Club Non-Members,
Michael Hudson: It looks very bad. It never really recovered from the Obama depression that begun in 2009 when the banks were bailed out and all of the debts were kept on the books. The debt has been growing very rapidly because of the Federal Reserve’s 14 years of zero interest rates that flooded the economy with money, which means debt, to try to prop up the stock market and the real estate market. The debt has grown much higher than it was way back in 2008, when you had the junk mortgage crisis. The arrears and defaults are rising for student loans, for automobile loans, for credit card loans. Commercial property is not only defaulting, but large companies are simply walking away from their office buildings. Many banks are in the same position that Silicon Valley Bank was in. There’s almost a negative equity because the mortgage holdings and their long-term bond holdings market value has gone way down below what they owe their depositors..
..There’s no way that America can become an industrial power again. There is no way that it can restore its industry unless it writes down the enormous amount of debt and housing prices and medical insurance that the American wage earner asked to make. Just imagine this. If you were to give wage earners everything they buy at the stores for nothing, give them all the food, all the clothing, all of the transportation, everything they need. They still couldn’t compete with foreign workers because they have to pay so much money on debt service, on housing, which takes between 30 and 40% of their income. They have to have medical care. That’s 18% of America’s GDP, higher than any other country. So the money that is paid to the financial, insurance and real estate sector in America is so large that there’s no way that America can be competitive with other countries. So, what the Biden administration is trying to do is saying, “Well, okay, I understand that we can’t compete on prices. I understand that our labor cannot compete with foreign labor anywhere near it, but if we can militarily tell everybody not to go China, Russia, India, Asia and other countries what they need to make wafers, chips, and information technology, then they’ll have to buy everything here from high cost. We can charge monopoly prices and our prices will be so high that we can basically impoverish the rest of the world by controlling everything that they really need to work. We can control their energy, we can control their oil, we can control their computers by sanctions against China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, any country that does not agree to let us control their economy and buy control of it.” Any country that doesn’t agree to let America produce all of the monopoly goods that are most profitable, will be treated like we’ve treated Ukraine.” ...
..But what I’m hearing from you is that for the United States sanctions has not only become a political tool, but an economic necessity as well.
Hudson: Well, that’s what the sanctions are. They’re intended to be an economic tool of coercion. Sanctions are a form of coercion, saying, “If you can depend on us for your food, for your oil, and we can turn off your oil, then you’ll be freezing in the dark. If we can block food to you, then you can’t afford to eat. If we can get you high enough and debt to us that all of your export surplus has to go to paying the money that the IMF and the World Bank and other foreigners have lent you, then you’re totally dependent on [us].” And that’s what America’s strategy is — to make other countries dependent on it so that they don’t have a choice...
..Oh, sanctions have been very, very effective, but I think you’ve got the players wrong. The sanctions were against Europe, not against Russia. The United States calculated two years ago that it cannot compete with Eurasia. It’s losing. It knows that it’s lost the long-term fight for not only dominance, but the long-term fight to be a major player. So it says, “What can we do? We know that we cannot compete with Eurasia, with China, Russia, Iran and the rest, but the one thing we can do is [to] lock in American prosperity by making Western Europe and the English speaking countries, Australia and New Zealand, completely dependent on us.” ...
..Do you expect the debt ceiling deal to help stabilize the American economy or will it only make things worse in the long-run?
The intention was to make things worse. There was never any debt crisis at all. The government could have simply continued to pay its bills for projects that Congress had already approved. There is no way that the government was going to default on its Treasury debt because, after all, the Treasury debt is held by the wealthiest 10% and the government is not going to do anything that hurts the 10% and benefits the 90%... We have to vastly increase the military budget and because we’ve agreed on a spending limit, we’ve got to cut back the social programs that we’ve just cut back, and cut them back even more.” So, what you’re seeing is right now the class war is back in business in the United States. This is class war with a vengeance. You’re seeing labor being squeezed without really much to do. Local city and urban budgets are being squeezed throughout the country. That’s one of the big problems, the budgetary squeeze. You’re having the banks being squeezed by the defaults on commercial real estate that they’re exposed to, and the rising defaults on the personal debts that I mentioned before that they’re exposed to. So, the economy is really in trouble...
..That’s right. It’s all just a made up. When they talk about cutting back the government debt, what they mean is cutting back social services. They would like to do what Biden and Obama wanted to do after 2009. They want to cut back Social Security...
..But how much longer can the US just keep printing money in order to service this government deficits? Is this really sustainable indefinitely?
Well, what usually stops a situation like that is a political revolution. The answer is it’s sustainable until people fight back, until there is a revolution. But as long as you have a political system where you have only two parties that are really the same party, and as long as you have the Democrats as the only alternative to the Republican Party...
..And why is financialization of the economy a bad thing? ... What’s the problem with that sort of model? Why can’t the United States just have an economy that’s built mostly on white collar professionals and offices?
Finance is really not part of the economy. There are two economies in every country. You have the production and consumption economy, which often people call the ‘real economy’, making things and selling them and using them, and you have the financial sector that provides credit for this. The financial sector lives in the short run... So, there’s a confusion about whether you are going to think of the economy as Wall Street and making money on stocks and bonds and lending money to real estate, or are you going to think of an economy employing workers and rising living standards, that kind of growth? ...So, the people who are making the loans and the new absentee real estate companies are getting rich. But when housing prices go up, that means that wage earners have to pay higher and higher proportions of their wages to pay their rent and to take out a mortgage and buy their house. And as long as more and more personal income is spent on housing or medical care or retirement pension income, then they’re going to have less and less to spend on goods and services. If you say “forget goods and services, we’ll have China and Asia and the foreigners produce them,” then all you really have is a hollowed out, empty economy... Well, if that’s your equilibrium, the debts can only be paid, as they grow exponentially, by consuming less and less, by living standards going down and down, by real wages going down and down, by social services being cut back more and more, by social security and Medicare being cut back more and more. That’s the program of both American political parties...
..What is your assessment of the current state of the US dollar? What’s going on here? Why are so many countries looking for options to dump the dollar?
Well, for the last year and a half, America has said, “if other countries hold their dollars and European banks or American banks and they do something that we don’t like, we have a right to grab all of their dollars and simply take them”...In order to make an alternative currency beyond merely holding each other’s currency, you would have to have an alternative to the International Monetary Fund. And that’s what Lula was talking about when he went to Asia. How do we make a common a common alternative bank? Well, the problem with an alternative bank is [that] you need its members to agree on who gets the credits... The kind of special money that this bank would create isn’t the kind of money that you spend at the grocery store. It’s not money that would spend domestically. It’s money to do what gold does. And that is only subtle balance of payments deficits among central banks. That’s what gold is now. Before you had the dollar standard or Treasury bills standard in 1971, when countries would run a balance of payments deficit, they’d have to pay in gold. So every month during the Vietnam War, the soldiers and the army would spend money in Vietnam, in Southeast Asia, that used to be part of the French colonial empire. The banks were mainly French. The banks would send the dollars that were spent to the central bank in Paris. And General de Gaulle would take these dollars and would say, okay, here are the dollars we have. Give us your gold at $35 an ounce. And that was how America’s gold stock was going way down... And all of a sudden, if the United States is unable to have other people keep their savings in dollars, meaning buying Treasury securities, then how are they going to pay the international balance of payments cost of their military spending? They won’t be able to spend militarily abroad. The only way they can do it is drastically cut back imports in the America. And to do that, you have to cut wage rates by 20%. You have to make the American labor force the poorest labor force in the West so that all of the balance of payments, money that’s spent, is not on buying goods and services to consume, but only for military spending...
..[re: opinions of] Paul Krugman in The New York Times and other mainstream outlets is that although there is some incentive for countries to move away from the dollar, there isn’t really a viable alternative at the moment, and that the countries of BRICS that, although they may have a common interest in forming a BRICS currency, an alternative to the dollar, these economies are to different too varied in order to be able to join forces and form their own alternative currency.
Well, let’s look at what happened with Colonel Gaddafi, the head of Libya. Gaddafi said we want a gold based currency for Africa. And so instead of holding dollars, he bought gold. So NATO bombed the country to smithereens, caught Colonel Gaddafi, tortured him to death and grabbed the gold from the central bank and nobody knows where it disappeared to. But it seems to have disappeared into the State Department to play dirty tricks throughout the world. So Krugman advocates militarily forcing and destroying any country that wants an alternative to the dollar. He’s a hawk and basically says, “do it by force”. And in his notorious article in The New York Times, he said, “Well, everybody is so used to dealing the dollar, they can’t find an alternative.” ... Well, most of my books are all about how to make an alternative to the dollar and the interviews that I’m doing, and my colleagues and I are spending our full time writing. We write for the Valdai Club in Russia. I write for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. We’re writing for other countries to help create an alternative to the dollar because we don’t want to see the world militarized in the way that the US is militarizing it. We want to see a resumption of the economic potential that the world seemed to have leading up to World War One before the whole economy got derailed a century ago...
..But throughout history, the creditors, people who do not work for a living, who are simply inherit their money or have their money by exploiting people, are willing to [hire others to kill] for this right to [own] other people. But people actually produce the wealth. The victims are much less willing to fight militarily or by violence. And the first thing that creditors, the ruling class, do is to have a monopoly of violence. You had assassinations every single century in Rome. The advocates of debt cancellation and redistribution of land were assassinated. That’s what you seem to be facing in the United States, just as the United States has been assassinating foreign leaders for the last 75 years. African leaders, Latin American leaders, Pinochet, the man coming in and assassinating Allende. The same thing happened in Africa. Same thing has happened throughout the Near East with Gadhafi. As long as you have America saying, “We know the secret to economic stability, it’s assassinating everybody who disagrees with us and who wants independence from the United States.” As long as other countries said, “Yes, that’s what democracy is, we’re for the United States,” then they’re committing suicide and then their leaders will be killed again and again and again. That’s how the world economy is keeping equilibrium today. It’s an equilibrium trying to subject the entire world to the Dark age into which Roman Empire itself declined.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.
It is likely to reshape politics along a new fault-line: No longer the banal issues of ‘uni-party’ (pro-Establishment) politics: marginal tax rates; easy monetary ‘fixes’ and the consequent debt that would accumulate. But rather, it would find expression in the confrontation between those wishing for a Green upending of human society; a ‘Trans’ world for children; easy immigration; the radical re-ordering of power between ‘Identity’ groups in society – and those viscerally opposed to all of the above...
“And yet, according to the New York Times and CNN, it was an orgy of right-wing conspiracy theorizing. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of one of the country’s most famous Democratic families,” wrote three New York Times reporters: “dived into the full embrace of a host of conservative figures who eagerly promoted his long-shot primary challenge to President Biden … On Monday, he sounded like a candidate far more at ease in the mushrooming Republican presidential contest.”
“In an earlier era, Kennedy, would have been universally regarded as a far-left candidate in the mould of Ralph Nader … Kennedy believes that the war in Ukraine is being fuelled by “the neo-cons in the White House” who want regime change in Russia. In his campaign announcement speech, he described his mission as ending “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power” that is threatening “to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.”
It is a dizzying political realignment – scrambling all of the traditional categories and leaving in its wake just two sides: not left and right, but insider and outsider. And no matter the substance of one’s beliefs, to the media, “outsider” means by default, “right-wing conspiracy theorist”...
Where is this realignment all leading? Well, we are in a chaotic re-sorting period right now. Kennedy, a Democrat, accused of MAGA-ism?? Extraordinary! Class politics it is not. It is a new realignment, scrambling old categories. And a shift in core values between ‘outsiders’ and their rulers.
These were the first steps in a process that is designed to put Donald Trump behind bars for the rest of his life." Carlson noted that "cable news carried every moment of it... but they weren't shocked... anybody who's been paying attention knew this was coming..."
But, as he continues, "what just happened was always going to happen, it has been inevitable since February 16, 2016... that's the day that Donald Trump may a blood enemy of the largest and most powerful organization in human history - the US federal government."
How did he make that force an enemy? It wasn't rapists from Mexico or trade with China - the stories that dominated the news at the time...
At 2:56, Carlson shows the exact moment that "permanent Washington" decided to send Donald Trump to prison - its from the Republican Candidates' Debate ...
"we should have never been in Iraq, we have destabilized The Middle East... "
But it was this line that doomed Trump to today's arrest...
"...they lied...they said there were weapons of mass destruction, there was none.. and they knew there were none."
That sealed his fate because:
"That was the one thing you were not allowed to say because it implicated too many people on both sides..."
He accuses politicians from both parties, including Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo, of betraying Trump's agenda and working against him from within.
"...they were all guilty of it... they all knew and they all lied and to a person they hated Donald Trump for exposing them."
Carlson notes that Trump's prosecution is seen as both political and ideological, aimed at disqualifying those who criticize wars, criticizing the Washington establishment for prioritizing global interventions and military actions over domestic concerns, and highlighting the disparity between the vast amount of government spending and the deteriorating state of public infrastructure across the country.
Carlson crescendos with the following...
"Trump is the only one who dissents from Washington's long-standing pointless war agenda... and for that, that one fact, they are trying to take Trump out before you can vote for him..."
“I’ll never leave,” Trump told the outlet. “Look, if I would have left, I would have left prior to the original race in 2016. That was a rough one. In theory that was not doable.”
The DOJ-NSD warrant, and the subsequent raid on Mar-a-Lago can only be related to records the U.S. government deems “classified” and material vital to national security interests. Hence, DOJ National Security Division involvement...
Think of the two sets of documents as evidence against two teams working in synergy. Team one (Clinton) was outside government. Team two (DOJ/FBI) was inside government. The documents pertain to both groups but are also divided...
The documentary evidence against the outside group (Clinton et al) would also involve government documented evidence as the DOJ/FBI inside group interacted with them. Notes from interviews, materials provided, FBI 302 summaries of interviews, etc...
These are the types of documents within what former ODNI John Ratcliffe called, “thousands of pages that were declassified by President Trump,” and given to both John Durham and Main Justice with an expectation of public release when the Durham special counsel probe concluded. That is why the DOJ has to make their moves now. The Durham probe has concluded.
In short, President Trump declassified documents that show how the institutions within the U.S. government targeted him. However, the institutions that illegally targeted President Trump are the same institutions who control the specific evidence of their unlawful targeting.
These examples of evidence held by President Donald Trump reveal the background of how the DC surveillance state exists. THAT was/is the national security threat behind the DOJ-NSD search warrant and affidavit.
The risk to the fabric of the U.S. government is why we see lawyers and pundits so confused as they try to figure out the disproportionate response from the DOJ and FBI, toward “simple records”, held by President Trump in Mar-a-Lago. Very few people can comprehend what has been done since January 2009, and the current state of corruption as it now exists amid all of the agencies and institutions of government...
President Donald Trump declassified the material then took the evidence to Mar-a-Lago. The people currently in charge of managing the corrupt system, like Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, Chris Wray and the Senate allies, are going bananas. From their DC perspective, Donald Trump is an existential threat.
Given the nature of their opposition, and the underlying motives for their conduct, there is almost nothing they will not do to protect themselves. However, if you peel away all the layers of lies, manipulations and corruption, what you find at the heart of their conduct is fear. The need for control is a reaction to fear.
“We are a failing nation. We are a nation in decline. And now these radical left lunatics want to interfere with our elections by using law enforcement. It’s totally corrupt and we can’t let it happen,” Trump told the crowd.
“This is the final battle,” he further urged, adding “With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
Trump continued, “We will roll out the fake news media, we will expose the RINOs for what they are, we will defeat Joe Biden and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
"The 1023 produced to that House Committee redacted reference that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them. Seventeen total recordings," Grassley said during a speech on the Senate floor.
"These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot. The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden," he continued. "More than that, the FBI made Congress review a redacted unclassified document in a classified facility. That goes to show you the disrespect the FBI has for Congress."
Germany is playing host to what NATO is touting as the largest air drills in the alliance's history, which has been four years in preparation.
Dubbed Air Defender 23, the drills kicked off on Monday and will go to June 23, and involve up to 250 aircraft engaging in operations launched from across six military bases. In total, 25 countries are taking part, with the United States sending 100 of its aircraft across the Atlantic for the major exercise. https://www.zerohedge.com/
Moon of Alabama (Germany):Ukraine SitRep: Destruction Of Its Third Army - Issues To Negotiate
During the spring and summer of 2022 the Russian forces destroyed the regular Ukrainian pre-war army. It was replaced with Soviet era material from east European states and Ukrainian draftees. By the beginning of this year that second army had also been destroyed.
What we currently witness is the demilitarization of Ukraine's third army... I do not sense any appetite in the U.S. or Europe to send their soldiers into Ukraine. It is quite obvious that their fates would be no different from the Ukrainian ones. That leaves negotiations as the only option. There will be a lot of hesitation as the price Russia will ask for to stop the war will be high:
For starters, will Russia insist on securing the rights to all territory east of the Dnieper River and on a special status for Odessa? I think so. Odessa would no longer be ruled by Ukraine. I also would expect Russia to demand (non-negotiable) the arrest and prosecution of those responsible for the murder of 42 Russian speaking Ukrainians in 2014 who sought refuge in the Trade Unions House.
I also would expect that Russia will demand the dismantling of NATO Aegis missile systems in Poland and Romania and a ban on U.S. or NATO troops being posted in countries that share a border with Ukraine. In light of Russia’s stated goal of de-nazification I would not be surprised if Russia demands the laws of Ukraine be changed and that Nazi-affiliated parties and symbols be banned.
I believe that Russia will want all historic Russian regions, at least those which Lenin and Khrushchev for whatever reasons gave to Ukraine, back under Russian control. Russia will also demand the lifting of all sanctions against it.
The West is failing to grasp the reality that Russia believes it is winning the war in Ukraine and that it is not suffering economic or political damage at home. And, when you factor in the international arena, the war has proven to be a boon for Russia’s efforts to help create a new international financial/trade system that circumvents Washington’s control. In other words, Russia has little incentive to entertain negotiations that would require Russian concessions.
It will still need some time for the 'western' public to move from swallowing 'Ukraine is wining' propaganda towards acknowledging reality. It unfortunately will also still take more Ukrainian and Russian losses.
But I strongly believe, maybe too wishfully, that the end of the war is now coming into sight. https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/06/ukraine-sitrep-destruction-of-its-third-army-issues-to-negotiate.html#more
Large Korean Study Confirms Disastrous Outcomes, Risks Higher for Moderna
I found that ,You gathered the info necessary to change a few opinions of how our social, economic, and political systems operate that affect our lives.
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