(Reporter's note: The following rant appeared on the Web in 2004; hard to believe nine years ago. It was upon the occasion of our first visit to western Russia, specifically Moscow, and a dreadful, dreary, windy, rainy weekend in London on the way home. The week in Moscow coincided with publication of those dreadful pictures of American turnkeys in military uniforms humiliating detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Rambling thoughts while we waited for our flight home at Heathrow.)
“When you're down on your luck
And you ain't got a buck
In London you're a goner.
Even London Bridge
Has fallen down
And moved to Arizona . . .”
These inspired lyrics by Texan Gary P. Nunn were ever on your correspondent's mind during his calamitous two-week his visit to the extremities of Europe, commencing in Moscow and ending in London.
After a full week of weirdness in Russia, and having watched for way too many hours the flapping of Boeing 747-400 and Airbus 320 wings and winglets, we are now compelled to connect the dots of the Metal Mens' mess on this continent a half-planet away.
London is a lovely place, what with its towers and clocks and such, but it is really not much different than Moscow, except that Russians speak far better King's English than do the Brits, who mostly speak Hindu and Farsi. The architecture is about the same. Lundy has the Thames; Moscow has the Moscow River. Both ancient cities circle bodies of water.
If you are Americanski, the telly will tell the tale. Bloomberg and CNBC Europe are carrying their lead stories the weekend before the Baghdad nastiness erupted; it is of the doubling of the size of the European Union, now 450 million strong, ten new nations, accomplished on a Friday night in Ireland to the drunken accompaniment of several millions of Dubliners who had to be hosed down by fire trucks.
This now creates, outside China, the largest economic engine on the planet. Was this story on the front page of your local rag? Doubt it. Sure was over here.
A Gallup poll of Muscovites reveals a majority would prefer to see Lenin's mummified corpse exhumed from its tomb and stuck into a hole in the ground. We went to Lenin's Tomb last week and were first in line to view the corpse.
Also the last. Nobody was ahead of us or behind us. Warren Buffet is shorting US dollars and the Bush Administration, and staying away from Google's IPO. Citigroup and Macdonald's have signs, buildings and offices up and down the Arbat in Red Square.
The people on this ancient continent are polite to us but they don't really need our good graces. Brussels and Lundy are bellyaching at Moscow about its arcane export quotas on nickel, lead, silver, copper, zinc and PGMs, but they'll work it out.
Russia's Norilsk Nickel is fattening itself up on the planet's gold, including a purported bid for 100 percent of gold-miner Goldfields. Norilsk's already-done 20 percent purchase of Goldfields was revealed recently to have been secured to Citigroup with Norilsk's nickel production, which explains why your stainless steel fasteners have doubled in price in the past few months.
Norilsk's CEO, whom we had intended to interview, conveniently disappeared to Israel (or was it Spain?) late last week after news broke that Norilsk was going to make the full-meal-deal grab for Goldfields.
It gets curiouser.
China, the other big planetary player, actually the third rail of world economics, is turning the screws down on its economy in an effort to cool inflation and protect its massive US dollar currency reserves preparatory to dumping them. Europe wants trade concessions from China, too, which the Chinese will be all too willing to grant should the EU rescind its arms embargo. The new Bank of China advertises every half-hour on both Bloomberg Europe and CNBC Europe. They are open for business. China's throttling-back will be tough on commodities for the next few months but it is temporary.
They have stuffed 200 years of Industrial Revolution into a single generation's lifespan and there's no looking back. By 2050 China, urbanizing along a trend experienced by Japan, Europe and the U.S. during their industrial revolutions, will shift their population from the country to the cities, necessitating the construction of the equivalent of a Los Angeles every two years or less.
China, Japan, South Africa, and most European countries cannot afford to see the dollar fall any further, but they also cannot afford to keep propping the USD up, either. There is simply not enough wealth on this planet to keep pace with the United Snakes Federal Reserve Bank's printing presses. And at a fixed 6% interest per year - the rate at which the Fed loans us our dollar bills - why would the Fed wish to stop printing? It is, in the words of Janet Reno and Jim Jones, for the sake of the children, no?
Please hang with us whilst we digress. What whacked us to our senses was a visit in Russia this past week to the world's biggest surviving rail-gun. It is a marvelous device, supported by some 13 pair of railroad wheel trucks, each capable of hauling 100 tons. The rail gun, named Robert, is proudly displayed near Gorky Park. The Russians own it, but the Germans built it in the early 1940s with the intent of lobbing lead at Moscow from it. Things went south for the Germans in 1944, and the Russians grabbed the rail gun from them somewhere outside St. Petersburg. Short of an aircraft carrier or battleship it is the most impressive piece of military machinery we have ever seen.
Memories die hard. It does not occur to we Americans, in our comfortable homes in Florida or Idaho, how hard a half-century of war was on these people. What I see here is an awakening and a rising, from the bar-room floor, of the participants in this half-century-long bar-brawl, the bloodiest in history (the peace of the Treaty of Versailles was, if you look at it rationally, just a time-out in the penalty box whilst everybody regrouped to go another round) and after 50 years' recovery smelling blood in the waters. Our blood.
The Europeans and the Asians are wiping the crud from their eyes and they are coming-to. For 50 years they have been down, but not out. Their fighting amongst themselves — Europe upon itself and Japan and China at each others' throats — is over.
It is over for them. Which means it's just getting started for us. The Baghdad fiasco squandered whatever goodwill was left over from the Marshall Plan.
It was not Americans who discovered, conquered and settled America, after all. Was it not instead the Russians, the Chinese and Japanese, the French, the Spanish, the British and the Dutch?
For a half-decade these nations have been rummy, comatose, recovering from the wounds of World Wars I and II. Certainly, resentments over here in Europe will remain; Russia, for example, wants the $20 billion in gold it sent to Japan for the purchase of weaponry ordered during WW I but never got. But again, they'll work it out. Reparations are cheap. All they need are resources.
And which country hasn't mined in 30 years? Which country hasn't pumped oil in 30 years? Which country's own EPA environmental movement is fund-raised for by a former Russian prime minister? Whose own natty conscience has left its resources uncut, un-mined, un-plumbed, preferring instead to plunder other nations for three decades? Can you name one other than America?
What a tasty snack for someone awakening from a long dark sleep, his barroom brawl wounds now fully healed, ready to settle up, looking over an ocean now barely an Airbus-flap away.
As Bunker Hill's Robert Hopper would have asked, “Have you got rocks?” Better get some — the more zinc, lead, silver and gold the better. Because the Russians and the Chinese are coming, and they are not alone.
