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Tuesday, March 08, 2011

The Coming Shift In Global Power

Around here where I live, spring has finally begun to look like it might actually happen.  Which has kept me busy, preparing for the coming flood of water and mud… especially around my barn, where I keep my now lone horse, and of course, the Princess who actually Rules All, our barn cat.  We have had so much snow here this year that I’ve had to push as much of it as I can, away from about the barn, to places where it can melt and run elsewhere… hopefully.

At the same time however, being a lifelong political animal, long tuned in to the larger world outside of my own, I’ve been having some conversations of recent with my friend kwd. And we are agreed, more or less, as much as he and I ever are,  that it is becoming clear that there is more than just a garden variety political crisis in the Middle East, shaping current energy AND food prices. As much as the speculators of Casino Capitalism may be taking advantage of the situation additionally, as is their fear and greed driven wont. Gas prices in particular, driving up as well other energy form prices, have been steadily rising for awhile now anyway, as we are or should by now be aware. And these price rises reflect more real supply problems already taking shape,  now being exacerbated by real growing demand in especially China and India at the same time.

To here, the US, which represents about 5% of the world’s population (at least according to recent statements on CNN), itself consumes about 25% of global oil supply. (Apparently 10% of global oil supply alone going to power US automobiles.) More, by far, than any other country in the world. Which supply guarantee presumptions are now being challenged by other global consumer ambitions. Hence, rising prices in the face of what is already known, future diminished supply prospects.

All of which is what really drove US interventions in oil rich Iraq, and in Afghanistan, where the US has long wanted to build an oil pipeline from the northern, again oil rich “stan countries (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc) , across Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Arabian Sea. From there, of course, loaded into tanker “bottoms” bound for the Imperial Motherland.

These we have known of well enough:

as a good starting point.

Enter a civil war in Libya, and a growing revolt of the masses spreading across the entire Middle East. (I well recall at the time of the US invasion of Iraq, many military analysts, even in the  US, predicting that before this was all over… Afghanistan and Iraq… the entire Middle East and perhaps beyond (Indonesia etc.) would be in flames. How right these predictions are now being proven to be!)

While the US Empire is not itself currently dependent on Libya for any of its oil supply, apparently Europe and China certainly are. If this important source of supply gets interrupted for any serious length of time, as a consequence of a prolonged civil war in Libya, these parts of the globe will be forced into competition with the US in other global oil markets. Hence growing alarm and thoughts of possible further interventions by The Empire into yet another oil rich country in the Middle East. And perhaps additional secret “bedroom thoughts” that if they could covet and control also this oil supply with force of American arms, along with those of Iraq, (Afghanistan looking less and less likely.), that could be an eventual supply bonus for themselves too. The temptation grows in thoughts of “boots on the ground” and “control of the air”… called “contingency planning”.


Of course, perhaps in anticipation and alarm at this prospect themselves, the British clearly attempted some kind of pre-emptive “probing” strike of their own into Libya, sending in a unit of armed Special Forces (SAS), dressed in Arab civilian garb.  Shortly after being secretly installed into the desert in the middle of the night, by helicopter, they were of course caught by Libyan rebel forces. (Whereupon they claimed it was a “diplomatic mission”, but were promptly installed in a ship out of the country by the rebels. When they really deserved to be killed as terrorists or spies.)

Anyway, a major paradigm shift, perhaps the greatest in our lifetimes, at least as great as the collapse of the British Empire, in global economic and political relations is clearly already underway. First, the Middle East IS in revolutionary flames against those regimes that have aided their domination by Western Imperialism, never to again be exactly the same. US power, already straining militarily and economically under the cost of Empire, is increasingly evidencing a desire to extricate themselves from their dilemma… even while it has delusional dreams of a further intervention in Libya. More and more there is emerging WITHIN the global capitalist system, signs of growing angst and competition for scarce, especially oil energy resources, in part I suggest, evidenced by the British pre-emptive military attempt in Libya, clearly to scout the ground and oil supply issues.  As well, China and Russia are expressing their own alarm.
                                                                                  Badge of British SAS
And two elements more than almost any other that have underpinned the “American Dream”, and our own, more than any other, cheap food for their bloated bellies and cheap gas for their gas guzzler SUVs,  are more than in just jeopardy, beginning to rise dramatically and spread alarm amongst their populace. The depth of the shit they are in is becoming ever more evident.

What we have here are all the ingredients for a major shift in the global economic and political system… and a crisis of extremely threatening proportions, in my view, to capitalism itself, as the impacts get driven and compounded home.  That which has underpinned it more than anything else, equal to cheap third world labour at least, itself under threat, but especially cheap oil is beset by supply, and serious and growing competition for that dwindling supply… amongst the US,  Europe, China and India, with concern about the potential for further imperial war interventions, being expressed by the Russians. We have here all the elements for a collapse of the US Empire, of which there are already many signs and issues, but also future global war between virtually all the major players to capitalism themselves.

We are entering again, into yet another historical time of great danger…. BUT, but also opportunity to make major social and economic changes benefiting masses of the global working classes, out of the possibility of the implosion of the global capitalist economic and military system itself… Which arises out of terminal harm by none other than its own greed driven hand.

In any case, there is no way of stopping it anyway… if it is as objective and inevitable a process that is underway as I think it is.

British Journalist witnesses capture of British SAS infiltrators in Libya:
http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories/2011/03/09/birmingham-photographer-on-libya-s-front-line-97319-28303346/

What British media are saying on the SAS bungle:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/06/liam-fox-sas-unit-libya


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