China’s growing economic ties to the cash-strapped regime of former Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev was a major reason Washington decided to dump its erstwhile ally Akayev after almost a decade of support. In June 2001 China, along with Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, signed the Declaration creating the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Three days later Beijing announced a large grant to Kyrgyzstan for military equipment.

Hayek had the sign and the destination right but was entirely wrong about the mechanism. Unregulated finance, the ideology of unfettered free markets, and state capture by corporate interests are what ended up undermining democracy both in North America and in Europe. All industrialized countries are at risk, but it’s the eurozone – with its vulnerable structures – that points most clearly to our potentially unpleasant collective futures.

This article is published at a time, when Berlin is using the Greek crisis to demand extensive intervention possibilities into the primary sovereign rights of EU member states. The demand for a more aggressive EU foreign policy is accompanied by dictates on member states to reinforce the EU.

America is used to having it all its own way. In 1972, as the US opened diplomatic relations with China, it abandoned pegging the dollar to gold. That enabled it - through its monopoly on printing US dollars - to create huge trade and investment advantages. Its economy grew strongly as it managed the value of its currency at the expense of other nations.

Real gross domestic product growth averaged 2.25 percent a year from 1981 to 1993; slipped to 2 percent from 1993 to 2003; and now stands at about 1 percent.

As Guy DeBord summed it up: “The economy has now come to declare open war on humanity, attacking not only our possibilities for living, but our chances of survival…. When an all-powerful economy lost its reason - and that is precisely what defines these spectacular times.”

We’ve never come across a terrorist who wasn’t trained, equipped, radicalized, entrapped, or provocateured by a western intelligence agency or a terror group controlled by a western intelligence agency.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, Kennedy explained why the State Department might not revoke the US visa of a suspected terrorist:“And one of the members [of the intelligence community]—and we’d be glad to give you that out of [open session]—in private—said, ‘Please, do not revoke this visa. We have eyes on this person. We are following this person who has the visa for the purpose of trying to roll up an entire network, not just stop one person.’”

This was perhaps the first time that a senior US official has openly flagged China as the US's rival in the energy politics of Central Asia. US experts usually have focused attention on Russian dominance of the region's energy scene and worked for diminishing the Russian presence in the post-Soviet space by canvassing support for Trans-Caspian projects that bypassed Russian territory. In fact, some American experts on the region even argued that China was a potential US ally for isolating Russia.