NEWSFLASH - 25 MARCH 2015. Is it immodest or perhaps premature to say "I told you so". Following last week's news of China launching the Asian Infrastructure Bank and the UK clambering on board, which horrified America, and my speculation below that prodding the Russian Bear with pointed sticks could force Russia into new currency alliances - comes this: "
The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A. As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/its-official-america-is-now-no-2-2014-12-04
2015 is a pivotal year in an epic history making century for the human race. How can I stay around long enough to see what happens next?
*********** HOT OR COLD WAR WITH RUSSIA?
What does the future hold for the new cold war between Russia and the West? If the US and EU persist in snapping at Putin's heels with personally irritating, if harmless, "economic sanctions" it risks stimulating Russia to turn to China, India, Africa and South America, perhaps also drawing in The Middle East, to form a new currency bloc. The entirety of what Bank of America, The Bank of England, The Central European Bank, Wall Street and The City do, with millions of employees; the paper we all shuffle so trustingly, could now be duplicated on a few powerful computers, situated anywhere on, or off, the planet.
The Electronic and Advanced Telecommunications Revolution, which we could say started when the average person or business acquired a desk-top PC and Sir Tim Berners-Lee explained the scope of the World Wide Web - say in 1988 - has made it possible to easily replicate the Anglo-Saxon Paper Economy, bookkeeping, at a fraction of current costs. The same functions could be easily automated, with far more efficient, up to date and useful rules and protocols, at about 1,000th of the prices charged by the great lumbering dinosaur of our present global system; evolved over 2,000 years and now engorged and incapacitated by hundred of thousands, if not millions, of work-shy, purblind, self-preening, self-deluding maggots, parasites, leeches and tape-worms.
The Electronic Revolution has also made it possible to replicate any manufacturing process, almost anywhere on the planet, from blue-prints that can be, and are, carried on a few disks or memory sticks across national borders. From primary industries to farming to manufacturing - it is now true to say that we, the human race, "have worked hard to abolish work and we have succeeded". A single combine harvester, some driverless, now do in an afternoon what 200 agricultural laborers used to achieve in a back breaking week. The laborers and their families lived an average 32 years before their bodies gave up the ghost. Cheap mass employment is rapidly disappearing into mankind's past. Slavery is becoming a rare event and distant memory. But the Anglo-Saxon Money Economy remains steeped in quaint 18th Century notions of Law, Land, Labor and Capital. It is blindsided to the societal implications of The Electronic Revolution.
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We in The West, the Capitalists, have come to believe our own delusions; we have neglected the realities of raw materials, food acreage, clean and fruitful seas and the long future. We now cleave to usury, numbers printed in bright colors on high quality paper, paper title deeds, numbers momentarily alive on magnetic disks which can be wiped out by a single DELETE key, lunatic micro-second stock & share trading which is divorced from any reality, or indeed from any humans. Above all others, we applaud bankers, lawyers, accountants, CFOs, wheelers, dealers, stock traders, and a host of other clerks who maintain our paper mountains and our delusions that we can batten on other nations by imposing our bookkeeping system, credit cards at 30% per year and siphon out an effortless living from the whole mouth gaping, enraptured world. Will our smoke and mirrors stand close examination?
Could Putin launch a second Reserve Currency and an Eastern Bloc rival to the Almighty Dollar? Should he tremble at our limp handed posturing and our threats to the Russian economy? Are the world's valuable resources accurately reflected by our Anglo-System of Bookkeeping, our Paper Tigers? Do we really own what we we like to imagine we have globally acquired and control? A new system could emerge overnight. Who is the better chess player? Unlike Napoleon and Hitler, should we pause for thought before attacking the Russian Bear?
