International Man: Russia is one of the largest producers of fertilizer in the world, and tensions with the US and EU are disrupting supplies.
In addition, it seems there is a deliberate effort to sabotage the global agriculture industry.
For example, in the Netherlands, the government is restricting the use of nitrogen fertilizer under the ridiculous pretext that it’s needed to combat so-called “climate change.” Dutch farmers have protested the measures because they believe they will destroy their livelihoods and cause food shortages.
In Canada, the Trudeau government has announced a similar policy. Other governments will likely follow.
What’s your take on this? Is this a deliberate plan to disrupt food supplies?
Doug Casey: This meme has been circulating, along with three related ones, for a couple of years.
It’s as if the world’s governments decided to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Pestilence, War, Famine, and Conquest). The Covid hysteria and subsequent Vax mania can stand in for Pestilence. The US proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine has every chance of getting much worse. Vastly higher commodity prices caused by central bank inflation and State dictates will cause famine in poor countries. As for the Fourth Horseman, Conquest? That’s best translated as State Power. Kings and rulers, of course, but it evidences itself as socialism and authoritarianism today. We’re in for tough times. The Four Horsemen are saddling up.
But let’s look at Famine. Few people realize that before the Industrial Revolution, which only started in the 19th C, the world was perennially on the edge of mass starvation. Privation and hunger were normal. Hobbes was accurate when he said that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The Industrial Revolution, powered by coal and then oil, changed the nature of life itself. Food has become abundant and is now, by far, at the cheapest levels in history.
That may be changing. Basic commodities like wheat, soybeans, and corn have doubled in the last couple of years—incomes haven’t. I doubt this is just a cyclical self-adjusting fluctuation. It’s much more serious.
So what’s going on? What’s the deeper cause behind it?
The great Covid hysteria was the catalyst that put WEF’s “Great Reset” in motion. Even though the flu itself turned out to be a big nothing, it brought on a collapse in economic activity. The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, a place few think about, seemed to lead the way. Its rulers decided to make it the most ESG-compliant country in the world at the very time tourism collapsed because of the pandemic hysteria. The government banned imported fertilizers in 2021, and production of tea and rice collapsed 50%. Sri Lanka made the news because of the depths of its self-caused disaster. I wonder, since Sri Lanka is an island with a very authoritarian government, whether this was an experiment to see what happens if you cut off all fertilizers and create an agricultural crisis in a country. Does it sound crazy? I think it’s a real question. It’s crazy—but it’s exactly what happened.
Is it possible that the world’s elite have decided, among themselves, that the world has too many people and that too many of them are what the WEF’s court intellectual, Yuval Noah Harari, has called “useless mouths”? With few exceptions, all the world’s leaders are members of the World Economic Forum. They all have common interests, share the same elitist/collectivist philosophy, promote each other, and have a common party line.
The elite are to blame for the problems that we have now, the release of the Four Horsemen.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is just a recognition of the fact that birds of a feather flock together. And once members of the elite become internationally influential or control a government, they become a “class.”
I hate to sound Marxist talking about class interests, but it’s true. The people who run most governments are much more loyal to their class—the international elite—than they are to their constituents or their countrymen.
They think alike. They went to the same schools, they go to the same clubs, read the same books, go to the same conferences, have the same worldview, and become friends with each other. They’re influenced by the same influencers. So what’s going on right now is not just an accident.
International Man: The Biden regime recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act. It aims to reduce inflation by creating more inflation.
A large part of this Orwellian spending bill includes an astronomical $369 billion for boondoggles related to “climate change.”
What do you think about this?
Doug Casey: The names of legislation in today’s Orwellian world will do just the opposite of what it says it will do.
The trillions of government spending we’ve seen in the last few years is the practical application of what is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). It came out from under a rock as a meme a couple of years ago. But it never really caught on, perhaps because the theory itself is so outrageous and radical.
The “Inflation Reduction Act” is the practical application of MMT. What does it mean?
It means that the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Biden regime has authorized itself to spend will go in through the top of the funnel. It will all go to people that they favor, the projects they favor, and the ideas they favor. A giant amount of money is being given to the elite and people who toe the line.
But how is this immense giveaway supposed to reduce inflation, theoretically?
MMT says that the government can counter the effects of the money supply increase by taking it back out of the economy through taxes. But who’s going to pay those taxes? Elements of the society that are not in favor. People that they consider to be unnecessary, politically unreliable, or deplorable.
In today’s world, taxes are paid mainly by members of the middle class. People in the lower classes don’t pay income taxes. Taxes are somewhat irrelevant to people in the upper classes—apart from the fact that they’re the ones who’ll get most of the new MMT money. It’s the middle class who will be taxed to withdraw the money that comes in the top of the funnel.
The theory is that the $400 billion the bill authorizes will go into society where the elite say. Then $400 billion will be withdrawn through taxes from the middle classes, aided by 87,000 new IRS agents. That’s exactly what they’re going to do, and that’s exactly what MMT intends.
The State puts money in at the top, in “smart” places, and they extract money from the economy from places, and people that they don’t think are worthy. It’s a catastrophically dangerous way for the government to totally capture and manipulate the economy. That’s what the perversely named Inflation Reduction Act is really about.
And they’ll do it without making it seem that way. It’s diabolically clever.
International Man: The US government has been draining its strategic petroleum reserves in a big way recently. At the same time, the Biden Administration has made it difficult for oil and gas producers in the US.
What is going on here?
Doug Casey: In the first place, I’m opposed to any strategic petroleum reserve run by the US government. Apart from the fact it amounts to the government speculating in commodities, it gives lots of extra power to the State and the bureaucrats who control it. Adequate petroleum reserves are something the market could, should, and would do—if we had an unrestrained free market. Which we don’t.
Entrepreneurs, oil companies, and private speculators are immeasurably better at figuring out if oil will be in shortage or if it will be in glut. The government’s debasement of the dollar is hurting the average guy, but the average guy votes. And he idiotically blames inflation on the oil producers—the very companies that are fighting the effects of inflation.
Of course, the Bidenistas want oil as low as possible before the election. They’ll paint themselves as the good guys and oil producers as the bad guys. They’re trying to reduce the effects of inflation by making oil more available. But once the reserve is gone, what’s going to happen?
The elite absolutely hate fossil fuels. They hate coal, oil, gas, and uranium because they’ve empowered the common man since the start of the Industrial Revolution. They don’t want to see more energy produced, they want to see energy conserved, then allocated ideologically, not economically. But the free market, not them, should decide if it makes sense to conserve energy or not.
They hate the fossil fuel industry and want to direct capital towards so-called green technologies, basically solar and windmills.
As I’ve said many times before, there is nothing wrong with these so-called alternative forms of energy production in select places and at certain times. But as a source of mass power generation, they make no sense at all. They’re a disaster in the making and totally inappropriate for a prosperous industrial economy. These idiots are playing with fire on a global scale.
The climate change agenda is another form of psychological mass control. The more fear and hysteria the elite create, the more control they have. The brainwashed hoi polloi will beg for a strongman with promises to set everything right.
The fact is that there are many, many decades of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power available. New technologies will eventually replace most of them, much as the internal combustion engine replaced the horse and electricity replaced wood 100 years ago. The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and the fossil fuel age won’t end because we run our fossil fuels. But trying to force these things for political and ideological reasons runs a genuine chance of collapsing the economy completely.
International Man: The European Union is similarly instituting self-destructive policies threatening to destroy its food and energy security.
It seems Western governments are deliberately sabotaging their economies. What is really going on here?
Doug Casey: It’s like watching the controlled demolition of a building right before your very eyes. These people have declared war on Western Civilization. Releasing the Four Horsemen could bring on what amounts to a new Dark Age.
The global elite really do think they’re different, better, and wiser than the plebs. They’ve become so bold that they’re actually explaining what they’re doing. They believe in authoritarianism because they believe they’re the ones that should be on top. They don’t understand economics, history, science, or technology—but they like being on top.
They’re trying to justify what they’re doing. They want to look smart by saying, “Well, we’re going to be in for some unavoidably tough times. We’re going to have some cold winters. We’re going to have some food shortages.” I suppose they can spin it, so they look wise for having seen these things in advance and predicting them—but it’s fairly easy to predict something that you cause.
This is about the continuing collapse of Western Civilization, which these people see as an evil thing. At this point, the US is the last real bastion of Western Civilization. But Jacobins now control the apparatus of the State in the US, and they’re not going to let go of power easily.
Western Europe has totally rolled over. It’s totally controlled by socialist ideology. So we can expect more controls, more laws, more regulations as we move into the gigantic financial and economic crisis that’s right around the corner. It’s no longer in some theoretical future. It could be in a matter of weeks or months.
International Man: What can the average person do to protect themselves—and their money—from the consequences of these destructive measures?
Doug Casey: As the Greater Depression deepens, the average guy is going to clamor for somebody to solve his problems. The public will demand more controls. About half the country voted for the Bidenistas, and in Biden’s recent speech, he practically declared war on the other half of the country. It’s as if Biden has decided he, too, wants to be a War President, like the criminally stupid Baby Bush. Except Biden may wind up being a Civil War President.
What can you do about it?
One possibility is that you can simply not play the game. As Timothy Leary said in a different context, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Perhaps you can imitate the Amish, but I don’t think they’ll leave anyone alone; at best, you’ll be left behind. Or perhaps you can be like Rhett Butler in “Gone with the Wind” and get out of the way of stupid people.
One thing seems certain: we’re facing a major turning point in world history. It’s really serious.
What’s going to happen in particular? What are the elite going to do, and what is the public going to do in response? It’s a complex guessing game, like predicting the next turn of a kaleidoscope.
My bets at the moment are on commodities, in general. They’re very cheap relative to all other financial assets. There will be shortages because of what the elites are doing with things like ESG and DEI and their general attitudes towards business, private capital, and entrepreneurship.
Buy gold, silver, and energy, while looking for smart places to speculate. They exist.
Pay heed to the French expression sauve qui peut—let he who can save himself. That’s the situation as we move into increasing economic, financial, political, and social chaos.
Editor’s Note: Whether it’s groceries, medical care, tuition, or rent, it seems the cost of everything is rising.
It’s an established trend in motion that is accelerating, and now approaching a breaking point.
At the same time, the world is facing a severe crisis on multiple fronts.
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