A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
AA: I told you Obama is a hawk. Look at his security team. No wonder the left can’t figure out what is happening. That’s why they are calling him an Uncle Tom. KH: Well, I can see that some could be worried that this is a recycling of the same old Washington elite. Who speaks […] →Read more
KH: You’re looking glummer than usual. What is it? Oil in the $50s? AA: No, we can hardly expect anything else with the world economy heading for the next Great Deflation, if it isn’t already there. I just spent a week in Riyadh. You know, the world looks different from there — four or five […] →Read more
KH: Where have you been? I wanted to talk about Obama’s victory. AA: India, Brazil and South Africa. You’ve heard of IBSA? We are looking to invest in South-South economic co-operation. I’ll tell you about it some time. So why are you so keen on a US election post-mortem? KH: Well, I wanted to tell […] →Read more
The period since 1945 saw a revolution in world society which, by the 1990s, had turned into widespread popular emancipation from the repressive state controls installed during the Cold War. The world was becoming more connected and more unequal at the same time, but people in general enjoyed more freedom than ever before. Since the […] →Read more
One in a series of World Summits on Free Information Infrastructures (WSFII) took place 1-3 October 2005 at Limehouse Town Hall in London. A programme of talks, demonstrations and discussion on free networks, alternative currencies, civic information, infra-red networks, open geodata and mapping, was preceded by a week of workshop ‘streams’ including a book writing […] →Read more
KH: Well, this has been a big week for relations between Britain and the Gulf states. I see that Gordon Brown, self-appointed saviour of the world economy, has made a lightning visit to Riyadh to persuade you lot to bail out the IMF. He calls it a “Global crisis fund”, sounds like the begging bowl […] →Read more
KH: I see that OPEC are going to cut oil output by 1.5 billion dollars a day from November 1st. AA: Well, now we know that the world economy is going through a deep deflation, it would be crazy to do otherwise. I hope you noticed that we didn’t propose any cuts when the oil […] →Read more
KH: Well, Abdul, what’s your position on these crazy markets? AA: I’m with Warren Buffet. I love that guy. Did you see his oped piece in the New York Times today, ‘Buy American. I am‘? It’s not just that I agree with his prediction that US stocks are going to bounce back soon, he has […] →Read more
KH: Ed points out that the crisis is essentially one of debt deflation. Another way of saying this perhaps is that the world is deleveraging fast. He wants us to acknowledge that there are winners and losers in a deflation, just as there are in inflation. AA: That reminds me of Keynes’s great piece in […] →Read more
These reports are edited versions of exchanges held via Skype, email and face-to-face, taken from a conversation that began in early 2007. Abdul Aziz (not his real name) is a minor Saudi royal with a degree in economics from a Midwestern university who now lives in London where he manages some of his immediate family’s […] →Read more
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
