Whether it’s the US threatening war in Iran, that posh scumbag getting arrested in the UK or new evidence that using ChatGPT makes you stupid, it’s hard to keep up.
But, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex world, I would like to suggest that almost everything you’re reading in the news right now can be best understood by looking briefly at three stories, dwarfed by more sensational headlines, that appeared this week.
On Tuesday, industrial giant Bayer announced that Monsanto (which Bayer bought in 2018) was offering to pay a settlement of just over $7bn to about 65,000 plaintiffs who claimed that Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup had given them cancer.
According to Reuters, the settlement “does not require Bayer to admit liability or wrongdoing”, because obviously it’s totally normal to pay $7bn to tens of thousands of strangers when you’ve done nothing wrong.
A day later, another headline: Donald Trump had used an executive order to invoke the Defense Production Act, legislation that allows him to tell private companies what to do if he believes it’s in his family’s financial interests — sorry, I mean, if he believes it’s in the interests of protecting the US.
The target of this executive order? Companies that produce phosphorous and glyphosate. Why them? Well, explained Trump, “glyphosate-based herbicides are a cornerstone of this Nation’s agricultural productivity and rural economy”.
And what is the most well-known and commonly used form of glyphosate, you might ask?
I believe that almost everything we’re reading, whether about Jeffrey Epstein, gross former princes, the weakening of democracy or even South Africans trapped in a Russian war, all boils down to the common theme of those three stories: an historic campaign of plunder by the unaccountable, insatiable 0.01 percent, perhaps unprecedented since the colonial scramble for Africa.
Roundup. Yes, that Roundup. The one that definitely didn’t trigger that $7bn act of altruism.
Completing this trifecta was a report by the New York Times on Wednesday: the already gutted Environmental Protection Agency is about to announce the relaxing of restrictions on coal-burning power plants in the US, a move that will allow them to pump considerably more poison — including mercury— into the air and the water.
In other words, this week the Trump administration publicly announced its intention to ramp up the industrialised poisoning of Americans so that the super-rich can get richer.
As I said at the beginning, there’s a disorientating shower of news cascading around us right now. But I believe that almost everything we’re reading, whether about Jeffrey Epstein, gross former princes, the weakening of democracy or even South Africans trapped in a Russian war, all boils down to the common theme of those three stories: an historic campaign of plunder by the unaccountable, insatiable 0.01 percent, perhaps unprecedented since the colonial scramble for Africa.
This, of course, is why the international oligarchy, which owns Trump and sees MAGA as its best route to unfettered control of the US since the glory days of the 1890s, has spent so much money demonising the left and manufacturing moral panics around what conservatives see as abominations born of leftism.
Partly, this is a smokescreen. If conservatives in Oklahoma City or Sheffield or Pretoria or Perth are panicking about white people being replaced by brown people, or being told to be angry about men in women’s sport or children identifying as animals, or arguing that removing Palestinians from Gaza isn’t ethnic cleansing, they can’t focus on how they’re having their labour, health and wealth stolen by predator capitalism.
Many of the people who consorted with Jeffrey Epstein or who build ballrooms for Trump or gut newspapers and buy social media platforms still crave that world. They might only be 40 or 60 or 80 years old, but they have inherited all of those lusts intact, and the desire to suck every penny out of us, regardless of the ruin it causes, burns as brightly as it did hundreds of years ago.
Mostly, though, the oligarchy needs to demonise the left because the left is the only bloc that has ever pushed back against the orgiastic, lethal instincts of unfettered capitalism.
To be clear, when the far left has mutated into extremism, whether as Stalinism, Maoism or the Khmer Rouge, it has been monstrous, and those horrors always take centre stage when conservatives denounce the left.
But what those conservatives are being encouraged to forget or deny is that, without the more moderate left and all the social gains it wrestled from the aristocracy and then the capitalist elite, the world would be a gaping strip mine worked by a vast underclass of deliberately under-educated labourers, many of them children, to which the oligarchical overlords have given two choices: either you can work 16 hours a day, six days a week, drinking filthy water and breathing poisoned air, without recourse when your arm is torn off by a machine designed for profit rather than safety, year after year until you become too broken or too old to work — or you can starve.
Many of the people who consorted with Jeffrey Epstein or who build ballrooms for Trump or gut newspapers and buy social media platforms still crave that world. They might only be 40 or 60 or 80 years old, but they have inherited all of those lusts intact, and the desire to suck every penny out of us, regardless of the ruin it causes, burns as brightly as it did hundreds of years ago.
Oh, their shills are working hard, to be sure, repeating talking points about protecting western civilisation from radical leftist and foreigners and feminists, but whether your politics is left, right or centrist, let us all be very clear: if it was more profitable for the oligarchy to turn us into meat pies than to give us cancer from weedkillers or poison us with mercury while they turned out minds into mush with AI slop, they’d be rolling out the pastry right now.
Yes, the headlines keep coming, but they’re all the same old story. If only there could be a new one.
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