Pepe ESCOBAR
Seven years after being launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping, first in Astana and then in Jakarta, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) increasingly drives the American plutocratic oligarchy completely nuts.
The relentless paranoia about China’s New Silk Roads “threat” has much to do with the exit ramp offered by Beijing to a Global South permanently indebted to IMF-World Bank exploitation.
In the old order, politico-military elites were routinely bribed in exchange for unfettered corporate access to their nations’ resources, coupled with go-go privatization schemes and outright austerity (“structural adjustment”).
This went on for decades until Belt and Road became the new game in town in terms of infrastructure building, offering an alternative to the imperial footprint….
