The global stakes of the Ukraine crisis. The failure of western civilization
By Prof. John McMurtry
War party bigotry and hate
may be enough to drive neo-Nazis leading Kiev in the Ukraine civil war.
But the reverse blame of Putin and Russia by corporate media and states
has a deeper interest. It propels the geostrategic economic and military
war of movement through East Europe to Russia. It is the
indispensible big lie to mask their set up for foreign financial
predation. A big pay-off matrix looms in Ukraine for US-led arms
corporations and military services, agribusiness and GMO’s, speculator
funds on debts and currency, monopoly providers of privatized social
services, Big Oil frackers for newly discovered rich deposits, junk food
suppliers like Poroshenko in US-frankenfood alliance, and – last but
not least – the IMF money party waging a war of dispossession by
financial means.
The IMF enforces the global money-sequence cancer system by its defining policy commands on debt-impoverished countries to open them up to foreign feeding on their domestic markets and fire-sale enterprises, drastically reduced workers’ wages and benefits, stripped public pensions, healthcare and education, sell-off of historic infrastructures to pay ever more bank-created debts, and – in general- multiplying transnational money demand and profit invading their life functions at all levels. The IMF and Wall Street have been cumulatively hollowing out Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia, South Europe and the US itself in these ways over 35 years. Now it is the turn of the once social democratic Europe, state by state, beginning with the most indebted and helpless. Ukraine on the outskirts of Europe next to Russia is where the military option has been required to strip it and its former Slavic economic union with Russia. This historic relationship has been the last line of life defense in the way, a conservative but sharing ethos of resource-rich societies with Putin as a superior leader facing the US-EU’s many-times more powerful economic levers and lethal arms to bully him and Russia into submission.
To take the naturally rich Ukraine for transnational bank and corporate looting, the public must be sold the story of Putin as the villain. Only then can debt screws be applied and the country opened to long-term and full-spectrum financial, foreign and oligarch control beneath the people’s notice. The IMF is already in motion to ensure that the Kiev coup state provides all of this. Few observe the underlying fact that the crushing bank debt eating societies alive across the world is all debt money created by big private banks with no legal tender to back 97% of it. Ukraine is the latest nation to fall into the deadly trap without a sound. Here public money for public need is ended, although it created the US itself. As Ben Franklin has testified, to regain public money issue was the prime reason for the American Revolution. Public banking was also what made modern Canada from 1938 to 1974 by public investment money without private debt-servicing loaned by the public Bank of Canada for construction of Canada’s material and social infrastructures from the St Lawrence Seaway to public pensions and universal healthcare.
The same is true of almost every society that has economically succeeded in the modern world. . The Depression and the War especially taught the world’s real leaders something about public banking as the only thing that works for real social development. Germany in peace, China, India, Japan in their most prosperous periods have all relied on public investment banking in some form. But the Wall Street counter-revolution happened invisibly in 1974 by Bank of International Settlements policy to stop governments from lending their own money for their public investments – the BIS being a coterie of bank heads meeting in Switzerland led by Wall Street bankers and with no accountability to any public interest or body. On the contrary, against their constitutional rights, all governments have been made accountable to the Wall Street system which runs the US Treasury and the IMF by the revolving door method. This silent BIS policy destroyed public investment free of the self-multiplying debt charges now eating away at every level of the Western economy including sovereign public investment. Ukraine, with few noticing, has just been privatized at the bank debt and investment level by the US-led coup state. Its arrangements with the IMF now loaning money on Wall Street permanent debt-servicing terms have replaced the $20 billion it had from Russia on payable public terms along with 30% cut-rate oil and gas.
This most far-reaching change of all has been erased from view by the official story – the delivery of Ukraine by the US-led coup into the ever-devouring funnels of the Wall-Street-and-company private banking system. With all the permanent new debt servicing of an already broken country spending its future debt on fighting a US-manufactured civil war fueled by neo-Nazi war thugs, Ukraine will be bled dry. A revealing example of how IMF debt bondage leverages transnational corporate control of Ukraine’s greatest resources is the new IMF $17 billion loan on the condition that Ukraine opens up its peerless vast stretches of black soil and fertile lands to the biotech cycles of Monsanto, Dupont, Deere and factory looting of the earth. Similar plans are also in motion for Big Oil racking of Ukraine’s large newly discovered gas deposits (fracking is prohibited in Russia).
The transnational corporate and bank looting of Ukraine is the shadow reason for the US block against any reasonable truce in the civil war that it has created. This is why a jackal government like Canada’s Harper’s refuses to respond to any diplomatic correspondence from Russia, blocking information flows, and proclaiming inflammatory falsehoods. The profound common life interests at stake are exactly what the war party is out to make impossible to act on. Ukraine is a prime agricultural land source of the world and Europe’s biggest landmass, and it is set for US-EU financial and corporate takeover. Ukraine is also facing the same ultimate crisis as every country and people – its government being mutated into a corporate satrap to ensure the country as an unlimited profit site at least costs and accountability for foreign corporate and local oligarch profit. It is a paradigm case of the carcinomic global dispossession that knows no growth but its own. But it is also the leading current case of armed resistance against this takeover. Donbas, Putin and Russia are alone in stopping the life-devouring system’s advance East, with Syriza in Greece the newly elected resistance within Europe.
All face the same stripping of collective life capital bases to grow the global money sequences of the apical few with no life function. Ukraine is the new major feeding zone opening towards Russia. Here as much as Greece, public assets are on the privatization block. Slash-and-burn budgets are set to service new unpayable debts to foreign banks, with far more rich natural and soil wealth to marketize and expropriate for debt servicing. Ukraine also has large and untapped fossil-fuel deposits, and it provides new strategic military control up to Russia’s main border and colossally rich natural resources on the other side.
Yet the operation of reverse blame goes from Iraq to Libya to Syria to Ukraine to Russia in one society destruction to the next. With one-way pervasive media abuse, cumulatively destructive sanctions, and incremental arming of neo-fascist-led Ukrainian forces, vast global power, treasure and most of all direction are at stake which affect all humanity. The line is drawn on the global disorder’s runaway aggression and trail of social ruin. Or it is stopped by intelligent mass resistance that does not let up.
This resistance has grown
stronger. A new truce was formed for February 15 by the EU, Kiev-Ukraine
and Russia for this reason. Predictably all voices of the official
story warn that “Russia and the separatists” will not obey its terms.
Yet when we examine the record of international law and agreements,
life-protective promises and agreements, who always overrides them at
will? The track record tells us very plainly, but the record is always
excluded from the ruling story. What is presupposed instead is the most
inane of all moral equations unconsciously assumed as first principle of
judgement in international affairs: the US = Good and its Enemy = Evil.
Search for any exception to this inner logic of the official narrative
in any major conflict across the globe in 50 years. What is never stated
are the actual facts of “lawless aggression”, “gross violations of
international law” and “innocent civilians terrorized and murdered”.
That the US is by far the knock-down leader on all counts of war crime,
killing, terror and, in general, violence against human life of every
kind is taboo to understand. While always accusing others of violating
“the international laws and norms of the community of nations”, it
repudiates and sabotages them without evident exception.
Consider the systemic violations and subversions across the spectrum. The US government has refused to ratify the International Criminal Court to uphold the law against war crimes and crimes against humanity, and it has publicly repudiated the Court’s right to investigate US criminal violations including the “supreme crime” of initiating a war of aggression. While it perpetually invokes international laws to accuse others, it repudiates any life-protective law whatever in its actions. In truth, the US (and its key ally Israel) has systematically undermined virtually all international laws to protect human life – treaties and conventions against landmines, against biological weapons, against international ballistic missiles, against small arms, against torture, against racism, against arbitrary seizure and imprisonment, against military weather distortions, against biodiversity loss, against climate destabilization, and even international agreements on the rights of children and of women.
The big-lie system runs
to the moral DNA of the US state. Its record of continual war crimes and
crimes against humanity by direct or proxy violation should be foremost
in the minds of those observing what happens next in Ukraine. It can only continue if NATO-country public opinion does not join the dots in the ultimate failure of Western civilization.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-global-stakes-of-the-ukraine-crisis-the-failure-of-western-civilization/5432144
