other societies’ markets, built infrastructures, public sectors, free extraction of their resources, and prohibition of any government legislation impinging on their ‘profit opportunities’ or ‘discriminating against’ their commodities’ free entry were all now ‘trade obligations’. They were in fact instituted in transnational bureaucracies with rules no-one had a choice in except corporate lobbies and lawyers.8 Their thousands of pages of new rights had to be logically decoded through their legalese to reveal their meaning – essentially, prohibition of any life, employment or other requirement interfering in the new corporate rights system, and a priori veto of any elected government’s legislation of anything against transnational ‘profit opportunities’.9
Chile was the test invasion for what was to become the transnational corporate rule of the world. The entire democratic social revolution over centuries supported overwhelmingly by the majority through every step was thus served notice. When Henry Kissinger famously said ‘The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves’, he was announcing the right to override self-determining society. When Margaret Thatcher later said, miming F.A. Hayek, ‘there is no such thing as society’, s/he was revealing the inner logic of the process – erasure of evolved social life-organization for free transnational capitalist rule across borders. Chile was the early set-point for mass murder and rule by terror of democratically self-governing society for foreign money-sequence regulation as absolute, the emerging new ‘rule of law’ for all societies by trade-treaty dictates to legislatures if not by armed invasion.
Accordingly no sovereign national rights or human rights or life-standards can be found in thousands of pages of prescription protecting transnational corporate money rights ever since. Over time, the system is structured to liquidate all social life-organization that protects and secures any means of life under public control and regulation from which transnational corporate profit can be made and multiplied. Conform or be embargoed. The hollowing out of life-systems is now so automatic that one stripping after another occurs without stop as a normal universal – rising debts and deficits, austerity programmes, structural adjustments, essential job cuts, privatizations, elimination of unions, competitive tax reductions, offshore havens, wars for resources, endless civil service reductions, lush subsidies to corporations, currency attacks, reduction of benefits, rises in student fees and debts, pension reductions and losses, deregulation and cutback on common life-resources at every level – where does it end? ‘More wealth’ for transnational private money-sequences keeps growing to ever less life and means for peoples and life-conditions – the ‘necessary sacrifices’ of the cancer system in formation.10
The Real Entitlement System: Transnational Money-Sequencing Eating Societies Alive
This system therefore seeks only to multiply its money-sequences. Life-requirements at any level do not exist for it. It grinds down, swallows, demands, overwhelms, mass murders, eats at the margins, and makes one war after another on what does not join it. Its genetic code is revealed in its invariant pattern of behaviour. Its formula, in turn, is complex, but every element is required to recognize the full meaning: Whatever the systemic destruction of human life and universally accessible life means of a society, and however they are provided by peaceful and self-governing life ordering, the ultimately driving transnational money-sequences dismantle them to multiply themselves. All proceeds in accordance with the unseen $ → AasM → $1-2-3 → n code whose life-blind elaborations despoil social and ecological life-support systems as their feeding cycle. As on the micro level: ‘Cancer’s modes of advance operate like brilliant military tacticians – when their original route to proliferation and invasion is blocked, they switch to an alternate one, marching through one immune-suppressed passage to another without resistance.’
Social immune suppression allows every invasive depredation. For two decades the reverse epithet of ‘economic miracle’ became the signature category for the victim societies, and every one of them was invaded by what was not named: self-multiplying foreign money-sequences overriding life-requirements at all levels. The phenomena Klein describes are cancer-system mutations without the diagnosis. As you read what follows, consider whether the ravages of social life-organization by the system have been slowed down since Chile, or now run amok across the world including now much of America and the European Union:
Chile under Chicago School Rule was offering a glimpse of the future of the global economy [sic] a pattern that would repeat again and again, from Russia to South Africa to Argentina: an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting felling super profits and frantic consumerism, ringed by the ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half of the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; decimation of nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of private debts into public hands.
In the remainder of this passage, Klein’s description is deepened by my square-bracketed diagnosis of the system cancer she does not name:
In Chile if you were outside the wealth bubble, the miracle looked like the great Depression, but inside its tight airtight cocoon [around the agents of private money-sequences seeking solely to be more], the [self-maximizing money-sequence] profits flowed so free and fast [without life-coordinate, limit or regulator] that the easy wealth made possible by shock therapy-style reforms [destroying evolved social life-organization by invasive death, terror and takeover] have been the crack cocaine of financial markets ever since [the revel in making a ‘big killing’]. And that is why the financial world did not respond to the obvious contradictions [common life-requirements versus private money-sequence multiplication – the missing principle of diagnosis], by reassessing the basic assumptions of laissez-faire [in fact, freedom of money-sequences to invade life-hosts without protective bound]. Instead it is reacted with the junkie’s logic: Where is the next fix? [the next rush of overwhelming all lines of defence to multiplied treasure].
Klein documents the pattern of shock attacks and social disasters at journalist level. The square brackets decode the systemic depredation of social life-organization as an objective cancer system.11
DIAGNOSTIC HISTORY: EMERGENCE OF THE CANCER SYSTEM ACROSS NATIONS AND TIME
The Vietnam War ended in US defeat as the invasion of Chile was being planned. The Vietnam holocaust had profited the military-industrial complex with huge and multiplying guaranteed cost-plus profits at massive life-cost. But it failed on every level. The productive-force advance of capitalism was reversed into destructive-force orgy. Vast gushings of human lives, public wealth and environmental conditions were the means of money-sequencing by armaments, oil and military-service corporations, but did not succeed in setting the conditions of their own further growth in the surrounding region. Productive leadership in colonization – think of the magnificent public Post Office in Hanoi built by the French decades before – mutated into ‘bomb them back to the stone age’ instead. In place of more advanced social infrastructure were craters, mines, mass prostitution, and a people who had been forced to live in tunnels. In classical capitalist terms, it was a black hole that undid the basis of the ruling world currency and the productive-profit base of US empire. It was cancer capitalism in neotenic form.
It was defeated in Vietnam, but ‘the fatal march was on’. Ever after there was censorship of war communications, press embedded reporters, and a more total system of media control to undo the social immune resistance at home and abroad that had prevailed in Vietnam. The war of aggression had failed. The hate object of China’s Communism was not touched. The Vietnamese economy was not taken over, but despoiled. The millions of people killed and maimed had aroused the world to rebellion, and falling profits and shrinking global monopoly of productive supremacy followed. But the sheer destructive waste with no productive point and enrichment of the private forces of destruction were a warning of what was to come.
From then on, an enraged imperial money party set into motion the Great Reversal of global social evolution itself. In Chile, all that that had defeated US empire in Vietnam was overcome. Total capture of resource, labour and market control by US corporate money-sequences was imposed in Nazi fashion. A psychopathic armed-force client murdered and terrorized the rapidly evolving social life-organization overnight. Transnational US corporate money-sequencing rampaged across the continent killing and terrorizing all socializing economies and resistances with boundless riches seized as ‘freedom’. Chile was quickly followed by Argentinian and Brazilian military coups and death-squad dictatorships, stripping every society’s rising life-standards to serve foreign and local oligarchical money-sequences. The same mutant de-productive system of mass-murderous aggression marched through Guatemala and El Salvador and all Latin American societies for the next 20 years – the underlying meaning of ‘the open veins of Latin America’.12
The Non-Shock Pathologization of Society Growing Beneath Connected Diagnosis
All the while in the background hardly noticed until the IMF hammer fell to restructure societies to pay, the newly multiplying debt cancer was underway. In 1970, the 15 most heavily indebted nations had an external public debt of $17.923 billion – which amounted to 9.8 per cent of their gross national product (GNP). By 1987, these same nations owed $402.171 billion, or 47.5 per cent of their GNP to foreign banks and bond money-sequencers. Interest payments owed by these countries exponentially multiplied from $2.789 billion in 1970 to $36.251 billion in 1987.13 Shock doctrine punctuates these debts when their compounding-interest extractions are not paid.
But there is a fatal system problem when all of the self-multiplying transfer of wealth goes to private transnational money-sequences from Third World education, health care and social programmes with no life-gain anywhere. Eventually the cancerous money-sequences invade Europe, the world’s leading civilization in life-protective social organization. It is this non-shock infiltration through every protective membrane of society, its peoples and their environments that is the underlying pathology of the system. It depredates everywhere – even the skin through pervasive carcinogens and toxins, people’s lungs and bellies through smoke and junk consumables, their souls through non-stop violence entertainments and desensitization, all addictive and growing beneath social resistance.
Behind the degenerating normality and the shock treatments is the cancer pattern of invasion of individual, social and ecological life-hosts. Yet the spreading depredation was not connected across disaster spectacles and the money-sequence multiplication of ‘wealth’ kept up until 2008 when the exponentially overreaching financial system itself collapsed. Even then social recognition does not kick in because the victims themselves were blamed instead. Those losing their homes were scapegoated for not meeting the small-print escalators of debt payments demanded by the Wall Street robo-mortgages in the recession-depression caused by Wall Street itself. When the compounding and manipulated debt system then hit poorer European societies with the fraudulent mortgage packages and other Wall Street-led schemes, their economies were in cumulative collapse by the same money-cancer growth. Governments and taxpayers then paid and still pay out more hundreds of billions of dollars to the same cancerous bank system to sustain debt-service payments at higher compounding rates, and, throughout all, is called ‘saving Greece’, or Portugal, or Spain, or Italy – who is next? – when in fact only foreign banks get the bail-out money. In the meantime the private transnational money-sequences keep attacking their bonds and currencies of payment by super-leveraged funds without legal-tender substance to indebt them further as more IMF austerity programmes ensure deepening collapse.14 This is the death spiral still in motion.
On the ground, the private money-sequencing predation across borders called ‘debt obligations’ grows through peoples’ most basic means of life of homes and food as well as their social life-support systems of public services and employment, pensions, income security programmes, public health systems, and environmental protections. For poignant particular example of newly normalized circuits of financial predation, multiplying speculations on the three top food commodities – rice, corn and wheat – spikes the prices of the staple diets of the world’s 2 billion poorest people. Since high finance got into a frenzy of betting on the prices of these foods that people must have, ‘a seventh of the world’s population cannot afford to eat’ when the prices escalate – as between 2005 and 2008 when average food prices rose 83 per cent with no harvest failures.15 In 2008, the same ravenous money-sequencing with no function but deprivation of people’s lives brought down the global financial system with homes as ‘securitization’. Yet the carcinogenic conglomerate money-sequences are still being bailed out of the last crash to go on doing the same more – by the end of 2011, $29.6 trillion from the US Fed alone.16
The Cancer System in Formation: The 1991 Eco-Genocide of Iraq as Signal of the Meaning
The chief marker of the cancer system is invasion of life-hosts, means of life and life-support systems to grow itself. Capturing control of people’s basic means of life to multiply transnational money-sequences is the financial mode, while armed forces make way for and enforce them. Perhaps the most revealing signal of the emergent cancer system erupted as the Soviet Union and its lines of defence were in the process of collapse after Iraq’s surrender to the US in 1991.
Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie had given the green light to Iraq’s armed force solution to dispute with Kuwait over a subsoil oilfield running under both countries – ‘We have no interest in inter-Arab disputes’. This allowed the invasion of Iraq to ‘save Kuwait’, but in fact to begin to turn Iraq’s nationalized oilfields into foreign money-sequences, as confirmed later. Saddam Hussein himself was a long-time paid CIA agent with its office next door, and had waged a war of aggression against Iran under US guidance and full logistical support.17 After official surrender, the victim Iraqi people who had formerly built by far the most developed social infrastructure in the Arab world were then mass murdered in a new way.
War-criminal bombing of desert Iraq’s central life-water support system began the covert genocide of the Middle East’s leading social infrastructure with continuous US-British bombing sanctions against any repair. What was predicted by Harvard Medical School researchers to kill over 500,000 children was executed month after month.18 Full-spectrum foreign money-sequencing through Iraq under the Comprehensive Privatization Programme was down the road, but here the bases of social life-organization were destroyed by bombing with no reason. A later-leaked US Defense Intelligence document entitled ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’ spells out how post-war sanctions were constructed to prevent clean water to Iraq’s people to deliberately cause mass diseases. I cite the key lines of US Defense Intelligence Agency reports: ‘With no domestic sources of water treatment replacement or chemicals like chlorine’ and ‘no desalination membranes’, and with water ‘laded with biological pollutants and bacteria’, ‘epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid’ will occur, but ‘it will probably take six months before the system is fully degraded’. The documents continue, ‘Disease Information / Effects of Bombing on Disease’: ‘Conditions are favorable for communicable disease outbreaks [by coalition bombing]’ with the ‘most likely diseases during next sixty-ninety days of diarrhial diseases (particularly children) acute respiratory diseases (colds and influenza); typhoid; hepatitis (particularly children); measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children); meningitis including meningococcal (particularly children), cholera’. ‘Medical Problems in Iraq’, dated March 15, 1991, reports success that the ‘water is less than 5 percent of the original supply – diarrhea is four times above normal levels – Conditions in Baghdad remain favorable for disease outbreaks’. The fourth document of May 1991 continues: ‘Cholera and measles have emerged at refugee camps’, and the fifth document in June, ‘Health Conditions in Iraq’, is heavily censored, but can be deciphered as reporting ‘almost all medicines in critically short supply’ and ‘Gastroenteritis killing children – in the south, 80 percent of the deaths are children.’19
Bombing Third World social life-infrastructures to open their resources to seizure was now done for the first time. That it was and remains the ‘supreme crime’ – a war of aggression – and that its destruction of life-support systems was the utmost ‘war crime’ and ‘crime against humanity’ under international law were silenced in the mass and state media.20 The ‘supreme crime which contains in itself all accumulated evils of the whole’ was enacted with no social recognition of it. The supreme crime of non-defensive armed invasion was to happen again in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, and in, continuous threat, to Iran from then to the present day. The Soviet Enemy which had justified every criminal intervention in Third World societies in the past 40 years no longer existed, but the next move was not ‘Peace Dividend’ as so many trusted would happen when the USSR fell. On the contrary, only when the USSR was helpless did the war-criminal bombing of civilian infrastructures begin in next-door Iraq.
In the wider world, the life-security of peoples was eaten away a piece at a time. In Yugoslavia, the most democratic of the socialist societies, it was by US presidential directive and debt-trap first, then ethnic division with as common life-support systems were stripped, and then saturation bombing.21 As always, everyone’s lives and life-conditions were made far worse.
The 9-11 Strategy to Reset World Uprising to No Resistance
The deep driver of socialized Iraq’s and socialist Yugoslavia’s destruction was not recognized. Yet other societies who were onside with corporate and bank rights globalization were suffering economic breakdowns, social decline and ecological crises nonetheless. Although the cancer system sweeping across the planet remained unseen, ever more people everywhere began to recognize the ‘New World Order’ was a cumulative threat to the future of their own societies as well the planet. There was no life-serving domain or sector not harmed by it.
A deeper mutation then occurred as a civil commons opposition built across borders against the still publicly unnamed cancer system. 9-11 finished the job in seizing Iraq’s world-premium oilfields, but the genetic programme to overrun all confining borders to multiply private foreign money-sequences without public opposition was the wider meaning. Now that the ‘Communist plot for world rule’ was no longer saleable as justification, ‘Islamic terrorism’ became the hate-object. 9-11 exploded. Osama bin Laden was blamed and found guilty as soon as the buildings came down. Afghanistan was guilty too with no proof provided because it stood in the way of accessing Central Asia oil in the fallen Soviet Union. Manufacture of the demon was easy because the ‘Islamic’ forces of Afghanistan had themselves been financed and armed by the US to successfully bleed the Soviet Union to death.22
Just as Saddam was CIA-controlled before he became the devil to be warred upon, so here. The master projection-invasion operation is well known, as Hermann Goering explained long ago. ‘It is easy. All you have to do is to tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce … lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any [sic] country.’23 In 1933, he explained the Nazi-arranged Reichstag fire and the immediate patriotic emergency laws to arrest opponents ‘as a well-prepared Bolshevik revolution in Germany’.24
The 9-11 operation was anticipated by the first edition of this book but years earlier vetted by US geo-strategic leader Zbigniew Brzezinski. He participated in the Project for a New American Century, declaring the post-Soviet mission of ‘full-spectrum U.S. dominance’ across the globe, and he identified the ‘necessity’ to have some ‘new Pearl Harbor’ for ‘unhindered financial and economic access to Central Asia’s natural resources’, now the Soviet Union did not exist to control them.25 The ‘great prize’ was long planned, but the cross-continental invasion was not viable ‘except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived threat’: that is, decoded, to justify uncontrolled armed-force opening of new pathways for the conglomerate money-sequence system without accountability to any life-host, border, law or right to resist.
It was not just to seize the oil. It was clear to geo-strategic planners that something had to beat back a growing worldwide uprising against the ‘New World Order’. For every society re-engineered to the system’s ‘free capital and commodity flows’ lost ever more of their lives and life-support systems to its compounding growth with no accountability to any life-requirement at all. The new corporate rights were, as we have seen, licences to maximize money-sequence extraction from societies’ natural resources, markets, workforces, social infrastructures, their banks and everything else, whatever the life-destructive consequences. Few penetrated the ultimately regulating money-sequence code as $ → AasM → $1-2-3 → n : where AasM = All as Means. But there was a rising civil community of informed people across borders who knew something had gone terribly wrong, with only more of the same and worse in frenetic motion.
This civil community – the subject of Chapter 6 – crosses domains and vocations comes up from the ground. It was stopped by 9-11, but emerged again in the ‘No Blood for Oil’ movement against the US-led bombing of Iraq in 2003. It emerged again after 2008 in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but again without the defined structure of alternative required.26 Assured civil rights protections were effectively removed by the Patriot Act and its like which were instituted across the world making any resistance a form of ‘terrorism’. Thus the ‘US police state’ came into legal force, as documented by political scientist Andrew Kolin in State Power and Democracy.27 Now the self-multiplying private money-sequences were free of advancing human and civil rights. The rights of other societies’ to their natural resources, markets, civil services, and economic self-determination had already been overridden by transnational treaty diktats, but now new internal legislation allowed all opposition to qualify as ‘terrorist’.
The Rising World Awareness Prior to 9-11
The successive collapses of Latin American and Asian Tiger ‘miracles’ and the once mighty Soviet Union showed the system was no longer a real economy, but its catastrophic failures were always blamed on the victims. As for the social and natural life-support systems which were the underlying concern of the rising world protests, they did not compute to the ruling disorder. While it brought disasters everywhere it spread, the causal connections were was blocked out a priori. All societies continued to be forced open to the private transnational conglomerate money-sequences as their freedom. And once they were forced open to the foreign money-sequences through them, societies eventually suffered unprecedented crises and collapses – including an increasingly hollowed-out US and European Union.
Market shocks punctuated the relentless programme of life dispossessions to grow private money-sequences, but a deeper meta-programme ruled. Whatever enabled or protected people’s lives that could be converted to transnational money-sequences was. Never-ending downsizings, cuts and elimination of people’s livelihoods, public sectors, benefits, pensions, income security, and regulatory protections on one side, and ever-growing tax reductions, privatizations, and subsidies for private transnational corporations and money-capital gains on the other. The pathological pattern was becoming ever more evident, but still unnamed. A transnational private money-sequence network without any life-roots or commitment was exponentially enriched, while an increasing majority of societies and the world were progressively without secure lives, vocations or life-support systems as the planetary life-host itself destabilized at all levels. By August of 2001, over 500,000 people from across Europe demonstrated in Naples in the biggest protest ever – far bigger than the more famous December 1999 uprising against the WTO in Seattle.
NATO jets buzzed it, and police violently assaulted hundreds as they slept, but rising mass anger across continents only grew. The lack of any Peace Dividend from the end of the Cold War had by now also proved that it was not the Enemy which mattered or even the future of the life-world, but only more money-sequencing to more now equated to ‘the economy’. The system’s degeneration was epitomized in the new and unelected US president, George Bush Jr. He represented the rapacious money-sequences wanting more without any limit or life-standard whatever happened. ‘You are the rich and very rich’, he famously said to his funders, ‘You are my constituency.’ The money-sequence cancer now ran through the American voting system itself. False attack ads and super-fraud led the presidential elections, votes were cancelled in their tens of thousands, and the US Supreme Court stopped the vote from being counted. Bush’s number-one financial backer, Ken Lay, founder of the criminal Enron enterprise, was a paradigm of the system. Enron became fabulously rich as a financialized energy corporation producing no energy or means of producing energy, bankrupting and blacking-out California, the eleventh biggest economy in the world, and bankrolling the energy-deregulating US presidency itself – all by financial manipulations with no driver but to extract more. Most knew something was very wrong, but not the common cause. The unelected president was booed and egged before inauguration. The giant pipeline from the ex-Soviet states counted on by US Big Oil was stopped by Afghanistan with the US threat of a ‘carpet of bombs’ weeks before 9-11. A recession was in motion, and the critical threshold of belief in the system was coming undone.
The 9-11 Construction in Historical Overview
The time was ripe for what had been geo-strategically gamed with countless new edicts already written – ‘9-11’. Its subliminal meaning – ‘call the armed authorities for help’ – was like everything else not publicly decoded. The majority-despised puppet of the energy and military money-sequencers was, overnight, magically transformed to an untouchable ‘President at war’. Any questions of the official conspiracy theory turning political disgrace into untold riches and world power overnight were now ‘terrorist’ and ‘conspiracy theory’. As for the official conspiracy theory itself, no claimed fact was evidentially proved. Buildings fell, but their heat-tested heavy-gage steel forms collapsed into their own footprints – physically impossible from jet fire. As to who did it, the first forensic question of any murder investigation – ‘cui bono’, who benefits? – was not asked. The hate-object bin Laden was found publicly guilty on the spot with no test of evidence, and never charged by the FBI.
Legal due process was abolished from top to bottom, and the official inquiry was led by a Bush campaign manager. Yet anyone asking questions risked civil life, job and media slander with impunity – as I myself discovered early on with fact-free and foaming-at-the mouth denunciations from the Wall Street Journal and the Globe and Mail as well as Fox News and a hate-letter campaign (including from a famed neo-Darwinist colleague) directed to my University. Even Chomsky raised none of these issues, and his friend Michael Albert of ZNet merely diverted from the facts in online debate with me.28 The fire-commander fraternity tells me – pleading confidence in concern about media attack – ‘our people are very angry at the fact they were told it was a jet-fuel fire when it was military ordinance’.
From the start of buildings falling into their footprints at the speed of gravity, there is little or nothing to the official conspiracy theory which stands up to epistemic investigation.29 While hundreds of highly qualified Engineers and Architects for 9-11 Truth now independently question the official conspiracy theory, a wider, more sinister pattern is diagnosed here. ‘9-11’ opened the floodgates to US corporate money-sequences of every kind to move behind the US war-machine across Islamic borders in destructive wars of public dispossession. ‘Everything has changed’ means, decoded, all is justified. Iraq has been war-criminally invaded, destroyed and control of its oil taken which used to provide 95 per cent of the Iraqi people’s revenues (its government even excluded from the ruling Iraq Oil Council run by foreign oil corporations).The oil-rich Libya has been seized for its spoils by proxies backed by special forces and heavy NATO bombing of cities to ‘protect civilians and populated areas’, while giant global-trade partner China was tapped into Darfur’s oilfields. Tumorous Somalia has been destabilized and invaded for years with off-shore as well as inland oil, the prize potentially bigger than Nigeria’s deposits. The fabulously oil-rich Iran is continually threatened with bombing strikes, driving the society into deeper darkness, and Syria is strategically key for another ‘humanitarian intervention’ – already, a special forces-backed insurrection has been declared the legal government.30
The armed-force invasions and justifications occupy media, state and public attention, but metastases of transnational corporate money-sequences are the deeper causal mechanism at work. After 9-11 allowed invasion and occupation of Iraq with no cause, US-led corporate money-sequences invaded everything by direct armed command – from oil to agriculture to social programmes and food subsidies to open-season looting of the creations of the world’s most ancient known civilization. The evolved social life-organization that had provided for essential life-goods for all citizens was obliterated, as in Libya later, and Yugoslavia before.31 Within the occupier countries themselves the same programme was at work, but it was more insidious. Wherever public dollars could be converted to corporate money-sequences, they were – increasingly by armed-force command across the occupier-occupied divide. As Klein reports, the US forces themselves were privatized – from ten soldiers for every corporate contractor in 1991 to 1.4 to 1 by 2004, with revolving-door CEOs Cheney and Rumsfeld leading the way. The 9-11 creation of the Department of Homeland Security simply contracted all work out to private corporations. Bush tried to turn the multi-trillion dollar US Old Age Security system into private money-sequencing too, but social immune response prevented it. Privatization of health care and life-security programmes all the while kept advancing in demands and legislation, while in foretelling words, the head of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) dismissed its responsibility as ‘an oversized entitlement programme’.32 What would be next?
In system overview, the 9-11 construction mutated the global money-sequence system from transnational corporate-trade fiat rule which was increasingly repudiated by the civil commons of the world into full-spectrum right of armed attack of any resisting society or individual – with no clear limits on the license to kill, cage, kidnap, torture or strip-search, anyone on any excuse. US drones now murder freely across continents with war drums perpetually beating for bombing and invasion of yet another society. Always 9-11 is the background enabling cause. Always masking euphemisms like ‘Patriot Act’, ‘Defense Authorization Act’, ‘rendition’, ‘drone interdiction’, ‘security’ are used to legalize murder, seizure, imprisonment, assault, strip-down, and abuse of typically harmless victims. As of April 2012 the ‘Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act (HR347)’ allows seizure, beating and imprisonment for ten years for protesting near someone with secret service protection. It, too, grounds in 9-11 and is directed at anyone in the new Occupy Movement.33 One might say a strategic incarceration of the US and the world is being set in place to ensure no obstacles to transnational money-sequencing and its protection, whatever the ruin of organic, social and ecological life.
In non-arrest time, social life-organization and functions continue to be eaten away one cut after another across the world to ever-declining life-security, labour protection and living wage, social life-support systems, environmental conditions, and vocations for the next generation.34
New Orleans and the Failed US State
What happened to New Orleans in late August 2005 when the long-predicted Hurricane Katrina came is a paradigm example of the private money-sequence cancer system. The already rotting public levees of America’s famed city were not repaired or bolstered by any public body, including the US Army Corps of Engineers, despite years of expert warning that they were inadequate, and despite their vulnerability because of extensive canal dredging for commercial ventures which exposed the worst flooded areas. Most of the city’s levees thus broke somewhere, and the predictable worst followed – submersion of 80 per cent of a legendary big city in ocean and sewer water, the ruin of the lives, permanent homelessness, deaths and abandoned bodies of countless tens of thousands of citizens, the police and vigilante armed-force treatment of refugees as criminals blocking their exit from the flood, the utter failure of any federal assistance during the peak flooding for five days, non-stop failures of emergency assistance afterwards in clean-up and rehousing, and a real-estate bubble for the gated rich which still climbs.35 All expressed the cancer-system pattern with no-one naming it.
While the US government demonstrated itself as a failed state with the words not yet said, the deeper problem was the spreading cancer of social life-organization. In the case of New Orleans, no level of responsible government was left to respond. New Orleans’ creative civil community of blues and jazz music and Big Easy celebration known across the world were, in effect, swallowed alive. Not securing the levees, not ensuring emergency transport, response, medical attention, food, or shelter and ensuring the mass clearance of the un-moneyed for developer profits – every step followed from the system’s genetic code. Deregulated small-print manipulation of contracts to avoid any responsibility to rebuild homes insured against hurricanes freed even the liable money-sequence corporations from responsibility to respond – ‘the damage was done by the water from the hurricanes, not from the hurricanes’.36 Corporate money-sequences gained more than if the cataclysm had been prevented, while those with insufficient money to pay for their lives were terrorized or died. Even seven years later countless thousands of the victims cannot return to their family homes.
The cancer system did not stop with the vaunted presidential brand change to a black man. When the private money-sequence system itself collapsed in 2008, the haemorrhaging out of public money to save Wall Street predation across the world never stopped coming. The code was clear, but not decoded. Unlimited public wealth for private and fraudulent money-sequences of Wall Street, but none for the lives of people and the life of a great city being drowned by failure of the US-army-built levees. The US army was, instead, occupying Iraq and Afghanistan to set up for the takeover of Big Oil and other transnational corporate money-sequencing as New Orleans remained in ruins. All the while the big banks were hoarding and speculating public-money infusions as the US and European economies themselves sank into undeclared Depression.37
The US Government Accounting Office’s own audit of the Federal Reserve in 2011 demonstrated without press notice that ‘over $16 trillion was allocated to private corporations and banks for “financial assistance” during and after the 2008 fiscal crisis’.38 At the same time President Obama was agreeing with the Tea Party to cut $1.4 trillion from the remaining social security system to incapacitate it further, and by April 2012 the cuts had more than doubled.39 In Greece, as in New Orleans, as in Baghdad, humanity’s evolution, memory and creative life are overrun, abandoned, and destroyed while private conglomerate money-sequences multiply their feeding on life-hosts.
Decoding the Deep-Structural Lies that Block Social-Immune Recognition
The justifications that conceal the cancer system are many and various. This is the social-immune suppression. ‘Productivity gains’ mean, in fact, only higher margins of money-value extraction by private money-sequences. ‘Ever increasing millions are being lifted out of poverty’ means more people in urban slums rather than countrysides with a dollar or two a day to live on. ‘Wealth increases provide people with jobs’ means more private money-sequence gains to be speculated off-shore with trade-shell escapes from taxation and no living-wage employment provided. ‘Ever more goods for consumers’ means more addictive and life-disabling commodities bought and consumed. ‘New efficiencies’ and ‘cost savings’ in privatization of public services predictably means less of both.40
The masks are manifold. But one system constant grows. Inhuman and growing impoverishment, mass unemployment, public service eradication, decline of universal education and health care, end of food and fuel subsidies, privatization of food inspection itself, looting of natural resources and wars – all feed the ever-rising wealth of private money-sequencers.41 If any of this seems one-sided, seek a counter-trend. It will only be found where societies put a stop to it by reclaiming their real economies, natural resources and life-support for the poor – as in much of Latin America today. Yet the ecological life-supports of the world continue to be turned into money.
From South to North, West to East: System Tumours in the First World
Once rated by the UNDP as the best country in the world to live, Canada in the second decade of the third millennium now succumbs under a new Big Oil rule that is hardly seen. The cancer law is invariant – ever more for private money-sequences and ever less for life-hosts. Canada’s branch-plant state follows in tow. It has stopped enforcement of the Canada Health Act, the nation’s proudest achievement, and simultaneously reduces its corporate tax rates towards the lowest in the developed world while stripping every life-protective public agency bite by bite.42
The meta-programme is well known – foreign oil and money-sequences rule with an election-bought state as servant. Vast tar-sands multiply ‘dirty oil’, private oil fortunes and high-paid temp work. But the tar-sands require six to twelve barrels of Canada’s fresh water for every barrel of oil, 25 per cent of the country’s natural gas demand to boil it out, a carbon footprint 240 per cent greater than US domestic crude, and an already doubled size with near the world’s lowest public share of revenues (a fraction of 1 per cent for a $60-dollar barrel).43 Ecocide follows. Devastation of forest watersheds, indigenous habitats and carbon-absorbing peat-moss, vast tailings ponds seeping poisons next to the 140-square-kilometre open mining pit, the world’s biggest point-source of carbon pollution, and non-renewable resource extraction to grow private money-sequences as global meaning.
The great and pristine Athabaska forests and River above the tar-sands 75 metres of drilling down are categorized as ‘overburden’, while the Big Oil money-sequences increasingly poison the land and waters as oil prices climb. Recognizing the catastrophic effects on every level of life, researcher Andrew Nikoforuk fittingly concludes that this eco-genocidal growth system is a ‘cancerous hold on national life’.44
From Big-Oil Devastation to Nuclear Meltdown: Decoding the Global Cancer Driver
At the far side of the world is Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe. It has killed over 19,000 people and left 340,000 still homeless. But who has read or heard that its nuclear-plant meltdown has been managed throughout by a powerful private corporation, TEPKO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), whose money-sequence growth pathway caused the meltdown by the 15-metre tsunami on March 11, 2010? In covert fact, deregulated TEPKO deliberately built the nuclear reactor ten metres lower than the original safety-requirement design to slash costs for more profit.45 With the original safety plan in place at 20 metres, the 15-metre tsunami would have been blocked from hitting the nuclear reactor, and the worst disaster in Japan since its deliberate nuclear bombing would have been averted. The testifying executive justified the catastrophic decision as normal and good (emphasis added): ‘The economy of nuclear power generation is always at the center of our attention.’ Economy – absence of waste – is equated to cost-cutting which, in fact, wastes thousands of lives and countless more in continuous threat while destroying countless hundreds of billions of dollars worth of built structures. This is the reversal of meanings built into the cancer system.
What did government do once the supreme emergency occurred? It stayed the course of abdicating the public interest. The non-regulation which allowed the catastrophe continued in ‘obfuscation, delay, inactivity and anxiety to protect corporate interests’ with a ‘muzzled media and the enveloping tentacles of the employers’ organization, the Keidanren, as if nothing had changed’.46 The inner logic of the disorder again remains constant across continents. It overrides life and life-support systems to grow money-sequences in violation of life-requirements at every level – not only in ruinous mega-energy projects for super-profits whose disasters never end, but in lowering wages, breaking unions, firing workers, removing and de-defining pensions, deregulating resource extractions, dismantling and privatizing public sectors, looting national resources, and accumulating pollutions and depletions. What is safe?
Without diagnosis of the mutating money-sequence code beneath the growing chaotic phenomena, the fatal disorder deepens. Without tracking of all the pathways of life-threatening disorder, the cancer pattern is not recognized.
Endnotes
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Analysis of the systematic parallels are reported early on in my ‘Fascism and Neo-Conservatism: Is There a Difference?’, Praxis International, 1 (1983), 86–102. Mass-media articles, radio broadcasts, and conference papers accompanied this analysis as a kind of ‘social immune system’ function which has become widely borne since, but the only effects I could discern were in less reckless rhetoric and strategic focus of the social counter-revolution on the transnational economic front, later to be euphemized even by the left as ‘neo-liberalism’.
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‘In twenty years’, summarizes a biologist from the once world-leading Soviet Academy of Sciences now in the more lucratively funded Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Micro-Organisms, ‘all the positive things about the Soviet Union have been destroyed, and replaced by nothing’ (Will Englund, ‘More Money, but Far Less Success’, Guardian Weekly, February 6, 2012, 32).
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While Klein’s Shock Doctrine dramatically confirms the diagnosis of this study without naming it, the The Cancer Stage of Capitalism was given to her by my brother Roy five years before Shock Doctrine was published.
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This decoding of the spurious ‘market’ value system is spelled out in detail in Chapter 5.
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Gavin O’Toole, ‘Analysis: Chile’s Forestry Plan Coming Under Fire’, Guardian Weekly, January 27, 2012, p. 12.
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Klein, Shock Doctrine, p. 543. This is why Canadian Barrick Gold founder regaled Pinochet as one to whom ‘we all owe a great debt of gratitude’ with the University of Toronto honouring him in turn for $30 million promised for the Munk School of Global Affairs. All things connect in the cancer system.
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David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, San Francisco: Berrett, Koehler, 1995, provides an inside expert account of the original corporate-loaded process of these unaccountable transnational trade constructions.
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A systematic spelling out of these transnational trade-investment treaty fiats is provided in John McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market As An Ethical System, Toronto and Westport, CT: Garamond and Kumarian Press, 1998, and Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, See also note 32.
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See note (
76) 25. -
The oncologist’s description of cancer on the micro level identifies the invasive spreading destruction of life-organization that occurs on both micro and macro levels: ‘Cancer cells do not merely multiply by division; they migrate through the body, destroy other tissues, invade organs, and colonize distant sites … abnormal genetic cascades of aberrant signals [enable] traveling through bloodstream to invade by … accelerating growth, enabling mobility, recruiting vessels … a pathological mirror [of the social level] … cancer cells are hyperactive, scrappy, survival endowed, fecund … [in beginning] driven to grow more swiftly than neighbour’s … [with] uncontrolled division… cancer’s primoridial ancestor … another decade passes … now a fatal march is on …’ (Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies, pp. 376–82). Both mutating multiplication and immune suppression must occur, however, for the cancerous growth system to become malignant on any level.
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William Blum’s classic, Rogue State, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000, and John Perkins’ inside Confessions of an Economic Hitman, San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler, 2004, confirm without the diagnosis the cancer system in formation.
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Vincent Ferraro and Melissa Rosser (ed. Michael Klare and Daniel Thomas), World Security: Challenges for a New Century, New York: Martin’s Press, 1994, pp. 332–55.
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The volumes cited earlier by Chossudovsky, Lendman, McMurtry, Palast and Wood provide rich documentation of this overall global pattern of the money-sequence cancer system as both normalized and crisis producing.
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Hazel Healy, ‘Food Speculation has Dire Consequences for World’s Poorest’, CCPA Monitor (February 2012), 20–1. These consequences in clued mass starvation, or murder as Healy diagnoses it. The cancer system kills in many ways.
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James Felkerson, ‘$29,000,000,000,000: A Detailed Look at the Fed’s Bail-out by Funding Facility and Recipient’. Levy Economic Institute Bard College, posted December 11, 2011, http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2011/12/bailout-total-29-616-trillion-dollars/, retrieved March 29, 2012.
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See note (
68) 17. -
Available at http://www.gulflink.osd.mil.
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The laws cited here are now all available on internet. Bruce Broomhall, International Justice and the International Criminal Court, New York: Oxford University Press, 46, cites the ‘supreme crime’ in full.
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John McMurtry, ‘The Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the U. S. Criminal State’, February 2013. http://www.journalof911studies.com/articles.html provides an in-depth monograph of this turning-point event of the third millennium in light of this book’s investigation.
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Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995, pp. 278–9.
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‘Berlin Under the New Regime’, Guardian Weekly, March 2, 1933/2012.
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York: Basic Books, 1997, pp. 124, 211.
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The viable constitutional framework required across borders has been spelled out in McMurtry, Value Wars, 121–220.
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Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
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For analysis of the debate, see http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq37.html. Direct text is available in ‘Reply to ZNet Commentary of May 22, 2002: What Did Bush Know?’, ZNet, June 8, 2002, http://www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/mcmurty.cfm.
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See David Ray Griffin (ed.), The New Pearl Harbor, Northhampton: Olive Branch Press, 2004. My analysis of 9-11 as following from known strategic self-maximizing rationality is available online under ‘9-11 and the 9-11 Wars’ (Science for Peace, October 2001) and in hard copy in ‘Explaining the Inexplicable: Anatomy of an Atrocity’, in James Fetzer (ed.), The 9-11 Conspiracy, Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, 2007, pp. 221–91.
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The US planning strategy of overthrowing governments not sufficiently subjugated or allied in the transnational money-sequence system to have open access to its natural and strategic resources has a eight-step generic programme never published but confirmable by observation since the fall of the Soviet Union: (i) covert introduction of special force operatives to lead, arm and finance new division and/or armed insurrection (a supreme crime under international law, but above all never named as such in official or corporate media); (ii) which is therefore perceived by all uninformed people to be a legitimate citizen uprising against an always-stereotyped despotism which is, in fact, much worse in still-supported client countries; (iii) whose orchestrated special-forces leadership forms rapidly into X Liberation Army or National Council (Kosovo/Croatia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran) which (iv) after sufficient killings always blamed on the government alone, never the special-forces led insurrection, or failing that, by non-stop false accusation of weapons of mass destruction, (v) leads to naming of the armed insurrection or financed opposition outside the country, the X National Council, as the ‘legitimate government’, thereby overthrowing by external direction and force the long-existing or elected government now deposed as an international legal entity, (vi) thus allowing seizure of assets and escalating transnational attack and embargo to divide, weaken and render increasingly defenceless the government and all associated with it; (vi) then bombing the country’s civilian infrastructure in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’ or ‘protection of civilians’ (who are always killed and harmed in mass numbers far more than before); and (vii) then presiding over the spoils in many forms such as oil led by transnational corporations as major beneficiaries (viii) with none ever calling them ‘war looters’ or the whole process as the ‘supreme crime’ and ‘war criminal under law’. Until this genetic code of the cancer system at war in metastasis is recognized, it repeats again and again, as it has the last over 20 years.
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Klein, Shock Doctrine, p. 354. Surrounding documentation regarding New Orleans, pp. 488ff. is excellent here as well.
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The Supreme Court at the end of March 2012 ruled anyone can be seized and strip-searched for any alleged offence, however minor, with Justice Anthony Kenny explaining that ‘the ruling is necessary because the 9-11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding’ (Naomi Wolf, ‘US has a New Tool to Control Masses’, Guardian Weekly, April 13, 2012).
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The European Commission Office for Youth announced in its 2012 Report that youth unemployment across the continent had skyrocketed by 7 per cent since the spring of 2008 when the deregulated transnational private financial system collapsed led by Wall Street and London. The effects did not fall on perpetrators, but on societies’ life-support systems. In Britain’s City-led March Budget 2012, for example, the top rate of income tax for those with over €1 million a year of income was cut while corporate tax rates continued reductions from 28 per cent to 26 per cent to 24 per cent to 22 per cent; while welfare recipients were required to work free for wealthy corporations, old-age pensions were frozen for 50 per cent, $16 billion more was cut out of welfare, and cuts to child benefits continued (‘UK Budget’, Guardian Weekly, March 30, 2012, p. 16). The same inner logic of public fund dispossession from human needs and life-support systems to enrich wealthy money-sequences ruled government in the US and Canada with more draconian transfers to the rich and foreign banks in Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy as – at the base of the whole economic system – youth unemployment rose to up to 46 per cent and university fees and student debts kept rising across the ‘Free World’.
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The best documentary account of the New Orleans tragedy and exposure of the failed state of the US itself is provided by Spike Lee’s searing and monumental first-hand record, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, HBO Documentary Films, 2006.
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The failure of transnational corporate insurance corporations to insure against the disasters they publicly claim to insure against to automatically siphon endless premiums from tens of millions of clients over their lives – always in place of social security systems which actually provide for citizens – is system-wide. Every small-print exception and disqualification that can be inveigled in may ruin clients’ lives, as a rich literature of victims testifies, but is ‘self-regulating’. The thousands of New Orleans victims so cheated are a graphic metonym of another level of the money-sequence cancer system sacrificing lives to its multiplication with no evident theory notice.
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Tracey Greenstein, ‘The Fed’s $16 Trillion Bailouts Under-Reported’, Forbes Magazine, http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the-feds-16-trillion-bailouts-under-reported/.
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Cuts included Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, income and home heating assistance to the poor, pension insurance, education, environment, veteran benefits, and lower federal wages, but Priority Pentagon open-cheques.
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See David Morris, ‘And The Winner Is … The Public Sector: In Health, Education and Defense, Government Programmes are More Efficient than Privatized Ones’, posted May 10, 2011, and citing that day’s New York Times, http://onthecommons.org/and-winner-isthe-public-sector.
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See, for colourful investigative account of the global financial scheme of social bloodsucking without remission, Palast, ‘The Generalissimo of Globalization’, Vulture’s Picnic, pp. 321–63.
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Critiques of the private money-sequence dismantling of Canada’s social life-fabric, life-security programmes, natural resources and rights of opposition are provided in the CCPA Monitor, December–January issues 2010–11 and 2011–12, including ‘U.S. has Become a Police State and Canada on the Same Track / Harper Builds Security State for Corporations and Investors’, pp. 28–9. The opposite direction of Argentina is provided in the 2010–11 issue by Asad Ismi, ‘Argentina was Rescued from Neoliberalism by Nestor Kirchner / Deceased Kirchner is praised by other Latin American Leaders’, pp. 30–1.
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Andrew Nikoforuk, ‘Canada’s Curse’, New Internationalist (April 2010), 8–11.
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‘Fukishima NPP Built 10 Meters Lower than Initial Plan to Cut Costs’, October 9, 2011, http://www.japan-press.co.jp.