Srila Prabhupada has told us:
"Machines mean unemployment for the many. The tractor they're using means unemployment for bulls and plowmen. Then the bulls must be killed. This is going on. Unemployment, then kill them. Send all the men to fight in Vietnam and kill them. As soon as there is overpopulation of unemployed, they declare war so that people may be killed."
(Morning Walk, Mayapur, February 12, 1976)
supakvausadhi-virudhah
vanadri-nady-udanvanto
hy edhante tava viksitaih
[Queen Kunti said:] "All these cities and villages are flourishing in all respects because the herbs and grains are in abundance, the trees are full of fruits, the rivers are flowing, the hills are full of minerals, and the oceans are full of wealth. And this is all due to Your glancing over them." (Srimad-Bhagavatam 1.8.40)
"Human prosperity flourishes by natural gifts and not by gigantic industrial enterprises. The gigantic industrial enterprises are products of a godless civilization, and they cause the destruction of the noble aims of human life. The more we increase such troublesome industries to squeeze out the vital energy of the human being, the more there will be dissatisfaction of the people in general, although a select few can live lavishly by exploitation."
How the New American Empire Really Works by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Great empires such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.
The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.
In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources.
Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.
America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars. So what is it all about?
The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.
The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.
In the New Empire success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty.
This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined.
Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens.
This truth doesn’t mean that the objects of American military aggression have escaped without cost. Large numbers of Muslims have been bombed and murdered and their economies and infrastructure ruined, but not in order to extract resources from them.
It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to extract lives from the targeted foreign populations. Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are victims of the American empire.
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached through his
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As a species, humanity is the world’s most spectacular creation. Whether shaped by evolution or divinity, its complexity is unparalleled, and progress unchallenged. Man is supposed to be a benign, social creature, and throughout my life, I have met hundreds of amazing people. Unfortunately, its cumulative history states otherwise. That is why I have always been particularly obsessed with the concept of WAR over the past two decades.
My interest in WAR was initially piqued by literature – and film – about one of the most tragic wastes of life of the 20th Century – Vietnam. Everything about this horrific event is deplorable, including:
1. The misguided reasons it was conceived
2. Fraudulent catalysts for its launch
3. 1.5 million deaths
4. Tens of billions of wasted capital
5. The appalling treatment of war veterans
But America’s “leaders” thought it a wise idea, not 20 years following World War II and 50 after World War I. A combined 75 million were killed and 150 million injured – not including the other, myriad consequences of global conflagration, with little to show for it.
Before Vietnam, the U.S. was viewed as a human rights “protector,” itself a misnomer given the large amount of questionable wars it participated in during its first 150 years of existence – many in conquest of native Indian lands.
List of Wars involving the United States &...8211; Wikipedia
However, for the most part that description fit well, and even Vietnam – misguided or not – had an element of brainwashed belief that the Vietnamese were somehow being protected by our presence. Unfortunately, as America’s economic and political POWER increased, so did the size of its government, ego, and ambition. Moreover, it should be no surprise this “triumvirate of evil” exponentially expanded when the gold standard was abandoned in 1971, a direct result of the Vietnam War. With money comes ego, and with ego ambition, as Yoda might say.
Regardless of the real story behind 9/11 – you know my view – it was incredible to see America, just 27 years after Vietnam ended, invading another large nation under questionable auspices. In this case, the President didn’t even ask for a Constitutionally-required war declaration, and Congress could care less. Hence, another decade-long WAR for no apparent reason, killing another 1.5 million people – although all you’ll ever hear about are the 6,300 U.S. soldiers. And let’s not even go into the injuries, mental trauma, property destruction, and economic collapse caused by the war. You know, things that don’t matter to Americans, so long as the government sends its “free lunch.”
Just Foreign Policy – Iraq Deaths
The Iraqi War “ended” just two months ago – while the still more ridiculous Afghanistan campaign rages on – and already the troops, thinned out and traumatized, have been deployed to the Persian Gulf to prepare for our next incursion, World War III.
Even to the casual observer, there can be no doubt America and Israel desperately want WAR, as they could not be more OVERT with their statements, actions, and plans. Heck, we have not only sanctioned Iran to the point that it is on cusp of hyperinflation and economic collapse, but have threatened our ALLIES if they don’t sanction Iran as well. We continue to speak of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, which obviously we know as little about as we did of Iraq’s supposed “Weapons of Massive Destruction.” Not to mention, the since disproven allegations that Saddam Hussein funded 9/11.
As we speak, GLOBAL gasoline prices are at all-time highs – with the heavily populated Northern Hemisphere not yet in its summer driving season – amidst an expanding global recession that will deteriorate dramatically if an Iranian military confrontation commences.
So WHY on Earth are we doing this? WHAT positive outcome can be achieved? And WHO will benefit?
To explain this conundrum, go no further than the last question – WHO will benefit. There is no simpler question than WHO will benefit, nor WHO has benefitted from essentially ALL the catastrophic decisions that led to the demise of the global economy. And that answer is thus – the Military-Industrial Complex, and the true “axis of evil” – Washington, Wall Street, and the Main Stream Media.
I would love to find a deeper psychological or philosophical meaning behind man’s actions, but have unfortunately been jaded by four decades of observation. And sadly, what I’ve learned is the quest for POWER and – particularly – MONEY, is man’s tragic flaw. For millennia, cultures have annihilated each other in the quest for POWER and MONEY, although such MONEY was not “dollars” but PHYSICAL gold and silver. Millions of good people will live until this inevitably occurs, and many will fall victim to this same tragic flaw. Eventually, mankind will be destroyed by the Earth, aliens, or its own hand, but until that time, expect nothing less than what it has always achieved – MASS DESTRUCTION.
Srila Prabhupada has told us:
"Machines mean unemployment for the many. The tractor they're using means unemployment for bulls and plowmen. Then the bulls must be killed. This is going on. Unemployment, then kill them. Send all the men to fight in Vietnam and kill them. As soon as there is overpopulation of unemployed, they declare war so that people may be killed."
(Morning Walk, Mayapur, February 12, 1976)
The acute global economic crisis today is the direct result of the continued wilful obstruction and overriding of the normal checks and balances that should operate within a capitalistic system of commerce. This interference has been perpretated by powerful banks and governments acting in collusion, for reasons of profit and power. At every instance in recent years when it looked like the economy was slipping into a necessary recession they have assumed a godlike role and stepped in to head it off. These periodic recessions are necessary to prevent excess debt building up within the system, but the banks liked the ever growing debt, because it meant ever bigger profits for them as they created money out of thin air and then lent it to everyone and everything and raked in massive interest payments. Being immensely powerful they exerted more and more control over governments and succeeded in bending them to their will, culminating in them "coming out" by actually maker bankers into Presidents and Prime Ministers, as has recently occurred in Greece and Italy. So there you have it - the world is now controlled and governed by bankers. The problem with this situation is that their objectives, which are the accumulation of ever greater profit and power, are at odds with those of the population at large.
The reason that things are coming to a head now is that global debt has grown to such gargantuan proportions that the parasites, the banking elites, are now killing their hosts, which is everyone else - Federal governments, State governments, businesses and ordinary citizens. Even the parasites realize that if they kill their hosts, their profit potential is going to be reduced, which is why they have clamped interest rates in interest years - the hosts are totally maxed out on debt and the idea of the interest rate controls is to allow them just sufficient resources to survive, while siphoning off as much profits as possible from their labor. To put it in a nutshell, the banks are farming the world for huge profits, and reducing the global population to a state of feudal serfdom - rather like some sports shoe companies have done with their laborors in places like Indonesia.
The situation has now become dangerously unstable, because everyone and everything is maxed out with debt, which we should not forget is frequently leveraged to far greater extremes via derivatives, and in many instances victims have gone way beyond their capacity to repay. This can only mean one of two things - default or repayment or servicing of debt in devalued coin. In such circumstances it only takes some spark - a catalyst - to bring the whole system crashing down, what we might term a "gigantic global reset", which is actually necessary and is going to happen as a deflationary implosion, or happen later as a result of accelerating QE via hyperinflation and its resulting economic wasteland. That catalyst is Europe. The discordant buffoons running Europe have created such an unholy mess that it is unravelling at extraordinary speed. Realizing that their creditors are not going to be able to repay them, the banks are scrambling to push the bill for their excesses onto governments and taxpayers via bailouts and austerity measures, which they are able to do because of the power they wield over politicians, many are who are severely compromised. The citizens of Greece and Spain don't need to be told that a deflationary implosion is already underway in their countries, with a vicious circle of falling productivity and reduced tax revenues well underway that is getting worse and worse, so the austerity measures look set to backfire on the bankers and their political representatives. If these austerity measures and associated deflation spread we are looking at a global depression, since Europe is the world's biggest economy. European leaders, which is to say Central Bankers, are well behind the curve with this and need to get cranking the QE money pumps without delay, in order to put off the onset of depression. This will buy time, and is thus the most attractive option for them, but will still lead to a collapse that is first preceded by hyperinflation.
What is set out above is "The Big Picture" of the world economy. The world needs a long and deep depression in order to purge itself of excess debt and the distortions, inefficiences and misallocation of capital resulting therefrom, and it is going to get it, QE and hyperinflation first or not. All the daily noise in the media about the Greek election, or any elections, or the hyped up Fed meetings and pronouncements, or what Mrs Merkel thinks and says etc is just irrelevant fluff, detail and distraction for the unthinking masses, and ultimately is not going to avert the grim outcome of this appalling mess. Not until all this debt is repudiated and the world has gotten the usurious banking system off its back, with its tentacles reaching deep into government everywhere, will the world be able to move forward again. Then at long last we will be able to hail the return of true capitalism and the free market.
Liaquat Ahamed, author of Lords of Finance, The Bankers Who Broke the World, discusses the parallels between the Great Depression and the Financial Crisis of today at The American Academy of Berlin.
I concur heartily with Mr. Ahamed on the primary causes of the bubble and collapse, especially with regard to the enormous policy errors of the Greenspan Fed.
But I always find it annoying that the conscious, widespread fraud that was promoted by Wall Street, both in 1929 and in the most recent crisis, is rarely discussed as the major corrupting influence that distorted both economic and monetary policy and the real economy.
I cannot speak to the 1920s, but there is little doubt in my mind that there was a concerted effort to game and corrupt the financial system that gained a major momentum in the 1990s, and that culminated in the financial collapse and economic malaise and instability that is plaguing the world today.
One needs look at the actions of Messrs. Greenspan, Rubin, and Weil, and the political administrations during Clinton and Bush and Obama, to begin to penetrate the veil of secrecy.
The only mania and madness of the people was in trusting the words of demagogues and conmen, and their associated supporters and enablers. And even today people continue to mouth their false slogans and fatal prescriptions.
The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained growth and recovery.
In Mahaprabhu's movement, we do not neglect the poor and the fallen, rather we go to them first!
This is the more recent version of the film, but it can be viewed in snippets. The older version can be seen in full, below.
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