THE STORM IS HERE

REFLECTIONS ON 2017 AND BEYOND

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The title of this lecture is called "the storm is here." Since our founding in 1995 we have talked about the coming storm. You really don't need to be a genius to see it. The overall trends, particularly in the environmental field, even in 1995 were very visible and very clear that they were not going to lead in a good direction from 1995 to today. That's 22 years. The dimensions of the storm have become a lot more clear and speaking in terms of the prophetic minds, the storm can now be physically visible on the world horizon. It can physically be perceived and the pace with which it approaches the world is speeding up. We are at the end of an age, the end of an age of American imperialism, the end of an age of American plutocracy and there are very revolutionary developments around the world in the world of religion.

THE WORLD CREATED AFTER 1945

Now the big picture is that in 1945 you had the arrival of two ideologies as dominant world ideologies: Soviet communism and the American liberal establishment, and these are two of the most destructive ideologies in history. In many ways, malevolent ideologies in terms of respect for the biological foundations of life. Human life doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists as part of a global environmental ecosystem. This rather obvious reality was denied as the entire structure of life was plundered and destroyed to create an artificial world. The worker's paradise in Russia. The American dream here in the United States.

THE COUNTER-CULTURAL SEXUAL REVOLUTION 1960-1970

Now in the 1960s and 70s in the West, you had the emergence of a so-called counterculture of people rebelling against the Christian sexual ideologies that had been imposed in the West, you had an awareness of spirituality and awareness of primeval religions. This helped lead to the birth of the so-called environmental movement in the West and an awareness in the in the West of the catastrophe that had been created since 1945.

COMMUNISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

In the communist world, China and the Soviet Union, this was not readily accepted by the elites. And as the Soviet Union began to liberalize, the awareness of the environmental nightmare was one of the political forces that helped destroy the former Soviet Union. By contrast, in China you had a totalitarian system put in place that has accelerated wholesale destruction of the environment. Fortunately, today there are forces in the Chinese elite that are trying to steer things in a different direction, but the overall structure of the Chinese economy is so horrendously destructive. It is not at all clear that this is going to decisively reverse China's disastrous direction.

THE BEGINNING OF DESTRUCTIVE TRENDS IN THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION

Now in 1980 you had a religious political reaction in America to these constructive trends. Very disastrous events took place. The Reagan administration, in a history making decision, destroyed the most advanced renewable energy research project in the world. Yes they did. It's unbelievable, isn't it? But that's what they did and you had religious lunatics in the Reagan administration who lived in a religious dream world with very malevolent intentions towards the structure of life. The end result of this is the momentum towards environmental disaster.

THE LIBERAL "GREEN REVOLUTION" AND ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER

As is very much intact in the case of the liberal establishment. You also had extremely malevolent forces. Specifically, you had the forces that promoted the so-called green revolution which basically involved unleashing a tidal wave of poison on and death on the fields of the world and soil is a very fragile commodity. By the way, and at the same time, pumping out the aquifers of the world because massive irrigation was a very key part of the so-called "green revolution." So it's very important understand that this is not a totally left right issue a in terms of American politics. The liberal establishment played an extremely important role in moving the world towards a catastrophe.

Now defenders of the current world order, one of them is in some scholarly article recently said, "Oh there's been less war since 1945." That is not entirely clear. I guess if you didn't live in Vietnam or someplace like that or Iraq where American imperialism slaughtered millions of people for no logical purpose other than malevolence. That's a really illusionary thought on the real picture since 1945. You had the greatest mass murder, Holocaust, whatever you want to call in history where just wholesale destruction of entire species' has taken place. Where do we begin? 90% Of the whales. 90% Of the Tigers, elephants, what have you. Destruction of the rain forests. It's been the greatest mass murderer in history, and these actions have consequences. This mass murder was used to prop up an artificially large human population.

THE DELUSION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

In other words, for these political systems to justify their existence, they had to at least give the appearance of improving the lives of the people they presided over, and a lot of delusions were put forth such as the idea that there is an opportunity for all. And in America you have this lunatic idea that...well...you can be whatever you want to be because you're living in America. Of course we all know America has the lowest level of class mobility of any modern state. There is a very malevolent intent for the promotion of this kind of rubbish, which is to keep a lid on social unrest, because America has the worst poverty problems in the developed world, and really this is a social economic basket case, a chamber of horrors. But as always you can feed people a lot of garbage that you can "be whatever you want to be" and one day you're gonna be a Silicon Valley millionaire and so on. This helps keep social peace, but the whole process is running out of resources to keep going. That is completely artificial.

MORE DISTURBING TRENDS VIA THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION

The country wasn't really in the greatest shape in 1980, but it wasn't in the catastrophic shape economically that it is in today. America was still the world's largest creditor, a position it held since World War I. But since 1980 you had a severe deterioration in the economic strength of America. That's truly history making. It began with the huge budget deficits of Reagan where you had tax cuts for the superrich that weren't paid for and the deregulation, so to speak of plutocratic forces in trade who shut down US factories and replaced them with sweatshops overseas, and so on and so forth. And this was all portrayed as a magical process that would somehow create happiness for all, which was a plutocratic lie. Now in fairness to Reagan, who was a very destructive person in history, at least at the end of the day his runaway debts a part of which we use for big military buildup did end the Cold War, a very important and successful development, without a thermonuclear Holocaust or catastrophe like World War II and so on and so forth. So you could say that that led to something and Reagan also did not allow the trade situation to spiral out of control without doing anything. He put restrictions on Japanese car imports and you had the massive devaluation of the dollar. By 1992 the trade deficit actually came back to about zero. So at the end of the Cold War in 1992 you had a historic opportunity to deal with the global environmental problems, the global poverty problems and so on.

DISASTER CONTINUES VIA BILL CLINTON

Unfortunately, there was the election of Bill Clinton, who I think will go down in history as one of the most disastrous presidents in American history. Clinton put his wife, Hillary Clinton, in charge of a completely botched attempt to reform the healthcare system, and it was a historic time to reform it because there was huge popular support. It was the number one issue of the campaign and she, a very incompetent and corrupt individual, basically made total shambles out of the thing and lied to the American people, saying it would cost nothing when it would cost quite a lot, and so that went down in flames and Clinton's support in Congress went down in flames in the 1994 election. Another thing that didn't help was the invasion of Haiti by Clinton, which unleashed a nightmare on the Haitian people due to trade agreements the Clinton's forced Haiti to sign, and the idiotic decision to ban so-called assault weapons, which are a very negligible issue in terms of crime, which enraged gun-owners. So anyway, in 1994, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate. Now the former is extremely significant because the house had been a base of democratic power throughout the postwar period, and this was a truly history making development. Now worse was to follow because Clinton decided to change course and promote right-wing policies. He even dismissed the idea of big government in one of the most shameful moments in American history as being a good force and he passed really criminal pieces of legislation such as the so-called "welfare reform" which could be considered a war on the poor and the sick, and so on. But the most damaging aspect of Clinton was that Clinton stood back and let the plutocratic forces gut American industry. This is a history making development, because the wholesale destruction of US industry and the export of the American industrial base, including a good part of the high-tech industrial base to places like China. We can now see was one of the biggest disasters in American economic history. Clinton did balance the budget, which is good in a very grim way because it ended up based to a large extent on gutting infrastructure spending, gutting environmental spending, and so on, but you have to give him credit that the budget did come out to be balanced.

GEORGE BUSH'S TAX CUTS AND IMPERIAL WAR MACHINE

Now with the arrival of George W. Bush things really started going downhill at a truly spectacular rate. Bush in 2001 put through another series of welfare for the rich, tax cuts, even though the first series had worked on the grounds that this would lead to huge budget surplus as well. Obviously they didn't, they lead to trillions of dollars in debt. Now the follow-on to the terrorist attacks of 2001 was the launching of a massive campaign of global imperialism which ruined the lives of millions of people and slaughtered at least a million people in Iraq. That led that led to trillions of dollars of more debt run-up to pay for that. All this was paid for by debt and then if that wasn't bad enough Bush then deregulated Wall Street. Further, Clinton had already set in motion very bad deregulation policies, but through Bush there was the hilarious Bear Stearns rule where leverage requirements for Wall Street were largely eliminated. In other words, they can run up as much debt as they wanted and on the grounds that it was named after Bear Stearns, on the grounds that Bear Stearns was so solid he couldn't go bankrupt well. Bear Stearns eventually went bankrupt and had to be taken over, and in 2008 as we know, we had a wholesale economic train wreck and collapse. This led to trillions of dollars and more debt really huge amount of trillions of dollars, mainly via the Federal Reserve Board to prop all this up.

BARACK OBAMA WHITE-WASHES PROBLEMS

Obama deserves credit for stopping a wholesale worldwide economic collapse in 2009. He does. But beyond that, Obama really did not do much of anything to solve the long-term downtrend. He kept saying everything was just wonderful. Well... the budget deficit zoomed into the trillions. And when he left office we had a structural budget deficit of $600 billion. Structural mean that's structural, it's not a one-time event. More ominously, under Obama, the trade situation continued to — after improving a bit because of the huge crash in the US economy — the trade situation continued to zoom out of control and Obama claimed that was no problem because — I don't know — fairytale jobs would eventually be created.

DONALD TRUMP AND THE POLITICAL APOCALYPSE OF 2016

The end result was the political apocalypse of 2016 with not only the election of Donald Trump, but the failure of the Democrats to take back the House and the Senate. Now as we move forward, we have this upside down pyramid of all this debt teeter tottering away and a president that is not respected or trusted by a good part of the American people. Even worse than that, starting under Obama and cheered on by Hillary Clinton, you have a huge momentum in America, supported by good part of the liberal establishment, to restart a new Cold War which will cause military spending to soar even more. It is very important to understand that Obama — if he hadn't been stopped by the crazy sequester — proposed military budgets that were the highest in the postwar period in constant dollars, that we discussed the various budget issues on our website in more detail can be read there.

THE COMING REVOLUTION: THE WORLD OF THE HAVES AND HAVE NOTS

But we need to get back to a basic question of the haves and have-nots. The coming revolution and the struggle for power, the world and particularly the American people, are not at all prepared for what's coming. We are at a historic time in America where the safety catches put in by the New Deal since the Great Depression of the 1930s have largely been removed from the car, so to speak, and the trillions of dollars used to prop up the system has been spent. So in the next crash, there's no airbags in the car so to speak, it's going to be something that has never been seen since the 1930s, or the good old days in the 19th century where bank failures in wholesale train wrecks and the depressions were just as American as apple pie. So the conservatives, I guess deserve credit. They're going to get us back to the "good old days" and the American people are not prepared for this. The really are not prepared for this. On a global scale, the green revolution will eventually produce the grim harvest that it's likely to produce. So you see the artificial inflation of the human population will be reduced. So you will have a struggle between the haves and the have-nots for the scraps, and as a whole thing begins to go downhill, the plutocrats are going to quarrel with each other; the various countries are going to quarrel with each other. Right now they're all smiling away. They're going to their meetings at the White House with visions of sugar plums of tax cuts and so on dancing in their heads and some vague theory that if only they got deregulated, that boy oh boy, this would create a utopia for the average citizen, and so on. This is all nonsense, but it is an example of the rot at the top of the system.

THE BAIL OUT OF THE SUPER RICH

A further example of the rot is the use of stock buybacks to artificially inflate stock prices. You see, the trillions of dollars in bailouts went to the rich. It didn't go to the poor. This is the political nitroglycerin in America. They went via the Federal Reserve Board with loans to the banks settle at ridiculously low interest rates and that's how the banks have sort of replenished their losses. But this is not a tenable situation, and you have the incredible situation of the Federal Reserve Board now holding $1 trillion in mortgage debt, which is virtually unprecedented. So this is not a tenable situation. It is not, and it is a politically untenable situation because the people who voted for Trump understood — they may not have understood a lot of things — but they understood they got screwed by Obama and his plutocratic buddies. They were absolutely right. Clinton, Obama and their plutocratic buddies screwed them over and the money for the bailouts went to the rich, and people say will there's been no consumer price and little consumer price inflation, well hello, wake up economic "expert" idiots. There's been no consumer price inflation because the money didn't go to the consumers. It went to the superrich. There's been huge price inflation for stock prices, luxury homes and so on and so forth.

THE CRISES AWAITS

So the crisis awaits. The crisis awaits. And as the turmoil unfolds they'll be different structures of turmoil. There is a series of intersecting crises here. The economic crisis will affect everybody. The environmental crises are more likely to ask to affect places like India, China, and Africa then the West. Though America is in very vulnerable shape. California and the southwestern artificial world is an artificial world based on water, for instance, either pumped out of the aquifers, there's a one-way strip trip for you, or imported from other parts of the of the state or the country. So America is in a very vulnerable situation. The other issue is the runaway imperialism in America. The endless war crimes generate negative karma and so there's the prospect of an EMP effect, a Carrington effect, a natural EMP, which could come from the sun, or some other cataclysmic environmental event is entirely possible. For example, the hurricane Sandy was a level II hurricane. Is it written in the laws of nature that a level five hurricane cannot hit New York City? No it is not. If you read any book on meteorology, there is no iron law that that cannot happen, and if it did, it would literally wash New York City away. So that's just another factor to keep in mind.

THE COMING OF THE EMPEROR AND THE STORM

So the storm approaches and as the storm unfolds the issue of democracy itself is likely not to last. And people will demand a dictator. They will demand an Emperor, and this is where things are going. This is the political structure of where things are going and we need to think through the revolutionary forces to come and the nature of how that comes together. One of the interesting questions is how that will fill out in terms of world religion. Around the world extreme religious ideas are gaining momentum. A particularly ominous situation is the whipping up of Hindu nationalism by the neofascist government in India, that's an ominous portent of the kind of thing that could be coming. But religious instability is likely, and cults are likely, and political cults are likely to grow around the world and the religious vacuum in China is something that could be filled in a very dramatic manner, which is why the Chinese government is so paranoid about even obscure cults like the Falun Gong. So fasten your seatbelt. Put your tray table in the upright position. Turbulence ahead in the world that the liberal establishment and the plutocrats have built. The storm is here. It's no longer coming. It's here and it's going to start beginning to break. We will elaborate this as we go through the year