CAPITALISM: And how it can only be this way. Until it can’t.

Fans of capitalism in its latest neoliberal iteration – and they are all over the place in Europe and the USA, at least among elites and the middle classes – tend to shut their eyes tightly against its latest horrors and the very real fact that the planet’s majority are not enjoying capitalism’s spoils, nor can they ever do so, although they may be unaware that capitalism is a zero sum game. The fans point with great determination at socialism’s failings, pinpointing the worst horrors of communism, many imagined, mostly dredged up from a decades-old past carefully not compared with other decades-old pasts.

Capitalism’s historical horrors are also, well, horrific. A thousand years ago, life expectancy, once childhood was overcome, was around 60 or even 70, especially if one had survived past 30 years of age. Studies of the skeletal remains of affluent people from over 2000 years ago paint the same picture. Childhood and war brought very grave dangers and, without them, healthy life expectancy was not dissimilar to our own. However, at the height of the industrial revolution, life expectancy for the poor in England’s major industrial cities was shockingly low, around 15-17 years in the 1840s.

In the 1960s, Russian life expectancy was above 64 for men, and 73 for women, similar to that of France. Current life expectancy in Cuba is over 78 years (80 for women; 76 for men). For China it is 79 years.

 

The point is that capitalism’s successes are extremely variable. The US, our capitalist hegemon has an overall life expectancy just below that of Cuba, a small and poor country that has suffered crippling sanctions imposed by its mighty rival, the US, for the best part of a century. Geographical differences are reproduced between the 1% richest and the 1% poorest in the USA, where a massive 15-year difference in life expectancy exists. Healthy life expectancy in the US is a mere 64 years.

Why can capitalism not be improved?

Because it is extractive. It extracts resources from poorer or weaker nations and does not pay the real price for them. France’s current economic woes and political unrest are in large part due to 14 African nations joining together and refusing to allow their former colonial powers to continue to steal resources without paying for them and without paying for the environmental damage. These countries are also attempting to put an end to the French imposed currency – the CFA franc - that keeps Paris in control and, from the start, has ensured that wealth is automatically transferred to France. The CFA franc was pegged to the French franc, and is now pegged to the euro. France demands that those 14 African countries maintain 50% of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury.

Another factor is uranium mining. This is incredibly damaging both to the environment and to those who mine it, and Niger is no longer handing it over virtually for free. Thus, France’s historically low nuclear energy prices are a thing of the past and consumers have suffered significant increases. The future cost of decommissioning the nuclear plants and the extremely long storage problems associated with the spent fuel are also unresolved.

The “Green Revolution” is based on filthy lithium mining, unrecyclable wind turbine blades (often full of asbestos) and solar panels, rare earths, unresolved technology and has nothing to do with improving the environment and everything to do with the creation of a new boom. It has hit a snag, however, in that hydrogen cells need iridium which is extremely rare (although Russia has a lot of it), lithium deposits are in places like Afghanistan, Bolivia and Australia (and the latter needs the Chinese to process it), and everything else needs rare earths which are also, well, rare and mostly to be found not in the EU nor the USA, but in African and China, and need costly (both economically and environmentally) and complicated processing. The current wars promoted by our elites as being all about democracy and human rights – killing thousands of innocent civilians as collateral damage – have cut off the tap to the cheap Russian gas that our industries and computing rely on. The problem is that, while we had all the money, they (the “others” in the world) had all the resources (and all the time).

Capitalism’s second inbuilt feature is that it is debt-based. Its extraordinary ability to out-produce other systems is because it relies on money taken from future output. Compound interest means constant and exponential growth and rising populations among which to spread the ever-increasing debt, faster and faster, until the entire Ponzi scheme collapses, as it inevitably will in the cyclical systemic crises faced every few years. Meanwhile, more GDP, more destruction, more construction, more, more, more. Until our modern-time day of reckoning, the Great Reset, in which almost everything we own will be stolen from us. Remember “You will own nothing and be happy”? The first part looks set to be on the way really soon; the second part, never. As a cautionary tale, when the USSR collapsed, life expectancy there fell 10 years over a decade and rampant corruption, crime and murders soared. Our own economic collapse promises to be imminent and no less terrifying.

National debt is nothing but debt that others will have to pay, mostly future generations, but also precisely those who received almost nothing from the billions borrowed. This inbuilt feature leads to political corruption and excruciatingly bad uses of the incoming money today, which is generally not used to build infrastructure, nor useful technologies but for vanity projects and to line the pockets of our elites.

Capitalism also builds up personal debt. The 80s smashing of union power and the opening up of work to foreign competition, and low wages, together with significant immigration and preference for technology over workers, meant that downward pressure was put on salaries and, for consumerism to continue to rise – in order for the products to be sold -, personal debt was actively encouraged.

However, the most damning feature of capitalism is that everything, absolutely everything has a price put on it. The only value is monetary. Surrogacy, unnecessary surgeries, trans mutilations, dubious psychiatry, opiate crises (yes, in Europe as well), sex “workers”, Only Fans, AI pornography, illegals picking fruit without labour protections, unnecessary caesareans and induced births in private clinics, the purchase of babies, “assisted” dying (in other words the assisted murder of the economically useless), the theatre of democracy with the only choice between Team Blue and Team Red, both funded by the same corporations, two-tier justice…; you name it, it’s all for sale. People on disability pensions due to mental illness have tripled over the last 35 years. Why? For the combined reason that our society is alienating, hard to do well in for the 99%, ruthlessly competitive and, to top it, mental health is seen as an individual problem, requiring psychopharmaceutic remedies that are highly profitable for Big Pharma and of almost no use for solving the problem even were it an individual, rather than a social one.

In the chilling documentary The Alabama Solution you can see how the logic of capitalism results in excessive sentences, overcrowded prisons, scarcity of guards, poor personnel selection, lack of rehabilitation, shocking mistreatment of prisoners…, all of it making perfect business sense. Modern-day slavery. In Alabama the mostly white and filthy-rich elites distract the white and black uneducated poor with cheap pageants and other spectacles.

Capitalism's successes rely heavily on unpaid and underpaid labour, that of the illegal immigrant fleeing from countries whose economies have been devastated by the very countries the immigrants go to, “volunteer” firefighters and other workers from among the incarcerated, unpaid overtime… Indeed, fire protection units are being defunded just at the same time as climate change narratives should logically dictate that they should be a priority. Immigrant labour works for peanuts, without proper legal protection, accrues no sick leave nor pension rights, especially if the immigrant is then deported; and, more importantly, it exerts downward pressure on all salaries being competed for. The immigrant who does not return to his or her original country will inevitably further weaken social and ideological cohesion in Western countries. Historically, such weakening has always resulted in rapid civilizational decline. 

Additionally, capitalism traditionally relies on women’s unpaid labour, in the home, bringing up the next generation, and as carers and as workers in many of the badly paid professions (which are ironically many of the utterly vital professions).

But the very worst feature of capitalism is the lack of empathy it engenders in its populations. It belittles all moral value. From the 1980s film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” has so permeated our consciousness that we cannot see how grotesque it is. A social system without moral values is not worth saving. Morality requires courage, itself an intrinsic value, in juxtaposition to our societies’ fetishist competitiveness, hustle, greed and grift. War, famine and pestilence stalk us in the West as we chug down our cocktails on the deck of the Titanic, and we are currently not worth saving.

THE TROLLEY DILEMMA

 

The train or trolley dilemma is basically the following:

 

A runaway trolley is speeding down a track towards five people who are for some reason unable to move or unaware of their impending fate. You are standing next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different track. However, there is one unwitting person on that sidetrack.

 

You have two options:

1. Do nothing: The trolley continues on its path and kills the five people.
2. Pull the lever: The trolley switches tracks and kills one person, but the five people are saved.

The dilemma forces a choice between two outcomes, centring on whether it is better to actively intervene to cause one death to save five, or to passively allow five deaths to occur by not acting. The core issue is whether you should actively maximise the number of lives saved.

 

The philosophical question presented by the philosopher Alex O’Connor in one of his videos is basically two dilemmas:

 

1)      Many people are reluctant to pull the lever and intervene to save 5 people and kill just one, feeling that killing a person is always bad, even if you have saved more people at the same time. Alex asks then, if you have inadvertently already pulled the lever (maybe by falling over) – and yet feel that this should not have been done on purpose –, whether you would be happy putting it back to its default 5-people killed position, or – more whimsically – if you could go back in time would you choose to do so and then not pull the lever (and go back to killing 5 instead of one).

2)      The philosopher Peter Singer’s problem: at what point are we no longer required to give up some of our money/comfort/time to help others worse off than ourselves. If you see a drowning child are you under an obligation to dive in and save it and maybe spoil your new suede shoes? Or if you might endanger your own life? Do you have to keep on diving in to save other children? The extrapolation is then done to whether you should give to charity and save other people’s lives which you cannot see but are no less real for it. Should you keep on giving to charity until you are as poor as those you are helping?

 

Both these problems are utilitarianism ones. We look at the different outcomes and are inclined to compare them. This is partly because we live in utilitarian times, where our default position is based on comparable outcomes, and generally viewed in a very short timescale. Governments typically make calculations based on cost and utility, taking on board that some members of society will end up not having resources designated for them in order for other initiatives to be funded.

 

However, it has not always been like this. Historically, there have been times when the default position would have been based on a certain view of morality and absolute values. Despite what is often erroneously said, utilitarianism is not valueless. By sleight of hand, it seems to be the logical way to go, but it does in fact have itself an absolute value: it typically elevates the value of aggregate human happiness (or welfare) above others. It also has a big problem with when exactly the outcome is to be measured and over what period of time (not to mention why it typically only takes into account human happiness).

 

For example, you might be given the choice in a plane hostage situation to kill one passenger so that the rest are not killed. But, apart from the effect this might in the long term have on your personal morals and wellbeing, it might also make future hostage situations more frequent, or might normalize the random killing of one innocent person with the aim of potentially saving others, and who knows if the others will then actually be saved? You might even find that you have just killed the one person who would have stopped a figure like Hitler from gaining power; or the one person who also knows how to fly the plane when the pilot suddenly dies of a heart attack. You might pull the lever to divert the trolley to kill only one person and then find that the 5 who were saved then had a fatal car crash going home. Had you not pulled the lever, one person at least would have been saved.

 

Utilitarianism is what makes Alex O’Connor’s questions so puzzling. In the first instance utilitarianism is colliding with an alternative value, that of simply not killing anyone on purpose (i.e. not playing God). In the second, utilitarianism would suggest one must keep on giving and giving until one has just enough to survive; or keep on jumping into the pond to save one child after another, eternally; or at least until one is exhausted enough to be in danger of drowning oneself. There is, alternatively, an absolute value in self-sacrifice, but not perhaps to the point of martyrdom. Utilitarianism is also, maybe, what has led us to the very situations that it is so maddingly unable to resolve. In the plane hostage situation, adopting the absolute value of never killing an innocent person on purpose might make such situations disappear in the future as hostage taking would become a futile activity and, thereby, not obeying the terrorists would be the right thing to do in the long term. The problem of perspective and over which timescale is one that is not really solved by adopting an arbitrary point of view or length of time.

 

Utilitarianism in fact makes our societies transactional and calculating, and maybe – happier or not happier, who knows? – worse for it. If one person after another sees little overall benefit in helping others – we are, after all, rarely presented with a pond full of drowning children –, people in general  will start not to act in accordance with moral virtue and this will put a larger burden on the few who will intervene whether overall happiness increases or not. If someone is drowning in a pond because they are suicidally depressed, should we rescue them, endangering our life – or ruining our new shoes – when they will probably be more depressed if we do, and may well try to kill themselves later? Is anyone else going to jump in (in which case on a utilitarian basis we would personally be absolved from doing the same)? Should we expend our energies on trying to get someone else to take the risk, if the end result is the same? (Which doesn’t sound like a nice thing to do.)

 

Western countries are bringing in laws enabling euthanasia (although the reality is a far cry from the “good death” that the word conjures up) under the guise of kindness and allowing individuals to “choose dignity in death”. (We have euthanised our pets for decades, blissfully unaware of what the procedure means in practice behind the vet’s closed door.)

 

Apart from the real questions over whether the new euthanasia laws will be misused – and it is notable that palliative care budgets are being drastically reduced at the same time –, perhaps there will be other effects: making people less resilient, making family members less prepared to care for their old and ill members, making doctors care less about curing/caring and more expedient and eugenicist, making us less stoical and resistant when faced with pain or bad outcomes, making governments more able to dispose of people according to their future monetary worth, and enabling lucrative but dubious medical processes during life that may well be actively making people ill. Will the calculation that killing the old and ill will save money mean that the old and ill themselves will be ruthlessly eliminated (along with their respective costs)? We can easily envisage that AI utilitarian cost-benefit calculations could easily lead to horrible results. Why would the same calculations carried out by humans differ?

 

Utilitarian arguments have enabled warmaking in distant lands under the guise of bringing democracy and freedom to other peoples that, often, have shown scant interest in our notions of democracy. Arguments over political expediency have justified different versions of the “first past the post” electoral method, giving us a pseudo-democracy in which we get a choice between the Team Red and the Team Blue, both of which are funded by the same donors, are corrupt at the top, and give society a shockingly low utilitarian value.

 

Utilitarianism has nothing to say about the intrinsic value of truthfulness, almost encouraging euphemisms and current misuses of lexicon, which is making some discussions almost impossible to bring to a useful termination, and are often permitted under a misguided notion of inclusiveness or kindness. (“Transwomen are women” comes to mind, given that “transwomen” are in fact men; or “safe and effective”, still promoting the covid and flu “vaccines”, when “safe” is not a medical term and “effectiveness” has to be in relation to a specificity.) Are utilitarianism and the current quest for equity stopping the few talented people that typically are produced by every generation from appearing? Will the quest for equity (an equal and supposedly happy outcome for everyone) make us lazier, more useless, more stupid, more depressed and more cynical in the long term?

 

So, going back to the original problems, maybe one shouldn’t pull the lever to save 5 and kill one on purpose, nor to save a million at the expense of one. And, if one tripped by mistake and fell on the lever without wanting to, even if one had the choice of going back in time, one should not do so either. Once again, one should not pull it because the end is irrelevant to morality in behaviour, and not because long-term outcomes cannot be clearly measured.

 

In the same light, one should rescue a drowning child so long as one is not horribly inconvenienced by doing so, because one has a duty to help others, within reasonable parameters. One does not have a duty to die or lose one’s only livelihood trying to help others, although self-sacrifice can be highly laudable. The utilitarian argument would maybe suggest that one has less of a duty to give to others the less one earns. In this way perhaps a person could become a better person merely by earning a little less. This is absurd.

 

As a side note, my personal view is that the existence of high earners who choose to give to their charity of choice does not remotely solve this question, even if many did so. Society should establish a progressive taxation system on wealth and establish a relative maximum permitted that does not allow a few to own more than half of humanity, not just for reasons of fairness but also because no system can benefit most of its citizens if there are a few who can literally buy up economic and political power.

 

Capitalism itself is an economic system praised because the majority of the populations of broadly capitalist countries have an affluent lifestyle. Without having to delve into the question of whether these countries are broadly affluent because they syphon off the monetary and resource wealth of poorer nations and future generations, there is another problem: people in capitalist countries are encouraged to deify wealth and monetary success, becoming less empathetic and more value-free as time goes on. Indeed, our broadly utilitarian-based governments have brought a crisis of identity and belief to large parts of their populations. Worse still, a significant number of people in affluent societies ingest detrimental amounts of drugs and alcohol, and are very often not happy.

 

If you dive into a pond to rescue a drowning child and then drown yourself, the utilitarian would regard this as a very bad act, with negative utility. But there is intrinsic value in trying to save a child and in personal sacrifice for the greater good. The end does not justify the means. Rather, the means justify the end. A completely different trolley dilemma would be if one could personally throw oneself in front of the trolley in order to save 5 further down on the tracks (rather than sacrifice an innocent bystander). In this case, the right course of action would be to do so, all other things being equal. It is so much easier to think of sacrificing another individual than oneself!

 

And maybe the question is not whether you should be diving in to rescue an endless number of drowning children, but rather what caused those children to be in the water with no one else around to stop them getting into trouble in the first place. Maybe once we’ve reached the point where hapless workers on a trolley track will needlessly die whatever one does, we’re already on the wrong track.

THE YELLOW PERIL, THE OPIUM WARS AND WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND…

 A long time ago…

 

The Opium Wars were two armed conflicts fought in China in the mid-19th century between the forces of Western countries and the Qing dynasty. The first Opium War was fought between China and Great Britain from 1839 to 1842, triggered by the Chinese government's campaign to enforce its prohibition of opium, which included destroying opium stocks owned by British merchants and the British East India Company.

 

The second Opium War, also known as the Arrow War or the Anglo-French War in China, was fought by Great Britain and France against China from 1856 to 1860. China, technologically behind Europe, lost both wars and the foreign powers gained commercial privileges and legal and territorial concessions in China under unequal treaties due to gunboat diplomacy.

Due to the problem of the trade deficit Britain had with China, the British were smuggling opium from their Indian colonies into Chinese ports against the wishes of the Chinese government to help pay for the large amounts of Chinese tea that they were importing. Hong Kong became a British colony through the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842; Kowloon in 1860; and Hong Kong was leased for 99 years from 1898. It only devolved to China in 1997. Treaty ports were increased where Britain could trade and reside, from one to five, including Shanghai.

 

China’s problem was the resultant importation of a product that had no possibility of compensating for the cultivation of tea, but instead created widespread addiction and social and economic disruption.

 

And now…

 

The US external debt is the largest in the world, 123% of GDP, with 33% of public debt held by foreigners: $33 trillion (33 with 12 zeros afterwards) at the time of writing. China, with over 4,000 times the US population, has $2.5 trillion of external debt), 14% of its GDP. While debt is not necessarily a bad thing in a capitalist system, if it becomes impossible to service countries can find themselves in dire straits. Switzerland, for example, has a low debt to GDP ratio of 48%. Post Bretton Woods, the US has maintained a constant deficit, providing itself with a high standard of living, facilitated by the dollar’s position as the only international currency. As the world turns potentially multi-polar, coupled with a cloud economy, in which China’s WeChat platform seamlessly integrates digital currency transactions, the dollar’s hegemony is seriously threatened and the USA is pushed to endless wars to stave off the day of reckoning as concerns its balance sheet, threatening any nation that moves towards international trade in non-dollar currency.

 

The USA is currently spending half of its tax dollars on military spending (and in addition there is much spending, for example R&D, that is military in intention, but not included directly in the official figures); and is spending almost as much on servicing its debt. The plethora of wars it is fomenting and selling weapons for is better understood as a last-ditch attempt to maintain the dollar’s hegemony, while the country itself is crumbling from within, border towns inundated by immigrants fleeing hardship in those countries that the Western elites decided to trash, immigrants that will do the low-paid jobs that maintain inflation under control, but which exert downward pressure on blue-collar salaries all over the country, creating misery for the entire working class. As Julian Assange famously explained, Western governments are better understood as nothing more than the instrument used to create endless war, itself the mechanism to remove public funds and give them to private elites, or in other words to steal the labour of the masses and syphon it upwards into a few hands. There is no transparency in “defence” spending – the Pentagon is utterly incapable of passing an audit, and yet receives more money every budget.

 

Currently in the US there are around 80,000 opioid deaths per year (out of a total of some 110,000 drug deaths), according to the CDC, a figure that does not fully reflect the social and economic decay caused by addition. Drugs are killing 324 people out of a million. The European situation is better, but still horrible: in Sweden, for example, 81 drug-induced deaths per million; and an average of 15 per million among 15-64 year-olds. In England and Wales, there were 80 deaths per million due to drug poisoning in 2020, nearly a 4% increase on the 2019 figure, an increase possibly due to lockdown policy. In Wales there was almost a 10% increase on the 2019 figure in 2020.

 

Social problems caused by drug addiction are not evenly spread out, meaning that severely deprived areas bear the burden of many problems, including drug addiction, which in itself causes a vicious circle of lowered economic prospects, bad parenting, crime…

 

The illegal Contra-backing by the US government of Ronald Reagan against the left-leaning Sandinista government in Nicaragua back in 1984, which was designed to circumvent Congress’ decision not to finance the Contras, was funded by the drug trade, as the CIA used flights out of Nicaragua to bring drugs out and send cash back in. Inner cities, especially those with significant black populations, were flooded with crack cocaine so that, while Ronald Reagan’s political discourse was extremely anti-drugs, his government’s policy resulted in massive drug-related crime and misery. 

In Western countries drugs and prostitution are included in official GDP figures. The EU made the inclusion official in all member states in 2014, and the UK’s GDP, as an example, leapt £50 billion, 4%, according to the UK government’s information!

 

In the EU today, policy is generally known to be set out by NATO. US wars are invariably seconded by the UK and the EU. Constant military spending, although good for the industrial military complex – and the third of the US Congress that invariably invests in the stock market at precisely the right time –, is bad for the people who pay for the arms manufacturers’ bonanza, either with life and limb or with plummeting social perspectives, constant austerity, reduced healthcare, vanishing pension schemes, and crumbling schools and infrastructure. As inflation and taxation make us poorer, as the “You will own nothing” mantra is imposed (apparently not even our own bodies as they become, with constant mRNA boosters, yet another subscription service), as the corollary “and be happy” has not come to pass, democracy becomes more elusive as the obscenely rich buy access to political and economic power. Our simulacrum of democracy, our periodic excitement as we choose Team Red or Team Blue, hides the reality that we live in a liberal oligarchy.

 

“The expense of a war could be paid in time; but the expense of opium, when once the habit is formed, will only increase with time” (Townsend Harris, 1804-1878)

 

So what goes around comes around. And this time it’s a reckoning for the West.

Who's The Poisoner?

We live in a world of pesticide-drenched food, polluted air, water containing all sorts of unnatural chemicals and drug residues, poisonous homes... Pesticides are biocides and will quickly kill you in large doses, and slowly and accumulatively over time. We also live under dubious medical regimes - even untested and coercive gene therapy, some say, that will irredeemably alter our health and perhaps even our genes. But surely no one is actually trying to poison us, are they?

Is this a necessary trade-off for having enough food?

There is no historical reason to think that small farms cannot produce enough food for the population. In capitalism, scarcity is artificially maintained for economic reasons.

In an important 4-decade-long study done on US farming, organic small-scale farming was in fact found to be more profitable that industrial farming, and had similar yields. During times of drought, yields were even 40% higher. Other long-term studies have found similar results. Additional findings are that organic soil has bacteria and fungi that keep plants healthy and able to defend themselves from pests, and that soil becomes progressively healthier, unlike the soil depletion that results from industrial farming.

India’s massive famines from the 18^th Century onwards occurred at a time when England was importing foods from India, and at times even stockpiling in order to increase prices. The English government at the same time prohibited other regions in India from helping those where hunger was rife, a custom that dated back more than 2000 years (the Kautilya treatise), sustaining in Parliament that aid would in the long term make India weaker and less able to fend for itself. In the mid-19th Century, it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful. The market would restore a proper balance. Any excess deaths, according to Malthusian principles, were nature's way of responding to overpopulation. Railroads were not, as some cynically state nowadays, used to help India during famine, but to transport India’s resources out of the country.  

The same happened during the Irish famines of the 19^th Century, and for the same reasons, when foodstuffs were exported from Ireland and millions of Irish people lost their land and perished.

Large industrial farms are extractive, removing from nature what is not replaced. Agrobusiness is a huge environmental problem and, as such, cannot be the solution. It decimates biodiversity and food-security, as we depend increasingly on a smaller and smaller selection of foodstuffs, grown on progressively depleted land. It eradicates pollinators. It requires massive amounts of chemical fertilisers, which in turn are 2% of greenhouse gas emissions and the principal source of nitrous oxide emissions.

Even our gut health has been decimated, due to the nutritional paucity of our calorie-laden diets, leading to a new medical procedure: faecal transplants, the transference of faecal matter from healthy people to those whose guts have no healthy bacteria left in them. Clostridium difficile Infections (CDI) are on the rise, no doubt due to our lifestyles. The US CDC reports that approximately 347,000 people in the US alone were diagnosed with this infection in 2012. Of those, at least 14,000 died but the figure is likely to be more in the range of 30,000-50,000 range. Like our soils and ecosystems, our guts have been desertified.

 

Is the sorry state of our environment due to incompetence from our leaders?

Sadly, we do not expect our politicians and leaders to be intellectually endowed, but favour showmen (and women), good-looking individuals like Justin Trudeau, despite his lies and a populist discourse clearly not in line with his coercive policies. We look for soundbites and amusement, so we favour superficially funny types like the UK’s ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, sacked by his own nasty party, but not by his country’s voters; or ones like media-savvy Donald Trump, with his preacher’s sing-song intonation, which goes down well in the southern states, and his brilliant epithets for his rivals – such as: Sanctimonious (Ron) Santos, Slippery James Comey, Sleepy Joe (Biden), Crooked Hillary, Animal Assad, Little Rocket Man (Kim Jong Un), Sloppy Steve (Bannon), Pocahontas (Elizabeth Warren), Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Low Energy Jeb (Bush)…

Our politicians are, maybe, kept reasonably busy scrabbling around for their political space, and we expect no real expertise from our so-called experts, nor relevant studies, nor experience, from government ministers.

But what about those who are really calling the shots, the Bill Gates, Carl Schwabs of this world, and the dark money behind them?

First, a little bit of history...

Once there was a conglomerate of large chemical corporations, formed in 1925, that was the mainstay of the Third Reich’s economy and war effort, supplying the synthetic rubber for vehicle tyres, synthetic fuels and explosives. On 20 February 1933, at a meeting with top Nazis, including Goering and Himmler, this conglomerate, IG Farben, was the largest donor to the Nazi Party, donating 400,000 reichsmarks (approximately $5 million in today’s money). It was the original military-industrial complex, a perfect example of the dangers of state-private collaboration, and very much the definition of fascism. As Mussolini famously stated: fascism is "corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

The Nazi ideology included social eugenics, the biological improvement of German people by selective breeding, involuntary sterilization and the belief that some people were not worthy of life. Eugenics research in Germany was inspired by similar research in the United States; and Britain also had many prominent eugenicists (including the Huxley brothers, Julian and Aldous, and HG Wells). Julian Huxley was President of the British Eugenics Society from 1959-62, and UNESCO’s first President.

The IG Farben cartel built at the start of WWII a large plant in December 1940/January 1941. The plant’s location was chosen because it had good rail transport and coal mines nearby, and land was given by the government at a knock-down price after it had been expropriated from its Polish owners, the site rendered doubly attractive by the possibility of slave labour from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp for workers housed some 11,000 people - mostly Jews - by July 1944; and overcrowding, plus overwork – including flogging and physical mistreatment ‑, produced high sickness and mortality.

Around 10,000 would ultimately be killed when deemed unproductive, either by lethal injection or, in the majority of cases, in the gas chambers. The Zyklon B gas used was produced by one of the company’s subsidiaries and several Nobel-prize winning scientists worked for the company. Apart from forced labour, the company also performed drug experiments on inmates. It was eugenics on steroids.

IG Farben was at the time the world’s largest chemical company. When it was finally wound up in 2003, its remaining assets were paid to banks, not to organizations and families of its victims. Compensation, following the IGF Liquidation Act of 1955, permitted top officials of IGF to resume leading positions in the German chemical industry. Some compensation was paid under the Jewish Material Claims Conference to Jewish forced labourers and prisoners who had been compelled to work at Monowitz, under a voluntary scheme, although the many non-Jewish victims did not receive any compensation.

 

After the Nuremberg trials, in which the IG Farben Trial was the largest of all industrial trials, IG Farben was split into its separate companies, some of which, like BASF, Hoechst (now part of French Sanofi), Agfa and Bayer, continue to prosper till today. In the Soviet zone of occupation, IGF plants were nationalised, whereas in the West they remained under their original ownership.

Only 13 of its executives were ever convicted and all were given small sentences of between 18 months and 8 years, often released early; indeed, by 1951, all IGF officials had been released from prison. Most were allowed to continue their lucrative careers as captains of industry, or receive honours. Some examples:

·      Philipp Heinrich Hörlein, who worked specifically on the Zyklon B gas that he was well aware was being used in the extermination camps, posthumously had a street named after him in Leverkusen in 1955).

·      Fritz ter Meer, who received a sentence of 7 years in prison for ‘mass murder and enslavement’, but was released in 1950 for ‘good behaviour’, in 1951 was elected Chairman of the board of directors for Bayer AG, holding the position of supervisory board chairman until 1964, and holding board positions at many other companies, including Commerzbank and Union Bank AG.

·      Otto Ambros, sentenced to 8 years for slave-labour, was also released in 1951 due to good behaviour and became an adviser to various chemical companies, including Dow Chemical and Grünenthal GmbH, the company responsible for the terrible thalidomide tragedy.

Operation Paperclip

In a secret US intelligence program, between 1945 and 1959, more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians, including leaders of the Nazi Party, were taken from Germany to the US for government employment after the war, some entering the US through Latin America. The official reason was to gain military advantage for the USA in the new Cold War against the country that had done most to win the war against the Nazis, Russia (by then the USSR).

The NASA Distinguished Service Medal (its highest award) was given to former SS official Kurt Debus, former Nazi Party and SS member Wernher von Braun, among other prominent Germans. Von Braun also received many other prestigious awards, such as the Goddard Astronautics Award, and is in the US Space and Rocket Centre Hall of Fame. 

Once one German medical officer, Walter Schreiber, was linked in the press to human experiments, he was helped by the US military to emigrate to Argentina.

 

Our present world

In 2018 Monsanto was found guilty in the US of knowingly concealing the carcinogenicity of its Roundup herbicide, despite claiming that it had studies that suggest that the product does not cause cancer. A man with terminal cancer was awarded $289 million (later reduced to a lesser, albeit enormous, sum); and tens of thousands of other people have pending cases for the same reason. Further sentences have been equally harsh. The initial court ruling resulted in France banning the product and was bad news for Bayer, which had just finalised its purchase of Monsanto and saw a 30% drop in its share price.

Since 2015 the WHO has ruled that glyphosate (Roundup’s key ingredient) is “probably carcinogenic”, itself a shocking admission for a product routinely sprayed onto our food crops and natural world in increasing quantities. It is a product that decimates endangered species, requires larger and larger doses, creates rapid resistance in pests, alters genes, destroys pollinators and creates ‘superweeds’.

Monsanto was founded in 1901 and has, since then, faced litigation relating to damage from asbestos, PCB, dioxin, benzene, vinyl chloride, Agent Orange, Alachlor and Dicamba (other herbicides), Penncap-M (an insecticide)… It has also admitted falsifying its books and records, and bribery; and the spread of experimental glyphosate-resistant wheat. If you want to read more on the horrors of Monsanto, read Merchants of Poison.

VW, originally created under the Nazi regime (and called the “people’s car”, was caught up in a huge emissions scandal, Dieselgate, in 2020, after the software to control toxic gases in their smaller diesel cars, marketed to city dwellers, had been designed to falsify the results of pollution tests, and the cars were in fact emitting 40 times more pollution than that permitted by law, predictably resulting in tens of thousands of excess respiratory deaths just in Europe. The company President, in a grotesque attempt to show that car diesel fumes are really not so bad compared to lorries, ordered for monkeys to be confined in a Perspex box and for a lorry’s exhaust pipe to be fed directly into the small box. The monkeys’ futile attempts to get away from the unbreathable air are heart-breaking. Other diesel car manufacturers copied VW’s method and also falsified the recorded emissions of their vehicles, including Fiat Chrysler and Opel/GM.

Corporations behave sociopathically, responding to no other objective criterion than their share price. Despite constant scandals of this nature, they generally factor in possible fines for malfeasance, viewing sanctions and large lobbying expenses as the normal cost of doing business. ‘The polluter pays’ is in fact ‘He who pays can pollute.’

One in five business leaders have psychopathic tendencies. According a 2010 study, there were at least three times as many psychopaths in executive or CEO roles than in the overall population.

“He is a charismatic leader who inspires people to follow him. A strategic thinker who can master the details. A tireless worker with incredible focus and problem-solving skills. He is well-liked by his employees but is also able to make and execute unpopular decisions. Above all, he is an exceptional communicator who can convey a vision to any audience, from Wall Street to the most junior employee.”

The quote above could describe an ideal CEO. But it’s actually a portrait of a corporate psychopath. People with psychopathy crave power and dominant positions, but they are also chameleons, able to disguise their ruthlessness and antisocial behaviour under the veneer of charm and eloquence. One route to grabbing power for the highly intelligent psychopath is to climb the corporate ladder. Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons.

Bill Gates himself, the son of a rumored eugenicist, managed to reverse the extremely negative image the public had of him, following his courtroom behaviour (for using his de facto monopoly to destroy the competition) and Microsoft’s subsequent conviction in an Antitrust case brought by the US government. By turning to corporate philanthropy, adopting an avuncular tone, and investing in vaccines and other drugs, while funding world organisations that would promote his vaccines and other drug treatments often extremely coercively, together with mainstream media that would sell the narrative, Gates has said it made his best investment ever, turning $10 billion into $200 billion worth of economic benefit, all the while having no medical expertise, no degree and no reason – apart from his extreme wealth – for anyone to take his advice.

The current US President is hellbent on bringing Nato into direct war with Russia, in what could easily provoke the use of nuclear weapons, the destruction of the whole of Europe, or even of humanity itself. The last US government’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, one-time head of the CIA, said: “We lied, we cheated, we stole”.

These people at the top are there to get ahead and stay ahead. They are sociopaths. Do we really want them ruling over us?

Are We Being Poisoned (Part II: Fluoride)

In Vermont, USA a few days ago a town employee was found to have reduced fluoride levels in the municipal water for the last 5 years. A mother was reported to be outraged because her children's dentist had recommended against supplemental fluoride because fluoride was already added to the town's water. What this shows is that adding fluoride to water is a medical decision that affects everyone, whether someone has had already significant amounts of fluoride or not; whereas taking supplemental fluoride or using fluoridated toothpaste is a personal choice. 

Vermont, USA

It has been argued that poorer people cannot afford fluoridated toothpaste and are thus helped by water fluoridation. In fact, as I shall show, poor people are the ones most harmed by the measure. In any case, the solution would seem to be to guarantee that poor people have enough money to buy basic necessities, or to prescribe poor people free toothpaste and fluoride tablets where necessary, and educate everyone on the importance of oral health and good diet for avoiding tooth decay, obesity and diabetes.

Does any of this matter?

We assume that fluoride added to water must be innocuous and, of course, good for our teeth. But is it?

In fact fluoride is a neurotoxin that in 21 out of 23 studies was found to reduce children's intelligence and should be categorised like lead, mercury, arsenic... It is a component of many insecticides and rodenticides (in these cases generally as sodium fluoroacetate).

Excess fluoride causes stains on teeth, hypothyroidism, and possible bone disease (as excess fluoride collects in the body's calcium, i.e. bones and teeth), including weakened bones. It also collects in the pineal gland (more of that later) and may cause mental impairment, tiredness and gastrointestinal problems. Those with impaired kidneys are unable to process fluoride, resulting in a greater accumulation in bones. Fluoride is a neurotoxic mutagen, a compound that can cause genetic damage and, therefore, could conceivably cause cancer. 

Though we talk of 'fluoride', in fact there are three types added to water supplies: fluorosilicic acid, sodium fluorosilicate and sodium fluoride. The first is a designated hazardous substance, a severe irritant and an unwanted byproduct from the phosphate fertiliser industry or from the manufacture of aluminium and iron ore. It is used industrially in the manufacture of ceramics, pesticides and Teflon, and these are highly toxic industries. This byproduct posed a costly and intractable disposal problem until it was solved by adding it to water supplies. The second and third types of fluoride are obtained by adding table salt or caustic soda to the mix. All these fluorides are extremely corrosive to water pipes. 

Amazingly, fluoride products added to water are not pharmaceutical grade, unlike those added to toothpastes, or in tablets. And the few animal studies done on the subject have generally used pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride, not industrial hexafluorosilicic acid. For the most prescribed medicine in history, there has never been a double-blind, randomised clinical trial, nor large cohort study completed. Fluoridated toothpastes by law include warnings that they are not for small infants and that only a pea-sized amount should be used topically, rinsing out with water afterwards. Yet the amount of pharmaceutical grade fluoride in the pea-sized toothpaste is roughly that of industrial-waste-fluoride in a glass of water.

Calcium fluoride, on the other hand, the natural version of fluoride found in some natural water and soils, is relatively harmless, as calcium and magnesium mitigate the harmful effects of fluoride. The effect to the body of drinking a cup of Indian tea, often naturally high in fluoride, has nothing to do with the toxicity of ingesting fluorosilicic acid.

The addition of fluoride to public drinking water systems has been routine in communities across the United States since the 1940s and 1950s. In the UK, there are cities that add fluoride to water (for example, Newcastle does, Hull doesn't). Where I live, Seville, water is fluoridated; but in Madrid it is not. Additionally, Seville is within what is 'officially' designated the 'cancer triangle', an area of high cancer incidence. Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland have stopped fluoridation and oral health has not declined, nor is below that of countries that do fluoridate. Many other countries have reduced the permitted levels. The US Federal government lowered recommended amounts for drinking water in 2015. In the UK the best performers in oral health are Brighton, Bristol and Richmond-on-Thames, all cities and towns that don't fluoridate drinking water. In the West Midlands, where water has been fluoridated since 1964, there has been a massive rise in young children being admitted to hospital for multiple teeth extractions over the last decade. At the same time, rates of tooth decay are coming down equally in fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries. 

Oral health is almost entirely determined by socioeconomic status. The poor have disproportionately bad oral health in all cases, and are more susceptible, due to bad diet, to fluoride's toxicity.

European countries that have never fluoridated - like Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway... -, and countries that have discontinued fluoridation - like the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany (East and West), the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland - do not have worse oral health than those that do - like Ireland (70% of the population drinks fluoridated water), the UK (around 10%) and Spain (less than 10%). In countries that stopped, tooth decay continued to decline. 

Ireland, where most people are forced to drink fluoridated water, has relatively bad oral health as measured by the average number of teeth that have been decayed, lost (missing) or filled-in at the age of 12:

And, unlike chlorine in water, fluoride molecules are very small and almost impossible to remove without complicated processes like reverse osmosis or distillation, which themselves bring unwanted health risks for drinking water. 

Many U.S. municipalities and other countries don't fluoridate water for a variety of reasons, including opposition to the universal medication of a population, feasibility, technical problems and the ability to get fluoride other ways. Fluoride is indisputably toxic in large amounts and any debate on the subject is also highly toxic, almost a taboo; but is fluoride itself toxic in the authorised amounts?

Is fluoride toxic?

Tooth decay is a widespread chronic disease and the result of sugary diets. Caries can easily lead to toothache, tooth loss, problems with chewing and infection.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claim that fluoride in water decreases cavities or tooth decay by about 25%, and reported in 2018 that 73% of the U.S. population was served by water systems with adequate fluoride to protect teeth. When a large proportion of municipalities are drinking fluoridated water, comparison between similar populations on a socioeconomic level becomes less viable. However, using the water system to medicate people most importantly goes against the Nuremberg Code and, additionally, is a remarkably inefficient way to do this, as 99,5% of the fluoride will go to environmental pollution. So why is it done, especially since EU countries show no advantage to those countries that fluoridate compared to those that do not?

Adding fluoride to water is Big Business and appealing to our authorities and highly attractive for the phosphate fertiliser industry, which gets to sell its waste chemicals instead of having to environmentally dispose of them. But given the 70-odd years since its introduction as a grand public intervention, it is significant that there is simply no killer evidence to convince the anti-fluoridation crowd. Like so many pharmaceutical and corporate-friendly decisions made by government, there is simply not the will for serious follow-up studies. After all, what government wants to find that they have indeed been poisoning their citizens for decades? What government wants to take on big vested interests and its own captured health authorities? Or alienate voters over a mostly invisible topic especially since water fluoridation is unpopular when the question is properly debated. It is an extremely hot political potato.

The phosphate fertiliser industry is itself a result the industrialisation of farming that came out of excess industrial capacity post-WWII, together with a wish to recondition all those industrial plants that had been previously used for the war, and to boost all those chemical industries that had been producing nerve gases and other unpleasant products that would henceforth be used to kill insects and other organisms. 

Till the 1970s, around phosphate fertiliser plants, all vegetation was decimated and cattle were left crippled by the release of toxic gases. Nowadays, companies have to recover their toxic waste and the industry uses 'wet scrubbers' (a spray of water) to remove two highly toxic gases, hydrogen fluoride (HF) and silicon tetrafluoride (SiF₄) from the stacks. The resultant H2SiF₆, diluted to 23%, is sent to chemical plants and onwards to water companies. Phosphate rock is also mined for uranium and produces the radioactive Uranium 238 and Radium 226 (that in turn produces carcinogenic Radon). No systematic control is made of how much radioactivity ends up in water supplies. Equally awful, after dilution up to 1.66 ppb (parts per billion) arsenic can also end up in our water, having been added deliberately. Ironically, the waste that is used to fluoridate water is considered too hazardous to dump in the sea! Large amounts of sodium hexafluorosilicate are imported from China to the USA, in solid form, leading to reports that after dilution there remains an unidentified sludge.

As a result, the health effects of fluoride in water are not well known. When entire communities are drenched in controversial chemical products, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine if a specific one is carcinogenic for the general population. According to 2020 data from the American Cancer Society, men have a 40.14 percent—or approximately one in two—chance of developing cancer in their lifetime, which in itself in an absolute scandal. For women, the odds are slightly lower at 38.7 percent. And it's not only the old people and an increase in longevity. In the UK, since the early 1990s, incidence rates for all cancers combined have increased for all the broad age groups in the UK. The increase is largest in people aged 25-49 where rates have increased by more than a fifth (22%) (2016-2018).

Quietly debated for years has been the relationship between fluoridated water and cancer, a fact observed in rats, especially male rats. The US National Cancer Institute states that a link cannot be found for humans, although there have been studies that have found an osteosarcoma link for males diagnosed before the age of 20 and exposed to fluoridated water during the mid-childhood growth spurt (6-, 7- and 8-year-olds). The evidence of a link between fluoride and cancer is strong enough to urge extreme caution and, indeed, is stronger than the proven link between cancer and DDT.

In its review published in 1987, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization, labelled fluorides as “non-classifiable as to their carcinogenicity [ability to cause cancer] in humans.” They noted that the studies “have shown no consistent tendency for people living in areas with high concentrations of fluoride in the water to have higher cancer rates than those living in areas with low concentrations,” but also noted that the evidence was inadequate to draw conclusions one way or the other. Additionally, supporters of fluoridation point to naturally occurring fluoride in some water supplies but, as shown above, the fluoride artificially added to water is not the same a natural fluoride. 

Fluoride is hard to remove once added, especially for lower-income people, and no account is taken of how much fluoride is ingested via other means, nor the amount-of-water-to-bodily-weight ratio. Bottle-fed babies receive a far higher dosage of what is a drug (but not an approved one, and certainly not an essential nutrient, as some would try to suggest). According to the US CDC, 32% of children have dental fluorosis (excess fluoride before the eruption of the second set of teeth, leading to staining and discoloration). Worse still for a drug ingested by whole populations when topical options exist is the fact that topical use is far, far more appropriate than drinking it. As the USA CDC state:

'Fluoride's caries-preventive properties initially were attributed to changes in enamel during tooth development ... However, laboratory and epidemiologic research suggests that fluoride prevents dental caries predominantly after eruption of the tooth into the mouth, and its actions primarily are topical.'

A small risk spread over a very large population becomes a real risk, especially for susceptible populations, which goes against the precautionary principle. Currently some 400 million people in the world drink fluoridated water, and one in a hundred is potentially hypersensitive to it.

As the EU's Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine puts it:

Article 5 – General rule 

An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it. This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks. The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.

Fluoride also accumulates in the pineal gland because this gland has the highest calcium concentration of any soft tissue in the body, with a high metabolic activity and a profuse blood supply. It is also outside the blood-brain barrier. For children, the accumulation of fluoride at an earlier age reduces melatonin production, affecting among other things puberty. More interestingly, the pineal gland is thought to be associated with spirituality and enlightenment. Might our governments wish us to be less enlightened, only able to think inside the box?

The most neoliberal countries have authorities keen on mandating fluoridation. The US, Canada and Australia have all recently pressed for mandates to fluoridate water. The UK grants indemnity to water providers against legal liability. If this sounds like the indemnity given to vaccine manufacturers, it is because it is. And the question is why private companies, making huge profits off drugs given universally to healthy people, need indemnity from prosecution. In countries mandating fluoride no government agency seems to accept legal liability for possible adverse health effects.

Perhaps Dr B Havlik, Minister for Health of the Czech Republic, put it best: fluoridating water is: 

1. uneconomical
2. unecological
3. unethical
4. toxicologically debatable.

For those readers who wish to know more about this subject, some of the above data is from the excellent book The Case Against Fluoride by Paul Connett.