Today’s post picks up where yesterday’s left off. Not because it too features Owen Jones, in this case as host with the confidence and discipline to let his guest do the talking, but because it too takes as starting point the inescapable truth that the impact of the US-Israeli war of unprovoked aggression on Iran will be globally devastating.
Before we get down to it, a few remarks:
- There’ll be at least one further post on this, featuring a man Paul Craig Roberts (a former Reagan appointee at the US Treasury who long ago went renegade) called our greatest living economist. He meant Michael Hudson. I mention this not just as a promise of posts to come but because every sane adult sees the screaming need for a shift from burning hydrocarbons, a shift in which China not only leads the world but is bringing cheap green energy to Africa to transform the economic prospects of a continent whose centuries on the receiving end of plunder, enslavement and genocide should see every Western head hung in shame even as we continue (for now) to reap the fruits. I mention it also because a dialogue I’ll feature in that imminent post houses, in the context of deflation coexisting with hyperinflation, this shocker:
Prices will rise for oil, steel, aluminum, fertilizer, gas, and helium, while other prices in general fall. We’re facing the biggest collapse since the Great Depression … And here’s the horrific part: if fertilizer supply falls by 20%, food production probably falls by more than 20% globally. That means enough food for about 6 billion people — and there are 8 billion. We may be looking at a global famine this year. 1
- The video of Owen interviewing Yanis is, like so many YouTube offerings, absurdly titled to draw in those of limited attention span. Ignore that. This dialogue goes far wider and deeper than the trifling matter of Trump’s political survival.
- As with Charles Dickens, I find Yanis at his least convincing when offering hope. (Witness his quixotic Diem-25 project to reform an irremedially corrupt EU. 2 ) Here he does that in occasional remarks outweighed by his marshalling of intellect, articulacy and real world experience – as Greece’s finance minister he stood eyeball to eyeball with the imperialist devil while his country was pulverised by ECB/IMF imposed ‘austerity’ on steroids in 2015 – that had me hanging on his every word. Said moments of hopium excepted.
- Am I seeing things not actually there? As I’ve said a few times, including yesterday, I’ve mixed feelings about Owen. One of several unshining moments was his failure to back unequivocally history’s greatest ever journalist in the long dark night of his vilification by liberal media, and the licence it granted to state persecution as what should have been Julian’s staunchest support base, the liberal intelligentsia, ran for cover.
On Assange as on other matters, most importantly his witless aid to empire agendas in Syria and even Iran, Owen’s radical liberalism is easily appropriated by dark forces. His naivity left him not seeing or caring that a ruling class on either side of the Atlantic was happy to harness IdPol for its own purposes.
So when Yanis twice cites Julian, as “a man I’m honoured to call my friend”, 3 do Owen’s eyes narrow and face tighten at those points? Or am I imagining it?
Just asking.
But that’s quite enough from me. Over to Mr Varoufakis, with Mr Jones yesterday evening.
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- We don’t only burn oil. Insofar as derivatives like urea and sulphuric acid are key to fertiliser production, we also in a sense eat the stuff. And organic farming is all well and good for well heeled of Surrey and Portland Oregon, but won’t feed all people that on earth do dwell. And while I’m on the subject, we’ve yet to find a way of digitally printing rice or wheat!
- The fact of EU corruption takes nothing away from the fact of Brexit as less car crash than fast lane motorway pile-up.
- It’s worth noting why Yanis invokes Julian. He has in mind an observation – “the goal is to have an endless war, not a successful war” – made fifteen years ago in respect of an Afghan war ten years old and with ten more to go, when Julian said the aim of US wars is to sustain a military industrial complex central to America’s economy and eyewateringly lucrative for its oligarchs. That’s a shade reductive in its exclusion of glaring geopolitical considerations, but contains a good deal of stomach turning truth.