Global playing cards.
EMPIRE OF THE VANITIES
AN OUTRAGEOUS STORY OF GREED, LUST AND STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT

In the run up to the annual meet and greet by world leaders (and ensuing mass insurrection on the other side of the police lines) at the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, it’s time we took another look at the Group of Eight (the USA, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, Japan and Russia).

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In the twilight months of the Bush administration, the G8 looks more like a global spectator than the sole player. Across the world countries that the West had gotten used to ordering around have begun to dance to their own tune. Even ‘reliable’ US allies like Saudi Arabia aren’t afraid to say ‘no’ to the US’s face (they recently they turned down a request to release more oil into the global markets despite Dubya’s personal intervention). Around the world the battle for drug patents has basically been won by the third world drugs producers (Brazil, Thailand, India) after the G8 realised that neither the western pharma companies or the WTO could stop them.

Latin America has now pretty much thrown out the IMF and their ilk, refusing to sup from the poisoned chalice of Structural Adjustment any more. During the ‘80s and ‘90s Argentina followed the dictates of the IMF & World Bank faithfully, only to be rewarded with the total collapse of their country’s economy - banks and factories closed overnight, and the Argentinian people responded with massive strikes and worker occupations of bankrupt factories (See SchNEWS 350). The elites of Argentina sensibly saw which way the wind was blowing and stepped aside to make way for the centre-left (and hardly revolutionary) government of Nestor Kirchner, who chucked out the IMF, WB, WTO and their advisors and refused to listen to the financial advisors who predicted doom and catastrophe. They were wrong, and since they stopped listening to the globalists both the Argentinean economy and average standard of living (not the same thing by the way) have gone up and up.

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The lack of customers has effectively ruined the IMF. From a budget of over $100 billion four years ago, they can now barely scrape together $10 billion, most of which now goes to just two countries: Turkey and Pakistan. The organisation which once played the role of global loanshark is now feeling itself the pinch. Once Turkey pays off the last of its outstanding loans, the IMF will basically run out of fresh sources of cash from the world’s poor.

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The Iraq war looks more like one last desperate throw of the dice by a visibly weakening empire. Bush’s legacy may well be that the United States is now seen as a fundamentally dangerous country that smaller nations can band together against. In the process this has created organisations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – See SchNEWS 551) which now holds joint military exercises “to fight back against new threats and challenges.” They also have an energy policy, the Asian Energy Security Grid, which has the potential to effectively counter US control the Middle-East’s oil.

With this shift in global political power the West is likely to get increasingly desperate as their economies go down the pan and oil resource pressures start to bite. The likely consequences may not be pretty as the US and its allies up their military spending and repression to counter the largely phantom threat of terrorism.