Brian Wheeldon

Paul Tucker has written a comprehensive overview of politics, international money, capital and the banking flows that today are technically incomparable with the pigeons and bills of exchange of yesteryear. In the High Tech world of euro clear, swift, and the looming BRICS system how can national and international politics (geopolitics) and its organisations manage and control the financialised-economic system that drives endless consumption and endless externalities in nature and human labour? The book goes nowhere close to identifying serious shortcomings in the system that is driving resource wars, climate chaos and the sixth mass extinction now well underway. It neither properly recognises the possible existential problems referred to here nor proffers any way forward for humankind to identify a pathway out of the existential bind we have created for ourselves on planet Earth. A complete geopolitical system and financial system change are required. Constant accumulation and total system capture by billionaire oligarchs together with transnational fraud that knows no boundaries have overriden commonsense in the real and living world. Delay and denialism particularly in the west have stifled free thought, and free speech is in lockdown. In that regard imagination and honesty and action are urgently needed by us all, and sadly that is all too much for the author to contemplate in a highly articulate book frozen in time.