One Big, Fat, Ugly Bubble

Submitted by Nick Giambruno via CaseyResearch.com,

The establishment is setting up Donald Trump.

The mainstream media hates him. Hollywood hates him. The “Intellectual Yet Idiot” academia class hates him.

The CIA hates him. So does the rest of the Deep State, or the permanently entrenched “national security” bureaucracy.

They did everything possible to stop Trump from taking office. None of it worked. They fired all of their bullets, but he still wouldn’t go down.

Of course, the Deep State could still try to assassinate Trump. It’s obvious the possibility has crossed his mind. He’s taken the unusual step of supplementing his Secret Service protection with loyal private security.

The Deep State’s next move is to pin the coming stock market collapse on Trump. When people think “Greater Depression,” they’ll think “Donald Trump.”

The economy has been on life support since the 2008 financial crisis. The Fed has pumped it up with unprecedented amounts of “stimulus.” This has created enormous distortions and misallocations of capital that need to be flushed.

Think of the trillions of dollars in money printing programs ~ euphemistically called quantitative easing (QE) 1, 2, and 3.

Meanwhile, with zero and even negative interest rates in many countries, rates are the lowest they’ve been in 5,000 years of recorded human history.

This is not hyperbole. We’re really in uncharted territory. (Interest rates were never lower than 6% in ancient Greece, and ranged from 4% to over 12% in ancient Rome.)

The too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger than they were in 2008. They have more derivatives, and they’re much more dangerous.

If the Deep State wants to trigger a stock market collapse on par with 1929, it just has to pull the plug on the extraordinary life support measures it’s used since the last crisis.

It’s already baked in the cake. It’s just a matter of when they decide to trigger the controlled demolition.

Donald Trump is the perfect fall guy. And there are signs the Deep State is already starting to get its revenge.

Even though most politicians, economists, and pundits in the mainstream media won’t admit it, central banks exist to help governments finance themselves, at the expense of the average man. It’s the hidden, but real, reason they exist.

The Fed accommodated Obama ~ effectively financing his regime’s deficits by creating new currency units. I doubt they will do Trump the same favor. And Trump will likely run up enormous deficits. Don’t forget about the $1 trillion in stimulus spending he has planned.

If the Fed doesn’t gobble up the debt used to finance Trump’s spending, it will only work to push up interest rates.

Interest Rates

Manipulating interest rates to near 5,000-year lows is a crucial part of the life support system. Now the Fed is set to pull the plug and leave Trump holding the bag.

In December 2015 the Fed raised interest rates for the first time in almost a decade, from 0% to a mere 0.25%.

The Fed kept rates there until last month, when it raised them to 0.50%. It also announced it would accelerate rate hikes throughout 2017 ~ three in total.

There’s a good chance the Fed will announce these rate hikes during the eight Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings it has scheduled in 2017. I think some of these rate hikes will be much bigger than the 0.25% most expect. They could pull a series of 0.50% rate hikes ~ or go even bigger.

Anything greater than the normal 0.25% tempo would shock the market ~ and seem designed to hurt Trump.

The establishment will get its revenge on Trump. The Federal Reserve is its weapon of choice.

Trump seems aware of the situation. He recently said, “They’re keeping the rates down so that everything else doesn’t go down.”

He’s also said that “We have a very false economy” and the stock market is a “big, fat, ugly bubble.”

During the campaign, Trump called Fed Chair Janet Yellen “highly political.” He said the Fed should raise interest rates but won’t because of “political reasons.” (Raising rates before the election would have hurt Hillary Clinton.)

The Media

The mainstream media is another variable to watch.

Paul Krugman, a New York Times economist ~ or, more accurately, witch doctor economist ~ has come out against Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure stimulus.

It’s bizarre because Krugman, a die-hard Keynesian, had previously never seen a “stimulus” program he didn’t like. Once, he even advocated faking a space alien invasion to stimulate the economy. It shows that Krugman is not only a fool, but a hypocrite.

This is a clue.

I bet the rest of the mainstream financial media ~ CNBC, Bloomberg, The Economist, etc. ~ will morph from bullish cheerleaders into pessimistic doom-and-gloomers after Trump takes office.

Don’t expect them to find any “green shoots” after the market tanks on Trump’s watch.

All this is why what happens after Trump’s inauguration could change everything… in sudden, unexpected ways.

THE INTERNATIONAL: OIL, DRUGS, GUNS & KISSINGER ASSOCIATES

ED: Just a few notes on Kissinger Associates Inc to start the ball rolling:

This shady organization is connected to several banks known for money laundering, especially in the facilitation of drug trafficking and weapon sales.  It helped to arm Saddam Hussein in the buildup to the Gulf War. It employs high-level government officials. Its client base is largely dependent upon the connections of Henry Kissinger

Note of interest: 

Timothy Geithner is a current employee of Kissinger Associates, Inc.

This international consultancy firm, owned and run by Henry Kissinger, was incorporated April 7, 1982 in the state of Delaware, though its primary offices are located in New York City.  

The company is extremely secretive and it is difficult to uncover information about them.  Despite the fact that they have operated for more than twenty years, been involved in several multinational scandals resulting in congressional investigations, and are headed by one of the most notorious criminal political figures in modern history, there is virtually no information available about them in traditional sources. 

They do not seem to produce an annual report.  There is no record of SEC filings.  

The only bits of information come from combing through old press releases, news articles, and brief biographies on event participant lists.  The company operated a website for five years with nothing but the firm’s name and two phone numbers.

The criss crossing of names here will make your heads spin, dear Readers. But it will also show just how incestuous and firmly bound these goons-in-power are. How tightly their grip of greed binds them as they scuttle about ~ a clutter of voracious wolf spiders, attempting to spin the planet helpless against their vicious onslaught. Interestingly, the last writer/historian to make my head spin with the details provided was Eustace Mullins and that is a huge compliment to Mr. Henderson!

In here you will find some fine details that show just how these financial elite, on the whole ancient families who can and are traced back through history, meddled with the course of the world and profited from what are now historical events to reach the position they are in today.

And never forget, the dark hand of the Rothschilds and their ilk, related by interbreeding and criminal activities, is ever present. Yes, the Jewish Sabbateans are in this up to their eyeballs and beyond.

As far as the pedophile KissAssinger is concerned, he is a busy little fiend; may his filthy corpse, oops he is still alive… My dancing shoes are all polished for the day we can collectively dance upon his grave.

Dean Henderson

LEFT HOOK

August 31, 2011

(Part one of a two-part series excerpted from Chapter 18 of my book Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf…) 

At the nadir of Four Horsemen/Gulf Cooperation Council/CIA petrodollar drugs for guns recycling scheme quietly sit the international banksters.  Through every major scandal and behind every despotic regime stands a global financial oligarchy ~ ultimate beneficiary of the world's addiction to oil, guns and drugs.

ED: Just for "fun" I would add slavery of all types to this list of problems.

The oil wealth generated in the Persian Gulf region is the main source of capital for these bankers. 

They sell the GCC sheiks 30-year treasury bonds at 5% interest, then loan the sheiks’ oil money out to Third World governments and Western consumers alike at 15-20% interest.  

In the process these financial overlords ~ who produce nothing of economic import ~ use debt as their lever in consolidating control over the global economy.

OIL AND DRUG MONEY OVERLORDS

The international bankers oversee Persian Gulf oil wealth generated by their Big Oil tentacles.  

Chase Manhattan called the shots at Iran’s central Bank Markazi, and then looted the Iranian Treasury as insiders Rockefeller, Kissinger and McCloy whisked their Shah puppet into exile.  

Chase had close ties to the Saudi SAMA central bank and Venezuela’s central bank, where Rockefeller-controlled Exxon Mobil “is the CIA”. 

Chase launched the Saudi Industrial Development Fund which doled out contracts to Chase-owned multinationals during the Saudi modernization drive, then bought Saudi Investment Banking Corporation, which did exactly the same. [1]  

World Bank Presidents Eugene Black and John McCloy both came from Chase.

Morgan Guaranty Trust presided over the House of Saud oil kitty.  SAMA, created as the Kingdom’s Central Bank as the ink was still drying on the US/Saudi Security Agreement, was run by IMF goon Anwar Ali, who was handled by the “Three Wise Men” or “White Fathers”,  the most powerful of which was John Meyer, chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust’s International Division and later chairman of Morgan Guaranty.  

Meyer funneled SAMA petrodollar royalties into Morgan, which was investment counselor to SAMA. [2]  

Morgan was banker to Bechtel and ARAMCO. Stephen Bechtel sat on Morgan Guaranty’s board, as did Chevron Texaco CFR insider George Schultz and Sulaiman Olayan, the Bechtel straw man crucial to recycling Persian Gulf petrodollars into international banks.

Olayan owned half of Saudi Bechtel and big chunks of Chase Manhattan, Occidental Petroleum and CS First Boston, where he was director until 1995.  Olayan founded Saudi-British Bank, a big player in the secretive Eurodollar market. He had a shady Caribbean partnership with Barclays and Jardine Matheson, which control Israeli finance and HSBC, respectively.  He was board member at American Express alongside Henry Kissinger and Edmund Safra ~ whose crooked Republic Bank is part of the HSBC cesspool.  

Olayan Group’s bankers were CS First Boston, Saudi-British Bank, Saudi Hollandi Bank (subsidiary of ABN Amro ~ now Royal Bank of Scotland) and Chase. [3]  

Through these relationships Olayan was the glue that bonds the House of Saud to its Four Horsemen American, British and Dutch family owners.

In 1975 Morgan Guaranty took a 20% stake in Saudi International Bank in London, whose executive director was Morgan Guaranty Trust Director Peter de Roos.  SAMA owned a 50% share, while Bank of Tokyo, Deutsche Bank, Banque de Nationale de Paris, National Westminster Bank and Union Bank of Switzerland each owned 5%. [4]  

Citibank bought 33% of Saudi American Bank.  SAMA was advised by Merrill Lynch and Baring Brothers (now part of Royal Bank of Scotland), assuring both New York and London control over oil proceeds. The White Fathers firmly held the reins over House of Saud ARAMCO oil revenues.

Morgan Guaranty was investment adviser to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, central bank of the UAE, where monarch and primary BCCI shareholder Sheik Zayed held the purse strings.  

Morgan Grenfell, the London arm of the House of Morgan, advised the GCC government of Qatar and UAE gold market emirate Dubai.  Grenfell ~ now part of Deutsche Bank ~ owned a large share of Jordan’s central bank and financed weapons sales to Oman, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.  

When Saudi Lockheed arms dealer Adnan Khasshoggi bought Arizona-Colorado Land & Cattle Company in 1974, US investment arm Morgan Stanley swung the deal.  When Khasshoggi bought a 17,000 acre dairy farm and a million acre cattle ranch in Sudan, Morgan Stanley helped again.

In 1984 Morgan Grenfell led the push for North Sea oil exploration.  Sir John Stevens of Grenfell advised Iran’s Bank Markazi.  Stevens was a Bank of England insider, where Royal Dutch/Shell Chairman Sir Robert Clark was board member.  

Morgan Stanley occupied the top 16 floors of the Exxon Building in New York. It handled the 1977 sale of BP shares by the British government to Kuwait’s al-Sabah clan. [5]

Jardine Matheson Chairman David Newbigging sits on the International Advisory Board at Morgan Guaranty and is arguably Hong Kong’s most powerful man.  

Chairman of Morgan et Cie, the bank’s international division, was Lord Cairncatto; who sat on the London Committee of HSBC, was Chairman of Morgan Grenfell and member of the Inner Council at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. [6]

HSBC and Kleinwort Benson control Hong Kong’s Sharps Pixley Ward gold monopoly. 

HSBC owns British Bank of the Middle East, which monopolizes Dubai’s thriving gold market; Edmund Safra’s Republic Bank of New York, which dominated the old Lebanese gold markets; and Midland Bank, clearing agent for the drug-riddled Panamanian government.

Until recently, HSBC’s Sharps Pixley and Samuel Montagu subsidiaries joined Cecil Rhodes-founded Standard Chartered’s Mocatta Metals, Johnson Matthey and N.M. Rothschild & Sons in London each day to unilaterally fix the price of gold. 

The latter two fixers have interlocking board directorates with both HSBC and Anglo-American- the Oppenheimer-controlled conglomerate whose Engelhardt subsidiary monopolizes world gold refining. [7]  

The Oppenheimers also control Rio Tinto and DeBeers ~ the Cecil Rhodes-founded monopolizer of the global diamond trade.  

Anglo-American’s Bermuda subsidiary Minorco plays a big role in Silver Triangle gold/diamond/drug swaps.

Diamond cutting is financed by the Belgian Lambert family, cousins to the Rothschilds; and Barclays Bank, whose board boasts Sir Harry Oppenheimer and four other members of Queen Elizabeth’s Knights of St. John Jerusalem ~ the most of any firm in the world. [8] 

Canadian banking giants Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal, Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto Dominion Bank and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce; join British giants National Westminster, Barclays, Lloyds and HSBC, in presiding over Caribbean Silver Triangle drug money laundering.

Bank of Nova Scotia is the biggest gold dealer in the Caribbean and owned the 200 tons of gold recovered from vaults beneath the ruins of the World Trade Center in late 2001. 

The biggest investment bank in the Caribbean is known as ITCO- a joint venture between Anglo-American, Barclays, N. M. Rothschild and Royal Bank of Canada.  

Lloyds Director A. D. F. Lloyd is brother-in-law of the 10th Earl of Airlie ~ chairman of the Warburg-controlled Schroeder Bank which financed Hitler.  The Earl’s wife is a granddaughter of Otto Kahn, leading partner at Kuhn Loeb.  

Winston Churchill’s mother-in-law was an Airlie.  Churchill’s cousin Viscount Cowdray owns a big stake in Lazard, where the Kennedy family banks. [9]  

Lazard controls the Financial Times, the Economist and Penguin Books.

Saudi-controlled Citigroup and Baker-controlled Texas Commerce ~ now a JP Morgan Chase subsidiary ~ helped Raul Salinas pilfer the Mexican Treasury.  

Rothschild-controlled Bank of America ~ founded as the Bank of Italy under the umbrella of Amadeo Giannini’s Transamerica holding company ~ formed a $3 billion joint venture with Banco Ambrosiano, bought looted Continental Bank, provided seed money for BCCI and cleared deals for BNL.  At the time Bank of America was the world’s largest bank. [776]

According to Chicago researcher Sherman Skolnick, Bank of America was the conduit for dirty money generated by Swiss/Israeli Mossad fugitive financier Marc Rich, and for the funny money that vanished amidst the Enron cesspool.  

Skolnick adds that Nugan Hand Bank morphed into Household International ~ a sub-prime lender based in Chicago, whose lawyer until his mysterious canoe accident was former CIA Director Bill Colby. [10]

Household is now a subsidiary of HSBC.

Tibor Rosenbaum’s Geneva-based Banque de Credit Internationale (BCI) was predecessor of BCCI, skimming profits from Meyer Lansky casinos and drug deals to finance MI6 and Mossad skullduggery, including Permindex. [11]  

Lansky got his start in organized crime with financial help from the Rothschild family.  

Robert Vesco got his wings from the Rockefeller-financed Mary Carter Paint Company.  Santos Trafficante is their successor.

CS First Boston was founded by the Boston Perkins family with opium proceeds and served as paymaster for both the JFK hit and the assassination attempt on French President Charles de Gaulle.  

Both Richard Holbrooke, Obama Afghan envoy and chief architect of the Dayton Accords; and Dick Thornburgh, Bush Attorney General during the BNL cover-up, worked at CS First Boston alongside Sulaiman Olayan.  The bank teamed up with BP Amoco to grab the first 20% of Russian Lukoil.

KISS ASS

Kissinger Associates clients included the BCCI-owned National Bank of Georgia and BNL ~ which worked with the Iraqi Central Bank to arm Iraq through numbered accounts at Bank of America, Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan and Manufacturers Hanover Trust.  

BNL’s clearing agent on these transactions was Morgan Guaranty Trust.  Chase Manhattan Bank’s Board of Directors mirrored BNL’s Consulting Board for International Policy.

Henry Kissinger is tight with both Chase Manhattan and Goldman Sachs, which helped the drug-infested Bank of New York and CS First Boston loot Russia’s Treasury.  

When the CIA mob was done looting S&Ls, Goldman Sachs swooped up billions in assets for a song.  

Chase Manhattan’s International Advisory Board includes Y. K. Pao of Hong Kong Worldwide Shipping, Ian Sinclair of the Canadian Pacific heroin express and G. A. Wagner of Royal Dutch/Shell. [12]  

Pao was Vice-Chairman at HSBC.

Kissinger Associates’ board is even more shadowy and powerful, a Masonic Freudian slip since kiss ass is what they do when old money talks.  

Co-founder Lord Carrington, board member at both Barclays and Hambros, chairs both the Bilderberger Group and the Royal Institute for International Affairs.  

KissAss board member Mario d’Urso of the Kuhn Loeb banking dynasty, heads Jefferson Insurance, the US joint venture of Assicurazioni Generali (AG) and Riunione Adriatica di Sicurta (RAS).

AG of Venice is keeper of the immense fortunes of the old Venetian banking families who funded the Crusades and the Holy Roman Empire.  Its board included Elie de Rothschild; Baron August Von Finck, the richest man in Germany; Baron Pierre Lambert, Rothschild cousin and the money behind Drexel Burnham Lambert; Jocelyn Hambro, whose family owns Hambros Bank ~ which owned half of Michelle Sindona’s Banca Privata; Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fequiz of the powerful Italian Luzzato family which had ties to Sindona’s Banco Amrosiano; and Frano Orsini Bonacossi of the powerful Orsini family whose members sat in the original Roman Empire Senate.  The biggest shareholders of AG are Lazard Freres and Banque Paribas. [13]

ED: As I have written in the past, these Black Nobility creatures go very far back in history and they never ever disappeared as their fortunes seemed to change, they merely went underground or donned faces of “respectability” in the minds of the hoi polloi. As a group, then never stopped ruling the people, just changed tactics.

Paribas  ~ now the world’s biggest bank ~ is controlled by the Warburg family, while Lazard is dominated by the Lazard and David-Weill families.  

The British Lazards are now part of the Pearson conglomerate, which owns the Financial Times, the Economist, Penguin and Viking Books, Madame Tussaud’s and extensive US interests.  The French Lazard Freres is tucked under a holding company known as EuraFrance. 

Lazard handles money for the global elite including the Italian Agnellis, the Belgian Boels, the British Pearsons and the American Kennedys.

RAS board members include members of the Giustiniani family ~ descended from Roman Emperor Justinian, the Dora family ~ Genoese financiers of the Spanish Hapsburg monarchs, and the Duke of Alba ~ who descends from the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy.

Another powerhouse on the Kiss Ass board was Nathaniel Samuels, another Kuhn Loeb old hand from the Samuel clan that controls much of Royal Dutch/Shell and Rio Tinto.  Samuels was Chairman of the Paris-based Banque Louis-Dreyfus Holding Company, which descends from the Louis Dreyfus grain trading dynasty ~ one of the Four Horsemen of Grain.  

Lord Eric Roll is another board member at KissAss.  Roll is chairman of the Warburg family investment bank S. G. Warburg.

The Kiss Ass Asian powerhouse board member is Sir Y. K. Kan of Hong Kong, who represents four old money Chinese families that control the Bank of East Asia.  

Kiss Ass client BNL’s P-2 Freemason roots can be traced back to Banca Commerciale d‘Italia, where P-2 was founded.  The bank’s Swiss subsidiary Banca de la Svizzera bought 7% of Lehman Brothers in the 1970’s.  

The Lehman family made their fortune running guns to Confederate forces while smuggling southern British opium family plantation cotton to the Union.  

When Lehman Brothers client Enron collapsed, UBS Warburg swooped in to seize Enron OnLine for $0.

When Lehman went belly up in 2008, it was Barclays that feasted upon its carcass.

ED: A little more information:

Current and Former Employees

Brent Scowcroft¹²

Timothy Geithner¹³

Lawrence Eagleburger

L. Paul Bremer¹⁴

Thomas “Mack” McLarty III

William “Bill” Richardson

Alan Stoga¹⁵

T. Jefferson Cunningham III

William Rogers

Pehr Gyllenhammar¹⁶

Sergio Correa da Costa

Paul Speltz

Roy, J. Stapleton

Thomas E. Graham

Alan R. Batkin

Current and Former Clients

American Express¹⁷

Coca-Cola¹⁸

Daewoo

Ericsson

Fiat

J.P. Morgan Chase

Heinz

Hollinger, Inc.¹⁹

Revlon

Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken²⁰

Volvo

[767] The Chase: The Chase Manhattan Bank N. A.: 1945-1985. Harvard Business School Press. Boston. 1986. p.231

[768] The House of Morgan. Ron Chernow. Atlantic Monthly Press. New York. 1990. p.606

[769] “The Olayan Group: Fifty Years of Forging Business Partnership”. Advertisement. Forbes. 7-7-97

[770] “Now the Desert Kingdom’s are Thirsty for Cash”. John Rossant. Business Week. 3-18-91. p.32

[771] Chernow. p.612

[772] Dope Inc.: The Book that Drove Kissinger Crazy. The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992. p.125

[773] Ibid. p.194

[774] Ibid. p.200

[775] Ibid. p.445

[776] “A System out of Control, Not Just One Bank”. George Winslow. In These Times. October 23-29, 1991. p.8

[777] “The Enron Black Magic: Part III”. Sherman Skolnick. www.skolnickreports.com 1999.

[778] Hot Money and the Politics of Debt. R.T. Naylor. The Linden Press/Simon & Schuster. New York. 1987. p.22

[779] The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. p.339

[780] Ibid. p.98

deanhenderson.wordpress.com

QADDAFI'S CRIMES: WHY THEY REALLY WANT HIM DEAD

DECLINE AND FALL OF JUST ABOUT EVERYONE

East vs West by S. Morrison

By Pepe Escobar

Asia Times

September 26, 2011

More than 10 years ago, before 9/11, Goldman Sachs was predicting that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) would make the world economy's top 10 ~ but not until 2040. Skip a decade and the Chinese economy already has the number two spot all to itself, Brazil is number seven, India 10, and even Russia is creeping closer. In purchasing power parity, or PPP, things look even better. There, China is in second place, India is now fourth, Russia sixth, and Brazil seventh.

No wonder Jim O'Neill, who coined the neologism BRIC and is now chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has been stressing that:

"The world is no longer dependent on the leadership of the US and Europe".

After all, since 2007, China's economy has grown by 45%, the American economy by less than 1% ~ figures startling enough to make anyone take back their predictions.

American anxiety and puzzlement reached new heights when the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) projections indicated that, at least by certain measurements, the Chinese economy would overtake the US by 2016. Until recently, Goldman Sachs was pointing towards 2050 for that first-place exchange.

Within the next 30 years, the top five will, according to Goldman Sachs, likely be China, the US, India, Brazil and Mexico. Western Europe? Bye-bye!
.

A SYSTEM STRIPPED TO ITS ESSENCE

Increasing numbers of experts agree that Asia is now leading the way for the world, even as it lays bare glaring gaps in the West's narrative of civilization. Yet to talk about "the decline of the West" is a dangerous proposition. A key historical reference is Oswald Spengler's 1918 essay with that title. Spengler, a man of his times, thought that humanity functioned through unique cultural systems, and that Western ideas would not be pertinent for, or transferable to, other regions of the planet. (Tell that howler to the young Egyptians in Tahrir Square.)

Spengler captured the Western-dominated zeitgeist of another century. He saw cultures as living and dying organisms, each with a unique soul. The East or Orient was "magical", while the West was "Faustian". A reactionary misanthrope, he was convinced that the West had already reached the supreme status available to a democratic civilization ~ and so was destined to experience the "decline" of his title.

If you're thinking that this sounds like an avant-la-lettre Huntingtonesque "clash of civilizations", you can be excused, because that's exactly what it was.

Speaking of civilizational clashes, did anyone notice that "maybe" in a recent Time cover story picking up on Spenglerian themes and headlined "The Decline and Fall of Europe (and Maybe the West)"? In our post-Spenglerian moment, the "West" is surely the United States, and how could that magazine get it so wrong? Maybe?

After all, a Europe now in deep financial crisis will be "in decline" as long as it remains inextricably intertwined with and continues to defer to "the West" ~ that is, Washington ~ even as it witnesses the simultaneous economic ascent of what's sometimes derisively referred to as "the South."

Think of the present global capitalist moment not as a "clash", but a "cash of civilizations".

If Washington is now stunned and operating on autopilot, that's in part because, historically speaking, its moment as the globe's "sole superpower" or even "hyperpower" barely outlasted Andy Warhol's notorious 15 minutes of fame ~ from the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union to 9/11 and George W Bush's doctrine.

The new American century was swiftly throttled in three hubris-filled stages: 9/11 (blowback); the invasion of Iraq (preemptive war); and the 2008 Wall Street meltdown (casino capitalism).

Meanwhile, one may argue that Europe still has its non-Western opportunities, that, in fact, the periphery increasingly dreams with European ~ not American ~ subtitles.

The Arab Spring, for instance, was focused on European-style parliamentary democracies, not an American presidential system. In addition, however financially anxious it may be, Europe remains the world's largest market.

In an array of technological fields, it now rivals or outpaces the US, while regressive Persian Gulf monarchies splurge on euros (and prime real estate in Paris and London) to diversify their portfolios.

Yet, with "leaders" like the neo-Napoleonic President Nicolas Sarkozy, Prime Minister David (of Arabia) Cameron, Premier Silvio ("bunga bunga") Berlusconi, and Chancellor Angela ("Dear Prudence") Merkel largely lacking imagination or striking competence, Europe certainly doesn't need enemies.

Decline or not, it might find a whole new lease on life by sidelining its Atlanticism and boldly betting on its Euro-Asian destiny. It could open up its societies, economies, and cultures to China, India, and Russia, while pushing southern Europe to connect far more deeply with a rising Turkey, the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa (and not via further North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) "humanitarian" bombings either).

Otherwise, the facts on the ground spell out something that goes well beyond the decline of the West: it's the decline of a system in the West that, in these last years, is being stripped to its grim essence.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm caught the mood of the moment when he wrote in his book How to Change the World that "the world transformed by capitalism", which Karl Marx described in 1848 "in passages of dark, laconic eloquence is recognizably the world of the early twenty-first century".

In a landscape in which politics is being reduced to a (broken) mirror reflecting finance, and in which producing and saving have been superseded by consuming, something systemic comes into view.

As in the famous line of poet William Butler Yeats, "the centre cannot hold" ~ and it won't either.

If the West ceases to be the center, what exactly went wrong? 

.

ARE YOU WITH ME OR AGAINST ME?

It's worth remembering that capitalism was "civilized" thanks to the unrelenting pressure of gritty working-class movements and the ever-present threat of strikes and even revolutions.

The existence of the Soviet bloc, an alternate model of economic development (however warped), also helped.

To counteract the USSR, Washington's and Europe's ruling groups had to buy the support of their masses in defending what no one blushed about calling "the Western way of life".

A complex social contract was forged, and it involved capital making concessions.

No more. Not in Washington, that's obvious. And increasingly, not in Europe either. That system started breaking down as soon as ~ talk about total ideological triumph! ~ neo-liberalism became the only show in town.

There was a single superhighway from there and it swept the most fragile strands of the middle class directly into a new post-industrial proletariat, or simply into unemployable status.

If neo-liberalism is the victor for now, it's because no realist, alternative developmental model exists, and yet what it has won is ever more in question.

Meanwhile, except in the Middle East, progressives the world over are paralyzed, as if expecting the old order to dissolve by itself.

Unfortunately, history teaches us that, at similar crossroads in the past, you are as likely to find the grapes of wrath, right-wing populist-style, as anything else ~ or worse yet, outright fascism.

"The West against the rest" is a simplistic formula that doesn't begin to describe such a world.

Imagine instead, a planet in which "the rest" are trying to step beyond the West in a variety of ways, but also have absorbed that West in ways too deep to describe. Here's the irony, then: yes, the West will "decline", Washington included, and still it will leave itself behind everywhere. 

.

SORRY, YOUR MODEL SUCKS

Suppose you're a developing country, shopping in the developmental supermarket. You look at China and think you see something new ~ a consensus model that's turning on the lights everywhere ~ or do you?

After all, the Chinese version of an economic boom with no political freedom may not turn out to be much of a model for other countries to follow.

In many ways, it may be more like an inapplicable lethal artifact, a cluster bomb made up of shards of the Western concept of modernity married to a Leninist-based formula where a single party controls personnel, propaganda, and ~ crucially ~ the People's Liberation Army.

At the same time, this is a system evidently trying to prove that, even though the West unified the world ~ from neo-colonialism to globalization ~ that shouldn't imply it's bound to rule forever in material or intellectual terms.

For its part, Europe is hawking a model of supra-national integration as a means of solving problems and conflicts from the Middle East to Africa. But any shopper can now see evidence of a European Union on the verge of cracking amid non-stop inter-European bickering that includes national revolts against the euro, discontent over NATO's role as a global Robocop, and a style of ongoing European cultural arrogance that makes it incapable of recognizing, to take one example, why the Chinese model is so successful in Africa.

Or let's say our shopper looks to the United States, that countries still being, after all, the world’s number one economy, its dollar still the world's reserve currency, and its military still number one in destructive power and still garrisoning much of the globe.

That would indeed seem impressive, if it weren't for the fact that Washington is visibly on the decline, oscillating wildly between a lame populism and a stale orthodoxy, and shilling for casino capitalism on a side street in its spare time.

It's a giant power enveloped in political and economic paralysis for all the world to see, and no less visibly incapable of coming up with an exit strategy.

Really, would you buy a model from any of them? In fact, where in a world in escalating disarray is anyone supposed to look these days when it comes to models? 

One of the key reasons for the Arab Spring was out-of-control food prices, driven significantly by speculation.

Protests and riots in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Austria and Turkey were direct consequences of the global recession.

In Spain, nearly half of 16- to 29-year-olds ~ an over-educated "lost generation" ~ are now out of jobs, a European record.

That may be the worst in Europe, but in Britain, 20% of 16- to 24-year-olds are unemployed, about average for the rest of the European Union. In London, almost 25% of working-age people are unemployed. In France, 13.5% of the population is now officially poor ~ that is, living on less than $1,300 a month.

As many across Western Europe see it, the state has already breached the social contract. The indignados of Madrid have caught the spirit of the moment perfectly:

"We're not against the system,

it's the system that is against us."

This spells out the essence of the abject failure of neo-liberal capitalism, as David Harvey explained in his latest book, The Enigma of Capital. He makes clear how a political economy:

"Of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day".

WILL ASIA SAVE GLOBAL CAPITALISM?

Meanwhile, Beijing is too busy remixing its destiny as the global Middle Kingdom ~ deploying engineers, architects, and infrastructure workers of the non-bombing variety from Canada to Brazil, Cuba to Angola ~ to be much distracted by the Atlanticist travails in MENA (aka the region that includes the Middle East and Northern Africa).

If the West is in trouble, global capitalism is being given a reprieve ~ how brief we don't know ~ by the emergence of an Asian middle class, not only in China and India, but also in Indonesia (240 million people in boom mode) and Vietnam (85 million).

I never cease to marvel when I compare the instant wonders and real-estate bubble of the present moment in Asia to my first experiences living there in 1994, when such countries were still in the "Asian Tiger", pre-1997-financial-crisis years.

In China alone, 300 million people ~ "only" 23% of the total population ~ now live in medium-sized to major urban areas and enjoy what's always called "disposable incomes". They, in fact, constitute something like a nation unto themselves, an economy already two-thirds that of Germany's.

The McKinsey Global Institute notes that the Chinese middle class now comprises 29% of the Middle Kingdom's 190 million households, and will reach a staggering 75% of 372 million households by 2025 (if, of course, China's capitalist experiment hasn't gone off some cliff by then and its potential real-estate/finance bubble hasn't popped and drowned the society).

In India, with its population of 1.2 billion, there are already, according to McKinsey, 15 million households with an annual income of up to $10,000; in five years, a projected 40 million households, or 200 million people, will be in that income range.

And in India in 2011, as in China in 2001, the only way is up (again as long as that reprieve lasts).

Americans may find it surreal (or start packing their expat bags), but an annual income of less than $10,000 means a comfortable life in China or Indonesia, while in the United States, with a median household income of roughly $50,000, one is practically poor.

Nomura Securities predicts that in a mere three years, retail sales in China will overtake the US and that, in this way, the Asian middle class may indeed "save" global capitalism for a time ~

but at a price so steep that Mother Nature is plotting some seriously catastrophic revenge in the form of what used to be called climate change and is now more vividly known simply as "weird weather".

BACK IN THE USA

Meanwhile, in the United States, Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama continues to insist that we all live on an American planet, exceptionally so.

If that line still resonates at home, though, it's an ever harder sell in a world in which the first Chinese stealth fighter jet goes for a test spin while the American Secretary of Defense is visiting China.

Or when the news agency Xinhua, echoing its master Beijing, fumes against the "irresponsible" Washington politicians who starred in the recent debt-ceiling circus, and points to the fragility of a system "saved " from free fall by the Fed's promise to shower free money on banks for at least two years.

Nor is Washington being exactly clever in confronting the leadership of its largest creditor, which holds $3.2 trillion in US currency reserves, 40% of the global total, and is always puzzled by the continued lethal export of "democracy for dummies" from American shores to the Af-Pak war zones, Iraq, Libya and other hot spots in the Greater Middle East.

Beijing knows well that any further US-generated turbulence in global capitalism could slash its exports, collapse its property bubble, and throw the Chinese working classes into a pretty hardcore revolutionary mode.

This means ~ despite rising voices of the Rick Perry/Michele Bachmann variety in the US ~ that there's no "evil" Chinese conspiracy against Washington or the West.

In fact, behind China's leap beyond Germany as the world's top exporter and its designation as the factory of the world lies a significant amount of production that's actually controlled by American, European, and Japanese companies.

Again, the decline of the West, yes ~ but the West is already so deep in China that it's not going away any time soon.

Whoever rises or falls, there remains, as of this moment, only a one-stop-shopping developmental system in the world, fraying in the Atlantic, booming in the Pacific.

If any Washington hopes about "changing" China are a mirage, when it comes to capitalism's global monopoly, who knows what reality may turn out to be?
.

WASTELAND REDUX

The proverbial bogeymen of our world ~ Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Mahmud Ahmadinejad (how curious, all Muslims!) ~ are clearly meant to act like so many mini-black holes absorbing all our fears.

But they won't save the West from its decline, or the former sole superpower from its comeuppance.

Yale's Paul Kennedy, that historian of decline, would undoubtedly remind us that history will sweep away American hegemony as surely as autumn replaces summer (as surely as European colonialism was swept away, NATO's "humanitarian" wars notwithstanding).

Already in 2002, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, world-system expert Immanuel Wallerstein was framing the debate this way in his book The Decline of American Power: the question wasn't whether the United States was in decline, but if it could find a way to fall gracefully, without too much damage to itself or the world.

The answer in the years since has been clear enough: no.

Who can doubt that, 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, the great global story of 2011 has been the Arab Spring, itself certainly a subplot in the decline of the West?

As the West wallowed in a mire of fear, Islamophobia, financial and economic crisis, and even, in Britain, riots and looting, from Northern Africa to the Middle East, people risked their lives to have a crack at Western democracy.

That dream has been at least partially derailed, thanks to the medieval House of Saud and its Persian Gulf minions barging in with a ruthless strategy of counter-revolution, while NATO lent a helping hand by changing the narrative to a "humanitarian" bombing campaign meant to reassert Western greatness.

As NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen put the matter bluntly,

"If you're not able to deploy troops beyond your borders, then you can't exert influence internationally, and then that gap will be filled by emerging powers that don't necessarily share your values and thinking."

So let's break the situation down as 2011 heads for winter. As far as MENA is concerned, NATO's business is to keep the US and Europe in the game, the BRICS members out of it, and the "natives" in their places.

Meanwhile, in the Atlantic world, the middle classes barely hang on in quiet desperation, even as, in the Pacific, China booms, and globally the whole world holds its breath for the next economic shoe to drop in the West (and then the one after that).

Pity there's no neo-TS Eliot to chronicle this shabby, neo-Medievalist wasteland taking over the Atlanticist axis.

When capitalism hits the intensive care unit, the ones who pay the hospital bill are always the most vulnerable ~ and the bill is invariably paid in blood.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.