Five things you need to know to have any real idea of what is happening right now

I want to talk about why the U.S. is waging war against Iran at the moment, and I’m going to explain it in five parts. The first part is the problem. What is it that the U.S. is hoping to achieve? Why is it going to war now? And the answer is not that Donald Trump had a brain fart or that Israel made them do it.

Part two is the solution. What are they, how are they going to get the aims, achieve the aims that they want? Part three is Iran on a tightrope, the explaining the situation that Iran finds itself in and the way it needs to respond carefully, but resolutely in order to forestall a much bigger, more destructive onslaught against the country. And part four is the empire on a razor’s edge, talking about the contradictions within the US empire

that mean that it also is an extremely in an extremely precarious situation as it wages this war that could bring the whole thing tumbling down and part five is the epstein class versus the people reminding us that this is not simply an abstract thing and that increasingly this is a

a war run for and by a very narrow extremely sociopathic class of people in a decadent empire who are completely unconcerned with the amount of suffering they cause in pursuit of their own self-interest and self-preservation so To start with the problem,

I’m going to start quite far back at the end of World War II when the US found itself to have nearly 60% of all of the world’s manufacturing capacity. This put it in more of a bind than you might think because it was then going to have a trade surplus, permanent trade surplus going forward.

Now, one of the problems with this is that The increase in material wealth would spread to the working class in the country and would undermine the social hierarchy. This is a process that’s described by Clara Matei in The Capital Order, which she traces back to post-

world war one austerity in italy and great britain and how that paved the way for fascism basically um the system requires the repression of democratic forces and enough wealth accumulating to the enough wealth and economic power going to the proletariat threatens that order So there is that, so this led to de-industrialization in the US,

but it also led to something called military Keynesianism. And military Keynesianism was partly, or certainly sold as being a way of stabilizing the economy, which it is, but the US could stabilize the economy by building a state sector in other areas. Indeed, you know, some of the things that are attributed to Military Keynesianism, like technological development,

actually take place more under programs such as the space program than they do under weapons programs. So, yes, it’s true that military Keynesianism has granted the U.S. a large state sector that stabilizes their economy, provides employment and distribution of funds and so forth. But in a lot of ways, that’s not really its purpose. It’s got two purposes.

One, it creates a mechanism of political control through the military industrial complex, which distributes larges and jobs in a way that actually provides a mechanism of control over congressional representatives. But the other way is that it’s a way of destroying wealth. So the thing is with arms, they are a completely non-productive item. They don’t give anyone anything.

They do the opposite. They will destroy things, which can stimulate economic activity without allowing wealth to accumulate in the lower classes, you see. So this was brought about in 1950 through something called NSC 68. The US promptly went to war in Korea to consolidate the system and has never really looked back.

It’s been using the system to wage war and control its own economy and keep down its own working class. ever since however this worked in conjunction with something else because over time the us had problems with keeping its the us dollar as reserve currency originally

it was backed by gold but with the expenditure in the second china war commonly known as the vietnam war this started to undermine their ability to actually pay in gold for the US dollars. So they needed another system. A system was pitched first in a couple of articles by a guy in Foreign Affairs magazine,

and then he took it to the Bilderberg Foundation. group so that’s an international group of elites and pitched it and this system was petrodollar recycling so petrodollar recycling works by ensuring that everyone has to trade oil in us dollars and in order to make it work they needed to drive up the price of oil

Two of their client states, Saudi Arabia and Iran, at the time under the Shah, decided to restrict oil supply, creating the oil shocks in the 1970s, which allowed them to do this. So fast forward to now, what is the problem? Well, one of the problems is that the U.S. under the system is basically de-developing itself industrially, economically.

So it’s keeping its own population down. And it’s fine for its own functioning in relation to its own client states because we, under the Washington consensus rules of neoliberal economic orthodoxy, we all do the same to our own people. We were all suppressing our own economic development and the welfare of our people

in order to maintain this system of control. But… The system is not in place in China, and China is leaping ahead in economic development, and it shows absolutely no sign of simply going along with what the U.S. wants. So immediately, like, the U.S. has obviously had China in its sights for a long time,

but it’s getting to the crunch point where where it’s hard, I mean, I live here in Aotearoa, it’s very hard for our elites to justify their increasing allegiance to the US when it is against our material interests. And I’m going to return to this,

but this is about the fact that the 1% who are extremely brainwashed are going against their own interests, but at some stage they may wake up and realise that they’re being taken for a right. So there is that problem and there is another problem. So the US controls most of the world’s oil.

It has seized control of Venezuelan oil. This is incredibly crucial. And now it’s got Iran in its sights. One of the problems they’re facing is that this obviously, as I said, the control of oil is a mechanism of global control. Oil is essential to The industrial functioning and just the social functioning,

the economic functioning in general of pretty much every country in the world. And it’s also incredibly important for military power as well. And that’s not going to change with renewables. But what is going to change? is that as renewables grow and the existing infrastructure of extracting oil, refining oil, and transporting oil is already paid for. It’s there.

The capacity is already there. As renewables grow, the demand for petroleum will hit a tipping point where even though the U.S. controls most of the oil producers, the temptation for someone to sell it at a price that people can’t turn down so russia for example could sell oil at a

price that will undercut the market and drive prices down and this tipping point will lead to a race to the bottom in the price It’s just that simple economics of it because they can restrict production. But if that’s undermined by a single large producer, then the kind of people restricting the production would be cutting their own

throats because their price will be driven down at the same time as their volumes will be driven down. So the pressure would be on them to actually keep the production up and try and compete on price, especially those places like in the Middle East that have easier to refine, cheaper oil as opposed to Venezuela or Canada.

So this is a big problem. The solution, the nature of the solution is obviously that this is not the first time the US has gone to war in the Middle East and thus disrupted oil supplies and driven the price up and has given massive windfall profits to its allies and clients and so forth.

So the main beneficiaries are People like Saudi Aramco, but also if people cast their minds back, if you’re old enough to the time of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, it drove prices up so much that suddenly like ExxonMobil was the biggest corporation in world history. You know, this is before the tech giants, obviously.

And so forth. So there is a logic to creating this restriction, even though it is against the interests of the ordinary US people who have to buy petrol and also have the prices of their groceries and stuff driven up by the price of petrol. The ordinary US people are not what the empire is run for.

I mean, I don’t know who would believe that it is for their benefit, but it is definitely not. So we do have to remember that this isn’t about the US as a nation. This is about an empire looking after itself. so the solution is partly to drive prices up donald trump has already said because

he’s quite desperate to get people to come on board with this he’s given the game away to some extent he’s like said well you know this is a comparative advantage for us and it certainly is one thing that would give them an edge over china going forward

Not that they’d be able to use it because their economy is so corrupted. And so the US economy is, the whole economy is a bubble effectively. You know, it’s based on a false valuation of their economic inputs into things that are mainly made in China.

So, you know, the solution though is not just about the driving oil prices up. It’s also about what they want to do to Iran, Iran being obviously a significant oil producer in its own right, a large country with 92 million people who, if they do get to either undercut the oil price or

use oil for their own development either way they provide they become a very big problem for the us and they’re also a source of oil for china so that the us can’t use its relative advantage to to compete against china The solution for the U.S.

is more or less what it’s been doing ever since the invention of the military Keynesianism I told you about, and that is that it doesn’t fight wars as people understand them. It commits genocide. Now, war, or what I call Clausewitzian war, is… The clichéd thing, which is like an army is sent against another army,

is politics continued by other means. Like it’s trying to, one sovereign trying to exert will over another sovereign using force of arms. That is the standard understanding of what war is. genocide in contrast is war against peoples and nations that is how it was defined

when it was term was first coined and if you look at the law surrounding genocide even though there’s a lot of um A lot of impressions that it’s about racial hatred and stuff like that. The actual original genocide convention is completely consistent with that idea.

So it is attacking a people as such rather than trying to attack their government and their army. So, you know, and not that waging war to control another country is legitimate or legal even, but that’s a different area of law and that’s also a different concept. So we are talking about genocide.

And the reason we’re talking about genocide is that the US does have this overwhelming military power. I mean, there’s We’re reaching the age now where they are facing, for the first time, some really, I mean, some important asymmetric limitations to its ability to fight war, which I will talk about a bit further. In the past,

people have looked at guerrilla warfare and said that this shows the limitations of US warfighting. Which is, I mean, sort of true, but not really because those guerrillas could never actually hit the U.S. heartlands. Anything the U.S., you know, because they’re fighting people thousands of kilometers away, there is no ability to really hit their interests successfully.

So the U.S. controls the tempo. It only attacks where it wants to and so forth. So there is a strong limitation to that form of asymmetric warfare. And also the reality is that that form of asymmetric warfare actually played into the U.S.’ ‘s plan of waging a genocide. So if the U.S.

was wanting to go to war with someone, if it was this Klaus Witzian war situation of politics continued by other means, then they would never, more or less, never have to because the other side, knowing the power of the U.S. would always concede to them whatever is legitimately can be conceded in such a circumstance.

And I realize that that might be a bit of a hard concept to get your head around. Just ignoring, just leave that for a second and think about the fact that like constantly the U.S. is through history has worked to ensure that the other enemy can’t negotiate a peaceful solution. So in Korea,

an initial period where they swept up and down the country wreaking havoc, they settled into a static position virtually exactly where the U.S. had divided the country in the first place. And they stayed there for two years while the U.S. completely trashed negotiations that were supposed to happen in be happening, and then used their soft power,

their media dominance, to keep saying that it was communist perfidy that was preventing a negotiated solution. And they kept this going while they completely obliterated the north of the country, killing 10% of its civilian population, driving the entire society underground. and committed a war of attrition against the north korean and chinese forces they

were fighting against inflicting incredible casualties and thus like permanently cut the country in half as we know it’s still still divided today and still technically at war today so it was a long time ago and they’ve created this permanent situation of division and conflict there. And in security.

So this is the sort of thing that happens in Vietnam and Indochina in 1954. They intervened in negotiations in Geneva to kind of leave the door open to further conflict and to prevent unification of the country. They then imposed a client as the ruler of South Vietnam,

who they then provoked into creating conflict with the local Viet Minh that had not gone north and drove the people in the south to take up arms again, which eventually forced the North Vietnamese against their will. has to be said, to join in the conflict. And then after years, like Johnson said, the Vietnamese don’t want to negotiate,

which the Vietnamese responded to by saying, yes, we do. Here are our points of negotiation. And he then turned around and said, he took their points and said, see, they don’t really want to negotiate because they’d asked for things that he didn’t want to give. It was a cheap rhetorical trick.

And then famously in 1968, when they were actually negotiating for peace, Henry Kissinger went to Paris and undermined those negotiations, persuaded their South Vietnamese clients to hold out and refused to negotiate. And you think, well, eventually, of course, they negotiated a peace in 1973, which, of course,

didn’t actually achieve peace because it was only the reunification of the country by force of arms that achieved peace in the end. And Henry Kissinger, the same person who’d undermined the peace process, was given a Nobel Peace Prize for… negotiating a non-end to the war. But the war ended, but not because the U.S.

intended, well, not the U.S. security state, not the deep state part of the U.S. They would not have ended the war. They wanted a forever war there, and their intention was to run what they called a um an enclave strategy which was to withdraw to a few major cities and just keep

fighting war in the country forever and ever and ever so this is the sort of this is what they want to do they want to inflict destruction and suffering and division on countries and you see it where they go again and again and again iraq libya sudan somalia and so forth.

This is the genocidal nature of what they do. In Iran, their maximal aim at the moment would be to go to Iran, assault them, then negotiate A ceasefire where they get concessions out of Iran thus weakening their position after having wreaked death and economic destruction on them.

And then maintain their siege or tighten their siege through sanctions on Iran. And then whenever they feel like it at a later date, repeat the whole process again. So this is the model they would love to pursue. But of course, Iran knows this. This is why Iran is refusing to negotiate.

They understand that the only way that they can get out of this trap is to change the calculation on the ground. So at least Iran has clarity. They know that there is no point in negotiating. I mean, the situation is really structurally very much the equivalent of the

indigenous people in continental United States negotiating treaties with the US government. Those treaties mean nothing because in the East, I mean, I’m talking about in the 19th century, in the You have a government that those, they can fight, the indigenous people can fight in the West and their homes, but they can’t touch this big,

increasingly industrialized society in the East. So there is this untouchable center and they’re in the periphery or the semi-periphery. And Iran is in the same situation. It’s not like they can hit the US at home. Of course, as I’ve discussed, in some ways they don’t have to.

The US is hitting itself at home, but we’ll get to that in a second. The thing is with Iran, though, what they’re facing at the moment is not the full might of the US military. And the US would love to unleash its military in full, and it may yet do so. I mean,

there are signs that it is intending to, knowing that Iran is not going to negotiate that sort of quick solution, they are going to engage in a six-month process of building up forces and then go for a much, much, bigger war. Why they can’t do this at the moment? Because they need, nobody supports the war at all.

So they can do this air campaign, but they have very little support around the world. And, you know, they are liable to lose it pretty easily. For Iran, there is a very big danger in that the U.S. wants to provoke them into doing something that will galvanize people’s opinion such that people are willing to take,

willing to see losses amongst U.S. forces and massive, massive losses of Iranian civilian populations. So because we live in a system where as soon as Iran does something that is considered morally condemnable, every single Western chauvinist newspaper and TV station and politician and business leader and fucking Every one of these fuckers will be screaming for revenge.

So this is part of the problem with Iran. If they do something that crosses a line, then US will be unable to unleash much greater firepower on them. So people have criticized the Trump administration for trumpeting its, so to speak, trumpeting its air superiority in Iran. And that’s the term they use, air superiority.

And people are mixing that up with air supremacy. They do have air superiority in Iran. I mean, there’s no question the air forces are… superior to those of the Iranians. However, they don’t have air supremacy, which is pretty much when you can just fly,

which is what the US has been used to in a lot of situations recently. You can just fly whatever you want and bomb whatever you want. However, if people are willing to sustain losses, then they can start flying bombers over and genuinely carpet bombing Iranian cities.

And we would see destruction on levels that are far beyond what we’ve encountered so far. So Iran has to avoid giving them that pretext. But the US has been trying to goad Iran into doing something like this for a very long time. And, you know, as I said,

the immediate interest would be to negotiate a solution and then go back. But they… working at cross purposes in some sense, because they want to push the hardliners in the hope that they will do something like that. And so in the past, they have obviously tried to spook the Iranians into some sort of preemptive thing

by faking an imminent invasion, going back to like 2008 or so, I think it was, maybe a bit later than that, 2010, when Seymour Hersh leaked a whole bunch of things about imminent invasion of Iran when it was clearly not imminent at the time. But because it came from inside, it seemed to be.

And this sort of pressure has been kept up on Iran for a long time. And the US has done a lot of these very provocative things like killing Soleimani and so forth. And a lot of what they do is to take out, not just with Iran, but in general,

they tend to try and kill the moderates and leave the hardliners there. And on the very first day of the assault, they didn’t just kill Ali Khamenei. They also bombed the elementary school that we all know about. Well, one of the things about that is it’s right near the Straits of Hormuz and a lot of

naval officers had children there. So I think that they deliberately killed those kids so as to try and provoke, as the decision-making gets pushed down, they tried to provoke some sort of reaction, such as a poorly considered attack on an oil tanker or something like that,

that would give them the pretext that they didn’t have in order to start this war. As it is, however, Iran has maintained their discipline and the US are still in a position where they can’t explain what they’re doing. And they can’t explain what they’re doing because nobody would accept the morality of it.

It’s not that there’s no explanation. It’s right there for everyone to see if they want to see it. It’s just that nobody would think that it’s acceptable, an acceptable way of behaving. Having said that, though, I just, as a bit of a side note, and it’s not really what I’m meant to be talking about,

the European response to the US, which is to say, well, that it’s illegal, it’s an act of aggression, but, you know, maybe it’s fine. Maybe we don’t care about that anymore. That is actually fucking chilling, because this is… Clearly, their way of managing their own populations to maneuver themselves into a position

of complete compliance with a future larger conflict. And we should be very frightened by that. But to take a look at the other side, the vulnerabilities that the US is facing, its internal contradictions are almost about, I mean, they are very close to creating a complete collapse in its own system. I mean, we have at the moment,

we’ve got SpaceX trying to launch an IPO for something where its market capitalization is something like 100 times its revenue and its revenue only comes from basically the United States government. This comes from the taxpayer. And they, you know, they think they can value at that high. And at the same time, Tesla, while we’re talking about Musk,

is like the, I think, the 14th biggest car manufacturer in the world, or maybe lower than that. And yet it’s valued at something like six times as high as its nearest competitor, which is Toyota. It’s insane. These things are insane. We have the AI bubble, which is a circular competition.

a circular trading system where the valuations are basically just people sending money to each other, which is a big part of why the US has had economic growth when its economy has actually been floundering. in real terms so the you know the us has got these fake figures that suggest that

didn’t didn’t have a downturn after covert when when in fact it probably in reality probably had a bigger one than most places the system is non-sustainable in and of itself and one of the things that the us faces It’s partly the people in the streets. It is partly that. I’m not going to write them off completely.

And it is partly as well the midterms and what might happen when the Democrats take power because there will be pressure for them. Everyone knows it’s corrupt. Things like this latest insider trading incident. are very on the nose and the pressure to impeach the president and or have trials, start trials against people.

I mean, it’s not the tech giants as well. There’s just been two cases where documents have come out showing that they’d deliberately constructed their platforms in order to do harm to children. I think that this sort of thing actually is quite, is going to rile people up a little bit, let’s say.

And there isn’t much of the US economy that isn’t implicated in this. So all this is happening while they’re waging this war that is creating an international destabilization, economic destabilization. Now, it’s interesting because, you know, this is, I think, 20% of the world’s oil production that’s been interrupted more than that in terms of fertilizers.

However, the impact is far in excess of that. Because of, I think, the inherent instabilities and because we also have price gouging, panic buying and so forth. But also, you know, these are going to be cycles. Once inflation hits, a lot of businesses are going to go under. Consumption is going to suffer. So there will be a…

Stag, well, worse than stagflationary, an economic decline at the same time as inflation, and it’ll be a nasty cycle. So a lot of the 1%. are going to stop being one percenters. They’ll be driven. I mean, they will lose everything, you know. And they are idiots.

I don’t underestimate their capacity for being the, you know, turkeys voting for Christmas. They have a lot of… They’re very brainwashed and they’re very self-satisfied. And, you know, as I said, they’re idiots. But they, even though… are probably going to start going, well, what? Why is this happening? And again,

the fact that there is no real sort of galvanizing pretext for this war, I think, is a massive deficit for the U.S. There’s no, this isn’t like, well, you know, keep calm, carry on, Titan belts, blah, blah, blah. This is, it’s not even, you know, because in those times of, of emergency, you know,

you had command economies that kept the, kept those sorts of people in business and in fact, often quite profitable for them. However, this is not going to be the case here. I don’t see that happening because, again, you know, it threatens the functioning of the whole thing.

I wonder if the people at the top have enough perspicacity and the ability to coordinate something like that once they’ve built this thoroughly corrupt system. I mean, giving the money to Elon Musk is not going to help anyone but Elon Musk. So yeah, that is the razor’s edge on which the empire finds itself balanced.

And I think as well, we’ve got to, I want to recognize here in this last part, the fact that this is an empire run world. Now, not so much by the 1%. It’s an empire run by the Epstein class. And they, you know, they don’t care about ordinary people. I mean, they are aligned with, um,

like neo-Malthusians who want, uh, the vast majority of people on this planet to die. They are aligned with, um, rabid neoliberals like, um, Who, I mean, I guess this is a talk for another time, but ironically, these anti-communists who talk about the gray, nasty socialist society,

what they actually want is to impose that on the work units that they think people are. They want them to be sent to. sent to preschools that make them efficient workers and then, you know, live these grey cubicle lives being production units. And yet they have the gall to accuse communists of wanting that, which is just awful.

Anyway, so they’re aligned with them. They’re aligned with pushing this Christian millenarianism, these people who believe in the end times, because they’re basically the only people who won’t have a a moral qualm about what they’re doing once they realize what’s happening. They’ll do anything because they think it all promotes the end times and they, you know,

and they’re credulous morons and fanatics and sociopaths and all, you know, just a perfect mix for a fascist empire to have in their corner. So this Epstein class, they think that people are disposable. I saw something recently about some of the rich who paid to hunt people to go on

safari in Bosnia when the war was happening so that they could shoot people because that’s what they think is fun. And of course, we know about the sex trafficking and the rape and almost certain murder of And then against this, we have the people and what the people are going through.

And we’ve seen what’s been happening in Gaza. It’s hard to even wrap your head around that. But you know, what’s happening now in Lebanon and Iran, you know, people are dying horribly. People are losing loved ones. People are suffering in so many ways throughout all three places.

And this is in order to inflict on the rest of the world massive economic instability that comes with this rise in oil prices that is essential to it, that is going to see a lot of people on the scrap heap. They will have no jobs, but at the same time, food prices will be spiking.

Throughout the world, people are going to starve to death because of this. So, I mean, our only hope is that Iran defeats them. So that’s all I have to say. I hope you get something useful out of this and I hope it clarifies. I realize I’ve laid out a lot here, but you know,

people are talking in very simplistic terms about something that’s a massive historical process. It’s not something that just arose out of nothing. This is going to change the world. Okay. Well, good luck to us all. And, uh, Stand in solidarity with each other because it’s us against the Epstein class.