THE ROVING EYE - Do the Trans-Siberian shuffle By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Do the Trans-Siberian shuffle By Pepe Escobar A specter haunts the elites of the Empire of Chaos; the new Russia-China strategic partnership. It's manifesting itself in myriad ways - energy deals, investment deals, a closer political alliance inside the G-20, the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a concerted effort to progressively bypass the petrodollar. I have described this long process as essential to thebirth of the Eurasian century. From a Washington/Wall Street point of view, it was so much easier in those long gone, unipolar, "end of history" days. China was still tiptoeing on the banks of the river of capital accumulation, and Russia was down if not out. So allow me a flashback to the early 1990s. I had been on the road in Asia for months, from all points Southeast Asia to India, Nepal, the Himalayas and the eastern Chinese seaboard. Then I finally hit Beijing - waiting in the bitter winter of early 1992 to take the Trans-Siberian to Moscow. I was barely aware of the collapse of the Soviet Union - not exactly a news item in the Himalayas. I was also fortunate enough to be in southern China just a few days after Deng Xiaoping made his famous tour - whose key consequence was to catapult the dragon to dizzying development heights. A look back to those heady times may have the merit of illuminating our present. All aboard the night train  It's 8:32 pm in Beijing Railway Station, and the Trans-Manchurian Train 19 to Moscow is about to depart. It's minus 9 degrees Celsius. A bunch of Romanian crazies are trying to load more than 20 huge, vaguely green bundles stuffed with Made-in-China gear into one of the carriages. The Russian comptroller spouts out a "Nyet". Romanian chicks immerse in Transylvanic hysteria. Then a stash of George Washingtons changes hands at the final whistle, just in time for PLA soldiers and lady sweepers sporting the ubiquitous red armband with the words "Serve The People" to impassibly observe the happy ending. A cacophony of Russians, Poles, Romanians, Czechs and Mongols has deployed dozens of bags, bundles and sacks to totally overload the train corridors. 300 kg of shoes. 500 kg of jackets. 200 kg of T-shirts. Thousands of beauty cream pots that will be all the rage from Bucharest to Cracow. A "bed" on the train is a concavity over one of the bundles. That will be story for six days, across over 9,000 snowy kilometers in the former USSR, now Russia, from East to West. At the comptroller's compartment, more bags - whose content will be sold in the streets of Moscow. With so many George Washingtons in sight, the success of her bazaar is guaranteed - what with multiple stops on the way and an unregulated "free" market in every platform. The whole of Eastern Europe is loaded with stuff and dying to make a quick buck. In the Chinese stretch of the journey, nothing happens, unlike the 1930s, when Japan occupied Manchuria, installed puppet Pu Yi on the throne and was ready to take over Asia. The Terminator action starts in Zabaikalsk, at the Russian-China border - after we cross a huge Arc of Triumph in cement, complete with Leninist motto and not-yet-destroyed hammer and sickle. Customs - on both sides - is absolutely deserted. The train changes configuration to adapt to the new tracks. Yet all sights are set on the new dining car; exit Chinese, which only offered a miserable pork with soya sauce; enter Russian, crammed with goulash, soup, salami, frozen fish, black caviar, champagne from Crimea, coffee, eggs, even cheese - everything on the black market paid with US dollars. With the border behind us, it's go-go bazaar time. Everyone freaks out, because we instantly move from Beijing time to Moscow time. Sunrise is at 1 in the morning. The black market is running at $1 = 110 roubles, the rouble in free fall as we cut through the sublime snowy infinite desert of the Siberian tundra, where each spectacular sunrise under a slight Arctic fog is an epiphany celebrated with more Crimea champagne. Occasionally we spot reindeers or even huskies. The taiga - coveted by Japan, Korea and the US - is enveloped in snow. Beyond lay the ghosts of the 20 million corpses in Stalin's gulags, the hunters of the rare Amu tiger (fewer than 200 left) and the sinister Norilsk complex; 2 million tons a year of sulphuric acid and other heavy metals dumped in the atmosphere - the reason for that Arctic fog. The train stops stretch for 15 and even 20 minutes, reaching a nadir in Novosibirsk and Perm, which previously housed a notorious gulag. At every stop, hordes of Russians in Genghis Khan mode attack the train with little plastic bags. The best deal in the Trans-Siberian is anoraks and leather jackets. Jao, from Beijing, sells 50 in three days, at up to US$50 each; she paid $20 each in the Beijing hutongs. The Russians buy everything in sight and sell roubles - now plunging to 160 to the US dollar - as well as vodka, beer, salami, champagne and local $1 Pepsi bottles. The whole of Eastern Europe has taken over Train 19. Post-Ceausescu Romanians are the most exuberant - from former boxers to hookers to a seedy gangster in a tracksuit boasting about his two hours with a Russian doll for $10 (the going rate is $20). There's an Albanian contingent, young Polish students, shirtless Mongol nomads feverishly counting their profits, babushkas bored to death and even a loquacious Chinese dandy. The Russian carriages, once elegant, are a mess: foul air, dense cigarette smoke, drenched in sweat, toilets crammed with sacks, and "Kapitan", the only waiter, trying to make a quick buck selling Soviet paraphernalia. I find it the ideal setting to devour almost 1,000 pages of Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, a history of the CIA. Blame it on glasnost Train 19 is not only a bazaar but also a multinational Agora. Young Russians elaborate how the almost genius perversity of the Soviet system led it to boost to the limit all the problems of modern industrial societies - offering nearly none of its benefits. Eastern Europeans volunteer that it was not the Cold War that finished off "real socialism"; it was the invasion of the capitalist economy combined with the inefficiency and "stupidity" (copyright by a Polish undergraduate) of the socialist economy. Russians say that glasnost finished off authority and perestroikafinished off the economy - and there was nothing to replace either. End result: physics graduates selling caviar tins in a moving train for survival. Everyone praises Gorbachev but essentially condemn him to a short historical footnote. In the train, I heard arguments that would be reproduced years later in countless US academic studies. All the Trans-Siberian navigators exhibit a solidarity not to be found at the United Nations; they exchange currencies, swap addresses, lend money and the indispensable calculators, help to load and unload the loot, accept bundles in their compartment, offer their places for half an hour for those who only have the corridor to sleep, and crack jokes about the small Bank of China yuan bills. They are all ardent defenders of this unheard of form of direct democracy that is synonym with the end of the Cold War. Amid the casino lurks the most improbable character: Lulu, a diminutive Bangladeshi, always attached to a Samsonite, dabbling in Allah-only-knows mysterious activities, passport filled with dodgy visas, Saudi Arabian included. Chinese and Russians treat him like an allergic Pekingese. Train chow is predictably unbearable for this strict Muslim, who wakes us all up everyday at 5 am with his prayers - Rashid Muhammad spends six days literally on bread and water. Skolka? That's the Trans-Manchurian bazaar motto, a preview of Moscow. Pink Floyd launched the legendary Dark Side of the Moon at the height of the Brejnev era; Moscow suburbs look like the ghostly, dark side of the moon. Stalin's lunatic legacy is alleviated only by a solitary kiosk selling flowers, fruit or sweet Georgia brandy. We arrive as zombies - and only a few hours late - at Yaroslavlsky Vakzal, one of nine Moscow train stations, where a deluge of Volga taxis fight for the precious Chinese cargo. Those moving on to Eastern Europe without a reservation are doomed: seats for Warsaw and Berlin are only available in 40 days. In Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, I had witnessed the spectacular success of post-Tiananmen Chinese "market socialism", where the economy was the locomotive and politics was dispatched to the bottom end of the train. Nothing more astonishing than the contrast with Moscow, where politics was the locomotive. I'm housed by Dmitri, an odontology student, three metro stops from the Kremlin, paying $6 a day, a small fortune; he and his girlfriend precariously subdivide the two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with a whole family, dog included, besides the occasional Western visitors, who sleep in the master bedroom. This is considered an upper middle-class lifestyle. At the beautiful metro stations, it's the return of the Trans-Siberian bazaar; on sale are political or porno samizdats, second-hand clothes, bottles of every possible liquid. Only when I reach Red Square doI see the light; at the Himalayas and China, my time-zone was still on Gorbachev. What's now at the top of the Kremlin is a Russian flag - as well as in the center of Dzerzhinsky square, in front of the KGB. As a perfect idiot, I aim for the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the former head of the Soviet secret police, only to be warned by a student that it had been torn down weeks ago. Gorbachev is now a vodka brand. And I can't get inside the KGB building. The whole city is converted into a giant Turkish bazaar. After Boris Yeltsin liberated the sidewalks, everyone wants to exercise thisprivatizatsiya thing. Until 1990, nobody knew what a checkbook or a credit card was, and $1 was equivalent to 1 rouble. There are absolutely astonishing street markets on Prospekt Marka and Gorki street, everyone silently in line exhibiting their wares; a broken doll, a solitary shoe, dusty champagne bottles, perfume, instant coffee, sardine tins, an empty beer bottle. The streets are filled with all the stuff brought by the Trans-Siberian navigators, but the supermarkets are empty. There's very little milk or meat, but lots of canned fish and interminable lines to buy nothing - with potential consumers resigned to play chess. The biggest hit in town is the new McDonald's on Pushkin square - one of the busiest in the world, selling full meals for 50 cents by cashiers sporting an Eva Herzigova smile. In front of the MacD, a paper Gorbie poses for tourists, and a crowd sells caviar tins for $5 and champagne for $3. At the GUM department store, there is not much except a few Sony and Honda showrooms and a new Dior window. The recent past does not let go; it's impossible to call Europe. It's impossible to send a fax from the Post Office. It's impossible to make a train reservation. It's impossible to make a plane reservation - at least on the Aeroflot shop in Lubyanka; only at the cavernous Intourist Hotel. At the lugubrious ground floor of the Mockba Hotel, deaf and dumb characters straight out of an Ionesco play crowd the corridors while a beer black-market does brisk business in front of the hotel bar. A glass of champagne goes for 50 cents. At the hall of the legendary Metropol - the 1899 Grand Dame favored by Trotsky - a dry martini is a steep $7,70. The Metropol is the new Wall Street; Danes, Italians, Americans and Chinese discuss all deals this side of a Brave New World downing Heinekens at $5 a pop. On Armed Forces Day, a Sunday, there's a communist demonstration, repressed with tact, boasting large numbers of old ladies carrying flowers and flags. For their part, Moscow punks with anarchist flags protest against the Armed Forces. A pre-historic Volga takes me to Sheremetyevo as if I was running from a 1950s Cold War B-movie set. The Volga gurgles, stops, cools off, runs, gurgles, stops again, cools off; a metaphor of the new Russia, and I almost miss Aeroflot SU 576 back to Paris. Nothing will ever be the (unipolar) same  Those were the days. That McDonald's - symbol of unipolar, "end of history", Pax Americana - has been recently shut down. It's harder and harder for the Empire of Chaos to rule the world alone while McDonald's serves burgers. Across Pushkin square, the fashionable Cafe Pouchkine now serves the best of Russian haute cuisine. And still, both Russia and China are seen as pariahs by the unipolar, imperial elite. It's as if we were still frozen in those early1990s days. Russia and China may have changed almost beyond recognition - but for the Empire of Chaos the priorities are to tear Russia apart, starting with Ukraine, and "pivot to Asia" via an anti-China military/economic axis in the Western Pacific. Meanwhile, the Trans-Siberian will soon be linked with the Chinese-driven New Silk Roads. And then one day in the early 2020s this will all be a high-speed rail network, linking Eurasia in a flash. And nothing will ever be the (unipolar) same. Except for the back-to-Russia Crimean champagne. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE How Crimea plays in Beijing By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE How Crimea plays in Beijing By Pepe Escobar "We are paying very close attention to the situation in Ukraine. We hope all parties can calmly maintain restraint to prevent the situation from further escalating and worsening. Political resolution and dialogue is the only way out." This, via Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong, is Beijing's quite measured, official interpretation of what's happening in Ukraine, tailored for global consumption. But here, in a People's Daily editorial, is what the leadership is really thinking. And the focus is clearly on the dangers of regime change, the "West's inability to understand the lessons of history", and "the final battlefield of the Cold War." Yet again the West misinterpreted China's abstention from the UN Security Council vote on a US-backed resolution condemning the Crimea referendum. The spin was that Russia - which vetoed the resolution - was "isolated". It's not. And the way Beijing plays geopolitics shows it's not. Oh, Samantha … The herd of elephants in the (Ukraine) room, in terms of global opinion, is how the authentic "international community" - from the G-20 to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) - who has had enough of the Exceptionalist Hypocrisy Show, has fully understood, and even applauded, that at least one country on the planet has the balls to clearly say "F**k the US". Russia under President Vladimir Putin may harbor quite a few distortions, just like any other nation. But this is not a dinner party; this is realpolitik. To face down the US Leviathan, nothing short of a bad ass such as Putin will suffice. NATO - or shorthand for the Pentagon dominating European wimps - keeps issuing threats and spewing out "consequences". What are they going to do - launch a barrage of ICBMs equipped with nuclear warheads against Moscow? Furthermore, the UN Security Council itself is a joke, with US ambassador Samantha "Nothing Compares to You" Power - one of the mothers of R2P ("responsibility to protect") - carping on "Russian aggression", "Russian provocations" and comparing the Crimean referendum to a theft. Oh yes; bombing Iraq, bombing Libya and getting to the brink of bombing Syria were just innocent humanitarian gestures. Samantha The Humanitarian arguably gives a better performance invoking Sinead O'Connor in her shower. Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin was polite enough to say, "these insults addressed to our country" are "unacceptable". It's what he added that carried the real juice; "If the delegation of the United States of America expects our cooperation in the Security Council on other issues, then Power must understand this quite clearly." Samantha The Humanitarian, as well as the whole bunch of juvenile bystanders in the Obama administration, won't understand it. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov gave them a little help; Russia didn't want to use the Iranian nuclear talks to "raise the stakes", but if the US and the EU continue with their sanctions and threats, that's what's going to happen. So the plot thickens - as in a closer and closer strategic partnership between Tehran and Moscow. Secessionists of the world, unite?  Now imagine all this as seen from Beijing. No one knows what exactly goes on in the corridors of the Zhongnanhai, but it's fair to argue there's only an apparent contradiction between China's key principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and Russia's intervention in Crimea. Beijing has identified very clearly the sequence of affairs; long-running Western interference in Ukraine via NGOs and the State Department; regime change perpetrated with the help of fascists and neo-nazis; a pre-emptive Russian counterattack which can be read as a by-the-book Samantha The Humanitarian R2P operation (protecting Russians and Russian speakers from a second coup planned in Crimea, and thwarted by Russian intelligence.) On top of it Beijing well knows how Crimea has been essentially Russian since 1783; how Crimea - as well as a great deal of Ukraine - fall smack into Russian civilization's sphere of influence; and how Western interference directly threatened Russia's national security interests (as Putin made it clear.) Now imagine a similar scenario in Tibet or Xinjiang. Long-running Western interference via NGOs and the CIA; a take over by Tibetans in Lhasa or Uighurs in Kashgar of the local administration. Beijing could easily use Samantha's R2P in the name of protecting Han Chinese. Yet Beijing (silently) agreeing to the Russian response to the coup in Kiev by getting Crimea back via a referendum and without a shot fired does not mean that "splittists" Tibet or Taiwan would be allowed to engage in the same route. Even as Tibet, more than Taiwan, would be able to build a strong historical case for seceding. Each case bears its own myriad complexities. The Obama administration - like a blind Minotaur - is now lost in a labyrinth of pivots of its own making. A new Borges - that Buddha in a gray suit - is needed to tell the tale. First there was the pivoting to Asia-Pac - which is encircling of China under another name - as it's well understood in Beijing. Then came the pivoting to Persia - "if we are not going to war", as that Cypher in Search of an Idea, John Kerry, put it. There was, of course, the martial pivoting to Syria, aborted at the last minute thanks to the good offices of Moscow diplomacy. And back to the pivoting to Russia, trampling the much-lauded "reset" and conceived as a payback for Syria. Those who believe Beijing strategists have not carefully analyzed - and calculated a response - to all the implications of these overlapping pivots do deserve to join Samantha in the shower. Additionally, it's easy to picture Chinese Think Tankland hardly repressing its glee in analyzing a hyperpower endlessly, helplessly pivoting over itself. While the Western dogs bark … Russia and China are strategic partners - at the G-20, at the BRICS club of emerging powers and at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Their number one objective, in these and other forums, is the emergence of a multipolar world; no bullying by the American Empire of Bases, a more balanced international financial system, no more petrodollar eminence, a basket of currencies, essentially a "win-win" approach to global economic development. A multipolar world also implies, by definition, NATO out of Eurasia - which is from Washington's point of view the number one reason to interfere in Ukraine. In Eurasian terms, it's as if - being booted out of Afghanistan by a bunch of peasants with Kalashnikovs - NATO was pivoting back via Ukraine. While Russia and China are key strategic partners in the energy sphere - Pipelineistan and beyond - they do overlap in their race to do deals across Central Asia. Beijing is building not only one but two New Silk Roads - across Southeast Asia and across Central Asia, involving pipelines, railways and fiber optic networks, and reaching as far as Istanbul, the getaway to Europe. Yet as far as Russia-China competition for markets go, all across Eurasia, it's more under a "win-win" umbrella than a zero-sum game. On Ukraine ("the last battlefield in the Cold War") and specifically Crimea, the (unspoken) official position by Beijing is absolute neutrality (re: the UN vote). Yet the real deal is support to Moscow. But this could never be out in the open, because Beijing is not interested in antagonizing the West, unless heavily provoked (the pivoting becoming hardcore encirclement, for instance). Never forget; since Deng Xiaoping ("keep a low profile") this is, and will continue to be, about China's "peaceful rise". Meanwhile, the Western dogs bark, and the Sino-Russian caravan passes. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - Word up, G-20? By Pepe Escobar

It certainly beats any dreary Group of 20 (G-20) communique. Everything one needs to know about the US Federal Reserve's quantitative easing (QE), currency wars and the mudslinging tsunami that passes for the current global financial system can be found at this animated rap video by Taiwan-based Next Media Animation (see the video here)

If only the G-20 summit in Seoul this week had released a ''making of''. The summit was billed as a lofty last rampart of antiprotectionism, supporting the global economic recovery

while alleviating widespread deficit and debt problems. As the meeting

was taking place on Thursday and Friday, the final declaration had been hammered out on Wednesday. And what a mud-wrestling match that was.

After much sweating, a draft communique was arrived at, stating that nations should let markets determine currency rates and ''refrain from competitive devaluation'' (a veiled reference to the US). But until the last minute the sherpas, the officials whose keen sense of hazards and secure routes help to guide their leaders to a safe if banal conclusion at any summit) also kept in brackets crucial alternative wording - ''competitive undervaluation'' (a veiled reference to China).

As a consolation prize to global public opinion, at least it was heartening to see the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - and the European Union (EU) finally getting their act together to produce a declaration stressing the - almost general - political will that nations should not adopt policies (such as the Fed's latest round of quantitative easing, or QE2) that seriously mess with other nations' economies.

Every central bank in the world had been asking the Fed for days to come clean on QE2. To believe that the G-20 would gladly accept US President Barack Obama's offer to embrace yet another tsunami of US paper dollars that the US cannot pay for is to live in Oz. No wonder many a diplomat would confirm, tersely or not, that this was indeed the G-19 to 1 summit.

Yet to exhibit as a G-20 success only a promise that the much-scorned International Monetary Fund (IMF) should monitor what the G-20 is doing is slightly less than appalling (although the IMF now dreams that a coordinated G-20 action to "save" the world economy could generate 52 million jobs in the medium term). Not to mention that Washington refuses to undergo the "structural adjustment" that its baby, the IMF, has always imposed on any other budget deficit patient.

The new model army
How could it be otherwise? Take the letter Obama sent to the G-20 leaders ahead of the summit. He tried to convince the other 19 that the US is keeping its "commitment to refrain from undervaluing currencies for competitive purposes" - when all of them were practically screaming that QE1 and QE2 are nothing less than US dollar devaluation. Obama's letter practically laid the blame for the 2008 financial crisis on China and the emerging markets. And as he defended the Fed's action in India on Monday, he in fact was stating that what is good for the US is good for the world.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s response was certainly more measured than many an angry European central banker, who were accusing the US of "treason"; Lula suggested that the BRIC countries should start using fewer US dollars while trading among themselves (and that's already the case).

Even the mineral kingdom is aware that since the US under Richard Nixon in 1971 unilaterally declared the end of a link between gold and the US dollar, the Bretton Woods system introduced at the end of World War II has been dead. What has been going on to this day is the unending coma of the global monetary system. Washington/Wall Street has embraced a take-no-prisoners law of the jungle - endless manipulating of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. For emerging nations, the only possible counterpunch is to coordinate an array of public investment works, to guarantee jobs and incomes in their internal markets, and to protect their local industries

.

It's enlightening to compare the current situation with what happened under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To reverse the Great Depression, the US government took over the economy. President Roosevelt did not resort to "the markets"; he unleashed a state-conceived developmentalist package - public works mixed with social action.

As much as the impasse at the G-20 is real, the current Washington rhetoric of striving for global coordination to beat the crisis is nonsense: what matters to Washington/Wall Street today is to smash any political alternative to its unilateral adjustment. The University of Missouri's Michael Hudson has explained it in a nutshell: "Essentially, you'll have America's financial system and the banks acting as an army to raid foreign currencies

."

It's still full spectrum, stupid
So what will happen in the US after QE2 and this G-20? Business as usual - that is, the return, in full force, under the auspices of a Republican-dominated US Congress, of the full primacy of the Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. Republicans will hysterically try to cut every budget in sight - but definitely not the Endless War budget.

Thus the ''honeymoon'' with China is over. China more than ever will now see its position solidified at the top of the Pentagon's strategic competitor/enemy list. The uneasily quantitative trillion-dollar question remains how, in which terms, and until when will Beijing agree to keep financing the non-stop build-up of Washington's overwhelming war machine.

The Full Spectrum Dominance-driven Washington/Wall Street plutocracy would interpret Obama's trip to Asia as serving essentially to warn China that the US intends to remain a formidable Asian power. India - a US nuclear partner - was charmed to kingdom come. And so was Indonesia. Those 40,000 US troops in Japan plus the Okinawa base, as well as the 28,000 US troops in South Korea, are not going anywhere.

The US internal situation - exhibiting every possible woe from the total debacle of the middle class to the rise of fascistic tendencies - is not even an afterthought for the Full Spectrum Dominance-driven Washington/Wall Street plutocracy.

As for the G-20, this is roughly the bottom line: nothing can stop the US dollar going down. Big banks will have a ball getting money for nothing in the US and chicks for free all over emerging markets. Average Americans will be left with housing prices and wages down. China won't be lectured: by the way, the yuan has actually appreciated since 2005 from 8.2 to the US dollar to 6.6; and it will appreciate another 15% up to 2015, following a timeline established by Beijing, not Washington.

South America, with its string of progressive governments now with much better coordination capacities, may show the world how to dance the integration shuffle, and how to escape the US dollar dictatorship, doing deals in their own currencies. Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega has been saying out loud what his colleagues have been whispering: the time of the US dollar as reserve currency is over. The move is toward a basket of currencies. The BRICs will become increasingly more coordinated. And with China liberalizing the offshore yuan market, sooner or later the Hong Kong-US dollar peg will become history.

France is next in holding the G-20 presidency. It's no secret that the embattled, mega-unpopular, micro-Napoleonic and macro-narcissistic Nicolas Sarkozy will pull all stops to come up with "his" Bretton Woods II next year in Paris, and thus save the world, not to mention his reelection in 2012.

Now that's a soap opera worth waiting for. Till then, let's rap. From the Mao to the Deng to the Jiang to the Hu/ You think you can keep on telling us what to do...

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.