By Michael Hudson and posted with special permission
Nearly half a millennium ago Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince described three options for how a conquering power might treat states that it defeated in war but that “have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom: … the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you.”[1]
Machiavelli preferred the first option, citing Rome’s destruction of Carthage. That is what the United States did to Iraq and Libya after 2001. But in today’s New Cold War the mode of destruction is largely economic, via trade and financial sanctions such as the United States has imposed on China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other designated adversaries. The idea is to deny them key inputs, above all in essential technology and information processing, raw materials, and access to bank and financial connections, such as U.S. threats to expel Russia from the SWIFT bank-clearing system.
The second option is to occupy rivals. This is done only partially by the troops in America’s 800 military bases abroad. But the usual, more efficient occupation is by U.S. corporate takeovers of their basic infrastructure, owning their most lucrative assets and remitting their revenue back to the imperial core.
President Trump said that he wanted to seize Iraq’s and Syria’s oil as reparations for the cost of destroying their society. His successor, Joe Biden, sought in 2021 to appoint Hillary Clinton’s loyalist Neera Tanden to head the government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). She had urged that America should make Libya turn over its vast oil reserves as reparations for the cost of destroying its society. “We have a giant deficit. They have a lot of oil. Most Americans would choose not to engage in the world because of that deficit. If we want to continue to engage in the world, gestures like having oil rich countries partially pay us back doesn’t seem crazy to me.”[2]
U.S. strategists have preferred Machiavelli’s third option: To leave the defeated adversary nominally independent but to rule via client oligarchies. President Jimmy Carter’s national-security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to them as “vassals,” in the classical medieval meaning of demanding loyalty to their American patrons, with a common interest in seeing the subject economy privatized, financialized, taxed and passed on to the United States for its patronage and support, based on a mutuality of interest against local democratic assertion of nationalistic self-reliance and keeping the economic surplus at home to promote domestic prosperity instead of being sent abroad.
That policy of privatization by a client oligarchy with its own source of wealth based on the U.S. orbit is what American neoliberal diplomacy accomplished in the former Soviet economies after 1991 to secure its Cold War victory over Soviet Communism. The way in which client oligarchies were created was a grabitization that utterly disrupted the economic interconnections integrating the economies. “To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires,” Brzezinski explained, “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”[3]
After reducing Germany and Japan to vassalage after defeating them in World War II, U.S. diplomacy quickly reduced the Britain and its imperial sterling area to vassalage by 1946, followed in due course by the rest of Western Europe and its former colonies. The next step was to isolate Russia and China, while keeping “the barbarians from coming together.” If they were to join up, warned Mr. Brzezinski, “the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America’s status as a global power.”[4]
By 2016, Brzezinski saw Pax Americana unravelling from its failure to achieve these aims. He acknowledged that the United States “is no longer the globally imperial power.”[5] That is what has motivated its increasing antagonism toward China and Russia, along with Iran and Venezuela.
TRANSITION: the problem was not Russia, whose Communist nomenklatura let their country be ruled by a Western-oriented kleptocracy, but China. The U.S.-China confrontation is not simply a national rivalry, but a conflict of economic and social systems. The reason why today’s world is being plunged into an economic and near-military Cold War 2.0 is to be found in the prospect of socialist control of what Western economies since classical antiquity have treated as privately owned rent-yielding assets: money and banking (along with the rules governing debt and foreclosure), land and natural resources, and infrastructure monopolies.
This contrast in whether money and credit, land and natural monopolies will be privatized and duly concentrated in the hands of a rentier oligarchy or used to promote general prosperity and growth has basically become one of finance capitalism and socialism. Yet in its broadest terms this conflict existed already 2500 years ago. in the contrast between Near Eastern kingship and the Greek and Roman oligarchies. These oligarchies, ostensibly democratic in superficial political form and sanctimonious ideology, fought against the concept of kingship. The source of that opposition was that royal power – or that of domestic “tyrants” – might sponsor what Greek and Roman democratic reformers were advocating: cancellation of debts to save populations from being reduced to debt bondage and dependency (and ultimately to serfdom), and redistribution of lands to prevent its ownership from becoming polarized and concentrated in the hands of creditors and-landlords.
From today’s U.S. vantage point, that polarization is the basic dynamic of today’s U.S.-sponsored neoliberalism. China and Russia are existential threats to the global expansion of financialized rentier wealth. Today’s Cold War 2.0 aims to deter China and potentially other counties from socializing their financial systems, land and natural resources, and keeping infrastructure utilities public to prevent their being monopolized in private hands to siphon off economic rents at the expense of productive investment in economic growth.
The United States hoped that China might be as gullible as the Soviet Union and adopt neoliberal policy permitting its wealth to be privatized and turned into rent-extracting privileges, to be sold off to Americans. “What the free world expected when it welcomed China into the free trade body [the World Trade Organization] in 2001,” explained Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr, trade advisor in the Reagan administration, was that, “from the time of Deng Xiaoping’s adoption of some market methods in 1979 and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 … increased trade with and investment in China would inevitably lead to the marketization of its economy, the demise of its state-owned enterprises.”[6]
But instead of adopting market-based neoliberalism, Mr. Prestowitz complained, China’s government supported industrial investment and kept money and debt control in its own hands. This government control was “at odds with the liberal, rules-based global system” along the neoliberal lines that had been imposed on the former Soviet economies after 1991. “More fundamentally,” Prestowitz summed up:
China’s economy is incompatible with the main premises of the global economic system embodied today in the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and a long list of other free trade agreements. These pacts assume economies that are primarily market based with the role of the state circumscribed and micro-economic decisions largely left to private interests operating under a rule of law. This system never anticipated an economy like China’s in which state-owned enterprises account for one-third of production; the fusion of the civilian economy with the strategic-military economy is a government necessity; five year economic plans guide investment to targeted sectors; an eternally dominant political party names the CEOs of a third or more of major corporations and has established party cells in every significant company; the value of the currency is managed, corporate and personal data are minutely collected by the government to be used for economic and political control; and international trade is subject to being weaponized at any moment for strategic ends.
This is jaw-dropping hypocrisy – as if the U.S. civilian economy is not fused with its own military-industrial complex, and does not manage its currency or weaponize its international trade as a means of achieving strategic ends. It is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, a fantasy depicting American industry as being independent of government. In fact, Prestowitz urged that “Biden should invoke the Defense Production Act to direct increased U.S.-based production of critical goods such as medicines, semiconductors, and solar panels.”
While U.S. trade strategists juxtapose American “democracy” and the Free World to Chinese autocracy, the major conflict between the United States and China has been the role of government support for industry. American industry grew strong in the 19th century by government support, just as China is now providing. That was the doctrine of industrial capitalism, after all. But as the U.S. economy has become financialized, it has de-industrialized. China has shown itself to be aware of the risks in financialization, and has taken measures to attempt to contain it. That has helped it achieve what used to be the U.S. ideal of providing low-priced basic infrastructure services.
Here is the U.S. policy dilemma: Its government is supporting industrial rivalry with China, but also supports financialization and privatization of the domestic economy – the very policy that it has used to control “vassal” countries and extract their economic surplus by rent-seeking.
Why U.S. finance capitalism treats China’s socialist economy as an existential treat
Financialized industrial capital wants a strong state to serve itself, but not to serve labor, consumers, the environment or long-term social progress at the cost of eroding profits and rents.
U.S. attempts to globalize this neoliberal policy are driving China to resist Western financialization. Its success provides other countries with an object lesson of why to avoid financialization and rent-seeking that adds to the economy’s overhead and hence its cost of living and doing business.
China also is providing an object lesson in how to protect its economy and that of its allies from foreign sanctions and related destabilization. Its most basic response has been to prevent an independent domestic or foreign-backed oligarchy from emerging. That has been one first and foremost by maintaining government control of finance and credit, property and land tenure policy in government hands with a long-term plan in mind.
Looking back over the course of history, this retention is how Bronze Age Near Eastern rulers prevented an oligarchy from emerging to threaten Near Eastern palatial economies. It is a tradition that persisted down through Byzantine times, taxing large aggregations of wealth to prevent a rivalry with the palace and its protection of a broad prosperity and distribution of self-support land.
China also is protecting its economy from U.S.-backed trade and financial sanctions and economic disruption by aiming at self-sufficiency in essentials. That involves technological independence and ability to provide enough food and energy resources to support an economy that can function in isolation from the unipolar U.S. bloc. It also involves decoupling from the U.S. dollar and from banking systems linked to it, and hence from U.S. ability to impose financial sanctions. Associated with this aim is creation of a domestic computerized alternative to the SWIFT bank-clearing system.
The dollar still accounts for 80 percent of all global transactions, but less than half of today’s Sino-Russian trade, and the proportion is declining, especially as Russian firms avoid dollarized payments or accounts from being seized by U.S. sanctions.
These protective moves limit the U.S. threat to Machiavelli’s first option: destroy the world if it does not submit to U.S.-sponsored financialized rent extraction. But as Vladimir Putin has framed matters: “Who would want to live in a world without Russia?”
Kin Chi: My quick comment: The USA surely would want to destroy its rival, taking the first option. But it knows it is impossible to succeed, even in the case of Russia, and not to mention China. Thus it hopes for the rival to disintegrate from within, or for substantial interest blocs from within to be complicit with US interests. Hence we need to assess how Russia and China are reacting to this challenge, given that there are multiple contesting forces within each country. And that is also why we have been very concerned with pro-US neo-liberal political economists and policy-makers in these two countries.
I agree with you that China has put much investment into infrastructure and industry. However, we have been concerned with China’s financialization moves. Hence your statement that “China has avoided financialization” may not be the actual case, as various moves have been taken in financialization, but we can say that China seems to be aware of the risks in financialization, and has taken measures to attempt to contain it, causing discontent from US financial interests which would want to see China going further down the road.
It is interesting that yesterday, the White House expressed concern over the China-Iraq use of digital RMB to settle oil accounts as this would be beyond US monitoring of transactions.
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1532), Chapter 5: “Concerning the way to govern cities or principalities which lived under their own laws before they were annexed.” ↑
- Neera Tanden, “Should Libya pay us back?” memo to Faiz Shakir, Peter Juul, Benjamin Armbruster and NSIP Core, October 21, 2011. Mr. Shakir, to his credit, wrote back: “If we think we can make money off an incursion, we’ll do it? That’s a serious policy/messaging/moral problem for our foreign policy I think.” As president of the Center for American Progress, Tanden backed a 2010 proposal to cut Social Security benefits, reflecting the long-term Obama-Clinton objective of fiscal austerity at home as well as abroad. ↑
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: 1997), p. 40. See the discussion by Pepe Escobar, “For Leviathan, It’s So Cold in Alaska,” Unz.com, March 18, 2021. ↑
- Brzezinski, ibid., p. 55. ↑
- Brzezinski, “Towards a Global Realignment,” The American Interest (April 17, 2016) For a discussion see Mike Whitney, “The Broken Checkboard: Brzezinski Gives Up on Empire,” Counterpunch, August 25, 2016. ↑
- Clyde Prestowitz, “Blow Up the Global Trading System, Washington Monthly, March 24, 2021.. ↑
As always pure pleasure to read Michael Hudson’s articles. One of the few economists, who deserve this description. Your books, Steve Keen’s and L. Randall Wray’s were eye opening while studying in university.
Your books were the reason, why I changed my study subject.
Your contribution to the world, to understand one’s own surroundings is as rare as gold – the first red pill in a series. It was surreal to understand more about how the real economy works than my teachers, while listening to the nonsense our macro economics professor was teaching. Years later the Bank of England (also BoN, Bundesbank) released a manuscript, which definitely and without question confirmed the real world model you presented in your books. Cannot also pass to write about the surreal feeling, which bubbled up while reading the journalistic garbage about the economy in damned rags like “FAZ”, “Handelsblatt” and other usual culprits. The conclusion is, that it doesn’t matter what truth is revealed, elites control the means of perception control.
At least some of us get to know a part of the truth.
The recent
“And forgive them their debts” by Hudson is fantastic, imo.
Hudson is an alchemist making gold for the people. Such noble men are more rare than gold, and they make a huge difference. In particular, when all clergy are busy preaching hate and selling indulgences, quacksters pushing deadly cures, licensed marauders burning livelihoods, and the black knights arraying their instruments of death, waiting for the robber barons to nod.
You nailed it in one paragraph…bravo Kassandra!!
Cheers and regards
Col
always a joy to read mh, thank you saker, thank you, michael. what astonishes me is how blind the few old left friends i have are regarding the war being waged between social fairness & the oligarchs. bernays’ legacy is chilling.
So true that Bernays is the historical intellectual successor to Machiavelli. These theories of both based in oligarchical propaganda have been the norm in the West.
This article is about malicious renters vs builders correct?
Didn’t the United Kingdom attempt the malicious renter approach in their twilight years, is there any reason to think that the U.S. will succeed where they failed.
This is an open question, I have heard many claims about the U.K, that they tried globalism and free trade and that destroyed their industrial base because it caused a huge trade imbalance. I do not know if this is true, it might be but it seems a tad self-serving.
Being that the U.K. wrote the book on imperialism and had no problem w/genocide, and had massive financial institutions, I find it impossible to believe that they did not use the same levers that the U.S. is doing today. I do NOT see this as an OT post. Sometimes it is easier to look at a past analogous conflict because emotional connection to present times makes it difficult to be objective.
Brilliant those 3 options of Machiavelli’s are for how a conquering power might treat states that it had defeated in war – first is to ruin them so that they can never rise again, second is to occupy them extracting resources from them, third is to make them “vassals” with a friendly oligarchy governing them in the best interests of the conquering power.
Then since Russia and China were not conquered Machiavelli’s recommendations don’t apply to Russia or China, so maybe some of Brzezinski’s thinking does – “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together”. This is where the isolating of Russia and China come in with some hope that those 2 nations coming together won’t happen – fair enough.
But while Russia was isolated since the days of the Iron Curtain, China was welcomed with open arms, legs and buttocks. While Russia was curtailed and constrained, China was empowered. So the one barbarian nation, instead of being isolated and curtailed and constrained, was instead empowered into the stratosphere, given every opportunity to grow and prosper, given most favoured trading status, allowed to blossom, etc, etc. Maybe this was done in the hope that those 2 barbarian nations won’t come together, who knows.
But yes, China has played its part brilliantly as well, the whole military and intelligence apparatus overseeing the production of globally demanded manufactured goods, identifying markets globally for those goods, securing the technology to produce those goods, preventing “independent domestic or foreign-backed oligarchy from emerging”, keeping finance and banking in government hands, etc, etc.
Globalization built China, it remains to be seen whether China can survive once Globalization disappears with the imminent collapse of the West due to Globalization. The West killed itself. We live in interesting times indeed.
It is worth making a distinction between Western modernization/globalization in particular and modernization/globalization in general. Western globalization is neoliberalism, which as Hudson describes is the source of rot in the West. However, as exemplified by its domestic policies and the BRI, China has a non-Western, non-neoliberal model for globalization and modernization that is certainly more sustainable.
Globalization, in some form, is inevitable for a species as successful as humans. The bell cannot be unrung.
China most definitely has a non-Western, non-neoliberal model for globalization and modernization that is certainly more sustainable, it is called Communism.
The strength lies in government funding investments in physical economy while keeping the private rent-seekers at bay. This is essentially the American System prior to neoliberalism taking over.
The problem with “pure” communism is loss of incentive for entrepreneurship and original creative thinking. Anytime you’re treating humans like cattle you’re getting into trouble in the sense of undermining the human creative process through micromanagement. You want to encourage that guy who is about to invent the next lightbulb, even if he doesn’t subscribe to you ideology so well.
So a necessary balance determines how much profit (in the form of tax) gets rolled back into the system, with special focus on creatively supporting higher technology, as opposed to simply maintaining the existing technology. This positive feedback loop of capital AND innovative ideas is the crucial element that happened in USA during boom years, but rent-seeking kills the positive feedback, regardless if the economic system in question is “capitalist” or “communist”. Both systems have ways in which this goose that lays the golden eggs gets killed.
Great essay from Michael Hudson. Thanks again to Hudson and to The Saker!
Re “But while Russia was isolated since the days of the Iron Curtain, China was welcomed with open arms, legs and buttocks. While Russia was curtailed and constrained, China was empowered. ”
Use of passive verbs obscures who did this empowering.
Actually it seems to have been American businessmen who in their greed and constant search for cheap labor and resources and obsession with shareholders’ bottom line and desire to break American unions outsourced American manufacturing and gave China its big “globalized” boost and “empowered” China. E.g.,Walmart and other retailers on the consumer end and hundreds of other big players in other sectors, including heavy industry.
They thought they could inveigle China with their neoliberal blandishments. For sure some Chinese businessmen took the bait, but it looks like the government and the CCP didn’t.
“There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.”
Bonus: Very apposite Chinese illustration here:
https://allpoetry.com/Limerick:-There-was-a-Young-Lady-of-Niger
Katherine
.
As Hudson describes, this autotrophic self-vassalization (“autovassalization”) of the United States of America is its inevitable downfall.
Domestically, public wealth continues to flow towards private hands, making USA less and less capable of responding to disasters (natural, civil, geopolitical) that will also increase in intensity due to lack of preventative measures. This positive-feedback loop of destabilization has only accelerated circa the “Great Reset” heralded by the Biden inauguration. If current trends are maintained, there will be a major internal displacement crisis in the USA sometime in the current decade. In order to maintain local order, state boundaries may rapidly ossify (e.g., an eastward refugee migration from the Pacific Rim to the Rockies/Southwest may trigger a hardening of borders in Utah) and the balkanization of the formerly-United States will commence.
Internationally, China and Russia know that there is little basis for an actual hot war with the USA; their assertively defensive posturing might be described as bracing for a shock-wave from a bomb that is yet to detonate. Any aggressive military action from the USA reeks of desperation, and blind attacks never succeed against a observant defender. Plenty of wisdom from Sūnzǐ applies.
The average American citizen is hopelessly unaware of all this. American Nationalists (i.e. conservatives) refuse to accept that the American project is irrelevant without global primacy, and is therefore doomed. Western Universalists (i.e. liberals), their individualist ideology undermined by 21st century realities, become endlessly self-absorbed and cynical. All are endlessly inundated with corporate media propaganda.
Let’s cut to the chase.
Boycott Wal-Mart!
In one of Hudson’s books into German the word parasite was banned for being anti Semitic.
This Micheal Hudson guy is the new Karl Marx, and I say that as a good thing.
His reasoning based on history actually makes it easier to understand than Marx’s proses.
“It is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, a fantasy depicting American industry as being independent of government”.
That is as plausible as trees being “independent” of the soil.
Another area where this fantasy amplifies U.S. govt power is in the MSM. The U.S. govt uses our ‘independent’ MSM to deliver its narrative and no matte how outrageous the narrative ends up being it can always claim plausible deniability because it is not an official govt announcement. Supporting Al Qaeda in N. Syria? That was just some think tank guy giving an interview to the WSJ. But since we claim that everything in China or Russia’s MSM is controlled by the govt we can depict any statement that we find as if it comes from the highest levels of their govt. ‘The CCP is claiming that the U.S. engineered Covid19’.
Professor Hudson; you have crossed the Rubicon. Allow me to seize the occasion to warmly congratulate you. You have clearly pointed up the essential linkage between monarchy and democracy that oligarchy will not hear of and cannot countenance. They will raise a howl to the high heavens declaiming the horrors of Authoritarianism and how Lady Liberty is certain to be ravaged and humiliated. Grim spectres of Power, excuse me, POWER, stalk the land reducing humankind to a condition of trembling fear. No property is secure, no contracts sacred, and above all no rule of law in the land. Civilisation is lost and free men lay prostrate to a lawless force that defies all reason and moderation. It gets worse. (And it’s all Michael Hudson’s fault.)
The rhetoric against kingship and a similar tyranny is nearly the same thing as the Western humanistic tradition. Our Western tradition enshrines the republic as the embodiment of liberty and self government under the rule of law. It is the heart and soul of what we understand by the term ‘civilisation’. Civilisation is distinguished from barbarism. Barbarism has two faces. There are the primitives on the one hand and the orientals on the other. The primitive is typically a tribal community that has not yet stepped up to the high plateau of the Political Association wherein each free and equal citizen enjoys a certain liberty under the rule of law. They are backwards but progress can be given a helping hand by enslaving them and teaching them how it’s done. Orientals have gone too far. They started out as small communities, like the primitives and the Greeks as well, tied together by kinship proprieties but instead of transcending this merely natural condition they just kept constructing larger and larger forms of communities that took shape as principalities, monarchies and finally empires. So the problem with Oriental Despotisms is that they took the wrong path and failed to make the qualitative leap to political subjectivity. No problem, just destroy the monarchies (civilisations), or set revolutions in motion and start all over. With some imperialistic help they’ll get it right if properly instructed. It was with these lessons in mind that JS Mill wrote ‘On Representative Government’ (we note in passing here that Mill wrote this treatise when he was an MP arguing the case for the private governance of a great and ancient civilisation).
In our time China, Russia, and Iran as well, are the new targets of this very ancient rhetoric of ‘oriental despotism’. Hardly a day passes when we are not reminded by the NYT of how unchecked despotic power blights the lives of billions of oppressed and passive oriental subjects. The effort to achieve an enlightened criticism of this incessant lying is like the mythical hero crawling out from under a heavy stone and trying to stand up. It’s all very uphill.But those of us who appreciate the accomplishments of the political leadership of China and Russia are sensible of the decisive significance of real political leaders of Xi and Putin’s calibre. Oligarchy can be confronted and overthrown. What this requires is a leader capable of the hard and difficult work this entails, but supported by a senior staff able to competently conduct the complex operations of governance in accordance with the enlightened aims of the leadership – and a popular base who support their governance. Oligarchy is one form of corruption among others. Monarchy and democracy can also assume corrupt forms. Therefore the general problem is not just oligarchy but corruption generally speaking, and the solution is .. virtue, or the good or some sort of public spirited and positive condition of good heath and spiritual wholeness, however defined. What is really needed to overcome corruption is a combination of all three virtuous (here I use the classical term of political goodness: ‘virtue’) constitutional forms: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. As Polybius argued, when one form starts to falter, the others can take up the slack and help the overall constitution return to it’s proper form. Last point: the difference between virtue and corruption is very simple. Virtue gives more than it takes. Virtue sacrifices private advantage for the sake of the public good while corruption is just the opposite. Oligarchy maximises private gain at the expense of the public good.
I think we live presently on the cusp of a great transformation. We are witnessing the severe corruption and death throes of modern liberalism and the rise of more traditional aspirations to achieve the good somehow, to embody political virtue for the well being of the old civilisations of Asia and in their interactions. Great Transformations. Again, my congratulations. You are the Karl Polyani of our time. I especially hope that the Chinese leadership listens carefully to you.
Thank you very much for the compliments.
Actually, my forthcoming “Collapse of Antiquity” is precisely about what you describe. Liberty and prosperity require constraining debt dynamics, and that requires a state (monarchy or socialism) strong enough to keep a creditor class in check, to prevent it from foreclosing on land and monopolizing it, reducing the indebted population to clientage.
You’re right in stating that this is met with cognitive dissonance by “free market” people, even alas J.S. Mill.
I’ve been surprised that Marxists don’t get it. That’s “Vol. III.” And many focus on communism as getting RID of the state, not realizing that a strong state is necessary as a transition period. Of course, Marx said that revolution was necessary. And that meant a strong state — especially to defend against its liberal opponents and their military response.
Prof. Hudson. Your analysis of the basics of Marxism would be greatly appreciated. I hope your forthcoming book addresses the issue. I think Marxists would say that keeping creditors in check is not enough. Doug Henwood writes in a recent article in Jacobin that petite bourgeois small business executives and owners provide the motive force for the most reactionary politics common since WWII, from the John Birch Society through the Capitol Riot. According to Henwood, they were enraged because they felt squeezed between big business and big labor.
The story of the Goose and the Golden Egg comes to mind. The value generated and contributed by a human mind (above that of animal status) in the form of useful discoveries and innovative ideas, is dependent on the cultural and educational environment of the current society. So when the rentier oligarchy loots, they ultimately loot the long-term source of all value by loss of opportunities for each person to develop higher potential, because they struggle more for everyday existence and have little time or money to do any study or expansion of capabilities.
Wykłady profesora Hudsona są bezcenne.
Ze względu na logiczność, i krystaliczną jasność określającą związki przyczynowo- skutkowe.
Brakuje w nich jedynie jednego wątku.
Kontroli elit swiatowych przez anglosaski system bankowy.
NIKT posiadający konta w rajach podatkowych kontrolowanych przez Anglosasow, nie może być pewien dnia i godziny.
Czy będzie to afrykański dyktator, południowoamerykański polityk, rosyjski oligarcha.
Wszyscy są uzależnieni od kontrolowanych przez zachod rajow podatkowych.
Stąd taka usłużność/ sterowność decyzji podejmowanych w rożnych krajach świata.
Byt wielu miliarderow zależy od ich posłuszeństwa.
Jest jeszcze jeden ciekawy wątek.
Korupcja.
Kto korumpuje i kogo?
Głownie, najwieksze koncerny świata, politykow krajow biednych.
Walka z korupcją wywołaną przez własne firmy, to gonienie kroliczka.
Medialnie atrakcyjne, realnie niedopuszczalne.
Skoro korupcji ulegają koronowane głowy- Juan Carlos- to co mogą maluczcy- politycy krajow III swiata?
Will it be an African dictator, a South American politician, a Russian oligarch.
They are all dependent on Western-controlled tax havens.
Hence such usability / controllability of decisions made in different countries of the world.
The existence of many billionaires depends on their obedience.
Machine Translation:
There’s another interesting thread.
Corruption.
Who’s corrupting who?
Mainly, the world’s largest corporations, politicians of poor countries.
Fighting corporate corruption is like chasing a rabbit.
Medially attractive, realistically unacceptable.
If the crowned heads – Juan Carlos – are corrupt, what can the petty politicians of the third world countries do?
“Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince described three options for how a conquering power might treat states that it defeated in war but that “have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom”
Hmmmm, I’m reminded of a forth option the story from the book of Acts of the Apostles chapter 2:44-45 but one in which comes with a twist.
“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”
I would say that is true socialism at work, one that actually works and I suppose no other culture / nation would be able to see this through than a thoroughly Jewish one. A family is a family no matter how big a nation is yes?
What is the twist though? Well, as I see it just imagine if some political ruler with an IQ of 1200% as this Valiant Thor was supposed to be managed to affect the ultimate Robinhood moment upon the world? Redistribute the wealth of the entire world equally thus gathering to itself the worlds poor and looking like the great savior of mankind for doing precisely that? Poor makeup about what 98% of the world population while the rich are the minority? Talk about declaring oneself godlike?
A far-fetched idea? Before computer technology yes of course but today anything is possible, anything! Y/N?
Would love to know Schwaub thought on this and his great reset?
Cardinal suens said decades ago that abortion and contraception will fade as issues because technology will make it so you will have to ask permission to have a child and be given a technology fix so you can , as you will be vaxxed young with a block. There is your lovely religious top guys: Vietnam was called “ spellys war” meaning red cardinal spellman.
That’s why China is rising and the West is collapsing . You can’t run an Economy based on the FIRE Sector . This has been well established way back in the times of Hammurabi and is still viable today . So expect a War , that’s the only option that the Western Parasitic Class knows .
The challenge seems to be how to disentangle these two forms of activity so as to be able to incentivize the investment of the good activities and disincentivize investment in the harmful activities.
The main points of control seem to be the currencies themselves and the “credit worthiness” of individuals and companies.
China’s social credit score comes to mind. While it is ripe for political abuse, assuming its somewhat objective, it might bring personal accountably for one’s actions which help or hurt society.
The big brother central control aspect feels quite problematic, however. Maybe a system where the judging is less concentrated would enable a less totalitarian model. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that doesn’t mean every new idea for improvement of accountably will lead there. Libertarians feel otherwise, but their principles as seen In the history of oligarchy leads more directly to hell. The cure to be less awful than the disease, and difficult to hijack to cause reversal of effects.
One could reduce tax on certain things like manufacturing and and on income invested in manufacturing companies, but this won’t get traction until the parasitical debts in western society are cancelled.
In this age of cryptocurrency, maybe there is a currency platform waiting to be invented that could feature incentive mechanisms built into the design. If money is the root of all evil, why not improve it to make it more useful and less evil? I know it’s easier said than done, but it seems like an exciting topic nonetheless.
I am still waiting to see wellinformed leftists admit that all of communism was the result of deliberate support by the oligarchic western elites Hudson purports to critisize.
And for wellinformed leftists to recognise that the real fear among those western elites was not at all communism but the opposite thing: competent and competitive capitalist rivals who were independent of the western elites and who would want to develop their nation states.
Dont trust the leftists before they come clean about this!