Industrious Citizens,
Michael Hudson , The Looming War Against China [I'm skipping that "war" part, because nobody can tell, and going to the last part about global economics.]
The problem lies in what the word “capitalism” has come to mean in today’s world. Back in the 19th and early 20th century, industrial capitalism was expected to evolve toward socialism. The U.S. and other industrial economies welcomed and indeed pressed for their governments to subsidize a widening range of basic services at public expense instead of obliging employers to bear the costs of hiring labor that had to pay for basic needs such as health care and education. Monopoly pricing was avoided by keeping natural monopolies such as railroads and other transportation, telephone systems and other communications, parks and other services as public utilities. Having governments instead of business and its employees pay for these services increased the global competitiveness of national industry in the resulting mixed economies. China has followed this basic approach of industrial capitalism, with socialist politics to uplift its labor force, not merely the wealth of industrial capitalists – much less bankers and absentee landlords and monopolists. Most important, it has industrialized banking, creating credit to finance tangible investment in means of production, not the kind of predatory and unproductive credit characterized by today’s finance capitalism.
But the mixed-economy policy of industrial capitalism is not the way in which capitalism evolved in the West since World War I.
Rejecting classical political economy and its drive to free markets from the vested rent-extracting classes inherited from feudalism – a hereditary landlord class, a financial banking class and monopolists – the rentier sector has fought back to reassert its privatization of land rent, interest and monopoly gains. It sought to reverse progressive taxation, and indeed to give tax favoritism to financial wealth, landlords and monopolists.
The Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has become the dominant interest and economic planner under today’s finance capitalism. That is why economies are often called neofeudal (or euphemized as neoliberal).
Throughout history the dynamics of financialization have polarized wealth and income between creditors and debtors, leading to oligarchies. As interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, more and more income of labor and business must be paid as debt service. That financial dynamic shrinks the domestic market for goods and services, and the economy suffers from deepening debt-ridden austerity.
The result is de-industrialization as economies polarize between creditors and debtors. That has occurred most notoriously in Britain in the wake of Margaret Thatcher and the New [Anti-]Labour Party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s “light touch” deregulatory approach to financial manipulation and outright fraud.
The United States has suffered an equally devastating shift of wealth and income to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-government deregulation, Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” takeover by Wall Street. The “Third Way” was neither industrial capitalism nor socialism, but finance capitalism making its gains both by stripping and indebting industry and labor of income.
The new Democratic Party ideology of deregulated finance was capped by the massive bank-fraud collapse of 2008 and Barack Obama’s protection of junk-mortgage lenders and wholesale foreclosures on their financial victims. Economic planning and policy was shifted from governments to Wall Street and other financial centers – which had taken control of in government, the central bank and regulatory agencies.
U.S. and British diplomats are seeking to promote this predatory pro-financial and inherently anti-industrial economic philosophy to the rest of the world. But this ideological evangelism is threatened by the obvious contrast between the US-British failed and de-industrialized economies compared to China’s remarkable economic growth under industrial socialism. [Not perfect, as we see, but point taken, Michael.]
This contrast between China’s economic success and the NATO West’s “garden” of debt-ridden austerity is the essence of today’s campaign by the West against the “Jungle” countries seeking political independence from U.S. diplomacy so as to uplift their living standards. This ideological and inherently political global war is today’s counterpart to the religious wars that tore European countries apart for many centuries.
We are witnessing what seems to be an inexorable Decline of the West. U.S. diplomats have been able to tighten their economic, political and military control leadership over their European NATO allies. Their easy success in this aim has led them to imagine that somehow they can conquer the rest of the world despite de-industrializing and loading their economies so deeply in debt that there is no foreseeable way in which they can pay their official debt to foreign countries or indeed have much to offer.
The traditional imperialism of military conquest and financial conquest is ended.
There has been a sequence of tactics for a lead-nation to carve out an empire. The oldest way is by military conquest. But you can’t occupy and take over a country without an army, and the US has no army large enough. The Vietnam War ended the draft. So it must rely on foreign armies like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and most recently Ukraine and Poland, just as it relies on foreign industrial manufactures. Its armaments are depleted and it cannot mobilize a domestic army to occupy any country. The US has only one weapon: Missiles and bombs can destroy, but cannot occupy and take over a country.
The second way to create imperial power was by economic power to make other countries dependent on U.S. exports. After World War II the rest of the world was devastated and was bullied into accepting U.S. diplomacy maneuvering to give its economy a monopoly on basic needs. Agriculture became a major weapon to create foreign dependency. The World Bank would not support foreign countries growing their own food, but pressed for plantation export crops, and fought land reform. And for oil and energy trade, U.S. companies and their NATO allies in Britain and Holland (British Petroleum and Shell) controlled the world’s oil trade.
Control of world oil trade has been a central aim of US trade diplomacy.
This strategy worked for US assertion of control over Germany and other NATO countries, by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline and severing Western Europe from access to Russian gas, oil, fertilizer and also crops. Europe has now entered an industrial depression and economic austerity as its steel industry and other leading sectors are invited to emigrate to the United States, along with European skilled labor.
Today, electronic technology and computer chips have been a focal point of establishing global Economic Dependency on U.S. technology. The United States aims to monopolize “intellectual property” and extract economic rent from charging high prices) for high-technology computer chips, communications, and arms production.
But the United States has deindustrialized and let itself become dependent on Asian and other countries for its products, instead of making them dependent on the US. This trade dependency is what makes U.S. diplomats feel “insecure,” worrying that other countries might seek to use the same coercive trade and financial diplomacy that the United States has been wielding since 1944-45.
The United States is left with one remaining tactic to control other countries: trade sanctions, imposed by it and its NATO satellites in an attempt to disrupt economies that do not accept U.S. unipolar economic, political and military dominance. It has persuaded the Netherlands to block sophisticated chip-engraving machinery to China, and other countries to block anything that might contribute to China’s economic development. A new American industrial protectionism is being framed in terms of national security grounds.
If China’s trade policy were to mirror that of U.S. diplomacy, it would stop supplying NATO countries with mineral and metal exports needed to produce the computer chips and allied inputs that America’s economy needs to wield its global diplomacy.
The US is so heavily debt-laden, its housing prices are so high and its medical care is so extremely high (18% of GDP) cannot compete. It cannot re-industrialize without taking radical steps to write down debts, to de-privatize health care and education, to break up monopolies and restore progressive taxation. The vested Financial, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE sector) interests are too powerful to permit these reforms.
That makes the U.S. economy a failed economy, and America a Failed State.
In the wake of World War II the United States accumulated 75% of the world’s monetary gold by 1950. That enabled it to impose dollarization on the world. But today, nobody knows whether the U.S. Treasury and New York Federal Reserve have any gold that has not been pledged to private buyers and speculators. The worry is that it has sold European central-bank gold reserves. Germany has asked for its gold reserves to be flown back from New York, but the United States said that it was unavailable, and Germany was too timid to make its worries and complaints public.
America’s financial quandary is even worse when one tries to imagine how it can ever pay its foreign debt for countries seeking to draw down their dollars. The United States can only print its own currency. It is not willing to sell off its domestic assets, as it demands that other debtor countries do?
What can other countries accept in place of gold? One form of assets that may be taken as collateral are U.S. investments in Europe and other countries. But if foreign governments seek to do this, U.S. officials may retaliate by seizing their investments in the United States. A mutual grabbing would occur.
The United States is trying to monopolize electronic technology. The problem is that this requires raw-materials inputs whose production presently is dominated by China, above all rare-earth metals (which are abundant but environmentally destructive to refine), gallium, nickel (China dominates the refining), and Russian helium and other gasses used for engraving computer chips. China recently announced that on August 1 it will start restricting these key exports. It indeed has the ability to cut off supplies of vital materials and technology to the West, to protect itself from the West’s “national-security” sanctions against China. That is the self-fulfilling prophecy that U.S. warnings of a trade fight has created.
If U.S. diplomacy strongarms its NATO-garden allies to boycott China’s Huawei technology, Europe will be left with a less efficient, more expensive alternative – whose consequences help separate it from China, the BRICS and what has become the World Majority in a self-reliant alignment much broader than was created by Sukarno in 1954.
C'mon "Chinks", buy US Savings Bonds! We won't cancel them, like we did to Russia.
Biden Needs China to Bail Out US Economy: Here's Whyhttps://sputnikglobe.com/20230721/biden-needs-china-to-bail-out-us-economy-heres-why-1112006490.html
The Mr. Kissinger Goes to Beijing saga was an "unofficial", individual attempt to try to mend increasingly fractious Sino-American relations. He was not representing the current American administration. [Henry Kissinger has always represented Rockefeller interests.] ..
..Everyone involved in geopolitics is aware of the legendary Kissinger formulation: To be the US's enemy is dangerous, to be the US's friend is fatal. History abounds in examples, from Japan and South Korea to Germany, France and Ukraine.
As quite a few Chinese scholars privately argued, if reason is to be upheld, and “respecting the wisdom of this 100-years-old diplomat”, Xi and the Politburo should maintain the China-US relation as it is: “icy”.
After all, they reason, being the US's enemy is dangerous but manageable for a Sovereign Civilizational State like China. So Beijing should keep “the honorable and less perilous status” of being a US enemy.
As quite a few Chinese scholars privately argued, if reason is to be upheld, and “respecting the wisdom of this 100-years-old diplomat”, Xi and the Politburo should maintain the China-US relation as it is: “icy”.
After all, they reason, being the US's enemy is dangerous but manageable for a Sovereign Civilizational State like China. So Beijing should keep “the honorable and less perilous status” of being a US enemy.
"Zelensky is carrying out a process of polonization [capture of Ukraine by Poland - TASS] of his country, hoping that, in return, his masters [Washington and Brussels - TASS] will allow him to stay in power for longer," he said.
To that extent, a law was adopted that effectively equals Poles to Ukrainians, providing them with the same set of rights - stay without permission, employment, education, medical service and even some allowances, the official added.
According to Volodin, Ukrainians are being expelled from their homes in Sumy and Chernigov regions, which border Russia, as the authorities seek to replace them with Polish migrants, loyal to the neo-Nazi regime. Ukrainian citizens are also being forced to use Polish language instead of Russian; orthodox Christianity is being persecuted, with Ukrainians being converted to Catholicism, the Duma Speaker underscored.
"Meanwhile, a 25-thousand military force comprised mostly of Polish and Lithuanian armed soldiers, ready to occupy Western Ukraine, has been established. The Poles want to take back what they consider their historic lands - the Eastern Borderlands. They do not need Ukrainian citizens on these territories," Volodin noted.
According to Naryshkin, Polish officials are gradually coming to the realization that “the issue of Ukraine’s defeat is only a matter of time,” regardless of the amount of Western military assistance sent to Kiev.
Commenting on the SVR report, Putin suggested that the true purpose of such a coalition would only be to occupy Ukrainian territories. “The prospect is obvious – if the Polish units enter, for example, Lvov or other territories of Ukraine, then they will remain there. And they will remain there forever.”
Putin also noted that it is “well known” that Warsaw “dreams” of also claiming parts of Belarusian territory as well.
The Russian leader warned, however, that while Ukraine has the right to sell off as much of its own territory as it wants, when it comes to Belarus, any aggression against a part of the Union State would mean aggression against Russia. “We will respond to this with all the means at our disposal,” Putin stated. [This sounds to me like Putin is saying that Ukraine can cede Galicia to Poland under the current administration.]
John Helmer on the end of the grain-deal.
White House officials claimed the Russians are weaponizing food. “Russia’s decision to resume its effective blockade of Ukrainian ports and prevent this grain from getting to markets will harm people all over the world,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said at a White House briefing. These claims aren’t true. They are “clashes with shippers’ reality”, a Bloomberg report acknowledged. Like almost every scheme the corruptly clever Zelensky (lead image, left) and the corruptly stupid Joseph Biden (right) have devised in the current war, the conversion of the fight for Odessa and Ukraine’s other Black Sea ports into a war to starve the hungriest peoples of the world is failing.
Instead, the battle for Odessa has begun where the electric war to turn off the city’s lights left off. The end of the Black Sea grain initiative will profit the Russian grain and fertilizer exporters by a big margin, compared to the past year; the neediest country importers will gain from direct Russian shipments at low to zero price; and the Ukraine will lose, not only its remaining ports and their trading and shipping infrastructure, but also its sea lanes southward.
At the same time, Ukraine’s neighbours in the European Union (EU) are closing the river lanes, roads, and rail lines to Ukrainian grain exports northward and westward. That’s weaponizing food – but the Europeans are doing it to protect their own farmers.
..““No sane owners will call there uninsured,” Bloomberg quoted the Greece-based Doric Shipbrokers SA, which has been sending vessels through the UN sea lane for the year of the grain agreement. Without the protection of the safe corridor “the Ukraine trade is dead.” “I don’t think shipowners will go to the Ukrainian ports until the corridors are reestablished — it’s not safe to do so,” another Bloomberg shipping source announced...
[This is like blowing up Nordstream pipelines to lock Germany in to the NATO plans.].. The new Russian military campaign, combining blockade at sea with targeted destruction of port infrastructure is aimed at landlocking the Kiev regime. Zelensky “can at least beg an aircraft carrier group from Biden to escort grain carriers and drag her into the Black Sea, spitting on the Montreux Convention,” commented Nikolai Storozhenko in Vzglyad. “But what’s the use of it if the ports can’t ship?” .....“The termination of the grain deal makes it possible to carry out the necessary restructuring of logistics routes and use the North–South route with maximum load with access to Asian and African markets through Iran. The development of this direction seems to be key for the level of food exports from Russia. This scenario will not only preserve the level of export earnings, but also supply grain, food and fertilizers to the poorest countries of the world. That is, to realize the same goals that were laid in the foundation of the grain deal, but were shamelessly ignored by our former partners”, says Maximov.
The US military is broadly involved in setting up integrated networks of information access, integration, evaluation, decision-making and command, so as to respond quickly, accurately and decisively, but... Michael Klare, The Military Dangers of AI Are Not Hallucinations
It doesn’t require great imagination to picture a time in the not-too-distant future when a crisis of some sort — say a U.S.-China military clash in the South China Sea or near Taiwan — prompts ever more intense fighting between opposing air and naval forces. Imagine then the JADC2 ordering the intense bombardment of enemy bases and command systems in China itself, triggering reciprocal attacks on U.S. facilities and a lightning decision by JADC2 to retaliate with tactical nuclear weapons, igniting a long-feared nuclear holocaust.....As early as 2019, when I questioned Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, then director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, about such a risky possibility, he responded, “You will find no stronger proponent of integration of AI capabilities writ large into the Department of Defense, but there is one area where I pause, and it has to do with nuclear command and control.” This “is the ultimate human decision that needs to be made” and so “we have to be very careful.” Given the technology’s “immaturity,” he added, we need “a lot of time to test and evaluate [before applying AI to NC3].” ...
..Such a prospect should be ample cause for concern. To start with, consider the risk of errors and miscalculations by the algorithms at the heart of such systems. As top computer scientists have warned us, those algorithms are capable of remarkably inexplicable mistakes and, to use the AI term of the moment, “hallucinations” — that is, seemingly reasonable results that are entirely illusionary. Under the circumstances, it’s not hard to imagine such computers “hallucinating” an imminent enemy attack and launching a war that might otherwise have been avoided.
And that’s not the worst of the dangers to consider. After all, there’s the obvious likelihood that America’s adversaries will similarly equip their forces with robot generals. In other words, future wars are likely to be fought by one set of AI systems against another, both linked to nuclear weaponry...
..Not much is known (from public sources at least) about Russian and Chinese efforts to automate their military command-and-control systems, but both countries are thought to be developing networks comparable to the Pentagon’s JADC2...
..China is said to be pursuing an even more elaborate, if similar, enterprise under the rubric of “Multi-Domain Precision Warfare” (MDPW). According to the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military developments, its military, the People’s Liberation Army, is being trained and equipped to use AI-enabled sensors and computer networks to “rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities.”...
“Somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real. And one of the FBI folks who was on the call did confirm that, ‘yes, it was,’ before another participant jumped in and said, ‘no further comment,'” Laura Dehmlow, section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, recollected in a closed-door deposition Monday, according to a release from the Republican-led committee.
The weeks after "vacine" injecton are the most dangerous in yet another way, much higher risk of both kinds of stroke if COVID is contracted in this defenseless period, which is a time of much higher susceptibility to catching COVID.
Extensively detailed article from A Midwestern Doctor: How Do Vaccines Cause Autism?
Drink R.O. Water. The membrane filter removes these compounds well.
Almost Half of U.S. Tap Water Contaminated With ‘Forever Chemicals’
A U.S. Geological Survey found 45% of U.S. tap water is contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) chemicals, with measured concentrations in both private wells and public water sources.
Thanks Richard.
CIA, DoD & Rockefeller Foundation confirmed as architects of Deagel .com 2025 Depopulation Forecast & current Mortality Rates imply Covid Vaccination has made it a target that could be hitExcess Human (pictured with the last eggplants in the summer heat)
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