Who's ready?

 There are some obvious parallels trumpeting their existence and their similar dangers among world powers. Russia has invaded Ukraine with the intent of bringing her to her knees, if not actually prostrate before the Great Russian Bear. And while none of us would ever have dreamt, and certainly not anticipated it, The United States is enviously, deviously and brazenly threatening to ‘invade’ Canada, first in and through economic and diplomatic threats and incursions, in order to bring her bowing and scraping and begging for annexation to the Great Behemoth of the plutocracy of unfettered capitalism. To the side of this stage, in North America, the American media has noted the president has directed the Pentagon to prepare all options for the take-over of Panama, whose two port cities have just been sold to the American corporation, BlackRock, in a move than irritates, at least, China. At the same time, Greenland, just having voted for independence from Denmark, although she was declared a protectorate of the U.S. after Denmark’s occupation by Nazi Germany, during World War II, in 1940, prior to the U.S. entering the war. Following the war, the pre-war arrangement was restored.

Imperialism, whether under the banner of Russia, Israel, or the United States, or even China, (think Hong Kong and Taiwan), is nevertheless imperialism. And, in the current context, despots are the primary agents of this now galloping thrust in geopolitics.

Imperialism, by any other name is still domination, and domination is not able to be restricted or constrained by national boundaries. Just ask the hundreds of thousands of American public service workers whose jobs have been eliminated, under the pretext of waste, fraud, and corruption. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!) Or ask the millions of American government employees who now work for Cabinet Secretaries who, by their public admission, are determined to eviscerate the very departments to which they have been appointed. Their professional and personal credentials, if they have any, notwithstanding, it appears that none of them would ever have been recruited by a self-respecting corporation, or organization.

So, just as in Moscow, so in Washington, where a cluster of oligarchs sycophanticly genuflect to the emperor (who has no clothes), in order to prop up these papier-mache governments, led by cardboard cut-outs of men, whose only claim to power is their mendacious rhetoric, in support of their private-fantastical visions of utopia, all of it at the expense and destruction of what the world considered the ‘liberal world order’ of the last three-quarters of a century.

Guns and cash, in humungus proportions, however, can seduce these tyrants of their invincibility, and also their claim to self-righteousness, in pursuit of their hollow and vacuous ambitions.

In 1848, Henry David Thoreau wrote an essay entitled, Civil Disobedience, in which we find words, ideas, perceptions and attitudes that seem to have some direct application to the world we are living in in 2025.

(But) the rich man…is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the ‘means’ are increased. The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. (Thoreau, Walden and other Writings, Prospero Books, p. 291)

Of course, attempting to convince the despots and the oligarchs to read and to digest such thoughts, and to change their ways, would be analogous to strapping a single bed sheet to a mast and expecting to survive a tornado in the mid-Atlantic. Foolhardy and frivolous! It is to the rest of us, the millions of Americans, Canadians, Russians, and even Israelites, and perhaps to the people of all cultures, ethnicities, languages and religions, that the words and their import might have some chance to be considered. We live in a time when the question of money is not merely a method of keeping score, for a game of trading, exchange of baubles for furs; the archetypal god of the anima mundi is, Plutus, the personification of riches. And our herd-like adoration and adulation of any and all of his icons, has become the ‘food for which all of the Pavlovian dogs will do anything that imitates or replicates the bell, in order to grab, as greedily as possible, the money.

And, as one of the more obvious proofs that money has become our surrogate religion, we have no one, no organization, no court, and certainly no mosque, synagogue, cathedral or monastery sounding the alarm, and demanding the ‘turning of the tables’ that we so desperately need. Politics and governance, in North America, and around the world, is measured by how the government demonstrates stewardship of the public accounts. Transforming millions of individuals into entrepreneurs, via the internet, has the benefit of lifting many out of poverty, while enabling connections between consumer and artisan across the globe. Micro-loans, and the supporting tutelage to nurture the micro-businesses enhance the likelihood of their survival. It is at the ‘top end’ of the economic ladder that excessive wealth does what only excessive wealth can do, it corrupts absolutely (to borrow and amend Burke’s adage). If Thoreau’s observation that the only question the excessively rich man has to answer is how to spend it, and thus the moral ground has been taken from under his feet, it follows that we are increasingly under the thumb of precisely such men!

And as we watch their sycophantic, narcissistic, greed-based, moth-flutter to the bulb of the ‘top-dog,’ they take with them not only their insatiable appetite for more money, but also the determination to re-set the rules of the game of all political and economic ideologies, dispensing the capitalism and socialism and communism, and replacing all of them with oligarchism, a superficial mascara for tyranny.

These men care not a wit for other people; they care even less for the health of the planet and its environmental requisites for the sustaining of human life; they care not a wit for the poor and their right to public education, effective and accessible health care, the right to free speech, access to free and objective (not despotically controlled and manipulated) public information, and the personal and private security from the ‘state’ authorities all of whom answer and bow and scrape to the equivalent of the mob boss, now governing too many jurisdictions.

Like fiscal, physical, emotional, intellectual, political and power-obsessed clones, there is a new set of terrorist-gang leaders, under the guise of ‘phony’ elections and self-appointed perpetuity.

In in deep and graphic relief, are a few, count them on our fingers, rich men who, having attained considerable wealth, have at least read and reflected on Thoreau’s counsel: to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. Names like Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, (and doubtless others) shine like beacons, in an otherwise dark galaxy of men of excessive wealth. Indeed, there are also many, lesser known, and to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor perhaps with less money, who themselves are fully engaged in philanthropic ventures to help others.

Having collaborated, whether consciously or not, in the erection of this shrine to the economic gods, we are all now impaled in the implications of both its attempt to destroy what we naively considered established ‘law’ and tradition, and custom and ‘world order,’ as well as the civilizations’ need to direct its attention, ambition, vision, imagination and energy to the monumental job of turning this ‘ship’ of public convention, military nuclear subs, drones, missile, and nuclear bombs away from what appears to this scribe as a head-long addiction to ‘self-sabotage’. We can see that the moral found has been removed from under the feet of these despots leaving no hope of their metanoia away from the addiction to personal power at all costs, into some modicum of mercy, compassion and universal equality.

Trade wars, flying like drones in the shape of tariffs, are now circling the globe, with the elemental and juvenile ‘tit-for-tat’ that demonstrates the moral and political and ideational bankruptcy of these MEN. Real drones, too, are laying their devastation when and wherever they find their military target. Operated anonymously, from some computer screen, on the opposite side of the planet from their target, they provide a clinical detachment for the killers, as well as for those ordering their deployment. Save the Children, UNICEF, Doctors without Borders, War Child, Ukrainian Foundation, and the plethora of other agencies cannot and will not be able to keep pace with the human devastation, no matter now successful their fund-raising efforts turn out to be.

We are all complicit as child-killers, refugee-generators, agents of migrant-seeking desperate hordes and millions of men, women and children who are starving and dying right before our eyes, on our screens and in the depths of our hearts, whether seen or not. A headline in The Humanitarian, this week, reads:

“The data streams that underpin humanitarian response are about to collapse.” The story continues: The FEWS NET, (Famine Early Warning Systems Network is a website of information and analysis of food insecurity created in 1985 by USAID, and the US Department of State after famines in East and West Africa. This week’s story reads:

On 21 February, anyone trying to access FEWS NET found a dead webpage. The site is a critical early warning data resource, which for 40 years has informed humanitarian response to hunger crises before they escalate into famines. Now, it is an early casualty to the USAID defunding crisis and an alarming harbinger of the assault on the data infrastructure that underpins humanitarian action.

This kind of back story, naturally, will not, indeed cannot make headlines, given the cataract of bluster, blunder and bombast spewing from the MOUTH in the Oval Office. No news outlet, with the best intentions, can or will keep up with the ‘poisoning smog’ a gaseous stream of lies constructed, written and disseminated to inflate the egos of the oligarchs and to distract the millions of ‘mere minions’ all of them easily duped, as perceived, believed and enacted by the men at the top of the hierarchical pyramid.

“World War III” is a phrase being chanted both in Washington and in Moscow, almost as if the same song-and-play-book were being deployed in both capitals. And who can or will doubt it is? Just as we are all refugee-generators, and child-killers, we also have the potential and the opportunity to emulate men like Zelensky, Starmer, Macron, and hopefully Carney, the newly minted Prime Minister of Canada, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

Divesting oligarchs of their wealth, while their perceived ‘idols’ willfully protect them and their power and wealth, so long as they remain loyal, and then eviscerate them at the first sign of disloyalty, is and will be a long-range project. Removing the despots, too, will require ‘acts of nature’ of which we are only groping for hints. It is the question of mounting determined, disciplined, convicted and courageous public opposition to the rape and pillage, not only of the ‘world order’ but of the lives of innocents, seemingly for the ‘fun-of-it,’ because ‘they can,’ that looms as the call to both action and to hope, if we are to have any.

Buying Canadian products, in the face of American illegitimate and illegal tariffs, while noble and honourable, will not dent the ego or the determination of the orange balloon in Washington. Even cutting off electricity to three American states, while it has been withdrawn, will replicate a fly on the lapel of the president, brushed off and dismissed summarily, in another act of contempt, disrespect and insulting patronizing.

Even marching to the embassies, and consulates, while honourable and noble, will never penetrated the Chuvalo-thick skulls of those in either the White House or the Kremlin. Recognizing the depth, the severity and the determination of those predators and perpretators of this scourge that stretches across oceans, continents, ideologies and ethnicities, and into the depths of the human psyche, means that we all are being conscripted, whether formally or informally or voluntarily, into action. Ou uniforms are our street clothes; our weapons are our words, our feet, our phones, our laptops and our neighbours. Our mission is to bring this (these) demoniacal monsters to heel and it will take ever last one of us, if we are to be even partially successful.

Those who have been calling us to join the fight to protect the environment, are the very ones for whom all of us must take up this ‘fight’….not with military arms, not with lies and propaganda, and not with the kind of personal pursuit of glory that motivates many of the heroes of history…but with a humility, and a determination, and a creativity that defies the thumb, the heel and the intransigent ego and vacuity of the villains.

As Prime Minister Carney asked rhetorically, ‘Who’s ready?’