In These New Times

No change as imperium launches policy of economic aggression

The answer to the question of where the bank bailout funds went has been made clear by the imposition of capital controls by those countries which find their economies threatened by hot money flows out of London and Wall Street. The empire is going down in a volcanic eruption of worthless paper, or, rather, electronic money.

Cailean Bochanan

20th October, 2010

As the schoolboy coalition presses ahead with its plans to gut what’s left of Britain the real news is on the international front: a whole load of countries including  Brazil, Thailand and South Korea are beginning to impose restrictions on capital flows, a direct challenge to our right to flood the world with near worthless pounds. This is the kind of impertinence which would once have been met with the dispatch of a gunboat and a short while ago was met with the complete destruction of an entire nation. So what will our response be this time?

The essence of imperial power, or, indeed, the exercise of mob power in general depends on a precise calibration of the actual balance of forces: you don’t make threats if you can’t act on them, and you don’t launch provocations if you can’t handle the consequences. We, along with our American allies,  have launched a provocation, through our policy of quantitative easing( currency debasement) and low interest rates, which has been characterised as an economic world war: are we in a position to deal with the consequences or is our policy an indication of a complete exhaustion of the intelligence, judgement, even the sanity of our elites?

I would suggest, very much the latter. If we think we have the military might to browbeat the world into allowing us a permanent free ride on the back of our devalued currency, then we have failed to learn the lessons of our recent military misadventures. If we think that we can somehow trick the rest of the world into doing our will we only deceive ourselves. They know our game now, it is quite transparent and there are no benefits for them in going along with it: the dollar/pound reserve currency racket is finished and nations everywhere are taking steps to protect themselves. They are entering into bilateral agreements to trade without dollars, they are using exchange controls and they are curbing the speculators. In other words, the Washington Consensus, globalisation Anglo-American style, premised on the free movement of capital, is over.

Unfortunately we are unable to see the writing on the wall. The imperial elite, throughout their history, have been nothing if not audacious. The mentality of such an elite is itself a form of madness: they go where others fear to tread. their lies , their deceptions, their entire modus operandi defies the imagination of normal beings. Their fall must therefore be as dramatic as their rise. Some of us had hoped for a moment of realisation, of a self-awareness which might have spared us from the full playing out of our lunacy. It is not to be: we are to keep right on to the end of the road. It’s not even hubris, it’s more like a kind of pathetic doggedness. Our strategy now is like a scorched earth policy rebounding against ourselves: our homes , our communities, our industry, our institutions are to be put to the torch. Our only hope is that, in extremis, the folly of our thinking, the vacuity of our ideologies, the hollowness of our culture becomes the focus of our attention: that it becomes a bonfire of the vanities.