The nature of scarcity and economic power, and how they are created and used as a method of social control

Saturday, 28 December 2014

According to the Chinese zodiac, in 2015 we will be transitioning into the year of the sheep. What will this bode for a world living in the New Gilded Age? The sheeple will have to decide if they will accept the historic changes that are occurring on the domestic and international stage or if they will resist and struggle against the tide of elite domination. There are many transitions well under way in the coming years and they all surround the notion of scarcity and the exercise of economic power. We are in the midst of a global liquidity crisis that will lead to the abandonment of the US dollar as the global reserve currency; climate change politics and environmental pollution are leading to global carbon tax proposals; and the geopolitical fight for control of the precious natural resources of Central Asia between the West and myriad combinations of Eastern factions is flaring up. All of these ostensible political and economic cleavages are coming to a head as of late, and will begin to show themselves not as cleavages between nation-states or regions, but coordinated efforts at consolidation of economic power through the use of social control and the manufacturing of scarcity.

SCARCITY OR ABUNDANCE: PURPOSE, STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

One of the most powerful methods of social control is the creation of scarcity. Scarcity, the father of supply and demand, and the foundation of economic power, is the ultimate means by which wars are fought; the purpose of which is not to save lives, but instead is a vehicle for death, disease, displacement, and crucially, debt creation. This point cannot be overstated: the purpose of war is the creation of scarcity and ultimately the raw expression of economic power; and war itself is the quickest and most powerful change-agent of society. It is important to understand both power and war in the broadest sense. That is, war is the intentional fomenting of conflict for the purposes stated above; and power is the ability to influence, direct, or create the actions and outcomes of individuals, groups, and events. Thus, economic power is simply the ability to create scarcity, while the ability to control scarcity is political power.

In contrast to the concept of supply and demand, there is another model for the creation of value that stands outside of the scarcity paradigm. The labor theory of value (LTV) is a naturally coherent model for the creation and exchange of value because it is by its very nature finite, i.e., there is only so much productivity that can be squeezed out of the workforce (this form of labor is distinguished from mechanized, non-human forms of production), which means that it circumvents the self-referentially incoherent characteristic of scarcity-based models of value, i.e., perpetual growth. The supply and demand model is based on perpetual material consumption and growth, where no real dynamic equilibrium that is in tune with the natural world exists. Prima fascia, it may appear to be a dichotomous phenomenon for LTV to possess finite characteristics when it embodies an ethos of abundance, with supply and demand being vehicles for scarcity creation, but one needs to look more closely.

LTV by its very nature is not driven by or based on surplus production, which is a phenomenon of advanced industrial societies that Marcuse has referred to as the performance principle. The manifestation of this principle can only be made possible through the mechanization processes employed by a technocratic system, which is rife with deep contradictions, e.g. the concept of fighting for peace, or the war on terrorism. Moreover, LTV does not require an increase in the velocity of money to function within a society. For example, an abundance paradigm would dictate that an increase in production efficiency would see a proportional decrease in labor hours, not an increase in production, which would foster the scarcity model.

If the current demand for shirts in a given community dictated the production of 20 shirts per day, 5 days per week for a total of 100 shirts in a year; and a new machine could make 40 shirts in 8 hours instead of the previous 20 shirts in 8 hours, this would result in the worker having 4 more hours a day they could spend engaged in other self-affirming pursuits, like playing with their children, talking with their spouse, or spending time with friends. By contrast, the supply and demand model of value would have workers produce 200 shirts a week, creating more demand and velocity (supply-side economics) through marketing campaigns that seek to elicit feelings of emotional and physical emptiness, and the desire to fill this void with shirts. Within the scarcity paradigm of marketing, this insecure, empty, desirous human being is called a consumer.

THE TWILIGHT OF THE US DOLLAR AND THE COMING GLOBAL CURRENCY

The invocation of China at the outset of this analysis was not accidental, as the elite’s solution to the liquidity crisis (scarcity of the global money supply) in 2015 will begin with them. The Chinese renminbi being incorporated into the International Monetary Fund’s SDR (Special Drawing Rights) basket of currencies and the growing global liquidity crisis is further evidence of the slow march away from the dollar as the global reserve currency.

The world stage is rife with evidence of manufactured scarcity:

The Brent crude spot price went from $100.71 on 28August2014 to $61.09 on 15December2014, and continues to fall. OPEC has had nothing substantive to say as to why this has been happening nor have they announced any plans to hold emergency meetings, as their silence is intentional. The reasoning behind OPEC’s (non)actions is an agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United States, where the Saudis open up the spigot and flood the oil market, strangling Russia’s break even margins, which has increased its ruble exchange rate volatility to dangerous levels, while the US proceeds with the bombing campaign and destabilization of Syria, where the Islamic State’s westward incursion has been a convenient pretext. Syria is a major pipeline way-point fought over between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. The Iran-Iraq-Syria natural gas pipeline, called the Friendship Pipeline by this alliance, threatens the geopolitical control exerted by the West since its agreement with Saudi Arabia in 1944, called the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement. The more recent history between these countries and their US relationships are well worth deeper discussion in another post, i.e., Saudi support of the US during the Iran-Iraq War where the US actively provided military and intelligence support to both sides of the conflict in order to bleed them dry (debt creation).

This brings us to the New Great Game, which is the same as the old Great Game except the players have changed, but the board is still the global financial system. The new (old) players are the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements; where the solution to the resource scarcity they have created are things like SDRs (global currency) and Agenda 21 (global sustainable growth program which will obliterate individual private property rights and national sovereignty). The expansion and globalization of central banks will facilitate the further development of this scarcity, with the obvious but ignored result being that the world’s money supply, and thus global control of capital flows, will be in the hands of unelected members of organizations that make decisions effecting people on opposite sides of the globe. Besides the previously mentioned organizations, there are many other known and less known entities. To name a few: Council on Foreign Relations, United Nations, World Trade Organization, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and The Club of Rome.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE WAR ON NEW ENERGY

Analysts have been predicting that the future of war will be over natural resources, but we are already in the midst of resource wars, and have been at least since the advent of the Great Game fought between the British and Russian Empires over control of Central Asia beginning in the early 1800s. Today, the war for control of Central Asia is the clash of civilizations between East and West that Huntington famously illustrated… over oil. The scarcity paradigm is further promulgated by the erroneous assertion that oil is a fossil fuel (established by Thomas Gold a number of years ago), and its usage represents the existential crisis of the antediluvian Weltanschauung of all the governments and political leaders of the world.

There exists today the possibility of accessing unlimited energy without pollution. This area of research and development is known by many names: pulling energy from the vacuum, zero point energy, free energy, over-unity technology, or new energy. This research is so fundamental to understanding the nature of where we are as a people in terms of our willful ignorance of what is possible. Much of this technology, which has been actively suppressed for decades, flies in the face of traditional laws of physics, which for many scientists creates such a deep state of cognitive dissonance that they simply cannot see it for what it is, much like the mythology told about indigenous peoples of the Americas not being able to see the European colonists approaching their shores on massive ships, as it was too far outside their realm of experience to comprehend. The elite who understand the power of this technology seek to weaponize and keep it from the public, and also understand that the widespread knowledge of its existence and use would undo centuries of the manufacturing of scarcity and exercise of social control by a select few that occupy seats of financial power. The widespread knowledge and use of these technologies would of course necessitate the complete end of all energy wars – oil, nuclear, etc.

The following are just a few of the many inventors, many of whom have been imprisoned or suicided, who hold US and international patents (the primary method by which the government uses to expropriate and withhold technology from the populace) of new energy technology that exist today that are actively suppressed but are nonetheless in use in very small pockets by those who aware of them. By most standards this technology appears miraculous, but is nonetheless very real. These technologies have been around at least since the 1980s. Examples include Paul Pantone, the inventor of Global Environmental Energy Technology (GEET), a self-induced plasma generator that can be fitted to any internal combustion engine. During a test run at Brigham Young University in 1994, the GEET generator was able to run on crude oil and saltwater. It increased fuel efficiency by at least 30%. The engine emitted no hydrocarbons, carbon mono oxides, or carbon dioxide; and produced more oxygen that in the ambient air. Stanley Allen Meyer created a water fuel cell that can be can be retrofitted into any engine. Similar to electrolysis, the fuel cell separates water into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen. This allows the engine to be run on water instead of gasoline. The fuel cell will get over 100 miles per gallon running on water, with the resulting emissions consisting of nothing but H₂0. Bruce DePalma developed the N-Machine, a perpetual motion gyroscopic magnetic machine that produces 5 times more energy than you put into it, and is pollution-free.

The preceding examples are a fraction of what exists today. Keep in mind that the thermal efficiency of machines (cars, industrial machinery, generators, etc.) in use today that are considered highly efficient is 20-50%, which means that the other 50-80% of the energy created from these engines is sloughed off into the atmosphere in the form of pollution. It is up to the general population to explore and experiment with these technologies ourselves, utilizing new avenues for independent technological development like 3D printing that do not rely on governments that have a vested interest in the petrodollar. The goal of creating a community free of governments and political leaders that utilize strategies of oppression and domination will ultimately come from below, not from above.

A BRAVE NEW WORLD?

In spite of all this, solutions abound for the possibility of the creation of a society based on abundance rather than scarcity. The causal link by which the concept of scarcity is used as a method of social control is its shaping and manipulation of our imagination and thus our behavior. For example, we believe that “bridge technologies” are needed to meet our energy needs (read natural gas, i.e. hydraulic fracturing), and that traditional nuclear energy production is the only viable alternative; and that wind, solar, and tidal will never fill the gap in our energy needs because there simply is not anything else that is possible. When hearing these platitudes, it is apropos to remind ourselves of Kuhn’s observation that all scientific revolutions require a radical and complete abandonment of the previous map of reality that was used to create the status quo, because it represents the outer limit of what was currently understood to be possible. It was Oppenheimer who observed the biggest danger in the creation of the nuclear bomb was to demonstrate to Russia and the world that it was in fact possible, which ultimately contributed to the nuclear arms race and the perversely Orwellian rationality of a new geopolitical reality: Mutually Assured Destruction.

Further, one of the primary methods, besides supply and demand, by which scarcity is created, is the use of the problem-reaction-solution model, often referred to as the Hegelian Dialectic. It is almost always used to explain how the elite control the masses. It is useful to examine the more abstract formulation of this model: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Real solutions can be created and implemented along what Kuhn was describing using the same paradigm that is commonly understood as a method of manipulation. For example, a reformulation of the syllogism might look like this: thesis = status quo (scarcity exists in the real world), antithesis = refusal of status quo (scarcity does not exist in real world), synthesis = paradigm shift (there exists another way of thinking and doing called abundance, which exists in the world and can be utilized right now). This reformulation would however, be used to the great detriment of the current structures of hierarchy, domination, and control because financial elites would no longer possess more of what others have in limited supply (money, services, food, etc. – a zero sum proposition. There is no debt in a society based on abundance, and therefore, no domination by elites. This would result in the ebb and flow of markets that become free avenues for exchange, self-expression, and innovation. Debt-based currency is not sacrosanct nor is it a law of nature. Local communities can choose to use alternative forms of exchange which are based on the exchange of goods and services like Ithaca Hours in New York, or the TEM, a Greek bartering system in use since the government’s financial collapse, or cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which are growing in popularity.

The deep cruelty of the current system is that it embodies a scarcity model which establishes values of exchange through the relationship between supply and demand, a product oriented zeitgeist that puts profits over people. An abundance mentality based on the labor theory of value that places people and process at the center of human interaction holds the promise of an entirely different world view than the one we currently have learned to accept. What does this new ethos look like in the real world and are there examples of its existence? Yes indeed there are and some have been discussed here, but they will come at a great cost to our current understanding of reality. It will require a complete re-imagining of who we are and how we move through the world. The biggest fraud committed on the human race is the belief in the notion of scarcity and all its implications for how we shape our lives, and how civilization itself has been shaped – and perhaps most importantly, who we will be and what we will do for the foreseeable future.