There's a new set of internet shows going round. Huge ships crash into other huge ships and boats and various harbours. These towering leviathans slowly break up and sometimes destroy parts of ports, decks, docks, heavy machinery and, as mentioned before, other boats. They do it with graceful momentum, seemingly so slow and yet utterly unstoppable, while hooting and howling from sad pipes and horns that smother the creaks and grinds of the cracking concrete or the scraping bellies of the other boats. There were no deaths or injuries in the pieces seen above. But tiny humans spread along the jetty gradually turned their walks into runs as the enormous pieces of the sea relentlessly ground down their full size and impact. This is not the beauty of the waves. It is the scuttles in the current hangover of globalisation.
A large container ship engine is similar in size to a six story building. Well over a billion tonnes is carried internationally in containers. Between 2000 and 2017 containerised cargo trade grew three times and about one and a half time faster than the world's GDP. The number of crashes of ships is actually harder to assess. There are a lot of questions and few honest answers in this area. But the issue that is most concerning now is - will these epic behemoths smash up globalisation?
The ships gathering in Los Angeles, unable to dock their Xmas cargo, has not only saddened the West Coast children but more significantly, created the opportunity of another Trump attack on President Biden. The mayor of Long beach California says
'We are facing an unprecedented cargo surge at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles due to major global pandemic productions shifts and decades old supply challenges'.
The British Prime Minister Boris pretends that the West Coast block is simply part of the same problems that the UK now faces over fuel, food and energy supplies. In fact the LA blockage is mainly the increased demand from the US for Xmas goods and the increasing problem of old fashioned port capacity. Even that minor crisis is pushing critical political issues in the US. In the UK, these hiccups are hugely more serious, and they expose much more rapidly the potential, gradual disintegration of globalisation at its weakest point. Boris talks only lies. The UK's current connection with globalisation, unlike the problems with the LA's port, is becoming the most problematic of all of the main western nations. And now ship containers price their voyages from £2000 to £18000. And gas containers are dropping their agreed previous prices in mid passage and turning their bows to the biggest offers.
The British Guardian newspaper now faces its Bidenic hero when he insists that the US will go to war against a Chinese intervention in Taiwan. This is a deeply serious initiative against China. Up to now, the Chinese policy is that Taiwan is Chinese. The Chinese leadership has consistently insisted on a peaceful and prolonged return of Taiwan to China. The US policy used to be supporting that approach. But Biden has turned the wheel and put possible war first. (His administration is desperately trying to dissolve Biden's statement into the previous, essential, non-developed Taiwan process.)
This is the sort of sword that slices the ultra modern capitalism's largest development - into pieces. The pillars of globalisation are not the ships (although they are becoming more and more unconstrained) they are the vast connections between the US, the EU and China. Biden has deepened what was Trump's intention to break down global capitalism into nationalistic dominations - with the single leader (and the minor copycats) determinedly on top.
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