Christopher Lani

Let’s be real. Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs in a single year, 2016 alone, across seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. He expanded the drone war to roughly ten times what Bush ran. He did more for military industrial complex profits than almost anyone who campaigned on peace. And Iran was the last name on the Wesley Clark memo: seven countries in five years, Iraq first, Iran last, with the Clean Break doctrine written for Netanyahu setting the table years before. But here’s the reality underneath it. War in Iran and Ukraine transfers wealth to bondholders, oil producers and refiners, from everyone who consumes energy and everyone who pays interest on debt. That’s the financial industrial complex. The FIC. The technical industrial complex, the TIC, gets to justify a police and surveillance state at home off the back of the unrest, while field-testing new killing technology abroad. The US, UK, EU and Israeli stock markets get a stimulus. Governments become more subordinate to their lobbies through debt. And the resulting inflation gets socialised onto you. War is a wealth transfer. It also drives liquidity into the bond market, which props up the backing of the world’s reserve currency. In my view, that’s why Obama and Trump both end up at war. Not left versus right, but the same complexes behind both of them. Israel is a military industrial complex node, an MIC with a state of its own. And right now, it’s privatising it: floating its state defence giants, IAI and Rafael, on the stock market at valuations inflated by two years of war. The MIC is being absorbed into the FIC, cashing in the war premium, live on the Tel Aviv exchange. War is a racket. And when the Middle East runs out of road, the MIC needs a new revenue stream. Which is why the war narratives are now escalating towards Europe, Latin America and a security state across the collective West. Left and right are tools for real power. As the power map shifts across BRICS, SCO, ASEAN and GCC, war becomes the tool for negotiating a new world order in a struggle between multiple nodes of power. In my opinion, it’s not WW3. It’s a renegotiation. And burning your attention on culture war and identity politics is exactly how you’re kept from noticing who’s transferring your wealth and raising your prices. It’s how the system was designed. You’re just seeing it more clearly now because the MIC is bringing its covert warfare apparatus home and manufacturing the unrest here. Don’t be a useful idiot in another election cycle of lies that changes none of it.