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Comments on the book The Economics of Killing, written by Vijay Mehta

The Economics of Killing reminds me of the many books written by Noam Chomsky about the imperialistic policy of the USA, the book of John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, The Warmongers written by Howard Katz, and many other books. Some people who have read books like these become indignados, and start to demonstrate and take action against these crimes against humanity. Others make donations to humanitarian organizations in order to ease their (guilty) conscience. But many people just shrug their shoulders, saying What can I do against it? They are NIMBYs (Not In My BackYard), who just go on living their lives, not realizing that they are also victims of the present geopolitical and financial system, not necessarily physical but surely financial and economical. And then there are those who adhere the false common wisdom that a war now and then is good for the economy.

If we could convince them that there is an alternative, then maybe these NIMBYs and ignorants could also be mobilized. Just as Steven discussed with me during our meeting in The Hague in April 2012, this is a matter of education, especially of the younger generations, ergo his 2025 initiative. But I think we could act faster: it is also necessary to present the people now with a blueprint of another kind of society. As Buckminster Fuller has formulated it: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete". That is what I have tried to do with my study Eight Days a Week The Fourth Wave. I have missed some important items in The Economics of Killing. The book focuses on how the West fuels war and poverty in the developing world, without explaining the why. In order to do so, we should find the answers to these two questions: What connect the dots? Cui bono? In my study Eight Days a Week The Fourth Wave I have focused on the why. I see one main reason: the current economic, financial en geopolitical system is based on some stubborn wrong premises, which are passed from one generation to the next. Some of these wrong premises are: 1. A major misconception in economic theory is the fundamental law of scarcity, based on the theory of Thomas Malthus: population is growing at a geometrical rate, while resources and production only grow at an arithmetical rate, so there will never be enough for everybody: it is us or them, but theres not enough for both together. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus). This has led to Social Darwinism, colonialism, imperialism, to many wars and even genocides in order to get control over Natures wealth and to tackle the problem of overpopulation. But the Belgian mathematician and Professor Pierre-Francois Verhulst (18041849) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Francois_Verhulst) has shown that population does not keep on growing, but stabilizes at a certain level. The logistic function of Professor Pierre-Francois Verhulst results in the S-shaped-curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function). Verhulst developed the logistic growth model, favored by so many critics of the Malthusian growth model, already in 1838 only after reading Malthus's essay. And Buckminster Fuller has shown with his 1

concept of ephemeralization that scientific and technological evolution make it possible to do ever more with less material and energy, in shorter time and at lower costs. So it has no longer to be us or them, but us and them together. War is obsolete, if you want it! 2. There is a second wrong understanding of economics, more specific on the origin and the social purpose of profit. This wrong understanding is very stubbornly anchored in the academic theories on economy, in the business community and the financial institutions. It is handed down from one generation to the next, as students in economy are supposed to be able to reproduce the theory the way the Professor has taught them. If they would question the theory, they would not get their degree. From my personal experience with discussions with Professors in economy, I can tell you that the more authority they have in the academic world, the less they are inclined to admit that they are wrong or that they just dont know. If one is full of his own self, there is no room for something new. I once read a double interview in a Belgian financial newspaper with two of the most distinguished [read quoted or interviewed in the media] economists in Belgium: a university Professor on macroeconomics, and a consultant on finance and business administration. They agreed on practically nothing. I have sent them my view on economy, and as you can guess, the reaction was nil, zilch. But the following saying by Mahatma Gandhi explains a lot: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Unfortunately the following saying of Niccol Machiavelli in Il Principe holds also some truth: Nothing is more difficult to tackle or more dangerous to execute and has less chance of success than the introduction of a new order. Mahatma Gandhi was shot, just at the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and many others. So maybe its better to stay under the radar as long as possible, and take the world by just one comprehensive surprise attack. 3. A third misconception is the concept of creative destruction reformulated in 1942 by Joseph Schumpeter, a professor in economics of the so called Austrian School, an ultraliberal club of a handful of economic ideologists in disguise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction). This creative destruction was used as a rationalization by the USA to enter the Second World War. Collateral damage is inevitable in a war, and later we can reconstruct the infrastructure. And here companies like Halliburton pop up, (Dick Cheney and C, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton), as they can make huge profits by reconstructing the infrastructure of a country that suffered from a war for democracy and a rgime change. I can recommend the DVD Iraq for Sale, made by Robert Greenwald http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155. 4. The military industrial complex is indeed very profitable, as it is highly subsidized with taxpayers money, under the pretext that it creates jobs. And the prices of their products and services do not have to obey the free market law of supply and demand. But the real strategy, policy and decision making is not done by these highly visible companies, nor by the military or the Pentagon, but by highly invisible companies as the Carlyle Group (George Bush Sr. and C, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlyle_Group). During the Great War (1914-1918), Basil Zaharoff, as a salesman for the Swedish inventor Thorsten Nordenfelt, was known for his crafty, aggressive and corrupt business tactics. These included selling arms to both sides of conflicts, selling fake or faulty machinery to clients, and sabotaging demonstrations. Zaharoff sold munitions to many nations of his day, including Great Britain, Germany, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Spain, Japan, and the United States. Despite his reputation for corruption, he helped popularize a number of famous weapons and vehicles, such as the Maxim gun (one of the first fully automatic machine guns) and the first true submarine. 2

5. And the ones who benefit the most of all of this are just a handful of privately owned central banks and investment banks, who can take advantage of the fact that governments and companies producing the arms have to loan money from them in order to pay for the military industrial complex and the warfare. Here I can also pinpoint a name: Goldman Sachs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs). The following two videos are quite revealing: one with Professor Antony Sutton http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/6321.html, and one with Marc Roche, a Belgian financial journalist, who wrote the book Le Banque on the investment bank Goldman Sachs: http://www.niburu.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1746:hetgeheime-bankiersgenootschap-video&catid=20:het-complot&Itemid=33 (the video starts in Dutch, but the interview is in English). During the Great War Germany lent money from the German Rothschild bank, France from the French Rothschild bank, and England from the English Rothschild bank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family ). In 1916 Germany was willing to end the war, as nothing moved on the warfront in the Fields of Flanders. But a group of international bankers traveled to Berlin and offered Germany extra loans in order to prolong the war. The peace treaty of Versailles after the Great War was not negotiated by politicians nor the military, but by bankers. The book The Warmongers written by Howard Katz explains in detail how the common people pay thrice for a war: higher income taxes and phony war bonds before and during a war; and a depreciation of their savings due to inflation after the war. And some banks even earn some $s extra by laundering drugs money. 6. These malversations are further rationalized by just a handful of scientists who also adhere to Malthusianism. I can recommend the book Merchants of Doubt, written by Professor Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, on the systematic dissemination of false scientific studies in order to deny the harmful effects of global warming, the dangers of smoking, second hand smoking and other phenomena. 7. There are also companies who would like to put the abundance of Nature in economic chains by developing genetically modified plants protected by patents. These plants no longer generate seeds themselves: farmers would then be obliged to pay each year for the seeds to the company instead of using seeds recuperated from the previous crops: Monsanto and C. I can recommend an interesting article on the development and the dangers of aspartame, written by Dr. Betty Martini (http://www.mpwhi.com/main.htm), who has made it her life project to ban aspartame from the food chain. Mr. Ronald Rumsfeld played an important role in this story: http://www.newswithviews.com/NWVexclusive/exclusive15.htm. 8. And finally, there is the control over the media: Celui qui dit la vrit, il doit tre execute, as the French singe songwriter Guy Bart it once formulated in his song La Vrit. Every year journalists are killed all over the world. The scandal around Rupert Murdoch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch), the quality of the British tabloids and of Fox News Channel in the USA are just some examples of how the people all over the world are misinformed about what is really going on. Agenda Setting, as defined in Mass Media, Mass Culture is the process whereby the mass media determine what we think and worry about: http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~johnca/spch100/7-4-agenda.htm.

These 8 topics lead us to the following 8 Hexagons of Evil:

So I hope that my comments on The Economics of Killing make the whole picture clearer and sharper. The military industrial complex is just the top of the iceberg. Let us hope that Spaceship Earth does not end like the Titanic in 1912.

Some important lessons from history Since the days of the English East India Company, the (neo)-liberal socioeconomic system and the geopolitics of the UK (and thus also the USA) has been based on the theory of Thomas Malthus. India was not colonized by England, but by the privately owned English East India Company, where Thomas Malthus was once professor political economy. Malthusianism and the resulting Social Darwinism have had a devastating influence on geopolitics worldwide, and this not only during the age of colonialism. In the USA, Canada, Australia and New-Zealand, the original population was rather at a low level, and most of the tribes were nomads, just following the migrating herds of the buffaloes, while the colonizators where settlers and farmers. The migration of the buffaloes and the tribes was rather annoying for the settlers, as it destroyed their crops. So the buffaloes and the local population were almost completely massacred [Can and Abel!], resulting in societies with equal opportunities for the colonizators, leading to economic growth and affluent societies, at least for part of the population: the WASP part. In his book Globalization and its Adversaries, Daniel Cohen notices in a rational and amoral way that colonizators who succeeded in exterminating the local population also succeeded in creating 4

affluent societies: the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand while in the colonies where they did not succeed in the complete extermination [sic!], the economy has failed: South Africa, Congo, India, Indonesia, Latin America Africa was cut off from the international trade routes once the Suez channel was constructed, South America once the Panama channel was constructed. The majority of the people in those countries were thus considered as dispensable eaters (the words of Henry Kissinger himself), without any right to their own natural resources. Dictators and a rich, greedy lite in those countries, as well as wars, were very convenient in order to protect the colonial and postcolonial international worldorder. Mr. Cohen, I do not know if you will ever read my study Eight Days a Week, but the latter countries didnt fail to create affluent societies because their native population was not completely exterminated, but because their native population was never allowed to become an equal partner in the economic process, there was no democracy, most of them were considered as dispensable eaters1! They were used as cheap labor force, without any purchasing power, so they could not contribute to internal economic growth, only to the export of basic products like cotton and rubber to the rich countries. So profit for society and profit for business was dependant on the international markets controlled by the Commonwealth of the British Empire and later by the American Empire! Cant you see this? It is not a matter of complete extermination, but of granting economic and political rights to the local people! More democracy leads to more material prosperity for more people. Using the local people as cheap labor and depriving them from a fair income is, on the long run, contra-productive: the countrys economic growth and thus the profit of companies depended solely on the export, as there was no growth of internal consumption. In India, just as in Indonesia and a lot of African countries, the population was too high in order to be massacred. In these colonies, the population was used as cheap labor force in the estates, where products were cultivated intended for export and not for local consumption: cotton, rubber, tea, and even poppy in order to produce opium. In the Gulf of Bengali, the farmers were forced by the British to produce poppy instead of food for the local population. Opium was used as means of payment in the trade with China. The local population of the colonies had no access whatever to the generated wealth, except for a small corrupt ruling lite, who was bribed and who collaborated with the colonizators. The inequality was sky high. In this system of Mercantilism, also people were exported by force or lured to migrate to other countries in order to work as slaves or cheap labor force: West African Negros to the cotton estates in the south of the USA, Chinese people to the west of the USA in order to work in the construction of the Wall Street financed railway system; criminals convicted to death in England could avoid to be hung if they were willing to migrate to America or Australia in order to work as a slave. Even during the 1950s orphans in the UK were exported to Australia and New Zealand without their consent or the consent of their relatives, as they were considered as a burden to the English society. This geopolitical system, based on Malthusianism - there is not enough for everybody -, has also led to The Great War and to the Second World War. History is indeed not a nice story. It is what it is, we cannot change it. But we can learn from the past and yes, we can change the future!
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What about dispensable intellectuals and economists?

Charles Dickens, who was born 200 years ago and is nowadays back in the picture, has given us in his books a realistic account of the miserable living conditions of the majority of the population of England in the 19th century, just like Victor Hugo did in France. Malthusianism and Social Darwinism are still alive and kicking in these days, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK and the USA, who are now trying very hard to impose their social model to Europe and the rest of the world. I dont think I have to give you a description of the present socioeconomic situation in Europe and the rest of the world. According to a recent report of the European Union, 25% of its citizens risk to end up in poverty, not only in Greece! What impact will this have on the export of India, China, the other emerging economies, and the whole of world trade and humankind? I recently learned about the organization Food Bank NYC via a program on a Belgian radio station: Approximately 3 million New Yorkers [on a total population of 8.5 million, so more than 35%!] have difficulties in affording food for themselves and their families, an increase of 60 percent since 2003 [the start of the second war in Iraq! Butter or guns?]. In many North African and even South-European countries, the young generation has nothing to lose, but everything to gain, even through a violent revolution. Many of them have a university degree but no prospect of a decent job in their own country. The situation in the emerging countries is also not that bright, as the income inequality is increasing, despite the impressive economic growth. This is a rather explosive situation. On February 2nd, the Institute for New Economic Thinking presented a video interview with the British economist John Kay in which he discusses the state of economics with INET Executive Director Rob Johnson. http://ineteconomics.org/blog/inet/rob-johnson-interviews-john-kay-rigorconsistency?utm_content=geert.o.j.callens%40gmail.com&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_med ium=Email&utm_term=&utm_campaign=John%20Kay%3A%20Why%20Economics%20Needs%20Ecle cticismcontent Kay suggests that economics has focused too much on axiomatic and deductive reasoning and has been constrained by the simplifying assumptions that such an agenda imposes. The exclusion of inductive reasoning in the name of consistency and rigor is not how real science advances, he says. Economics would benefit from a healthy dose of eclecticism. I fully agree with this.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Oscar Wilde

What I will present to you in my study Eight Days a Week The Fourth Wave is in itself the result of decades reading a lot of books, not only on economics, but also on philosophy, religions, sciences, history, and of reflecting (listening to music, musing and meditating) on their content and their relevance for humankind and the society as a whole, and, most of all, by being critical about what socalled experts claim what is good for the common people, especially the economic experts, who tell us diverging stories anyhow. 6

Most word leaders have announced 2012 to be a crucial year in order to tackle the financial and socioeconomic crisis, with both risks and opportunities. There is indeed an imminent risk for wars or civil wars (Iran, Syria, Nigeria, Soudan, Mali). The health of an economy is not only dependant on the profit companies make, but also on the purchasing power of the people who buy the products and services the companies sell on the market, the people who make these products and services themselves are also the consumers. What use is there in producing and marketing products and services when there is no purchasing power? Do we really want to relive the 1930s, the rise of fascism and Nazism? And 1939-1945? I recently read the book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly written by the Professors Reinhart and Rogoff. On the back cover, Professor Ferguson praised their book as quite simply the best empirical investigation of financial crises ever published. I fully agree with this. Personally, I find the figure 16.9 on page 265 is very revealing: The contracting spiral of the world trade month by month during the 1930s, leading to the Second World War.

Hitler, Mussolini, Franco..., do we have to endure this once more?

It depicts the contracting spiral of the world trade month by month during the 1930s due to economic warfare between economic power blocks, which ultimately led to the Second World War. Indeed, a picture is worth a thousand words. That figure on itself is worth a thousand mathematical economic models. It makes me think of a meteorological depression on the southern hemisphere (due to the rotation of the Earth, a depression turns counter clockwise on the northern hemisphere, clockwise on the southern hemisphere), or of the picture of the eye of a hurricane. Let us hope that the history book on the shelf does not repeat itself. As Bertrand Earl Russell it once formulated: The history of the world is the sum of that what could have been avoided. In a Belgian financial newspaper, I recently read an essay Fear in our Head about the financial and socioeconomic crisis. Some quotes from the Dutch Professor Herman Wijffels: We are facing the end of our society model and We have to reinvent our civilization. All right, but what will be the new society model? According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, the new civilization will be emphatic. I would like to add or it will not be. I would like to introduce you to a blueprint for a new empathic civilization model. This will take some time, so I have not included my comprehensive study of just 290 pages, Eight Days a Week The Fourth Wave. I have included two documents as an introduction to the whole study: On the diverging advice given by economists: the analysis of the problem. eight days a week - synopsis and highlights stripped: the solution for quite some problems (Mobility, unemployment, demographic evolution, profitability for private business and budgetary problems for governments).

In our digital age, were indeed drowning in information. The web offers us infinite data points news stories, tweets, wikis, status updates, etcbut very little to connect the dots or illuminate the larger patterns linking them together. I think my study connects the dots and illuminates the larger pattern. Furthermore, it is significant, eclectic, relevant, and my solution is applicable. The complete study is about the recurrence of financial and economic crisis and the correlation with the occurrence of wars, the causes of this recurrence and correlation, and what can be done to avoid similar crises and wars in the future. In my study I proof that Thomas Malthus was wrong, and that the current geopolitics and the current economic policy are based on wrong premises and a wrong understanding of Nature and evolution. I hope this information can be useful for you and all of mankind. Please feel free to share it with others. I would appreciate a confirmation of receipt of this e-mail, and maybe later a reaction and some feedback. I am always willing to offer my services and knowhow in order to solve the socioeconomic Gordian knot the world is currently faced with. I think the matter is rather imminent.

Sincerely yours, 8

Geert Callens Van Peborghlei 20 bus 4 2640 Mortsel Belgium GSM: +32 (0)485 86 02 63 geert.o.j.callens@gmail.com http://www.scribd.com/Geert%20Callens/documents http://www.scribd.com/doc/42446357/Eight-Days-a-Week-The-Fourth-Wave

PS 1: A story that inspired me to formulate my out of the box solution. An old Jewish story goes like this. A man dies. In the world beyond he is allowed to choose himself between heaven and hell, which is, indeed, rather exceptional. The man does not like to take the risk to buy a pig in a poke, so he asks for a short visit to both places before making a decision. First he is shown hell: a beautiful decorated room with long tables dressed with the most delicious food and drinks. Then a door is opened and the guests of Beelzebub enter the room, all dressed in magnificent clothes. But all persons seem to have the same handicap: both their elbows are stiff, they cannot bend their arm, so they cannot reach to their mouth. From the moment they see the food, they rush toward the tables. In doing so they push each other aside with one arm and try to grab everything they can with the other, much more than they can eat. But then they fail to bring the delicious food to their mouth, and out of anger and despair, they start to hit each other with the duck lorange, the lobsters and that sort of things. As Jean-Paul Sartre would say : LEnfer, cest les autres. After this visit to hell, the man is given a glimpse of heaven: exactly the same scene. The same beautiful room with the same tables full of delicacies. Again the guests enter the room, dressed in exquisite clothes and again with two stiff arms. Each soul calmly walks towards the table, they all carefully select a piece of food... and reach it to the mouth of the person next to them. All this happens in a serene atmosphere. They all enjoy the delicious banquet. So here we could say: Le ciel, cest les autres.

PS 2: Heaven is where the policemen are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers Swiss, the policemen German, and everything is organized by the Italians.

PS 3: 9

The history of the world is the sum of that what could have been avoided - Bertrand Earl Russell.

PS 4: The history book on the shelf is just repeating itself. Waterloo, ABBA PS 5: For the millions in a prison, That wealth has set apart I lift my voice and pray: May the lights in The Land of Plenty Shine on the truth some day. The Land of Plenty, Leonard Cohen (album: Ten New Songs) PS 6: The birds they sang at the break of day Start again I heard them say Don't dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be. Ah the wars they will be fought again The holy dove She will be caught again bought and sold and bought again the dove is never free. Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. We asked for signs the signs were sent: the birth betrayed the marriage spent Yeah the widowhood of every government -signs for all to see. I can't run no more 10

with that lawless crowd while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud. But they've summoned, they've summoned up a thundercloud and they're going to hear from me. Ring the bells that still can ring ... You can add up the parts but you won't have the sum You can strike up the march, there is no drum Every heart, every heart to love will come but like a refugee. Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. That's how the light gets in. That's how the light gets in.

Anthem, Leonard Cohen (album: The Future)

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