Re: [A-List] A 'New Europe'?

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>I believe we are watching the changing of an era. 50 years from now,
historians will be talking about the seismic shift that occurred
because of an off-the-cuff remark by someone called Donald Rumsfeld.

We will not know the full implications of this new order in Europe for
some time. The leaders in Europe will have to work that out for
themselves. I hope it is along free market lines.<



Pardon my rude remarks several days ago. I care nothing for ideologist and this forwarded article indicates my reasoning. A good financial analyst is worth 100 ideologists. I deeply believe that "50 years from now, historians will be talking about the seismic shift that occurred." 

This shift is akin to the political and economic shift of our Civil War era and the period of new political alignment from the Hayes Tilden Agreement of 1876 to roughly the early 1890s.  For reasons of history peculiar to America, what has been called American financial-industrial imperialism arose at the apex of the tidal wave of change leading to 1914 and the outbreak of the First World Imperial War. 

By 1875 the old Southern elite understood that chattel slavery was gone forever and their future - survival lay in unity with the Northern financial-industrial oligarchy. It took a few more years to win a vast section of the Southern whites to this position. Nevertheless, by the late 1890s the merger of the Southern elite and the Northern financial-industrial oligarchy was fact. This unity created the conditions between 1876 and 1890 for the American form of what we called modern imperialism. 

The political alignments needed for the successful completion of the Civil War and then the breaking of the political strength of the Southern elite - who showed up after the war to claim their seats in government, was completed. This political process, which required war to implement, is being carried out today on a planetary basis. 

Not by that sector of capital called financial-industrial capital, but by a newly dominating sector identified as the speculative sector of capital. A new sector of capital, which expresses this stage in the form of accumulation is consolidating and striving to shatter every single barrier that inhibits its rapid movement in and out of various areas of an increasingly interactive world economy. Monetary policy is important, as is the role of petroleum as it sits at the base on not "capitalism" but the industrial infrastructure. Old structures of domination and control of wealth are being burst asundered. And this most certainly includes political structures throughout the Middle East and then on continental Africa, where China and the US are poised to perhaps enter serious conflict in the next several decades. 

This cycle of history is absolutely mind-boggling and at this stage it appears as if the industrial system of production and its various shells of accumulation are drawing to an end exactly as it became a world epoch - in the area of the focus point of slavery. The intense and extreme obviousness of Marx is bone chilling. I read a passage from the Communist Manifesto again this morning: 

"From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. 

"The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development."

Talk about chickens coming home to roost.  


I had thought that the actions of my imperial were aimed at Germany as a historic center of economic gravity in Europe and wrote such a year ago, become the controversy hit the front pages. Perhaps I am wrong, won't be the first time. Nevertheless, we are locked into history and its forms of realignment. 

For my money American troops will be withdrawn from Korea in the strategic sense, because they serve no purpose to the interest of the "speculator." A unified Korea under the watchful eye of the speculator within the political structure of China is desirable to capital. If and when these troops are withdrawn - maybe in the next ten years or so, someone will claim a victory to the "anti-war" forces. 

I also believe we are undergoing an evolutionary leap - a profound transition, where the category we called "left" and "right" - that arose on the basis of the French Revolution undergo collapse and reconfiguration. It has become fairly obvious that being "anti-war" - which I am, is not a statement of politics. What is called "politics" itself is being realigned. 

A knowledgeable "bourgeois" investor's insight is worth more than the ranting of 100 ideologist. 

Excellent article. 


Melvin P.