Planet of Fear

A fearful House of Saud is a mere pawn in this strategy. Assuming the plan would work, the House of Saud under -- virtually demented -- King Salman, now confined to a room in his Riyadh palace, would also be regime-changed, via Saudi military officers trained in the West and recruited by Western agents. As a bonus, the Islamic Republic of Iran would also collapse, with moderates (rebels?) taking control.

So the Masters of the Universe strategy essentially boils down to regime-change in Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia, leading to Exceptionalistan-friendly elites/vassals; in sum, the ultimate chapter in the global Resource Wars. Yet what this is yielding so far is the House of Saud having absolutely no clue of what may happen to them; Riyadh royals may think that they are undermining both Iran and Russia, but in the end they may be only accelerating their own demise.

Losing my religion

In Europe, it's as if we're back to 1977 when The Stranglers sang No More Heroes. Now, no more heroes and no more ideals. Even as some of European youth's best and brightest have tried to fight the immense violence of neoliberalism, via alter-globalization, the poorest among the young are now mired in violence and suicidal nihilism -- extreme Wahhabism which they've learned online. Yet this has nothing to do with Islam, and it's not a war of religion, as myriad extreme-right parties across Europe routinely insist.

All across the spectrum, driven by fear, the toxic mix of political and economic instability continues to spread, leading quite a few insiders to wonder whether both the Fed and the Politburo Standing Committee in Beijing don't really know what's happening.

And that once again feeds the warmongering hordes, for which that good old-fashioned world war is the easiest ticket out. Cancel all the old debt; issue loads of new debt; turn ploughshares and iPhones into cannons. And after a little thermonuclear exchange, welcome to full employment and a new (waste)land of opportunity.

It's in this context that, under the volcano, surfaces an essay by Guido Preparata, an Italian-American political economist now based as a scholar in the Vatican. In The Political Economy of Hyper-Modernity, soon to appear in an anthology published by Palgrave/Macmillan, Preparata offers an account of the last 70 years of US/international monetary dynamics/history by using a single indicator: the overall US balance of payments -- which has not been released since 1975.

Yet the most important conclusion in the essay seems to be that the neoliberal engine, which has had to run mostly on domestic fuel, has shown... appreciable resilience. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve, together managed to erect a wall of money.

And yet "US technocrats seem to have grown disillusioned with the neoliberal machine. So, as a momentous alternative, the technocrats have called for some kind of 'global rebalancing.'" The US-led system seems to be transitioning to a neo-mercantilist regime . And the answer is the TPP (The Trans-Pacific Partnership) and the TTIP (The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) trade agreements that, together, will place the United States at the center of an open trade zone representing around two-thirds of global economic output.

This would imply, ultimately, a sort of Make Trade, Not War endgame. So why so much fear? That's because in the internal battle raging among the Masters of the Universe, the freewheeling neoliberalcons have not yet imprinted the last word. So beware the Falcons of War.