Indeed, Antonyl, and the author acknowledges this with his reference to “important differences between the Caspian Sea and the South China Sea”. I offer two such differences. One is that the immediate stakes in the South China Sea are higher for the USA, which will seek to maintain, among other things, control of the sea lanes given its scores if not hundreds of military bases, all armed to the teeth and making nonsense of its talk of ‘Russian aggression’ in the region. The other, related, is the greater ease with which USA can exploit regional tensions of the kind exemplified by maritime disputes between China and Vietnam, and by exasperation on the part of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam over China’s disruptive damming of the upper Mekong.

That said, James O’Neill is right to make the comparison. Ultimately, the issues are the same: the slow steady shift of economic power from North America and Western Europe to Eurasia, and the billion dollar question: how far will the world’s most rapacious power go in its attempts to block that shift?

Nice thought, Fair dinkum. Meanwhile, here on planet earth, I welcome moves that check its most rapacious capitalism …

And even less about Putin’s 3 hour meeting with Merkel.

The Graun this morning being 2 days behind the curve and as usual groaning on about how Nord Stream 2 will choke-off transit tax money grabbing by Ukraine. Our friendly neighbourhood Nazi regime..? No?

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/aug/18/putin-urges-europe-to-help-rebuild-syria-so-refugees-can-return

But don’t despair as this is an excellent piece by James O’Neil about the realities of evolving geopolitics.

More about Merkel and Putin here if you haven’t read it already: https://www.rt.com/news/436316-putin-merkel-iran-syria/

Apologies for ‘liking’ my own comment. Unintended.

Robbobbobin: I have no idea what you are talking about …there’s a bunch of words, but … we seem to be agreeing, I for one wholeheartedly agreed with your earlier comment: except that I draw a different conclusion from the same set of propositions …

“In a degenerate, capitalist society where everything has its price ticket, the advice of Deep Throat to Bob Woodward to “follow the money”” is relevant to the understanding of just about every commercial, social and political problem you care to [lo] mention.”

From your earlier post: the money trails lead to NY, London and Zurich, and then offshore. So where is the challenge and alternative to the neoliberal global world system? There is none. Dialectic materialism pre-supposes two states that are co-modifying each other; you know – dialectically. One state will eventually emerge as a phase change from the other. But the negation of the negation of neoliberal globalism is neoliberal globalism: it is not a paradigm shift, but a re-ordering within the global system from uni-polar to a multi-polar order. This is not without merit as it will entail a certain meta-democratic balance. But a meta-democratic balance in an anti-humanitarian, alienating, and violently super-exploitative system does not forecast the emergence of a post-capitalist, post-exploitative universal humanity – globalism forecloses the possibility.

A true phase change is away from the inherent ultra-violence and super-exploitation of capital accumulation: a shift from the quantitative stochastic reduction in the value of human life to that which is valorisable only through Gross Domestic Psycopathy …I am not a statistic; I am not a function in a Cobb-Douglass equation; I am not an abstract value that can be valorised as a mythical share of GDP. Therefore, I assume, neither is anyone else. And a view of monetising debt to grow a pseudo-scientific number that totally externalises our common humanity; a priori externalises around 85% of world population; and externalises the common support network of nature is the work of psychopathy.

There is nothing of value outside of recognising our common humanity. The Neo-Classical Econometrics of violence that govern neoliberalism a priori negate a universal humanitarian paradigm shift.

I will leave you with a quote from a different PCR post:

“The external costs associated with economic growth as measured by GDP can be more costly than the value of the output.”

“Herman Daly notes that last year the British medical journal, Lancet, estimated the annual cost of pollution was about 6 % of the global economy whereas the annual global economic growth rate was about 2 percent, with the difference being about a 4% annual decline in wellbeing, not a 2 percent rise. In other words, we could already be in the situation where economic growth is uneconomical.”

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/08/17/is-capitalism-killing-us/

“…if you (or anyone else) thinks that the EMEs hold the keys to future harmony. They do not…”

Firstly, though perhaps with too many words and commas enclosed in virtual parentheses to make it totally explicit, I think it’s still pretty clear:

‘an international trading order, with a couple of political side shows for the easily bored […] through loudly stated public relations messages proclaiming an era of “freedom”, “justice”, “equality”, “political harmony”, “human rights”, “joint prosperity” and so on.’

that I, for one, do not so think (if a pre-existent EME is considered to be a sufficient or even necessary a base for change).

Secondly, … well, after such an unpropitious firstly, I think there’s not much point proceeding to a secondly…

As an aside, though, it’s unusual (though not without precedent) to encounter someone who appears to be self advertising as a dialectical materialist but who seems to have left his dialectic at home. Did you forget to bring it or did it refuse to leave the house except via a discrete proxy link to PCR’s place?

John: I think you underestimate the anti-life dehumanisation of unfettered neoliberal capital accumulation: witness, the desolation of the entire planet. The profits go to the few: the benefits to the vast majority are marginal (and could be amplified exponentially locally in terms of quality of life) …and the externalities (85% of humanity; all of the biodiversity and all of the ecosphere) are laid to waste. What part of neoliberal globalism is there not to resist?

As for the Bancor: that was rejected in favour of economic imperialism in 1945. Apart from as a theoretical concept – or modernised as a ‘Green Bancor’ – it has gained no traction with the corporate credit imperialists …why would it? I do not underestimate it, it always was the superior idea, but the corporatist Harry Dexter White killed it. The IMF and World Bank (and later the WTO) were set up to internationalise corporate credit imperialism instead. Every BRICS Declaration reads as explicit subordination to the established post-Bretton Woods ‘global governance’ architecture. It would save an awful lot of confusion if people actually read them?

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-07/27/c_129921358.htm

It’s the longest suicide note in history.

I think you underestimate the goodwill of Keynes and his Bancor.