.
This should have been posted two days ago.
-------------------------------------------
Jarvis Cocker was featured on a Sky Arts programme last night, about songwriters and their techniques. A whole hour of the wonderful Jarvis explaining how to compose, even if you only have a rudimentary ability to strum chords on the guitar. At one point he used the very same ancient model of Casio keyboard my children played with two decades ago, complete with little orange percussion pads. He was having a laugh, to be sure, but also demonstrating that he's no snob about having the coolest instruments, and showing that you don’t need expensive equipment in order to write and be creative.
There are three excellent and very different versions of Pulp performing ‘Common People’ on Utube. As Jarvis says, it’s only three chords: C, G and F.
Coincidentally I was thinking just last week how imperceptibly we make progress with playing an instrument. What sparked that thought was memorising and playing the chords for Lennon & McC’s ‘In My Life’ on the guitar.
Eight years ago I had to abandon the attempt to play the song, but suddenly, now, it seems quite doable - to move easily from A to F#m to D, then Dm and back to A, and so on. Whereas getting three fingers squashed into an A chord used to be an almost impossible task, it’s now even become possible to nail that B7 that sneaks into the final sequence.
We really need a campaign in this country to implement the Venezuelan scheme that enables all children to learn to play an instrument. I believe it ought to be a basic right of every child in this country, and if it can be done in Venezuela then it can surely be done here.
---------------------------------------------
Saturday’s Guardian Review carried a curious two-page spread giving massive publicity to a new book by Iain Sinclair, “A bittersweet love letter to the London borough of Hackney”. Eh?
So what’s he have to say? He came to live among the common people some 40 years ago. He doesn’t like the new flats next to the new Dalston station. He can’t bear to leave “the repository of memory” (i.e. Hackney) where the children of this Welshman were born. He can see the end of Hackney as he knows it, and he feels like he’s ‘crumbling in synch with the old Hackney’. He’s “deeply disturbed and angry” at the Olympics site that’s taking shape just across the River Lea, calling it “a folly”, “apocalyptically catastrophic”, and “brutalising”. And . . . Er . . . That’s about it, according to the author of the piece, Rachel Cooke.
For a mere £20 you can buy the book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, out now in all good booksellers. Don’t all rush at once.
Apparently NuLabour’s tosspot of a Mayor, Jules Pipe, has banned Sinclair from doing readings in Hackney libraries, since Sinclair’s so anti-Olympics, and they can’t allow “controversial topics” to be discussed in libraries. No, that would never do, Jules - clearly he's the mayor that likes to say No.
-----------------------------------
Technically, and statistically, Hackney is a dump. However, it has huge pockets of poverty, but it also has more parks and open spaces than anywhere else in London; parts of it have more artists per square mile than anywhere on earth, and it also has some nasty and vicious gangs who fight one another for territory and control of the drugs trade.
Property prices are high, rents are high, many of the common people are extremely poor. It’s incredible that there isn’t far more crime and danger on the streets.
This morning my local cornershop owner was livid about the bonuses that the bankers are still determined to pay themselves, in spite of their spectacular greed and incompetence having totally fucked up the economy. He was absolutely fuming. He’s been a pillar of my local community for two decades, and operates an informal community centre, with a loyal customer base that values both the shop and the family that runs it.
And now he’s struggling with pressure from the bank, and lack of credit facilities. Plus customers whose spending power is seriously depressed. To know that the bankers are still stuffing their own pockets with cash when all else are suffering is just too much. The bastards wouldn’t even have a job if we, the people, hadn’t bailed them out, and they still expect to keep their snouts in the trough. Unbelievable.
Martin Rowson’s cartoon in the Guardian sums it up superbly:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/cartoon/2009/feb/08/banking-crisis-executive-pay-cartoon
As Johnny Prescott said on Newsnight last night, “They’ve bust our economy and they’ve a lot to answer for”. Yes Johnny, and whose government allowed them to get away with it, and who was Deputy Prime Minister for ten years and said not a word about the need to re-regulate casino capitalism and put and end to the bonus culture and the obscene salaries the fat cats awarded one another?
Today in Parliament four of the former top guys in the bust British banks faced questions from a committee of MPs. They appeared to apologise, but as someone said, since they didn’t own up to any personal incompetence and liability for fucking up our financial and economic system then their apology’s worth nothing. Off with their heads!
------------------------------------
Nick Cohen, in his Observer column, makes the point that the government’s greatest desire is to restore the status quo ante to the wonderful capitalist system we still have - just.
They still hope that the model of free trade and globalisation can be put together again. Property prices will shoot upwards. The tax receipts from financial services will flow. The City will resume its primacy and all will be right with the world.
In this intellectual climate, reforms that appear obvious to social democrats remain unthinkable to insiders. Closing tax havens, regulating hedge funds and stopping high street banks behaving like investment banks so that never again do we have the obscenity of taxpayers bailing out speculators are items the agenda-setters have no wish to put on the table.
Much to their discomfort, however, our leaders are realising that although the Washington consensus lives on in London, it is dying in Obama's Washington. Now when they talk about Paulson there is a faint whiff of nostalgia. Say what you like about old Hank, but at least he wanted to consult us. We wish we could say the same about his successors.
Every day brings news from Washington our rulers find profoundly unsettling. Conceivably, Labour may have to imitate Obama's pay cap on executives of firms that have taken public money. The power of the American example, combined with the public's disgust at the remarkably dumb yet brazenly rapacious executives of Lloyds, Barclays and RBS, could be too much for any government to resist.
But, trust me, they will hate intervening if they forced into it. They still yearn for the roaring days when the moneymen were getting richer and Labour was winning elections. Salary caps and bonus bans are alien inventions from a strange, new world they neither like nor understand.
[Alistair Darling] argues for international co-operation to stop the banks bringing the roof down again, but there is no echo of the talk in Washington about closing tax havens or regulating hedge funds.
In my view, tax havens are centres of organised crime and, like everyone else, I find the sight of bankers enriching themselves at public expense revolting.
I also know, however, that Whitehall regards such social democratic views as naive and extremist.
But I sense as I watch startled ministers react to the changing line from Washington that they are beginning to suspect that perhaps normal is dead and gone; that maybe, just maybe, there is no normal to get back to.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/barack-obama-protectionism
---------------------------------------------------
The Observer’s editorial, meanwhile, says,
The bonus culture encouraged short-term risk and irresponsible behaviour, leading eventually to the banking sector's near collapse and rescue by the state. With the taxpayer now in charge, the bonuses must stop.
What is baffling, then, is why the government has seemed unable to exert any power on this matter despite having majority opinion and moral authority on its side. Authorities in France, Germany and the US have all used the leverage of state bail-out to demand pay restraint in the financial sector. The British government, by contrast, has appeared impotent, relying on vague exhortation and thinly veiled pleading. Now at last it seems a government review is to be launched.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/banking-salaries-bonuses-government
--------------------------------------------------------
The Torture Papers
Andrew Rawnsley’s column focuses on the complicity of the Blair government in torture and kidnapping in the ‘war on terror’.
Torture was sanctioned by George W Bush early in 2002 when he signed the now notorious memorandum declaring that the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to members of al-Qaida and the Taliban.
From those strokes of the presidential pen flowed the outrages in the cells of Abu Ghraib and the cages of Guantánamo, at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan and CIA "black sites" in Europe and around the world. From that sprang "extraordinary rendition", the Orwellian euphemism for state-licensed kidnap, and "enhanced interrogation", the spin-torturer's way of describing his trade in pain.
Charles Guthrie is no one's idea of a bleeding heart liberal. He served with the SAS and was commandant of the intelligence corps before he became chief of the defence staff. As he puts it, torture is not only illegal, unethical, ineffective, cruel and counter-productive, it is also plain dumb. "Western use of torture to counter terror has been a propaganda coup for al-Qaida and a recruiting sergeant for its global jihad. Our hypocrisy has radicalised our enemies and corroded the power we base on our proclaimed values."
David Miliband has just suppressed the publication of grave allegations about the activities of US and British officials in the case of Binyam Mohamed. In the view of two high court judges, what happened to him "gives rise to an arguable case of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment". There was a "very considerable public interest" in publication, they argued, "particularly given the constitutional importance of the prohibition against torture".
The David Miliband that I know is a humane and liberal man who utterly abhors torture. Yet he finds himself suppressing a dossier about the crime, doing so in the name of national security, the very invocation used to justify torture in the first place.
On the same day that the foreign secretary was facing accusations of a cover-up, Tony Blair was in Washington wearing his faith on his sleeve. At a "prayer breakfast" with Barack Obama, the former prime minister made more than 30 mentions of God and declared: "We pray that in acting we do God's work and follow God's will."
Only God knows how Tony Blair reconciles his conscience with his role in this disgraceful period. It was not as if the Bush administration made much pretence about it. "Bad things happen to bad people," baldly declared Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Did Tony Blair never ask what was going on? If he did not ask, was it because he knew he would not like the answer? His own law officers were highly uncomfortable with the legal black hole created at Guantánamo. Charlie Falconer, not only his lord chancellor but also one of his closest allies, tried to persuade his friend to raise his voice in opposition. He failed. "An anomaly" was all Mr Blair would ever say about Camp Delta when he was prime minister.
The true extent to which British officials colluded in torture is yet to be established. In terms of ethical complicity, I think we can already begin to return a verdict. As the God-fearing Tony Blair knows, there are sins of commission and there are sins of omission. "We have condoned with our silence torture committed by others," says Charles Guthrie, his favourite general.
That was arguably the biggest moral failure of Tony Blair's premiership.
The biggest? Hmmm - maybe. We might give equal status to his failure to regulate the fat cats; his failure to prevent the gap between the poor and the rich increasing; his failure to prevent the rich becoming obscenely rich; and . . . oh yes - the little bit of a failure to keep this country out of Iraq and thereby have no part in the unlawful and unnecessary killing of thousands of innocent men, women and children, the common people indeed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/tony-blair-human-rights-torture
.
Showing posts with label Martin Rowson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Rowson. Show all posts
Friday, February 13, 2009
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Layer 83 Looting The Public Wealth.
.
There’s a brilliant cartoon by the wonderful Martin Rowson in yesterday’s Guardian , a perfect Halloween summary of the state of our society. It sums up more graphically and powerfully the insanity that’s all around us than any amount of well-argued column inches.
In the background, silhouetted against the light and smoke of flaming torches, are the unmistakable figures of Russell Brand, who’s dangling from a gallows, and J Ross who’s still fighting off a mob that’s armed with pitchforks and rakes.
In the foreground are two hideously fat, grinning, pinstripe-suited fat cats with a case bulging with bank notes, unconcerned about the mob which is clearly not interested in them. One of them says, looking towards us, the readers, “Hey! HE fucked your economy!! Ha Ha Ha!”
And his companion responds, “An’ I ain’t going to APOLOGISE or RESIGN or NUFFINK!”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/cartoon/2008/oct/31/cartoon-credit-crunch-crisis
---------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, alongside the cartoon, there’s a column by Reihan Salam, an editor at Atlantic magazine, who begins, “Despite running one of the worst presidential campaigns I’ve ever seen, John McCain would, I’m convinced, make an excellent president”.
So in other words, he’s convinced that a man who can’t even run a half-decent political campaign is capable of running the most powerful, complex and significant country on earth. Brilliant.
His rationale, naturally, goes like this: “Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps that the US will have to take”.
Reconcile? Interesting word. They have to be reconciled do they? And those hard steps can’t be taken if they’re not? Hmmmm. We shall see.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/john-mccain-us-elections-barack-obama
------------------------------------------------------------
The wonderful Naomi Klein, who’s been sadly missing from the Guardian of late, though it’s possible to read her columns at http://www.thenation.com/ , is back with a brilliant piece called, “The Bush gang’s parting gift - a final, frantic looting of public wealth.”
“There has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion." The US government, meanwhile, is reduced to pleading with the banks that they at least spend a portion of the taxpayer windfall for loans - officially, the reason for the entire programme.
What, then, is the real purpose of the bail-out? My fear is this rush of dealmaking is something much more ambitious than a one-off gift to big business: that the Bush version of "partial nationalisation" is rigged to turn the US treasury into a bottomless cash machine for the banks for years to come. Remember, the main concern among the big market players, particularly banks, is not the lack of credit but their battered share prices. Investors have lost confidence in the honesty of the big financial players, and with good reason.
This is where the treasury's equity pays off big time. By purchasing stakes in these financial institutions, the treasury is sending a signal to the market that they are a safe bet. Why safe? Not because their level of risk has been accurately assessed at last. Not because they have renounced the kind of exotic instruments and outrageous leverage rates that created the crisis. But because the market will now be banking on the fact that the US government won't let these particular companies fail. If they get themselves into trouble, investors will now assume that the government will keep finding more cash to bail them out, since allowing them to go down would mean losing the initial equity investments, many of them in the billions.
This tethering of the public interest to private companies is the real purpose of the bail-out plan: Paulson is handing all the companies admitted to the programme - a number potentially in the thousands - an implicit treasury department guarantee. To skittish investors looking for safe places to park their money, these equity deals will be even more comforting than a triple-A from Moody's rating agency.
Insurance like that is priceless. But for the banks, the best part is that the government is paying them to accept its seal of approval. For taxpayers, on the other hand, this entire plan is extremely risky, and may well cost significantly more than Paulson's original idea of buying up $700bn in toxic debts. Now taxpayers aren't just on the hook for the debts but, arguably, for the fate of every corporation that sells them equity.
Not only were profits privatised while risks were socialised, but the implicit government backing created powerful incentives for reckless business practices.
With the new equity purchase programme Paulson has taken the discredited Fannie and Freddie model and applied it to a huge swath of the private banking industry. Again, there is no reason to shy away from risky bets, especially since the treasury has made no such demands of the banks (apparently it doesn't want to "micromanage".)
This may be Bush's most creative innovation: no-risk capitalism.
Meanwhile, every day it becomes clearer that the bail-out was sold to the public on false pretences. Clearly, it was never really about getting loans flowing. It was always about doing what it is doing: turning the state into a giant insurance agency for Wall Street, a safety net for the people who need it least, subsidised by the people who will most need state protections in the economic storms ahead.
This duplicity is a political opportunity. Whoever wins on November 4 will have enormous moral authority. It should be used to call for a freeze on the dispersal of bail-out funds, not after the inauguration but right away. All deals should be renegotiated, this time with the public getting the guarantees.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/useconomy-banking
-------------------------------------------------------
It’s all happening just as George Orwell forecast it would in 1949, in “1984”.
Wikipedia says,
The book has major significance for its vision of an all-knowing government which uses pervasive and constant surveillance of the populace, insidious and blatant propaganda, and brutal control over its citizens.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three intercontinental totalitarian super-states. The story occurs in London, the "chief city of Airstrip One", itself a province of Oceania that "had once been called England or Britain"
Winston Smith has in his possession a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
When the aforementioned Reihan Salam talks about reconciling “conservatives” to the steps the country needs to take he is, of course, referring to the oligarchs whose collective views and decisions determine what goes on in the country, with “conservatives” like McCain (or Mandleson, or Osborne, or Cameron, or Brown) acting as their mouthpiece.
Arguably there are four, and not three, “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” - the US and its satellites (including the UK and Japan), the EU, Russia and its remaining satellites, and China. Things are a little blurred, however, by the existence of NATO, which acts as a unifier for the US and the EU.
What’s clear, however, is that in the USA, at least, there’s now no separation whatsoever between the government and business (the oligarchs), and the government is now clearly and blatantly revealed in its role as first and foremost supporting US finance and US business (think Halliburton and Blackwater as well as the banks and Wall Street), which in turn determine the policies of the government.
This is in contrast to a social democratic system of government which sets out to make we, the people, the governors of the country’s business and financial sectors - laying down strict regulations to ensure that their activities benefit the nation as a whole, rather than enrich those who already possess most of its wealth and are greedy to possess even more.
Control of the planet, as such, is now less of an issue than control of its remaining oil and gas reserves, as they now begin to go into serious decline, at a time when consumers in China and India are beginning to compete very seriously for these resources with consumers in the so-called First World.
Control of the planet’s finances also seems to be a key issue, and China holds several trump cards. The US, as the world’s biggest debtor, would appear to be in considerable difficulties. They borrowed low in order to lend high, but will the creditors want to continue to make credit available?
We’re now entering a very interesting period of history in which the power of the US is being seriously challenged and there are several possible scenarios ahead of us.
1) The US becomes even more of a neo-fascist militaristic superstate, which is less likely to happen if Obama wins. In this scenario the US presses ahead with military expansion and a quest for world domination, with disastrous consequences for world peace, justice and enlightened cooperation between nations.
2) The “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” compete ever more vigorously, but peacefully, for power, influence and resources, with dire consequences for the masses, the proles.
3) The superstates realise that the only possible way of achieving a stable, sustainable, peaceful and viable planet is for governments to work together with an agreed set of principles based on human values. Perhaps set up an umbrella organization called something like the United Nations. George Orwell’s preferred option.
Place your bets.
.
There’s a brilliant cartoon by the wonderful Martin Rowson in yesterday’s Guardian , a perfect Halloween summary of the state of our society. It sums up more graphically and powerfully the insanity that’s all around us than any amount of well-argued column inches.
In the background, silhouetted against the light and smoke of flaming torches, are the unmistakable figures of Russell Brand, who’s dangling from a gallows, and J Ross who’s still fighting off a mob that’s armed with pitchforks and rakes.
In the foreground are two hideously fat, grinning, pinstripe-suited fat cats with a case bulging with bank notes, unconcerned about the mob which is clearly not interested in them. One of them says, looking towards us, the readers, “Hey! HE fucked your economy!! Ha Ha Ha!”
And his companion responds, “An’ I ain’t going to APOLOGISE or RESIGN or NUFFINK!”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/cartoon/2008/oct/31/cartoon-credit-crunch-crisis
---------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, alongside the cartoon, there’s a column by Reihan Salam, an editor at Atlantic magazine, who begins, “Despite running one of the worst presidential campaigns I’ve ever seen, John McCain would, I’m convinced, make an excellent president”.
So in other words, he’s convinced that a man who can’t even run a half-decent political campaign is capable of running the most powerful, complex and significant country on earth. Brilliant.
His rationale, naturally, goes like this: “Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps that the US will have to take”.
Reconcile? Interesting word. They have to be reconciled do they? And those hard steps can’t be taken if they’re not? Hmmmm. We shall see.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/john-mccain-us-elections-barack-obama
------------------------------------------------------------
The wonderful Naomi Klein, who’s been sadly missing from the Guardian of late, though it’s possible to read her columns at http://www.thenation.com/ , is back with a brilliant piece called, “The Bush gang’s parting gift - a final, frantic looting of public wealth.”
“There has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion." The US government, meanwhile, is reduced to pleading with the banks that they at least spend a portion of the taxpayer windfall for loans - officially, the reason for the entire programme.
What, then, is the real purpose of the bail-out? My fear is this rush of dealmaking is something much more ambitious than a one-off gift to big business: that the Bush version of "partial nationalisation" is rigged to turn the US treasury into a bottomless cash machine for the banks for years to come. Remember, the main concern among the big market players, particularly banks, is not the lack of credit but their battered share prices. Investors have lost confidence in the honesty of the big financial players, and with good reason.
This is where the treasury's equity pays off big time. By purchasing stakes in these financial institutions, the treasury is sending a signal to the market that they are a safe bet. Why safe? Not because their level of risk has been accurately assessed at last. Not because they have renounced the kind of exotic instruments and outrageous leverage rates that created the crisis. But because the market will now be banking on the fact that the US government won't let these particular companies fail. If they get themselves into trouble, investors will now assume that the government will keep finding more cash to bail them out, since allowing them to go down would mean losing the initial equity investments, many of them in the billions.
This tethering of the public interest to private companies is the real purpose of the bail-out plan: Paulson is handing all the companies admitted to the programme - a number potentially in the thousands - an implicit treasury department guarantee. To skittish investors looking for safe places to park their money, these equity deals will be even more comforting than a triple-A from Moody's rating agency.
Insurance like that is priceless. But for the banks, the best part is that the government is paying them to accept its seal of approval. For taxpayers, on the other hand, this entire plan is extremely risky, and may well cost significantly more than Paulson's original idea of buying up $700bn in toxic debts. Now taxpayers aren't just on the hook for the debts but, arguably, for the fate of every corporation that sells them equity.
Not only were profits privatised while risks were socialised, but the implicit government backing created powerful incentives for reckless business practices.
With the new equity purchase programme Paulson has taken the discredited Fannie and Freddie model and applied it to a huge swath of the private banking industry. Again, there is no reason to shy away from risky bets, especially since the treasury has made no such demands of the banks (apparently it doesn't want to "micromanage".)
This may be Bush's most creative innovation: no-risk capitalism.
Meanwhile, every day it becomes clearer that the bail-out was sold to the public on false pretences. Clearly, it was never really about getting loans flowing. It was always about doing what it is doing: turning the state into a giant insurance agency for Wall Street, a safety net for the people who need it least, subsidised by the people who will most need state protections in the economic storms ahead.
This duplicity is a political opportunity. Whoever wins on November 4 will have enormous moral authority. It should be used to call for a freeze on the dispersal of bail-out funds, not after the inauguration but right away. All deals should be renegotiated, this time with the public getting the guarantees.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/useconomy-banking
-------------------------------------------------------
It’s all happening just as George Orwell forecast it would in 1949, in “1984”.
Wikipedia says,
The book has major significance for its vision of an all-knowing government which uses pervasive and constant surveillance of the populace, insidious and blatant propaganda, and brutal control over its citizens.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three intercontinental totalitarian super-states. The story occurs in London, the "chief city of Airstrip One", itself a province of Oceania that "had once been called England or Britain"
Winston Smith has in his possession a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
When the aforementioned Reihan Salam talks about reconciling “conservatives” to the steps the country needs to take he is, of course, referring to the oligarchs whose collective views and decisions determine what goes on in the country, with “conservatives” like McCain (or Mandleson, or Osborne, or Cameron, or Brown) acting as their mouthpiece.
Arguably there are four, and not three, “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” - the US and its satellites (including the UK and Japan), the EU, Russia and its remaining satellites, and China. Things are a little blurred, however, by the existence of NATO, which acts as a unifier for the US and the EU.
What’s clear, however, is that in the USA, at least, there’s now no separation whatsoever between the government and business (the oligarchs), and the government is now clearly and blatantly revealed in its role as first and foremost supporting US finance and US business (think Halliburton and Blackwater as well as the banks and Wall Street), which in turn determine the policies of the government.
This is in contrast to a social democratic system of government which sets out to make we, the people, the governors of the country’s business and financial sectors - laying down strict regulations to ensure that their activities benefit the nation as a whole, rather than enrich those who already possess most of its wealth and are greedy to possess even more.
Control of the planet, as such, is now less of an issue than control of its remaining oil and gas reserves, as they now begin to go into serious decline, at a time when consumers in China and India are beginning to compete very seriously for these resources with consumers in the so-called First World.
Control of the planet’s finances also seems to be a key issue, and China holds several trump cards. The US, as the world’s biggest debtor, would appear to be in considerable difficulties. They borrowed low in order to lend high, but will the creditors want to continue to make credit available?
We’re now entering a very interesting period of history in which the power of the US is being seriously challenged and there are several possible scenarios ahead of us.
1) The US becomes even more of a neo-fascist militaristic superstate, which is less likely to happen if Obama wins. In this scenario the US presses ahead with military expansion and a quest for world domination, with disastrous consequences for world peace, justice and enlightened cooperation between nations.
2) The “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” compete ever more vigorously, but peacefully, for power, influence and resources, with dire consequences for the masses, the proles.
3) The superstates realise that the only possible way of achieving a stable, sustainable, peaceful and viable planet is for governments to work together with an agreed set of principles based on human values. Perhaps set up an umbrella organization called something like the United Nations. George Orwell’s preferred option.
Place your bets.
.
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