Last week and without any great fanfare George W Bush broke from deep cover and moved to strike at the enemy.
He took out the free market.
Bush is a commie!
All these years the free wheeling oilman from Crawford Texas with the rich daddy and well-connected Saudi buddies was actually a closet leftie.
He had us all fooled.
It was a brilliant cover making the Manchurian candidate look like false nose and glasses from a Christmas cracker!
Had Hugo Chavez moved on the financial system of Venezuela in a similar fashion then we could safely assume that the lads in Langley would be planning another coup.
In fact what Bush did with his move in state control of the economy was much less than what Salvadore Allende did in Chile in the early 1970s.
The democratically elected President of Chile offended US business interest he paid with his life, as did thousands of other Chileans who were tainted with leftism.
The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed a vast bailout of the United States financial system, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions based in the United States.
The US state is now the owner of major financial institutions and millions of US homes.
The most right wing, free market US president in a generation has nationalised banks and taken a huge housing stock into public ownership.
Read that sentence again, because it doesn’t look right does it?
What we are trying to witness is as ungraspable as what the people of the developed world started to witness in 1929.
We have no idea what is unfolding-we only know that the epoch is about to change.
In 1929 Hitler was a nobody. A sick deluded man with a handful of followers. Then a huge financial tsunami, which no one had predicted, catapulted him to be the saviour of the German people.
Millions of sane rational Germans voted for him five years after Wall Street crashed.
You know the rest.
Who will be the new Hitler?
Where will the new Nazis emerge?
We have no idea.
Not a single one of us.
History-contrary to popular misconception does not repeat itself.
Similar things to reoccur again and again-like wars over scarce resources in times of shortage.
That is the human story, but the circumstances of the new conflict are never exactly the same as before.
I was born in the 1950s.
All of my life the world financial system-set up after World War Two-has worked.
There have been recessions, downturns, readjustments and blips.
Through all that the system worked.
Historians will argue about whether or not these eight years of Bush was the key pathogen in a global catastrophe.
The ideological drive to de-regulate and then de-regulate some more was a coup d’etat against the financial order that the world had enjoyed since the end of World War Two.
It could have been different if people in powerful judicial positions in Florida in 2000 had acted with good authority.
They didn’t.
President Gore would undoubtedly have taken corrective action as envisaged by J.M. Keynes and by the smart men who met and concocted the “Bretton Woods agreement” while Hitler and the Empire of Japan had yet to be defeated.
This was admirable forward planning.
The new world order was being planned and the IMF was a key part of that every bit as much as the UN.
Now the US federal debt is a number that I cannot pronounce .I have to count and recount the numbers of zeroes and work out what it is as a word.
Historian Niall Ferguson said that the US Empire, in his book “Colossus”, had three deficits.
Manpower, Finance and attention.
The middle one just got a lot worse.
China now owns a sizeable chunk of the US economy just as America bailed out Britain during World War One.
The geo-politics of the planet are starting to tip towards China again for the first time in 500 years.
While the American legions are embroiled in the battlefields of the Middle East central Asia Beijing quietly builds up its power.
The invincible US military has found its own forests of Germania just as Britain over-reached itself on the Somme.
Islam is bleeding America dry and the Jihadi cannot be parleyed with. There will be no Paris Peace accord with the Al Qaeda franchise that is opening up a branch near you soon.
The old men of Beijing have no war to fight with Islam, but quietly buy up US assets while their people labour in the new workshop of the world.
The Chinese curse could not be more apt.
These are indeed fascinating times.
Damn it!
