From MAI To December (2012, that is)
Harold Hark
14 April 2003

Remember MAI? The Multilateral Agreement on Investments? Here is what CovertAction Quarterly, Fall / Winter, 1999, p37, had to say, as quoted on Third World Traveler's web site:

The purpose of MAI-type agreements is to remove virtually all barriers to investment by corporations. Foreign investors would be required to be treated the same as domestic investors...

So while the MAI-and now its clones-would threaten nearly every public sector of national economies such as health care, education, and culture, government spending for the military weapons development and production, and direct support for weapons corporations are excluded from the liberalizing demands of such an agreement.

NAFTA mechanisms, as well as the WTO, IMF, and World Bank are totally undemocratic, with no access by the people. They are run by the nations with the greatest wealth, the U.S. in the first place-with the corporations and banks pulling the strings...

It is clear that the new world order of the free market promises further erosion of the U.N., more wars, destruction of sovereignty, elimination of social programs for the people, increasing poverty and joblessness, and the demise of democracy.

Prophetic stuff. MAI was quietly pulled from world negotiation tables a few years ago because it was too hot. Since then, it has simply been implemented by stealth.

This goes along way in explaining John Howard's unqualified capitulation to the military/industrial, might-is-right of the United States. He has sold Australia to the Transnationals without a word to the people. Australia's participation as an invasion force in Iraq, and now as an occupying force, was predicated on deals already made (Ink dry on war script a year ago), which have nothing to do with sovereignty or the wishes of the citizens of either country.

OK, most Aussies don't care, or would even champion the move. Anyone who believes the invasion of Iraq was just or humanitarian or even necessary is likely to believe anything their government tells them. And why not? These are the people who tend to flourish under totalitarian regimes; it's democracy (a word they use but do not understand) that worries their cash flows.

However, concurrent with the blatant hypocrisy underlying America's pincer movement on the world, is what one Melbourne war protester calls the creation of an Iraq generation: citizens who won't blindly follow the leader. Now, as never before (thanks largely to the available information on the Internet), people are thinking for themselves instead of being told how to think. It is on this basis that the battles of the future will be fought.

Here in Australia, seven years of devastation to the social fabric in favour of self-serving materialism has been highlighted in neon by the Howard Government's decision to enter the war against the wishes of the majority. For many who disliked him but took no interest, the penny has finally dropped regarding the true nature of the man. They now realise that John Howard is a pathological liar who acts soley for his interests and those of his masters.

The same percentage of Americans know this to be true about George W. Bush. He has shown his hand for all to see and the cards he has laid on the table do not even include a lowly pair. There is nothing coming from him but lies and confusion. It is now blatantly obvious that the game is rigged in favour of an Ayn Rand-based rule of elite right wing military industrialists, best exemplified by the Mad Thatcher's dictum that there is no society, only individuals.

Rand favoured the reasoning, Aristotelian mind, taking it to a desiccated extreme. Left out of her equation was Platonic humanity, where people cooperate for the benefit of each other's well-being. The result, as we are seeing from Washington, is a cold-hearted, brutal world based on superficial, short-term goals with society replaced by a mass of lesser individuals (slaves) regarded as fodder for the enrichment of higher individuals (masters).

What better example of the philistine mind-set of the Washington Medusa and its corporate tentacles than Donald Rumsfeld's reaction to the looting of treasures from the cradle of civilisation in Baghdad's National Museum: "Stuff happens," he said. Like the Christian sacking of the great library at Alexandria in the 4th century, this mob of Christian crusaders has allowed a modern version to take place while its soldiers looked on. The Age letter writer Larry Stillman writes:

I am sure [Rumsfeld] had been advised to guard against such acts -- but no, the new Empire wants no memory of other, much longer living ancient empires. It has killed the dead again. They are just dead "stuff". May the ancient gods curse him."

Australian Senator Bob Brown adds: Rumsfeld's words were at least "two words more than we have heard from our Prime Minister, who sat on his hands, who said nothing, who's done nothing."

How can we interpret this sudden decline in civilised behaviour from those who used to be its guarantors? Especially in light of a very recent past when the future seemed to be coming along very nicely, thank you. Surely, George W. Bush's anointing by the Supreme Court in December 2000 has to be a defining date for the beginning of a new era.

As nothing happens randomly, not even from the point of view of Chaos Theory, there must be a way to describe this mess. Indeed, there is an interesting theory, Timewave Zero, which points to a future moment when the doubling of information since the beginning of time reaches point no point. According to Robert Anton Wilson, it took:

... nearly four billion years of evolution to get to the first tool. Almost four million years to arrive at the information density of Rome in 1 A.D. Only one-and-a-half thousand years for information to double and for the West to arrive at Leonardo, the high point of [the] Renaissance and the dawning of Protestantism. Two-and-a-half centuries for the next doubling, the rise of Industrialism, the birth of Democracy -- and the radical supra-democratic heresies of socialism, anarchism, feminism...

By 1900, the information had doubled again. The process had only taken 150 years this time.

That year Max Planck published his first paper on quantum mechanics, beginning the process by which science in this century would gradually abandon Aristotelian logic and evolve in a non-Aristotelian, almost Buddhist direction. We were learning that the "one" "objective" Aristotelian "real world" previously posited by all Western thought existed only as a concept in our linguistic structures: that the only worlds we knew were plural and created by our senses and scientific instruments, all of them uncertain to some degree and all of them given structure by the inbuilt hardware and software of our senses and instruments.

It took only six years for the doubling of information between 1967 and 1973.

(In the first month of this war there has been more anti-war protests, world-wide, than any year of the Vietnam war.)

Is this information-acceleration a Mandelbrot fractal, as Terrence McKenna claims? Will we reach a point in 2012 where information doubles a million times a second?

I think we all agree that time is speeding up. It's no longer just an illusion, or a quirk of getting older. Children are in on it too. They are absorbing knowledge at an unprecedented rate, almost to the point where a short attention span may be the only way to absorb and instantly file new information without going mad. Something weird is happening, and the fact that in the 21st century there are regressive legions attempting to reinstate the thumb-sucking past signals that one hell of a battle is about to be played out. It will not be a battle to capture the hearts, but the minds of the human race. This battle will be fought between the undeveloped, primordial brain of a George W. Bush or a John W. Howard, and the unstoppable evolution of the willing brain, its neurons sizzling as it takes in more and more information, so much information that it may be transformed into a perceptor the likes of which has never been experienced on this planet. This is what the future of humanity is all about.

(The alternative scenario is just another era of warfare fought on the same old battleground of freedom vs suppression. I'm old enough to be bored shitless by such tiresome repetition.)

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