VISION 2018: LIFE AND DEATH ON PLANET EARTH (DRAFT)

the purpose of this lecture is to clarify or thinking about themes as we go forward to call this lecture life and death on planet Earth because that’s what’s at stake here the Donald Trump administration and the long-term policies of America it’s not just trumpets were important it’s not just talk talk is the culmination of a series of long-term negative trends that go back into American history there were aspects of Trump that are an aberration but there are other aspects of his disastrous policies that are long-term trends in US history bottom line is that the environmental policies of the Trump administration or a direct attack on life itself they are a direct attack on the biological foundations of life the most spectacular and the most insane obviously is to have America be the only country in the world that has repudiated the Paris climate record which is an act of total insanity that really can’t even be described these actions have consequences Obama’s reforms were completely inadequate in terms of the global environmental crises it’s not just crisis is a series of crises such as the destruction of the oceans as we document on our website Trump has simply openly repudiated the whole system now you can’t look at this and not see disaster up ahead a lot of the environmental community seems to be in a state of denial about this having predicted disaster if we went above 350 on carbon levels were now at 410 so either the prediction of disaster about 350 was wrong or we are heading in a totally catastrophic direction the latter is the truth is not just the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord the Trump campaign and the Trump administration represents an assault on environmental health and safety is basic assault on my present environment. The oldest are some environmentalists eating granola some news is a direct assault on life on gutting the EPA so you don’t protect people against cancer-causing chemicals produced by corporate America is a direct assault on life it is a it is a policy that is virtually certain to end up poisoning and killing very large numbers of people so the world approaches an extremely serious series of environmental crises now at the same time the financial debts of America get larger and larger and larger and are fueled by the lunatic tax cut or promoted by Trump the end result of the tax cut which is not paid for and the huge increase in military spending which now has America spending more on the military than it did at any time since World War II in constant dollars the end result of that is to bleed white what little is left of the American social safety net and so on and so forth so this is going to kill very large numbers of people are here at home the end result is an agenda of death and agenda of death which will produce a counter reaction

now the Democratic Party has is in a very difficult spot in because she Trump is creating a kind of false boom with all this trash debt and the Democratic Party does not want to tell people that we have to take tough measures to get America back on track they be in him in the Democratic Party does opposition the so-called austerity never problem is that what they mean by austerity is largely austerity for the poor which is been the policy since of economic collapse of 2008 on because we really haven’t had austerity without austerity for the poor and welfare for the rich which is really a history making phenomenon there’s never been anything like this really throughout world history just one more reason why disasters up ahead however to get America back on track is going to require very harsh measures such as a consumption tax and energy tax simply to raise the money to fund the programs that are needed it’s not just going to be enough for quote taxing the rich know that’s not that’s earned were way way past that way past that so you see this is a real problem here this is a real problem because the Democratic Party does not want to confront this issue we feel it would be politically useful to discuss in greater detail the extent to which Trump’s policies threaten the existence of life such as the cuts to Medicare and Social Security funding which are still in place and they’ve restored some of them but these were again were done by Obama that that’s a direct threat to the elderly in this country and across the board you have problems you have the failure of Medicare to cover Alzheimer’s and is our total failure to develop a plan for long-term care of the elderly and it is not an accident that this is the case because the focus of American policy really since Reagan there’s been a bipartisan agreement that we should fund the plutocrats and do what they want and since 911 there’s been a bipartisan agreement that we should fund imperial wars overseas and the wholesale destruction of democracy at home vis-à-vis totalitarian policies this is been very bipartisan

 it’s very important to understand the role of the Democratic Party in this Reagan’s domestic policies were in in so many ways disastrous but they were in many ways less disastrous than Clinton Reagan’s trade policies began and and the changes in the world economy began the decimation of the US economy in the 1980s but at least Reagan put through nontariff barriers on cars and the devaluation of the dollar in the Plaza records so that by 1990 the trade balance had come back to two pretty close to zero okay from huge deficits and we still of Japan huge amounts of money from the deficits of the 80s on but it was really under Clinton that you began this precipitous decline of the US economy insofar as Clinton pedaled along I Clinton Paraguay that if we if you let the big corporations shut US factories and move their manufacturing overseas to sweatshop labor countries this was part of a magical process which ordinary people just weren’t smart enough to understand and that would lead to some short-term problems I love in their lives wrecked but via magical forces that were never defined this was a process that would create lots of high-tech jobs here and it was part of the needed transition we sent the quote jump jobs to China and then magical high-tech jobs would appear this was all a hoax from day one it was all a complete fraud from day one and from the election of Clinton right up to today you better bipartisan agreement to pursue these crazy policies the end result is the evisceration of the American economy and the result that net trillions of dollars of debt Americas and in debt to the tune of trillions of dollars on a net basis this raises questions about social reform see because in the 1930s the pet the past big arrow social reform the American economy while it been mismanaged by the plutocrats was basically very strong immune America under Roosevelt was the world’s largest creditor the world’s largest oil exporter the American industrial machine was was just unrivaled in terms of the year the outside world on and even as late as the 1960s at the time of the turmoil of the civil rights movement and antiwar movements on the American economy was still in very good shape of some very good shape the way we didn’t have these trade deficits are Detroit was a boomtown Flint Michigan was a boomtown so on and so forth so this was all a very good situation and today however the American economy is is really sick as a dog it’s really sick as a dog and so the ability to put through reform is by that by its very nature going to be very painful meanwhile you have this ever escalating debt bubble an interesting statistic that no one has really discussed at length is the fact that a good part of the stock market boom since the crash in 2008 has been fueled by corporations just simply buying back their own stock in other words self-dealing and running up more debt Susie this is obviously not a very sustainable situation and the whole boom since 2008 insofar as its boom has been artificially holding down interest rates by the central banks of the world this again is not a sustainable situation

 so things move towards a kind of inevitable crisis the crisis is inevitable and the only thing that can be discussed is what we do to deal it.

 

WFF UNIQUE ROLE

This is where we come in.  We are light years ahead of any other organization in the world in thinking through where all this is going

Most American Americans are very arrogant. Americans like to claim in the rent positive aspects to our country there’s a very negative aspects and one is the arrogance of the American people in thinking they are better than everybody else Americas exceptional that this is God’s country and so on and so forth and this leads to American being very intolerant of other countries okay in other systems so if your idea of trying to figure out what’s going to come is to restrict yourself from reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution it’s like a drunk looking for as well and I mean he may be hanging onto a lamppost but he needs to go back down the street and look for where he lost wallet okay and

you can have to look at other political systems and that’s what we’ve done that’s what we’ve done and look at the likelihood of the emergence of the Emperor the figure of the authoritarian figure who will sweep all this garbage away this is what is always happened in history and what is going to happen here what we talk about is a series of emperors coming

now a particularly pernicious aspect of the American situation is the rot in the US liberal establishment US liberal establishment is particularly starting in the 1980s became so subverted by the corporate world now they’ve always had an incestuous relationship which is been one of the reasons why America never had the long-term social reforms that Europe had but in the 1980s due to a variety of things which we can discuss in another lecture the Democratic Party became actually more dependent on corporate cash than the Republican Party and this had very deleterious effects in this led directly to the election of a corporate Democrat is present in the form of Bill Clinton now in our time the Democratic Party under Obama has sort of morphed with the Republican neoconservatives to promote a kind of liberal imperialism this has some very dark connotations vis-à-vis the past of this specifically the horrible figure of David living in Livingston in the 19th century who provided a liberal veneer for the most ruthless expansion of Western imperialism in Africa and even gave it a kind of religious veneer is very interesting connection between American self-righteousness and private sector Christianity and the genocidal nightmare that took place in the Congo because you see King Leopold put forth his Congo free state project as a great Christian private sector initiative member that the private sector is gonna take care of the poor well yes Marie and the U.S. Congress actually had he was very much a you definitely be of a leading figure in the Clinton Global initiative he was around today and he put forth this vision of the the idea of the cup Congo free state business model Christian endeavor and of course it turned into a nightmare which ended up murdering millions of Africans and was basically a total chamber of harassment that’s very portentous and today under under Obama you have the liberal imperialist people like Samantha power and other nauseating figures like this who knew better they knew better than Third World people and we were going to invade Third World countries and murdered their leaders and murder people and torture people and make them be like us this is part of a very ugly aspect of America and it goes back to liberal Christian imperialism in the 19th century there is a very direct connection between that and some of the very unsavory aspects of the missionary movement were not single missionaries were better so not saying all Christians are better than many very good Christians out there but there’s a very unsavory aspects of Christian missionary imperialism now when we go back to today we see that 80% of the white evangelicals in this country support truck will just think that through about what that says about those people we just got a book bring up another factor which is the when you look at people like the Clintons Bill and Hillary Clinton took $150 million when running talking about the Clinton foundation they took $150 million in corporate cash and and cash from foreign governments and put it in their own pockets does anybody really think that that cash was just given to the Clintons because they were wonderful people that Hillary was just a marvelous speaker Goldman Sachs paid her $300,000 a speech because she was just so full of wisdom if you believe that I don’t know there’s not too much to say so this is this is a vignette about where things are going

 nowhere things are going to end up is the crisis that’s coming the emergence of the Caesars and our study of the ancient world our study of Plato, our study of Aristotle, our study of Hegel, our study of the Arthashastra and ancient India, our study of legalism in ancient China this all becomes highly relevant because the the time of Western imperialism is basically going out know what’s happening under trumpets particularly ominous where America is going to try to use brute military force to cling to a declining position this very dangerous in history we will declining statements, lash out at other people in terms of military imperialism and you also have religious lunacy in so-and-so for this is not good this is not good so obviously something needs to be done about that however as as we mentioned the crisis is coming and the revolution is coming and it’s not going to be the American world order that’s going to prevail know it is not so this is a vision of the future this these are some thoughts this lecture is not totally organized it’s just to outline a a some basic thoughts we have our building a sustainable future outlining the course of action that needs to get taken is not that things are totally hopeless but it’s important to frame things in the correct framework and that’s the point of this lecture