Home 2015 – Media, finance, oil system, military-industrial complex, QE : the narratives war

2015 – Media, finance, oil system, military-industrial complex, QE : the narratives war

In the chaos that characterizes any crisis, explanations increase as so many attempts to impose their vision of the world where the stake is world domination. The chaotic “gap[1] » opened by a crisis is also a narrative war zone whose winners will be either the strongest (for a short period of time), or the most coherent (for a long period).

For the everyday citizen or player, the great difficulty is not to lose one’s head in the middle of these countless story-tellings. The GEAB’s mission since January 2006 is precisely this: helping its readers to look beyond the obvious and the dominant noise and try to get closer to the reality of profound changes. This work is important individually, in the decisions that everyone must continue to make in an unstable environment, but it’s even more important on a collective basis because the choice of narrative is of course a choice for the future. Yet between the narrative imposed by force and that by reality, a society can lock itself into an ideological system or resolutely commit itself to an open world.

In the 20th century, the people who swung to ideological systems disconnected from reality probably had little choice. Today, ultra-connected and multi-informed societies have a real responsibility in the choice of their future. This is why the GEAB and political anticipation, without claiming to be always right, is offering a summary of the narratives attempting to maximize objectivity and help its readers to keep as much distance as possible from events, to distinguish between factual information and opinion, between false and reliable information, and provide the tools to forge and have confidence in one’s own opinion.

We have already mentioned the fact that 2015 would be characterized by a “monstrous overlap” between the world before and the world afterwards, where the two worlds appear to be equal: one by the strength of the tools of power at its disposal and which are still operational (media, armies, finance…), the other by its intrinsic strength.

In reality, the world before is henceforth eminently weakened and its residual domination is no more than the fruit of its superhuman efforts to make its tools of power “speak” in its place, an effort in which it is exhausting itself, much as the URSS exhausted itself in the arms race.

Our team has decided to make public the first part of the Perspectives section, about the tools of power in crisis, knowing that the second part of the section proposes some analyses on the European QE and the euro-dollar rate.

 

Four tools of power in crisis

Let’s look for a moment where the world before’s famous tools of power are:

. open questioning of the media’s objectivity, their professionalism, their added value, etc… with the Charlie affair an illustrative event of this deep questioning: the contrast between editorial chiefs with ultra-authoritarian methods suddenly proud to wear the “I am Charlie” badge didn’t fail to examine whole classes of journalists, but also citizens, on the freedom of expression; a healthy debate on the Western media’s work on the Ukraine, for example, timidly appears; the question arises as to the relevance of media pyramids really too small (a plumbing problem) able to properly reprocess the immense complexity of a multi-polar, multicultural and multilingual state world’s reality…; also the question of the legitimacy of this self proclamation as the “fourth power” which increasingly looks like an “usurpation of power”, that of the citizens, which it had an implicit mission to represent before the Internet, in fact. But the Internet is here and henceforth, if the media has a role to play, it’s certainly not that of any exercise of the fourth power but really this, original and inescapable, of contributing to the real fourth power’s proper information, the people. The coverage of the Ukrainian crisis has revealed media control by various interests, but in no way by the citizens. The damage to this profession is considerable, requiring it to persist in a formalization of its propagandist turn or to reinvent itself. But in both cases, the media will really have a hard time to credibly serve the prior system.

. a fully overheating dollar-centred financial system[2], boosted by instability and speculative opportunities, but completely disconnected from its primary mission of financing the economy: the reality is that the retail banks continue to lay off staff and go bankrupt[3] ; only the speculative investment banks are prospering but in a fashion which no longer garners anyone’s support: individuals have left the world of stocks which was opened to them as a land of plenty in the 90s[4] ; the Sovereign-States (in particular the emerging nations, such as China) no longer know what to do to protect themselves from the bubbles spreading in their path always causing more instability and disrupting any strategic economic planning[5] ; the real economy is moving apart as well, which is no longer getting the financing that it needs to develop and is henceforth searching for new formulae such as crowd-funding to mention but one[6].

. a fully collapsing « oil system”: the US grip on the 20th century’s ultimate energy resource has collapsed under the triple shock of oil – dollar de-coupling caused by the Euro’s arrival in 2002 (followed by some producing countries’ efforts to sell their oil in Euros to free themselves of US control); the dislocation of the US-centred system of oil governance, OPEC, induced at the instigation of the US itself by shale drilling; and by energy transition led by Europe to the forefront, soon followed by all the emerging nations, leading to the collapse in prices… and what was left of dollar credibility.

. a Western military-industrial complex attacked by budget cuts and austerity plans and it’s not because the German finance minister, Schaüble, has announced that it will be necessary to increase military budgets again out to 2017 (!) as if that changes anything as regards the fact that German military expenditure will only fall again this year[7], that Tsipras’ Greece won’t fail to undertake reducing the huge drain caused by the army on the Greeks through the financing of an army wholly disproportionate to the Turkish “threat”[8], that UK military budget reductions worries the US[9], that Bulgaria has just cancelled the whole military budget[10], etc…

The reality is that the West can no longer afford its policies.

 

The ear-splitting grating of these blunt tools

So of course, these four pillars of power of the world before have never screamed as loudly as now. And the ear-splitting grating of these blunt tools creates real dangers:

. As regards the media, whilst displaying real attempts at reinvention, the temptation exists to ideologize even more, even permitting itself to counter the very official propaganda of the Russian media machine, for example[11].

. the banks, financial markets, statistics, the size of fines and profits, and especially the increasingly improbable increases in stock prices, fill the pages of the financial media and minds hypnotized by the chasm that separates these astronomical sums from economic reality; but the power which these staggering numbers give authorizes the banking and financial system to lay down its law to the central banks and governments for a while yet.

. the oil price collapse puts the oil producing powers at bay even more at the centre and with a real pressing need for reorganization: Saudi Arabia at the forefront, trying to grab the region through its daesh Islamic armies spreading Wahhabism in the Middle East[12].

. as for NATO, it attempted a military coup on Europe in 2014 taking advantage of an inept management of the EU’s neighbourhood relations. The fact is that it isn’t easy to ask for the wallet of the person who holds the gun… The Western military-industrial complex’s strategy is simple and perfectly logical therefore: capitalize on, or even create conflicts to make itself indispensable and able to maintain/increase its budgets.

Thus the considerable weakening of the tools of power which remained the prerogative of a sick world before, still runs significant risks for the planet for some time to come, namely: risks of war (oil, NATO), risks of a Western camp confining itself ideologically (media), risks of economic collapse (financial markets)…To read more, please subscribe to the GEAB

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[1] The word « chaos » comes from the Greek «khaos » which indicates « gap, weakness ». Source : Wikipedia

[2] Our team has always asked itself to what extent the dollar standard’s running off the road wouldn’t happen from above rather than below; the US currency’s current overheating, even if not definitive, seems to be in the process of taking the US dollar transition out of its status as a world standard.

[3] The big cleanup, especially in the US, of course happened at the beginning of the crisis (2008-2010) and the reduced number of survivors makes their difficulties more anecdotal. That said, the banks are still suffering as evidenced by this list of recent layoffs and bankruptcies: Boston Bank, Doral Bank Puerto Rico, Hungary’s banks,  Polish banks, ANZ Bank Australia, Bank of America, JP Morgan,  Royal Bank of Scotland, etc…08/01/2013)

[4] Sources : La Tribune, 08/01/2013; CNN, 27/12/2012

[5] Source : Ecns.cn, 02/03/2015

[6] Source : BusinessBecause, 18/02/2015

[7] Source : Deutsche Welle, 01/03/2015

[8] Source : The Guardian, 19/04/2012

[9] Source : Washington Post, 12/03/2015

[10] Source : Novinite, 24/02/2015

[11] Our teams have seen a hysteria about the alleged media war between the West and Russia, which seems to allow the use of propaganda speeches to balance the forces present. Media like Ukraine Today, for example, was created in the Ukrainian Western camp with the official objective of producing counter-propaganda (which is propaganda, of course). It’s interesting to read what the BBC has to say on these issues.(03/03/2015)

[12] Source : New Statesman, 27/11/2014

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