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THE REVOLUTION THAT IS ARISING FROM THE EARTH

by William H. Kötke

Part One

The planetary elite are compelled to continue on their path of growth leading toward planetary domination. The international bankers through their control of the industrial world's privately owned central banks maintain a tether on the money system through their control of the U.S. dollar as the currency of international trade. One important mechanism that allows this is that the largest item in international trade, oil, is sold in dollars. In order to insure the continuance of the dollar economy, they must be able to choose which currency oil is sold for, or control the oil, or control both. The center of the empire, the U.S., is maintained by debt as the petrodollars and other dollars come into the U.S. at the rate of at least 2.5 billion per day (through the purchase of U.S. government bonds) in order to continue the cycle, which keeps the empire and its military power expanding. As the elite carry out their strategies of domination, they are racing against time. The monster trends of Peak Oil and energy exhaustion, climate change, which will severely disrupt the seasons of growth in the food supply system, the weakness of the dollar, and ecological collapse are pursuing them. An exponentially growing world population with growing material consumption based on dwindling resources and a dying planet won't work, but they have no other option to maintain their power and profit.

SEEDS OF CHANGE

As the industrial system spins toward exhaustion, seeds of change are sprouting at the base. The people at the base are not revolting in order to take the power that the elite have but are revolting to take power over their own lives. In Argentina, after the Neo-liberal apparatchiks collapsed the economy and devastated the middle class leaving massive unemployment, the workers began to take over the factories and run them themselves, with all employees receiving the same wage. The great documentary, "The Take", details the story of one factory take-over by the employees against a background of over two hundred factory take-overs. Earlier, the people at the base had begun to move when the courageous Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began to organize and demonstrate. These were women who had family members disappear and were demonstrating in the face of a vicious fascist military dictatorship which is estimated to have murdered at least thirty thousand people. The courage of the mothers was an importantfactor in bringing down the fascists and spreading courage and inspiration to the working people.

The economy had crashed under the military dictatorship and then after electoral politics was reorganized, the economy revived to some extent and then it crashed again under the auspices of the Neo-libs in the IMF and World Bank. President Carlos Menem who had acquiesced to them was tagged as the culprit.

In the final scenes of the documentary, "The Take", Menem had gone down in disgrace, and a new election was being prepared. Suddenly, the new factory worker/owners saw that the political class had gone down to central casting and thrown up a slate of the same tired old political characters. Even Menem ran again, though Nestor Kirchner won.

When the film makers questioned the worker/owners about this they symbolically shrugged their shoulders. The machinations of electoral politics performed by the political/financial class had become only marginally relevant to them. They had taken power in their neighborhoods, on the factory floor, and in the head office.

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