Story Transcript

PEPE ESCOBAR, SENIOR ANALYST, TRNN: The eyes of the world are on the Paulson-Bernanke plan, now called all over the world “cash for trash.” Meanwhile, there’s the small matter of the UN General Assembly sanctioning the troubled birth of a new multipolar world. Just listen to the speeches. Brazilian President Lula, he talked about the new political, economic, and commercial geography of the multipolar world. He praised UNASUR, the first treaty uniting all South American nations in 200 years, in fact. He blasted super-national economic institutions who now have no authority and no policies to prevent what he called “speculative anarchy.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he correctly described the Wall Street meltdown as the biggest crisis since the 1930s. He’s proposing rebuilding capitalism, In fact, in the original French, moraliser (moralizing) capitalism—not subjected to market operators, banks financing development and not engaged in speculation, and with control of credit agencies. Sarkozy described speculators as the new terrorists. US Republicans, of course they would call Sarkozy’s plans socialism, as if the Bernanke-Paulson scheme was not socialism for the wealthy. The UN general secretary, Ban Ki-moon, he called for the democratization of the UN. This means a new IMF, a new World Bank, which is still controlled by US and Western Europe, coming with completely different policies. And then there’s Bolivian President Evo Morales. Evo, more or less, he nailed what was going to happen. The new multipolar world, Evo said, should get rid of imperialism and get rid of colonialism. He stressed there’s no possible social peace under capitalism. Of course, Morales didn’t fail to recall the long-time asserted Bush administration campaign against him. He was once dubbed the bin Laden from the Andes by a former US ambassador. He stressed there was not a single word of condemnation by the US of right-wing terrorism in Bolivia, and like all the other nations in South America united in UNASUR. Morales also revealed that Bush himself sent him a message. Bush said, “If I’m not your friend, I’m your enemy.” Evo’s response, well, he said, “I’m a friend of the American people. I’m anti-imperialist. If they like me, okay; if they don’t like me, it’s okay as well.” What the UN is not talking about is how the US will be able to sustain wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan and go against the Iran, the Pashtuns in Pakistan or in Russia, if the Chinese, the Japanese, and sovereign wealth funds of Gulf petro-monarchies, they decide to stop financing these adventures. And that’s the elephant in the UN house: everybody knows that the end of the unipolar world is tied to the fact that the US cannot continue to be a superpower financed by foreigners. The Bush administration will do anything to get Georgia into NATO, choke off Russia, and Bush himself still referred to Iran at the UN as terrorists. But the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, he preferred to stress conciliation. He’d rather have, I quote, a “friendly” relationship with Washington. He would meet Obama or McCain, whoever’s elected. His beef is with Zionists, not the Jewish people. He said the Israeli regime will disappear in the same way as apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union disappeared. Maybe after what Ahmadinejad call, I quote, “humanitarian solution” there will be a referendum in Palestine, where Palestinians will decide their own future. And while Rome, that is, Wall Street, burns, Russia sends the Peter the Great, with 20 nuclear missiles plus an anti-sub destroyer, for military exercises with Venezuela in the Caribbean. And Hugo Chavez, he didn’t even bother to show up at the UN. He’s busy doing mega-deals in China. The US Navy’s Fourth Fleet, disbanded in the 1950s, is back to police South America, and the Brazilian military have already launched their own military exercises to protect what they call the Blue Amazon—that’s the huge offshore oil fields in Brazil. And then, live from New York, we had Sarah Palin’s speed-dial diplomacy, from Henry [inaudible] Kissinger—I wonder, maybe they talked about Metternich and Clausewitz—to Hamid “Mayor of Kabul” Karzai and Colombian friend of Bush, Alvaro Uribe. The media had a few seconds to take photos, and that was it. Did she learn anything? Well, who cares. Palin, she could meet Irish pop leader, world leader Bono and they could sing “One” together. And with the meltdown on Wall Street, it will be hard for John McCain to pay for his vision of America’s world’s policeman. Well, in a dramatic gesture, he suspended his campaign. Well, he still counts on the Bernanke-Paulson $700 billion scheme, and he’ll still be pushing for even less taxes for the wealthy. Meanwhile, while the new multipolar world is being born in New York City, the US is fast becoming the new Brazil—appalling social inequality, tremendous concentration of wealth, in sum the law of the jungle.

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