by Michael Hudson posted by permission
Mr. Soros has thrown a public sissy fit over the fact that he can’t make the kind of easy money off China that he was able to make when the Soviet Union was carved up and privatized. On September 7, 2021, in his second mainstream editorial in a week, George Soros expressed his horror at the recommendation by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, that financial managers should triple their investment in China. Claiming that such investment would imperil U.S. national security by helping China, Mr. Soros stepped up his advocacy of U.S. financial and trade sanctions.
China’s policy of shaping markets to promote overall prosperity, instead of letting the economic surplus be concentrated in the hands of corporate and foreign investors, is an existential threat to America’s neoliberal priorities, he spells out. President Xi’s “Common Prosperity” program “seeks to reduce inequality by distributing the wealth of the rich to the general population. That does not augur well for foreign investors.”[1] To neoliberals, that is heresy.
Criticizing China’s “abrupt cancellation of a new issue by Alibaba’s Ant group in November 2020,” and “banishment of U.S.-financed tutoring companies from China,” Mr. Soros singles out Blackstone’s co-founder Stephen Schwarzman (Note that Blackstone under Schwartzman is not to be confused with BlackRock under Larry Fink) and former Goldman Sachs President John L. Thornton for seeking to make financial returns for their investors instead of treating China as an enemy state and looming Cold War adversary:
The BlackRock initiative imperils the national security interests of the U.S. and other democracies because the money invested in China will help prop up President Xi’s regime … Congress should pass legislation empowering the Securities and Exchange Commission to limit the flow of funds to China. The effort ought to enjoy bipartisan support.
The New York Times published a prominent article defining the “Biden Doctrine” as seeing “China as America’s existential competitor; Russia as a disrupter; Iran and North Korea as nuclear proliferators, cyberthreats as ever-evolving and terrorism as spreading far beyond Afghanistan.” Against these threats, the article depicts U.S. strategy as representing “democracy,” the euphemism for countries with minimal governments leaving economic planning to Wall Street financial managers, and infrastructure in the hands of private investors, not provided at subsidized prices. Nations restrict monopolies and related rent-seeking are accused of being autocratic.
The problem, of course, is that just as the United States, Germany and other nations grew into industrial powers in the 19th and 20th century by government-sponsored infrastructure, progressive taxation, and anti-monopoly legislation, the post-1980 rejection of these policies has led them into economic stagnation for the 99 Percent burdened by debt deflation and rising rentier overhead paid to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors. China is thriving by following precisely the policies by which the former leading industrial nations grew rich before suffering from the neoliberal financialization disease. This contrast prompts the article’s thrust, summarized in its summary of what it hopes will become a Congressionally supported Biden Doctrine of escalating a New Cold War against non-neoliberalized economies, juxtaposing U.S.-sponsored liberal-democratic imperialism against foreign socialism:
Last month, Mr. Blinken warned that China and Russia were ‘making the argument in public and in private that the United States is in decline – so it’s better to cast your lot with their authoritarian visions for the world than with our democratic one.[2]
Mr. Soros had seen the ending of the Cold War open the path for him and other foreign investors to use “shock therapy” to provide easy pickings in Russia, followed by the much broader Asian Crisis of 1997 as a grab-bag opportunity to buy up the most lucrative rent-yielding assets. He is upset that President Xi is not emulating Boris Yeltsin and letting a client kleptocracy emerge in China to carve up Russia’s economy – which made Russia’s stock market the world’s darling for a few years, 1995-97.
Right after the Asia Crisis, Bill Clinton’s administration admitted China to the World Trade Organization, giving U.S. investors and importers access to low-priced labor able to undersell U.S. industrial labor. That helped stop U.S. wage gains, while China used foreign investment as a means of upgrading its technology and labor to become economically self-reliant. It has not let its monetary system or social organization become financially dependent on “markets” functioning as vehicles for the U.S. control that Mr. Soros hoped would occur when he began investing in China.
China recognized from the beginning that its insistence on maintaining control of its economy – steering it to promote overall prosperity, not to enrich a client oligarchy fronting for a foreign investor class – would create political opposition from U.S. Cold War ideologues. China therefore sought allies from Wall Street, offering profit-making opportunities for Goldman Sachs and other investors whose self-interest has indeed led them to oppose anti-China policies.
But China’s success has creating so many billionaires that it is now moving to curtail exorbitant wealth. That policy has sharply cut prices for the leading Chinese stocks, prompting Mr. Soros to warn U.S. investors to bail out. His hope is that this will bring China to heel and reverse its policy of raising living standards at the expense of sending its economic gains to U.S. and other foreign investors.
The reality is that China does not need U.S. or other foreign money to develop. The Peoples’ Bank of China can create all the money that the domestic economy needs, while its export trade already is flooding it with dollars and pushing up its exchange rate.
John McCain characterized Russia as a gas station with atom bombs (neglecting to acknowledge that it is now the world’s largest grain exporter, no longer dependent on the West for its food supply – thanks largely to U.S.-sponsored trade sanctions). The corollary image is the United States as a financialized and monopolized economy with atom bombs and cyber threats, in danger of becoming a failed state like the old Soviet Union but threatening to bring the entire world economy down with it if other countries do not subsidize its debt-ridden New Cold War economy.
Presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy despite its financial oligarchy at home and its support of client oligarchies abroad, the United States has consolidated financial power in the wake of the 2008 junk-mortgage and bank-fraud.
Policy making and resource allocation have passed out of the hands of meaningful electoral politics into those of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, and what Ray McGovern has called MICIMATT the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank complex, including the major foundations and NGOs. These institutions seek to concentrate income and wealth in the hands of a FIRE-sector oligarchy just as the Roman Senate blocked reform with veto power over popular legislation, and Europe’s upper houses of parliament such as Britain’s House of Lords used similar chokehold power to resist government control in the public interest.
The rise of U.S.-sponsored neoliberalism means that the 19th-century’s fight to free markets from predatory finance sponsoring rentier parasitism and has failed. This failure is celebrated as a victory for the rule of law, democracy, property rights and even free markets over the authority of public power to regulate private wealth-seeking. Integrating the global economy along unipolar lines enabling U.S. financial interests and those of allied NATO economies to appropriate the most profitable and highest rent-yielding assets of foreign countries is idealized as the natural evolution of civilization, not as the road to neoliberal serfdom and debt peonage embodied in what U.S. officials call the Rule of Law.
What is the Rule of Law?
The United States refuses to join the World Court, or any international organization in which it does not have veto power. And it simply withdraws from international treaties and agreements that it has signed if its vested interests believe that these no longer serve their interests. This always has been U.S. policy, from the many treaties with Native American tribes broken by Andrew Jackson and his successors down through the U.S.-Soviet agreements ending the Cold War in 1991 broken by Bill Clinton to the treaty removing sanctions on Iran broken by Donald Trump. This policy has introduced a new term into the world’s diplomatic vocabulary to describe U.S. diplomacy: non-agreement-capable.
The evangelistic neocon administration of George W. Bush , effectively run by his Vice President Dick Cheney, followed the principle that “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” [3] To impose this reality on other countries, U.S. “intelligence” is selected, invented or censored to give the appearance of whatever reality is deemed to serve U.S. interests at any given moment of time. Past and present reality is redefined at will to provide a guide for action. Whatever U.S. diplomacy dictates is claimed to reflect the rule of law, giving the United States the right to definite what is legal and what is not when it imposes economic and military sanctions against countries that do not follow pro-American policies. The resulting dictates laying down the law are always wrapped in the rhetoric of free markets and democracy.
What is a free market?
To the classical economists, the objective of 19th-century reform was to replace the rentier class’s political power with democratic power to create state policies to either tax away land rent and other economic rent, or to take (return) land, natural resources and natural monopolies such as transportation, communications and other basic infrastructure needs to the public domain. A free market was defined as one free from economic rent – the land rent imposed by heirs of the feudal warlord landlord class, whose economic role was purely extractive, not productive. Natural resource rent was said to belong to the public domain as national patrimony, and monopoly rent was to be prevented by keeping natural monopolies in the public domain, or firmly regulating them if privatized.
The 20th century’s anti-classical reaction has inverted the concept of a free market, Orwellian Doublethink style, to create one “free” for rent-seekers to carve out free-lunch rent income. The result is a rentier economy in which land, natural resources and natural monopolies are privatized and, in due course, financialized to turn rent into a flow of interest payments to the financial sector as the economy is driven into debt to afford the rentier overhead and debt-financed asset-price inflation for rent-yielding assets.
The “freedom” of such markets is freedom from governments to tax away economic rent and regulate prices to limit rent extraction. An exponential growth of unearned rentier income and wealth in the hands of a sector diverts income away from the “real” production-and-consumption economy.
As for free trade, the United States also retains the right to impose tariffs at will (euphemized as “fair trade”) and levy fines and sanctions to prevent companies from being free to sell technology to China. The aim is to concentrate technological monopolies in U.S. hands. Any “proliferation” of technology (which is treated much like nuclear weaponry as a national security issue) is deemed to be “unfair” and antithetical to U.S. freedom to control the world’s trade and investment patterns in its own interest.
This attempt to promote “free markets” and “fair trade” is defended by U.S. claims to protect democracy against autocracy, and to intervene throughout the world to promote Free World members defined ipso facto as being democratic simply by virtue of being U.S. allies. Today’s New Cold War is all about maintaining and extending such a captive U.S.-oriented “free market” by force, from Henry Kissinger’s coup in Chile to impose Chicago-style “free markets” to Hillary Clinton’s coups in Ukraine’s Maidan and Honduras and her NATO-backed destruction of Libya and assassination of Qadhafi.
What is democracy?
Aristotle wrote that many constitutions appear superficially to be democratic, but actually are oligarchic. Democracy always had been the deceptive euphemism for oligarchy making itself into a hereditary aristocracy. Democracies tend to evolve into oligarchies as creditors expropriate debtors (the “rule of law” guaranteeing a hierarchy of “property rights” with creditor claims at the top of the legal pyramid).
The move toward democratic political reform in the late 19th and early 20th century was supposed to create rent-free markets. But the dynamics of political democracy have been managed in a way that blocks economic democracy. The very meaning of “democracy” is degraded to mean opposition to the government’s power to act against the oligarchic rentier One Percent on behalf of the 99 Percent. The resulting travesty of a democratic free market serves to block political attempts to use public power to promote the interests of the wage-earning population at large, and indeed of the industrial economy itself to avid financial asset stripping and debt deflation of markets.
In the language of international diplomacy, “democratic” has become a label for any pro-U.S. regime, from the Baltic kleptocracies to Latin America’s military dictatorships. Countries using state power to regulate monopolies or to tax rentier income are denounced as “autocratic,” even if they have elected heads of state. In this new Orwellian rhetoric of international diplomacy, Boris Yeltsin’s kleptocratic Russian regime was democratic, and the natural move to stop the corruption and depopulation was called “autocracy.”
What is autocracy and “authoritarianism”?
Foreign moves to defend against U.S. financial takeovers and sponsorship of client oligarchies are denounced as authoritarian. In the U.S. diplomatic vocabulary, “autocracy” refers to a government protecting the interests of its own population by resisting U.S. financial takeover of its natural resources, basic infrastructure and most lucrative monopolies.
All successful economie throughout history have been mixed public/private economies. The proper role of government is to protect economies from a rentier oligarchy from emerging to polarize the economy at the expense of the population at large. This protection requires keeping control of money and credit, land and natural resources, basic infrastructure and natural monopolies in the hands of governments.
It is oligarchies that are autocratic in blocking reforms to overrule their rent-seeking by keeping basic needs and infrastructure in the public domain. To confuse understanding, Rome’s oligarchy accused social reformers of “seeking kingship,” much as Greek oligarchies accused reformers of seeking “tyranny” – as if their reforms were merely for personal gain, not to promote general prosperity. The resulting Orwellian Doublethink is woven into the rhetoric of neoliberalism.
What is neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism is an exponentially expanding financial dynamic seeking to concentrate the world’s most profitable and highest rent-yielding resources in the hands of financial managers, mainly in the United State and its client oligarchies that act as proconsuls over foreign economies.
The liberal mass media, academia, and “think tank” lobbying institutions, policy foundations and NGOs sponsor the above-described rhetoric of free markets to create vehicles for capital flight, money laundering, tax evasion, deregulation and privatization (and the corruption that goes with emerging kleptocracies). Neoliberal doctrine depicts all public moves to protect general prosperity from the burden of rentier overhead as being authoritarian autocracy “interfering” with property rights.
What are property rights?
In today’s financialized economies “property rights” means the priority of creditor rights to foreclose on the housing, land and other property of debtors. (In antiquity that included the personal freedom of debtors condemned to debt bondage to their creditors.)
The World Bank has promoted such creditor-oriented property rights from the former Soviet Union to Latin American indigenous communities in order to privatize hitherto communal or public property, including land occupied by squatters or local communities. The idea is that once communal or public property is privatized as individual rights, it can be pledged as collateral for loans, and duly forfeited or sold under economic duress.
The effect is to concentrate property in the hands of the financial sector. That in turn leads inevitably to a failed austerity-ridden economy.
What is a failed economy?
Economies fail because of the rising power of vested interests, primarily in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector that control most of the economies assets and wealth. A failed economy is one that cannot expand, usually as a result of becoming burdened by rising rentier overhead in the form of land rent, natural-resource rent and monopoly rent as the financial sector replaces democratically elected governments as central planner and resource allocator.
The FIRE sector is a symbiosis between finance and real estate, along with insurance. Its business plan involved a highly political dimension seeking to centralize control of money and credit creation in hereditary private hands, and to turn this economic rent. “free” from taxation, public collection or regulation, into a flow of interest. The effect of lending primarily to buyers of assets, which are pledged as collateral for loans, is not to create new means of production but to inflate asset prices for property already in place.
The resulting finance-capital gains have become the easiest way to acquire fortunes, which take the form of rent-extracting claims on the economy, not new means of production to support “real” economic prosperity and rising living standards.
Financialized economies are doomed to become failed states because the exponentially growing expansion path of debt accumulating at compound interest plus new credit creation and “quantitative easing” far exceeds the economy’s underlying growth rate of producing goods and services to carry this burden. These financial dynamics threaten to doom the U.S. and its satellite economies to become failed states.
The underlying question is whether Western civilization itself has become a failed civilization, given the roots of its legal system and concepts of property rights in oligarchic Rome. Rome’s polarized economy led to a Dark Age, which recovered by looting Byzantium and subsequently the East and new conquest of the New World and East and South Asia. For the past twenty years it has been China’s socialist growth that has primarily sustained Western prosperity. But this dynamic is being rejected, denounced as an existential threat precisely because it is successful socialism, not neoliberal exploitation.
In times past there always was some part of the globe to survive and carry on. But Super Decadence occurs when the whole world is being dragged down together, with no region able to resist the polarizing and impoverishing rentier dynamics imposed by the militarized imperial core. Following the U.S. lead, the West is cutting itself off from survival. Rejection of neoliberalism by China and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is met by U.S. trade and financial sanctions whose self-defeating effect is to drive them together to create a state regulatory system (“autocracy”) to resist dollarization, financialization and privatization. That is why they are being isolated as an existential threat to the dynamics of neoliberal rentier decadence.
The Alternative
It does not have to be this way, of course. China is defending itself not only by the productive industrial and agricultural economy its socialist government has sponsored, but by a guiding concept of how economies work. China’s economic managers have the classical concepts of value, price and economic rent, that distinguish earned from unearned income, and productive labor and wealth from unproductive and predatory financial and rentier fortunes.
These are the concepts needed to uplift all society, the 99 Percent rather than just the One Percent. But the post-1980 neoliberal reaction has stripped away from the Western economic vocabulary and academic curriculum. The present economic stagnation, debt burden and locked-in zero interest rates are a policy choice by the West, not a product of inevitable technological determinism.
- George Soros, “BlackRock’s China Blunder,” Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2021. ↑
- Helene Cooper, Lara Jukes, Michael D. Shear and Michael Crowley, “In the Withdrawal from Afghanistan, a Biden Doctrine Surfaces,” The New York Times, September 5, 2021. ↑
- Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, quoting Bush-Cheney strategist Karl Rove. ↑
US, Germany and other ,,western ,, powers grew into industrial powers not by government sponsored infrastructure, but by ruthless colonial rule and exploatation and theft of the natural resources of the colonies in theirs posession! If you look at the map of the europe and start to looking from Atlantic Ocean to Russian border, there is no one single country wich was not a colonial power! and on that stolen wealth came economic power of the Europe! The same thing was with United States! They say that western countryes originated at work! They were created on roberry!
And you dont think Russia colonised the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia?
What’s conspicuous is that Russia didn’t expand by genocide, despite much clamour by the omnicidal West to the contrary. And the most solid corroboration of this fact is that there is no messianic urge to genocide in Russian culture and religiosity. The contrast to what passes for Western mass ”culture” and the cesspit which is the Roman Catholic Church speaks for itself.
There are currently over 193 ethnic groups all living in Russia.
Not in reservations. Not “poly-genocided” as on the North American continent
They speak their languages, have their traditions, and live on their own land.
Before posting condescending and snarky comments like yours, please get a *minimum* of knowledge about the topic.
Either that, or don’t post anymore.
Thank you!
Andrei
Also, Saker, a minimal knowledge of the USA would conclude that Manifest Destiny is what drove us to displace the indigenous and steal their land and resources in what is now North America. As John Sullivan said in 1845, “Our manifest destiny is to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” Russia has nothing like this in its history as far as I know.
The Russian ‘colonization’ was smashing the different parasitic ‘hordes’ living by plunder and slave trade.
@ivica repic
Yes, Euro-American prosperity is inseparable from centuries of genocide, ecocide, enslavement, plunder, greed, and corruption. Interestingly, Germany stands out as an exception in the sense that, yes, its industrialization was accomplished at breakneck speed (similar to the US). but as far as its industrialization was concerned, Germany’s very successful achievements were not driven by colonial super-profits. Yet the two reactionary imbeciles Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler were 100% obsessed by ”European values”, inflicting horrors upon Africa, China, and most notably Russia.
Well, Germany didn’t have such a big colonial empire (like lets say the French and the British)
fact is the German colonies were more a burden than aything else, I think that at the time the most profitable product they got from them was Copra oil
The German economy was somewhat as big as the British in 1913…
look at the data of GPD by country in those years, it is easy to foud them in wiki.
But the German colonies in Africa were just as genocidal as with the other Western European “enlightened” empires.One example: starting in 1904, a rebellion by the Herero people of Southwest Africa (Namibia now) killed 100 German men (no women). In return, the German troops killed 100,000 Herero (i.e. almost all)by driving them into the desert and preventing food and water. This was widely recognized as the first genocide of the 20th century. (1904-1908)
@illusionist: “The German economy was somewhat as big as the British in 1913…”
Which is why Great Britain declared war on Germany in 1914; to smash a rising industrial competitor. Also to grab the oilfields of Mesopotamia from Turkey, and to install a National Home for the Jews in Palestine.
You are right about German colonies being a burden. Germany was fortunate in having few colonies; as a result its capital was invested at home: in infrastructure, education and social services. This accounts for Germany’s rapid industrial development.
In contrast, British capital was mostly invested abroad for industrial exploitation of its colonies. Huge amounts of British capital were sunk into the goldmines of Australia, the gold and diamond mines of South Africa, the oil wells of Persia, and so on around the world; while in Britain itself domestic infrastructure decayed, education lagged and the slums of London were a byword for poverty, disease and crime. One sees the sorry results of Empire in the Britain of today — a dilapidated grandee posturing pathetically on the world stage.
It was rather to prevent Germany to grab the oil fields of Iran, Mesopotamia and Russia. People rarely think that the perspective of Germany grabbing Russia’s resources and ”exploited by the organizing genius of Germany always conjured up a vision which no Western European can contemplate with equanimity”. That’s England had no choice that to ally grudgingly with Russia in both WW.
‘The German Economy was somewhat larger than the British’ true enough, but both the British Navy and the British empire were bigger than Germany’s. Britain was never a land power, Germany was. And the United States was both a land-power and a big Navy. Geopolitical facts I think
Dr. NG
Ten years ago a study estimated that Britain pillaged India in the amount of 46 Trillion dollars (it could be sterling) during the colonization. That amount in today’s money. In 1940s BP earned over 200 million sterling in one year from Iran while Iran’s share wasless than one half million. This of course an example. Japan alone had at one point over 3 trillion dollars in reserve. What would happen if the dollar tanks? Add to that of all countries’ under America’s protection. And all the gold being deposited in western banks to have access to th dollar! And a thought, when they deliberately devalue the dollar for the good world economy.
With what money did the British build the railway network of India? Canals and irrigation systems, telegraphy, roads and ports, public buildings?
ivica repic, sorry for being daft here but are you saying that Norway got rich because of Normans going viking in Ireland etc and by being mercenaries in Byzantinium?
Please do not misunderstand me i am genuinly curious, our kings earned a lot on the opium to China and piracy like their cousins in the uk and elsewhere in Europe but a colonial power?
We conquered Normady and the brits do that count? But we were conquered by the Danes and swedes and have only been a sovereign country since 1905.
https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionen_mellom_Sverige_og_Norge
Portugal,Spain,France;Italy, Netherlands,Belgium,Germany, Austria,……you know what i mean
Sorry, you’ve got that wrong. Ireland, on the edge of the Atlantic, was never a colonial power. It was in fact a victim of British colonialism, which we suffered under for around 700 years.
Western economic success cannot be explained only by colonization
Many very succesfull western countries have never been colonial powers.
To see reason of being “successful” country, one must look at the “negative space” in large picture.
In 20th century, NOT being sabotaged by Anglos is sole reason to be successful country.
It is not surprising that most of successful countries was ruled by same bloodline.
Being left alone is enough to live decent life. You do not have to rob anyone.
Size of misery around the world is measure of crime that robber barons committed.
I do not see how, say Scandinavian countries profited from pillaging the world. Cold, expensive, teritories. Yet, they live pretty decent lives. How come? They were left alone for some reason.
Conclusion is that whole world could have Scandinavian standard without imperialism.
Amount of damage that Empire inflicted on the World wastly exceeds benefits for them. Due to inefficiency of ancient business model called War.
Excepting for the UK, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Austro-Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Turkey
Strongbow first entered Ireland in 1169, a full 852 years ago. I live in the North-east of Ireland, still under British occupation….or does this part of Ireland, severed from the rest by the illegal setting up of an apartheid, sectarian fiefdom in 1921 not count anymore?
As others already told you, your theory is wrong in general and true only for specific cases (namely England and France, and partially Spain and Portugal). Not true for Germany nor Italy nor Scandinavia nor others.
In a nutshell: “Financialized economies are doomed to become failed states because the exponentially growing expansion path of debt accumulating at compound interest plus new credit creation and “quantitative easing” far exceeds the economy’s underlying growth rate of producing goods and services to carry this burden. These financial dynamics threaten to doom the U.S. and its satellite economies to become failed states.”
This is the poison pill the US capitalists created and consumed.
What China and Russia are doing now is standing clear as the US edifice is set (doomed) to tumble down.
It does look like the oligarchs are trying to either ‘castle move’ to England or Germany or crash the EU, depriving not only its own market but the EU market to China/Russia. Taking down the global economy may be a plan.
Or they have a new game set with cryptocurrencies.
Whatever the final event becomes, recall that 2008 midnight creation of Goldman-Sachs transforming into a bank so it could survive and flourish as the FED pumped ‘blood’ into the corpses of Wall Street.
Corporate metamorphosis applies to the dying government also.
TBTF is intact.
Larchmonter445,
please, can you elaborate, in a few words, “castle move”?
“Financialized economies are doomed to become failed states…”
Financialization is tool to exploit vasals and allies by QE and leverage advantages.
Money printing is usefull tool before knee of exponential growth. Leverage require guaranteed profit every time, or it can backlash horriblly. Also, there must be ever-increasing base to absorb intrinsic losses of the system. That base is represented by helpless countries with Central Bank and governments on remote control. Rich enough to pay what is required, but weak enough to be cheaply controlled.
There’s lack of such countries because of overexploitation and inability to acquire more. The rest are firmly entrenched. No more riskless, cheap wars.
When Empire dried-out vasals, it turned on allies. When that was not enough, it started to cannibalize its own. So, it is not “taking down the global economy”.
It’s just hungry parasite squirming.
King moves to where the castle piece is on the chessboard.
Often a last desperate move to save check or checkmate. Sometimes a deft move that saves the game.
Soros v. Fink reminds me of an old lyric, something along the lines of “every way you look at this you lose”
Here’s a better question:
“What is the Kosher Sandwich?
please don’t post nonsensical comments
thank you!
“seeking to centralize control of money and credit creation in hereditary private hands”
Hereditary Wealth leads to Nepotism which leads to Incompetence.
We are being led by a decadent generation of incompetent oligarchs. Too many people are now in power solely because they are the fifth possessor of a foolish face.
And the images of Donald Trump Jr., Hunter Biden, Liz Cheny, Chelsea Clinton (or whatever her name might be now) and on an on, pop into my head to confirm THE PROBLEM!
The following brief passages from Dr Noam Chomsky’s book “How the World Works” support and expand on Dr Hudson’s thesis.
====================================================================================
One document to look at if you want to understand your country is Policy Planning Study 23, written by Kennan for the State Department planning staff in 1948. Here’s some of what it says.
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity… To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives… We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better…
Along the same lines, in a briefing for US ambassadors to Latin American countries in 1950, Kennan observed that a major concern of US foreign policy must be “the protection of our [i.e. Latin America’s] raw materials”. We must therefore combat a dangerous heresy which, US intelligence reported, was spreading through Latin America: “the idea that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people”.
US planners call that idea Communism, whatever the actual political views of the people advocating it. They can be church-based self-help groups or whatever, but if they support this heresy, they’re Communists…
Every part of the new world order was assigned a specific function. The industrial countries were to be guided by the “great workshops” – Germany and Japan – who had demonstrated their prowess during the war and now would be working under US supervision.
The Third World was to “fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market” for the industrial capitalist societies, as a 1949 State Department memo put it.
“The Third World was to “fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market” for the industrial capitalist societies, as a 1949 State Department memo put it.”
No different, then, to the policies of the British and the Dutch before them.
There’s that name Kennan though I have it here as spelled H. S. Kenan with an interesting quote as well from Cantelon’s book The Day the Dollar Dies:
“Some of the strongest words that come to my attention were those of Curtis B Dall, written in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 1968, as an introduction to H. S. Kenan’s book on the Federal Reserve Bank. In reference to the international bankers, Mr. Dall writes:
They are driving toward complete control of the worlds long range monetary policy and principal world markets for their own profit. They foment foreign wars to aid this objective.
It is the words of Abraham Lincoln which are the most enlightening surely:
In 1863 he said:
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country;…money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign…until wealth is aggravated into few hands and the republic is destroyed.
Strange in all of this Carrol Quigley however, believes they the international bankers are the hope of the world and we need to trust them? lol?
Next up techno tyranny! I’d suggest reading everything by Scott Howard here:
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/author/scott-howard/
The last death throes of a dying beast.
Ominously, the AngloZionist Empire is not one that will go quietly into that dark night like empires of the past. First of all, it has nukes, lots of them. It is in their chosenite DNA to finally end human history in an apocalyptic conflict that will pit the chosen few (them) against everyone else. Israel calls this the Samson Option and claims it is a last resort. In actually it is Zionism’s ultimate goal. These nukes can be set off anywhere on the planet as they are already deployed in Israeli consulates in every major city. On the bright side, nuclear winter will definitely be the “fix” for global warming.
Yes, Reverend George Soros is mad at China and Russia and, given his extremely parasitic role in society, rightly so. Luckily, he can congratulate himself for having found much more fertile ground right in his own s••thole country of residence that’s now sinking incredibly fast thanks to his Open Society Foundation and its numerous sub-contractors and stormtroopers.
What I find intriguing here Is whether the US Deep State is unconcerned or complicit in this wrecking of the US as a state organism. Sure, the rabid neocons are glowing über-Zionists and Soros is Jewish, and all of them are strongly committed to Russophobia but one would also imagine the current wrecking of the US, especially the trashing of its social cohesion, should appear terrifying to the neocons at a time when Russia has a strong and immensely capable leadership rallying a great majority of the Russian people behind it while winning hearts and minds on a global scale.
If Soros is angry China must be doing it right.
Today in the China Daily, as a reply to his whining in the WS journal, George Soros was described as ‘the son of satan’. When a CCP mouthpiece, normally sharp but still polite, calls him like that then they know with what kind of anomality is dealt with.
“What I find intriguing here Is whether the US Deep State is unconcerned or complicit in this wrecking of the US as a state organism.”
That is a very intriguing question. For quite a while I used to think that TPTB had evil plans, every now and then screwed up by miscalculations and mismanagement on lower levels.
More and more I get the idea that there TPTB are not homogeneous at all, ideas incompatible, ideas made out of fairytale thoughts, and most of all there are a damn whole lot of lower level people who met their Peter Principle; that is that they have already reached their level of incompetence.
When I read about the decline of former empires I used to think why in those times they didn’t see that coming. They were blinded then. So, why would that be ‘different’ this time?
Only now thousands of nukes are at stake. And that’s a scary thought.
Cheers, Rob
”Today in the China Daily, as a reply to his whining in the WS journal, George Soros was described as ‘the son of satan’.”
Lousy anti-Semites, LOL.
Anyhow, what matters is that Soros can continue his favourite pastime undisturbed: bringing the US down from within. His US compatriots seem to know whom they are not supposed to take out with their firearms, thus boosting his arrogance further still.
What we see in the West is a failure of the education system, a failure of understanding how their countries really work compared to the fairy tales.
Not wanting to appear ignorant people pretend to know what the meanimg of words are, and the ideas they represent without knowing anything.
So what any conman and woman wants is ignorance and gullibility, so we have the conman as our representatives.
To Cookie
Bravo! Nothing to add.
“Failure” is incorrect. 100+ years ago, those who owned the universities simply altered the curriculum by erasing the study of political-economy with that called economics. Hudson has covered most of how all that occurred in his other works. The real damage was done long before the dumbing-down of schools.
Are you from US, Cookie? I’m asking this because it could be that the situation you observe is more of a US thing than a “West” one. For example, in Italy where I live, the situation is mixed: some actually live in Lalaland as you said, but others don’t; but the latter just do not have space, nor media coverage (if not to slander them), nor real political organization (still), nor real hope anymore. It’s like being hostages of your own conformism, government and media system. No wonder why school struggles so much.
I’m from a U.S satellite state, the decay in education started about the same time the feminist and hippies took over the education system.
Discipline went out the door, teachers said the students could call them by their first name, nobody failed, stars or elephant stamps for everyone, etc etc.
This gave the child a false sense of the world, and when they went out in the world…it smacked them in the face.
The rest is history.
As I see it, the schooling systems number one job is to teach children to think and question.
Discipline is back in order in the form of censorship.
Problems got little to do with “discipline,” though I understand that self-discipline is a desired good.
It’s all part of a pretty well-documented pattern of decline in history’s empires. Read Sir John Glubb’s work “The Fate of Empires” as it is QUITE telling. What Glubb failed to recognize as being the common failure point was that of growth: ALL operate as open-ended-growth entities; nature doesn’t allow/approve…
Good article!
Reminded me of an earlier article
It was perhaps entirely predictable that Germany with its system of Bismarckian style guided capitalism would emerge to poll position in this imperial club. At the time France had other, imperial and pressing commitments in Algeria and Indo-China, the British had commitments more or less everywhere East of Suez, and even little Belgium had problems in the Congo (Zaire)
Germany had no such incumbrances on its economic development and was thus free to power ahead with its version of guided, bank-funded capitalism, and avoid the pitfalls of Anglo-American financialised capitalism. Under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard Germany’s rebirth was dubbed the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). A far-reaching contract between business and labour unions allowed the rapid rebuilding of industry and strong growth, creating the foundations of an economic powerhouse.
Francis Lee for the Saker Blog Wither Germany.
The bottom line is simple;
In the West, Money controls Power… in the East, that is in China, Power controls Money.
This is clearly a historical fact; in Europe, small kingdoms proliferated, and ‘Kings’ needed to borrow to finance their adventures; thus they turned to money lenders… and got to be controlled by owners of money.
In China, the Emperor had all the power (plus most of the money) and there were no competing ‘Kingdoms’… therefore his word was law.
In China, seriously corrupt officials are executed. In the West, seriously corrupt officials write the rules…
As a long time student of Hudson, it appears he’s been influenced by Alastair Crooke’s latest series of essays (see here and here and here ) with his hint that Neoliberal policy choices are “not a product of inevitable technological determinism.”
It’s not all roses for the EU’s Neoliberals as Crooke explains in the first linked essay, although their problem differs from the dead end in which the Fed has mired itself. A consensus is growing that the Outlaw US Empire aims to extricate itself from its financial dilemma by waging war with China. But first we get to see what happens at the CSTO and SCO Summits followed by the annual UNGA Debates, all of which will serve to sharpen the focus of the Global Arc of Resistance at the expense of the Outlaw US Empire and its few remaining vassals.
The author spells out very clearly and succinctly (he even went through trouble to define definitions – the reality of them) that we are currently living in a well planned out deception.
It is on a global scale illusion,and no one is acknowledging it (in power)- but this exists in all areas of society they all interlink at some point- a centralized illusion if you well- with lots of thinking and planning.
I do not see what more he could do- the writing is clear / to the point. He makes sense.
The hard part comes when one tries to square “ones perception” with this “reality,” because then the dominos start to fall one by one until one starts to realize our concepts we take for granted are well thought out pre- planed in nature constructs- they did not evolve out of thin air (yes this is evil- it does exist)
If one does enough searching the planners tend to narrow in scope, it repeats through history, the same patterns, over and over, it seems very consistent, almost logical in the trail it leaves. It is not obvious because we are used to discussing topics in terms of what we see in front of us, (not how it got there) we are taught this :
We view “civilization” as moving with capital through means of expansion as “normal” as “humans progression” but do not recognize or acknowledge it is out of sink with what a Creator expects or advises.
Those who are the key drivers of this expansion = “modern civilization” acknowledge very openly what they are doing is “evil” they simply do not care, because their control of modern thought has expanded over the past centuries to expand corrupting ever aspect of thought (brainwashing).
Not just happy controlling the concept of “expansion” = “civilization” ( see British empire) they have to control every aspect of social life and “culture” even religion and gender thoughts.
Our modern civilization has lost all connection with a Creator. This is the “normal.” A soul you say? You are crazy?
Nothing is more “crazy” then printing money on riba, (forbidden) where the money never exists to pay it back.
Now we are all suffering as the riba monster has all ready taken over all forms of modern “thought” corrupting everything.
I am sorry to state reality, but the planners are very happy when we do not acknowledge our current plight, they know exactly what and how we think (they are there to steer us in the wrong direction).
They are not in sink with God nor do they ever plan to be.
Hudson’s coup is detailing how the Western Class War between Creditors and Debtors got launched and continued on down through the ages to today–a course of 4,000+ years. Moral philosophers and the political-economists that followed them tried hard to turn the issue around beginning with whoever represented the historical Jesus as Hudson depicts in … and Forgive Them Their Debts. If the Roman Church had been a moral institution, it might have succeeded where Jesus failed, but as we now know it was just as corrupt as the Empire it served, and continued as such until today.
The situation at the core of the Outlaw US Empire today is dire as the USA faces bankruptcy, which means the parasites will have finally killed their host. IMO, time still exists to stave-off that outcome. But false hopes like Trump or Sanders aren’t the answer. IMO, a genuine Conservative-Humanist Revolution is required, not the Establishment contrived Woke garbage which doesn’t address economic reality whatsoever. The USA could become the next China or Russia but not without massive change that retains humanistic values centered on families and communities–the very policies Putin’s Russia is implementing.
Empires have been ruled by men, women, children and under all sorts of ideologies, yet, they ALL FAIL. Got nothing to do with following some “god” or whatnot. That thinking removes one from seeing the actual issue: growth- perpetual growth on a finite planet; unless one’s “god” is going to offer up an infinite number of planets to reside on this equation is doomed to fail.
Hudson is great on being able to expose the flaws, but his solutions still fail to address GROWTH.
Go Forth And Multiply – Really bad advice w/o providing some stopping point (bad instruction)
The matrix is The social construction of reality and the antidote is Reality beyond social constructs.
The Matrix was a movie designed to deceive not inform. Hollywood (“a hollow wood” meant to cast spells of deception, that is where the term Hollywood came from).
I was not referencing it by any means- I was basing mine on Cabolistic practice, its origins, thru it’s evolution with the Templers, Masons, (always run by Jews at the highest levels) their control of the printing press (central banks) thru their expansion into various world agencies (that is always expanding/ and mostly hidden from public view).
There is a consistent money trail of control in each century going forward- that gets worse and worse until you reach the present day because the entire point of controlling money was to sneak in through the back door control of ideology -to make you and everyone else Godlessness without your becoming awear of it.
This is the real but hidden objective- the end goal is purely evil (not capitalistic nor academic).
One last racket: contemporary feminism, chiefly in America, (later globally) were innovated, pioneered, and led by Jewish women.
Russia was imperial power. But Russia mainly colonized empty lands or settled with small tribes in Siberia.
No genocide , those tribes today live normally and they culture and languages are protected.
And they are very loyal and well integrated in Russia.
Caucasus is a bit different story but they also have their republics and culture protected.
It is very hard to compare Russia and West. But as we can see, states and peoples of EX-USSR did not show any gratitude to Russia, just opposite. They hate and despise Russia and Russians. After collapse of USSR, in former republics of USSR, ethnic Russians experienced genocide, prosecution and extreme non-respect of their rights and language.
So it looks like that western countries were right to be cruel toward ex-colonies, because today they adore and respect their former masters.
Western colonial past … it was one step in historical development … I think that it could not be avoided.
Structurally Russia is an imperial power.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Isn’t that the ‘modus operandi’ of the ‘faustian’ ‘collective West’?
Crimean Tatars for example. For centuries their economy was based on attacking Slavic settlements, killing, slaughtering and taking young boys and girls to slavery, they were sold on markets in Ottoman Empire.
If they did that to Brits or Germans, Tatars would later be completely exterminated to the last one.
Brits or Germans would not be so generous toward Tatars like Russians.
Excellent article. The fact that we find Mr. Hudson in The Saker and the Unz Review and not in any mainstream publications shows how far gone the US and West are. His definitions and clarity of prose are remarkable. The Orwellian doublespeak the Rentier class has fostered in the US has rendered it difficult to have a serious discussion about political economy as most Americans are unaware that their economic “concepts” are basically propaganda constructs.
I think it was pretty much out the window during Chomsky’s heydays.
pls corrent me if I am wrong –
to date, in china, blackStone bail out but blackRock is on the guest list open for business
why? why Rock and not Stone?
can anyone explain this to me?
also, what is ‘technological determinism’? how do you read this? mayb MH should give us his definition :)
tqvm :)
bwbs
Financialism is essentially where an ‘elite’ group gets to borrow at advantageous rates [and never really has to pay back, just borrows more at an advantageous rate to ‘settle’ the debt] and everyone else has to find a way to service that ‘elites’ needs to access credit/the means of exchange. Meanwhile insiders just ‘borrow’ more at privilidged rates, buy real resources which has the effect of driving up the price of that asset class, use that resource/asset as collateral to borrow more, rinse repeat until the entire economy belongs to that narrow set. This effect is multiplied if you ‘own’ the international means of exchange, and spreads into every corner which can be persuaded to take on debt in that currency. China with it’s digital currency could now, should it wish, extend the best credit terms equally to all it’s citizens, and use this as a hedge against any externally forced downturn of trade. The irony of sanctions forcing an upgrade of living standards almost makes me smile. There’s a current post at https://wolfstreet.com/ [Evergrande] which suggests, to me, that China may be considering crashing the wests economy through the dependency it has foisted on some of it’s western investors. Or is it just teasing?
Michael Hudsons’s essays are of the greatest value and he especially deserves great credit for openly taking on George Soros, the last of the Mt. Pelerin neoliberals who have tirelessly paved the real road to serfdom. The political association, celebrated by the Greek philosophers and uncountable luminaries ever since is the heart of Western civilisation (please note that I’m not celebrating this) but these uber liberals are in fact trying to bury it. Hence we are subjected to the shrill rhetoric declaiming populist authoritarian regimes threatening our ‘open society’ with deplorable fascism. Neoliberalism is an ideological brand name for oligarchy, that is, rich people who aim to exploit every thing and every body for their private gain. What is of the essence for these people is the ability to ‘offshore’ their plunder to be buried somewhere in unmarked locations known only to the esoteric wizards of Price Waterhouse Inc. This is the essence of their universalistic cosmopolitanism. The rights of refugees, the heart throb of neoliberal moralists runs cover for this rentier ransacking of so many economies and the removal of their wealth. But point: neoliberals hate and fear the political associaiton, which alone has the power to defeat it.
States under the dead hand of the West are economically crippled by captured institutions (IMF, WB) that in dozens of ways forbid any real political autonomy for developing nations and thus the ability to manage their own economic development. Those that tried: Allende, Morales, and Chavez on the left or Gadaffi, S. Hussein, or Assad have had to endure the furys. We might note in passing that the prime development of modernity, the sovereign secular state, the developmental state, is presently banned in the West and survives only at the margins where it might enjoy some degree of protection from the rising SCO powers. It is actually they who are likely to preserve the real legacy of the modern West.
We are exposed to the rhetoric of neoliberal operatives talking up freedom while talking down authoritarian despotism. We need to be clear that the real situation is one where the genuine legacy of the modern west is being attacked by oligarchic criminals who are the real authors of corruptions and crimes that would be too long to list in this brief notice. This legacy is presently being preserved in China and Russia especially. They are not our enemies. Our enemies are those who have hijacked our governments, plunging our political associations into an abyss of debt, and all with the aim of privatising what little is left of ‘our democracies’.
I was a Bretton Woods baby, born in 1944. Interestingly enough a Labour Government was elected in the following year and embarked on the type of state capitalism which Mr Hudson endorses. Basic industries were nationalised: Coal, Transport, Iron and Steel, Health (National Health Service NHS), Public Utilities – Gas, Water, Electricity, Post Office, the Bank of England … and so on and so forth. The Labour government narrowly lost the 1951 to the Conservatives. The interesting thing was that the incoming administration never attempted to reverse these policies until the great neo-liberal counter-revolution began by Mrs Thatcher in 1979.
This social-democratic (or state-capitalist) if you will, was the norm in the Western world during what the French called Les Trente Glorieuses, the golden age 1945-1975. From the late 1970s, when the US went (or was forced) off the gold standard in 1971. That was the beginning of the end for the old order. The new order effectively began in the early 80s with the establishment of the Thatcher-Reagan coup and still continues to the present day.
The New Order of the type which Hudson’s bemoans, wasn’t all bad, unfortunately however, it did have inbuilt destructive mechanisms: the growth and spread of monopoly/oligopoly, an increasing and parasitic growth of the financial sector and the boom-and-bust propensities which became increasingly severe and extensive – 2001, 2008, 2020 ongoing. It can’t last and it won’t .
Just peruse the writings of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Fred Engels, and in the 20th century John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Alois Schumpeter.
Alas these great theorists are seldom read and that is why we are in the position we are in.
What a major Tour de Force. If I read Michael Hudson, I keep getting the idea of someone with a Kalashnikov shooting words that find their mark like bullets.
After this, if someone does not yet understand the two forces in our economic world, I would suggest read and read this until understanding dawns. Hudson’s prior writing on this also can be read yet again.
/george-soross-dream-to-turn-china-into-a-neoliberal-grabitization-opportunity/
What he does here, is to outline the weapons of the economic war – the ones used by Mr.Global or TPTB. If these weapons are made non-effective, in my view a huge stumbling block for the world will be removed. Seems to me this process is well on its way and the Belt and Road and concepts of Common Prosperity are the counter weapons. And then, we are also well into dedollarization.
“…seeking to make financial returns for their investors instead of treating China as an enemy state and looming Cold War adversary”
From this excelent writing transpires that anticipated factions in US ruling class are beginning to emerge from fog.
The faction that has deep roots in former British Empire and other Euro royalties are obsessed with conquering EuroAsia. At any cost, with only one exception. They do not have to pay the bill.
Of course if they put Siberian resources and Chinese workforce on the list of their assets, it will pay off generously.
But, as Spartans would say: “If”.
The other facton wants do deal with World as bankers and businessmen do. (At present, at terms that are so unfair that outcome can be worse than being conquered.)
Both groups are absolutely indifferent that neither is acceptable for anyone in the World, except by force. China and Russia are not countries that can be forced, and that creates unbearable conflict in Western political mind.
Resulting “bipolar disorder” manifests through ever-changing positions in foreign policy voiced by POTUSes. They do not create policy. Most likely, they do not think anything. They say what lobbyists tell them to. When one faction surpasses other in donation, narative changes. Everything else stays just the same.
Since US internal struggles are irrelevant , Russia and China should mind their own business and keep their gunpowder dry. Just in case.
Mr. Hudson has within the past week been interviewed by Max Keiser on the second halves of two episodes of “The Keiser Report” on RT.
Part 1 is here:
https://www.rt.com/shows/keiser-report/534242-zero-rates-causing-deflation/
Part 2 is here:
https://www.rt.com/shows/keiser-report/534465-security-industry-profits-attack-september11/
My favorite words from Hudson:
_________
“… the (US) trade balance and the investment balance really isn’t the problem. Almost the entire problem with the American balance of payments like the budget deficit is the military spending. Well, regarding your question about Afghanistan, that was supposed to have cost two trillion dollars. Hardly any of this was given to Afghanistan. It was all spent in the United States. So, basically, the cause of all of that is the military industrial complex. And the military industrial complex operates on a cost-plus basis. In other words, it maximizes the cost of the weapons it produces .. like the F-35 ,,.ah and the mark-up on how much it’s able to spend. So, ah, the military industrial complex told the government two things. We need to make our profits and employ labor by building these weapons……………you have a choice. You can either drop them into the Pacific Ocean, or you can drop them into Afghanistan. So we dropped the weapons into Afghanistan. And, as far as the military is concerned, OK, we’ve already spent the money on the weapons, given the profits to Raytheon, Boeing and ah the other US companies, so it doesn’t matter what happens to them. So, they’ve left them in Afghanistan and who knows what Afghanistan is going to use them for. It certainly is not going to use the airplanes or helicopters to attack the United States. The US doesn’t care. All it cares (about) is that it paid campaign contributors … the military …. for these weapons …….. and it’s sort of a circular flow between the US government and the military producers and all of this … and the contractors and all of the generals who got rich off all of this.”
______
Mr. Hudson is far from the first person to have noticed that there is a relationship between government spending of borrowed, printed-out-of-thin-air “money” (money issued by fiat) on the military industrial complex and perpetual war. Each requires the other. George Kennan explained exactly why the US vitally needs perpetual war just a few short years before the end of the Soviet Union. What he said is even more true today.
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
To drive home the true seriousness of what Kennan said decades ago, we have the two options that Mr. Hudson said that the war corporations offer to the US government when it comes time to decide what to do with the weapons that they have just created: “either drop them in the Pacific Ocean or you can drop them on Afghanistan”.
Why didn’t/doesn’t “the government” choose to drop them into the Pacific Ocean, year after year, perpetually, instead of conducting perpetual wars — wars which are going to inevitably lead to all-out nuclear war and all of its consequences?
It didn’t/doesn’t/and never will choose to drop them into the Pacific Ocean (the way it drops money and manpower and resources and manufactured stuff onto those 800 military bases around the world year after year after year) because this bald-faced insanity would be noticed by everyone who has even one single functioning brain cell and they’d ask “why are you doing that?” And then some Kennan-clone would have to say, if he spoke the truth (which he/she/it never will), exactly what Kennan said back in the mid-1980s — that the US economy would be unacceptably shocked without that “defense” spending of fiat USD going on literally forever. In other words, that the US whatever-you-want-to-call-it economic system could not continue to rob the rest of the world blind; keep tens of millions of US voters employed; and keep prices of stocks on the stock market and homes on the housing market propped up, if that DoD war-spending/borrowing did not go on, year after year after year, literally forever.
People might actually begin to understand that, as crazy as it sounds (and actually is), perpetual war is a dystopian jobs program in a psychopathic nation called The United States Of America. And, right along with that, the US military literally forces other nations to accept a literally infinite number of fiat USD as payment-in-full for their REAL products and natural resources. Under the present arrangement, the US Fed and other central banks can, literally, hand freshly-printed money to “primary dealers”, hedge funds, etc. to buy the world. Anyone else see a problem with this present arrangement?
Therefore, if China, Russia and other nations were to announce to the world in 2021 (in the exactly same way that Nixon announced to the world in 1971 that US treasuries were no long redeemable in gold) that in one week they will no longer sell their natural resources and manufactured products, etc. to US consumers and investors for freshly printed USD, and will henceforth only accept, say, gold (as final settlement), or proceed from that day forward on a strict barter system (for example, a certain weight or volume of oil for a certain weight of, say, wheat, etc.), the US’s war-based economy would collapse literally overnight.
IMO, this announcement would have a far greater effect on the world in 2021 than that of The Nixon Shock in 1971, but making such an announcement today would be far better in the short and long term, especially the former, than either staying the present course or conducting a slow-to-the-point-of-no strategy of de-dollarization, and inevitably having to either conduct a well-justified preemptive nuclear first-strike on the US out of self-preservation, or, more likely, retaliate in kind to a nuclear first-strike by the US, albeit after a long series of false flag “attacks on US national security, interests or foreign policy” (of robbing the world blind) to which the US will be forced to respond.
But China and Russia and other nations are not going to make such an announcement because the US is an important part of a “world market” for THIER exports (some of which is selling weapons to the non-US part of the world market). Doing that would almost certainly hurt THEIR profit-based capitalist economies, which, by vital necessity, must ALSO grow in perpetuity. Anyone else see a problem with this present arrangement?
It also does not help the cause of stopping the US’s behavior that investors of all types, from many places around the world, continue to buy US treasuries and, knowingly or unknowingly, by so doing, invest in US war corporations (or invest in mutual funds and other investment vehicles that invest in either treasuries or US war corporations). Anyone who does this is enabling and assisting/demanding the US to continue carrying out world-wide murder and robbery.
In short, the rest of the world has somehow got to stop feeding the Great White Shark and, ironically, figure out how to live, literally survive, without feeding its insatiable appetite for imports and using its USD. To me that means having to first develop a stand-alone economy and, only after that is accomplished, to maybe start trading with other nations – again, preferably using a good-for-good barter system rather than using national currencies as a means of final settlement.
The truly sad thing is that some people actually live, or have lived, their lives guided by the golden rule ……….. and then along comes/came either the Great White Shark or one of its disgusting pilot fish, with their take-it-or-die investment opportunities and their WMD-guaranteed rates of return (and ensuing SWIFT descent into slavery). What should they do? Defend themselves, of course! And how should they do that? Once again with feeling, do not in any way feed the Great White Shark! Starve it! BDS it! I think that Iran probably gives the best example of how to swim in the same ocean with the Great White Shark and survive…….. so far, anyway.
Soros is the front-man agent for the EU & some US & UK moneychangers.
That lot of swine sequentially build up economies and markets then tear them down to come in and buy things up at 5 cents on the dollar.
Currently they are trying to tear down China (having failed to do it to Russia because Putin and his people are too clever for them) for the same old racket, because of plans for Eurasian currency and trading block. and for other reasons. Climate change, pandemics etc.. is part of this game plan.
They talk free markets only to the extent they can rig them and use them to their ends.
They never believe in or want truly free markets.
And for this reason countries should outlaw people like Soros.
He will try and pull the same stuff on Sth American countries including Brazil when conditions are right.
CHINA TO USA: DON’T PICK ON THE WEAK. TRY US…
On Soros, Alaska, Japan, SOHO, Schwarzman, Solomon, Fink, Blackstone, Goldman, Biden, and the Day the Lights went out in Taiwan and America’s War with China that the Chinese hope will happen: The Battle of Taiwan
SOROS DOG AND PONY SHOW
Like America, George Soros never had the balls to take on the Chinese. Even when doing so, it was never face-to-face so that, from an ocean away, he’d make it appear as freedom-of-Press criticism, like dogs snarling while still chained to the pole of a torii 鳥居, which is the Financial Times (FT). Some days later the US was to use Taiwan. Again. But, instead of simply changing right off the official status of Taipei Cultural and Economic Representative Office to Taiwan Representative Office, they’d let out the FT. That time, barking again, too.
Defeated at every turn – from Xinjiang to Hong Kong; going nowhere with Kabul to Myanmar, Hanoi to Manila; unable to strangle to death the stoic Meng Wanzhou, our dear, dear tongbao同胞 who must suffer the pains of an entire Chinese nation, defeated even by some little virus named Covid-19 – America has turned into a demented, runaway mad woman, each morning dashing down the market street shouting curses at everyone. (That’s an old Chinese saying.)
Michael Hudson, to whom we own a debt of gratitude, should not bother with those theories in this article. Surely, he knows it: they are valid and pertinent talking points, yes, but they don’t matter and it ain’t about those things. People make of them as they would, for Reason follows the Will (Schopenhauer). This is as sure as the sun rises in the East.
RUNNING DOWN ALIBABA’S MARKET STREET
We had our replies to Soros ready long before that busy week of September he wrote us, not once but thrice, via Wall Street and City of London. For three calumny letters, we packaged-return three of China’s biggest companies, which holds the top five wealthiest individuals: You like, Georgie? Did we miss out any? Here they are, below, all the rentier class (the western names, in italics, on the right side of the semi-colon are their American connections with whom you, Michael Hudson, might be more familiar than we are.)
Evergrande. Gross asset 2.3 trillion yuan (US$358 bn): Wu Jiayin许家印 : Blackstone, MB Asia Real Estate Fund, HSBC, Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKSE). Bankruptcy rumors spread. All at once, every bank and creditor in town is knocking on its doors. During which we drop it from HK$11 a share to HK$3. Sep 12 morning came, some 700 investors and creditors crammed into its Guangzhou headoffice, looking for scalps. After some calls, police turned up, and stood by as two of Wu’s senior managers lay sprawled on the front entrance: “Disturbance? What disturbance? Only ordinary people exercising their democratic rights to a free market and freedom of expression. Isn’t that a good thing?”
SOHO China. Gross asset 70.7billion yuan (US$11bn): Pan Shiyi 潘石屹 & Zhang Xin 张欣 (American nationality): Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, Harvard, HKSE. On the morning that Joe Biden, officers of the State Administration for Market Supervision 国家市场监督管理总 visited the couple at their Beijing offices. “Sir, Madame, Our visit is in regards to our Jul 30 notice to you. Have you paid it any consideration? We are here to collect your ledgers and account books to assist in our investigations. Can you co-operate with us, please?” Later that day, we watched them enter the boarding gates for a flight to New York. Something about the US Open. Next morning, there they were, on China Television watching the final set. How nice: No Covid-19 quarantine! We don’t think they will coming back anytime soon, if at all and if they can help it. Dropped from HK$4.40 a share to HK$2.20.
Alipay / Alibaba. Net asset US$457 bn: Jack Ma, Pony Ma, Joseph Tsai (Canadian nationality also named, in Taiwan, Tsai Chung-Hsin / Cai Chongxin 蔡崇信. (Canadian nationality. Hong Kong green card.) – Goldman Sachs, Quantum Fund, Soros, Yale, HKSE. An old story, but for update, It’s going to be chopped up like slabs of pig meat then hung up in its pieces for sale in the market. Dropped from HK$210 to HK$158.
“And we are not done yet, Georgie. Did you not tell the world to avoid China’s financial markets? Well, why bother? Surely you can’t be that stupid when we ourselves are doing it, even showing the way.”
In the old days, we have a far more poetic name for such punishments meted out to betrayers: 五马分尸 wuma fenshi, torn asunder strapped to five horses going in five directions. After which, we’d collect and leave their scalps on the front gateway by the lit watch tower for their marauding barbarian masters to pick up on their next visit, invasion actually. Surely, that which had hurt Soros the most must have been Jack Ma, his Chinaman protege with a big mouth and China’s wealthiest, now reduced to practising silent taiji 太極拳 so he wouldn’t turn mad running down Alibaba’s marketplace.
Ah…! All these Jacks and Ponies and Sorrows… in a Soros dog and pony circus show. But, do note the HKSE in all three groups above. Being busy for the moment, we’d prefer to deal with it later, if you don’t mind.
ANGLO-AMERICA TO CHINA: SUBMIT OR DIE
If one finds names being named here then it’s because:
One, those names suggest to you what we Chinese are up against yesterday, today and tomorrow, the neo-liberal, financial and rentier class that we have let into our ranks and thence permit to flourish in our land;
Two, the fight is today out in the open, so what the heck; and,
Three, both the ramifications and the stakes are eventually global, systemic, material, affecting life and death. Billions of lives, real lives, and not just in China, are at stake and so make our efforts dead serious.
There is actually more to be said about events taking place within the financial/rentier class. And, if you read Chinese, you’d find our efforts ongoing, for example, in Hong Kong as well. Everyday – and one means everyday, without exception – before the sun rises, somebody is knocking on doors, somebody else is pulled up, goes on trial, jailed. It’s now a Daoist dictum happening: The more one works, the more there is to be done, and needs done. Why…! This penetration of sewer filth is everywhere. Take Lee Cheuk-yan 李卓人 . By profession, the Anglo Press, will tell you he is a “unionist and activist” – a good man, they seem to say, with a heart for the poor and downtrodden. Between May 1989 and 2020, the US regime and the CIA, in the name of the National Endowment for Democracy, NED (with small contributions from NED in Norway and Germany) dropped off in his Hong Kong bank accounts US$152 million. And for doing what…?
Talk of landlords and bankers making money in their sleep…. Talk of US dollar power in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). America has only to print the banknote, Citibank doing the rest, and the world will be blown up. At the front row seat of nearly every big daily riots and mayhem in Hong Kong 2019, Lee was there, the same man who took with him (he said so himself) bags of cash, total HK$1 million, to blow up Tiananmen. Beijing on 1989 June 4. His 2021 copy in Afghanistan is ex-president Ashraf Ghani, taking off in a private charter plane with US$146 million with crates of cash on the day of Kabul’s liberation. Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan will be next. As with SOHO’s Pan Shijin and wife, we’d let Tsai leave. But leave the money alone, in China. Those belong to the Motherland.
So vile is this race Anglo-Saxons, they corrupts everything they touch and torches anything that won’t bow to them. Australian prime minister himself admits as much in a recent interview with the German fascist Deutsche Welle. Projected his own, Christian sins on a nation that won’t bow to his God – Morrison by extension and all Anglo-Saxons – he would say:
“The original sin of China committed on Western society is not the one-party dictatorship of the Communist Party, Xinjiang cotton or Hong Kong elections but that China has the potential to surpass the United States to threaten its foundation. Given that prospect, then the only way, the only pre-condition, to preserve American dominance is….” keep China poor.
That wasn’t some isolated policy position of a demented voodoo White man such as Morrison. Immediately below are words of Kiron Skinner, a US State Department official, during a 2019 April briefing on US foreign policy to academics wherein she could barely disguise her racist bigotry even though she is black as charcoal. Karl Marx was at least White, she begins. Hence, said she:
“The Soviet Union and that competition, in a way it was a fight within the Western family.” But China? “It’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”
BACK TO MARX
As early as 2013, both the Chinese government and the senior echelons of the ruling party had resolved to act on the poison and corruption Anglo-America spreads to the world, in China in particular. Here though is the irony: All China need do for it be treated as an enemy of the West, is not to make more weapons, point missiles at Washington DC, and drop bombs at their neighbors. All it needed to do was manage well its country and economy.
We didn’t have the theoretical foundational backing, though, nor could they invoke Das Kapital (1867). Nobody would understand it anyway. Then you turn up, and, along with you, MMT. We dusted off that old book, looking into, in particular, and as had you suggested, Volume 2 and 3. But, Old Marx never gave any suggestion by way of remedy, did you know? (Marx in Chinese is 马克思 ma-ke-si, though we call him, affectionately, 老马, lau ma, Old Horse.)
The economists returning from training in Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge was of no use either; so hopeless were they. In some brain-storming sessions, we’d get liberal answers to problems liberals had themselves created. We were, for example, particularly disappointed – sometimes incensed – with Jin Keyu, daughter of the President of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) Jin Liqun 金立群 , ex-Asian Development Bank, ex-central People’s Bank monetary committee. Received as if a Saint and Deliverer for the Third World, Jin Keyu went all over town, London to New York, and all she could say every time was, liberalize, liberalize, liberalize. By which she means the financial markets. In the end, we were glad she didn’t return to China becoming instead an associate economics professor at Oxford. Master Kong (Confucius) was right: “To learn and not think is lost. To think and not learn is dangerous. ” Jin is in the first Confucian category. Jack Ma et al is in the second.
OF RACIST DIALECTICS
But the combination of Hegelian and Daoist dialectics have been good to us: That is, the questions themselves are half their answers. The remainder was provided in your theories on origins of debt, their ramifications on governance and the international, circular flow of the US current accounts and balance of payments. Needless to say, we didn’t have to finish Das Kapital Volume 2 and 3. Much is found in the following line, wherein you distinguishes (above) “…earned from unearned income, and productive labor and wealth from unproductive and predatory financial and rentier fortunes.” You have no idea… In 2013, that was a revelation.
To remedy those problems arising, it was left of us to improvise, legally, paying in particular attention to rule of law and principles of free market (however defined). All this is why it took us some time. Our actions thus far, such as those against Jack Ma, SOHO and their American cohorts in Goldman and Blackstone, have nothing to do with such absurdities as this, coming from one Rudy Fritsch, a Saker reader: “In China, the Emperor had all the power (plus most of the money) and there were no competing ‘Kingdoms’… therefore his word was law.” This stupid, western trite – where did Fritsch pick that up even assuming he can read Chinese and can write his mother’s name in Chinese? – is never found in our written records, and one could go as far back as 200 BCE to the court historian Sima Qian. For one thing, no emperor has total control of the public purse, influence sometimes. Otherwise, why have the public examinations to build and sustain a bureaucracy?
To be mistaken is one thing, but Fritsch was regurgitating the standard, liberal and Anglophile Press propaganda troll, made deliberately, factually and intentionally wrong. Examples: China is a “repressive dictatorship” (Morrison) without ethos suppressing everything in sight, markets, too. Any good it does for its people becomes a causal agent to endanger the West. Fritsch’s labelling of China is identical in substance, meaning and intent to this Wall Street Journal recent headline, “Beijing Wants BlackRock but Not Capitalism”. How does Joseph Sternberg know? He advises the CPC? This is not opinion masquerading as fact but pure fiction intended to malign the Chinese as a cruel, deceitful race. Our history says otherwise: capitalists in China can be dated as early as 800 CE during the Tang era of mass porcelain and silk production, while capital accumulation were provided from trades in Southeast Asian markets. These are not matters of historical or economic speculations but come from archaeological finds, personal accounts and written records because of the taxes traders and factories must pay. So rich is China’s archives. Private property ownership in China is older than Morrison’s God.
This illustration in mass propaganda inanities, produced even among the well-meaning (as in Fritsch, to whom the Soros, Sternberg, et al write for), brings me to the penultimate point in this reply to you, Michael Hudson.
Fundamentally, that reply has to do with Chinese political and ethical cultures, human relationships, society and governance. It is those ethos that has led China to cut the legs off from SOHO, Evergrande and Alibaba, on the one part, Liu He (刘鹤 vice-premier who lead China’s delegation on trade talks with Donald Trump’s regime) Jean Liu (of Didi Global), Jin Keyu (Oxford) and the like. Yesterday, they were the props of the like of George Soros, Larry Fink (BlackRock), Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone) and David Solomon (Goldman).
DISAPPEARED INTO AMERICA
Before going into that reply, a word about Soros, Fink, et al. For a period, in particularly during the early Obama years, we had admitted this financial class into China’s markets not for the US dollars. Why would we? In the central People’s Bank we have more dollars than we know what to do with, thanks entirely to the sweat and blood of our workers and compatriots and no thanks to Jacks and Jeans?
But the Jacks and Jeans were useful to help build political bridges to the US Congress and White House. It was then hoped that, through their American capital connections, they’d ameliorate the American aggression and belligerence building up. In consequence, we let the Jack and the Joeys, the Jeans and Jins, turn up in Davos, etc, and especially make deals with the American rentier class. Even Liu was permitted to say openly to Fink, please come to China.
Now that the US war against China is presented in clear and present dangerous terms, the entire cast of characters have no use to China as a people or nation. Hence, they have “disappeared” wailed the WSJ, the NBC, and Economist. We laughed at these headlines: Stupid, naive Yank and their Hongkie Anglophiles. It was simply time to stop their gallivanting and bring them home: Remember the Confucian adage, about learning then getting lost, and thinking without learning.
THINGS HAPPEN
Back to my point, which I shall illustrate in a series of events in the week that Evergrande and SOHO were crippled (though we are not done with them yet). Not in any order:
1. Joe Biden called
2. Angela Merkel called
3. US spy plane is chased out of Taiwan
4. Mainland fishermen breaks cordon at Taiwan waters
5. Chinese coast guard vessels slams a Japanese counterpart off Diaoyu islands.
6. Taiwan military exercise codenamed Hanguang closes shop within 30 minutes.
7. DPR Korea test fire its longest range ICBM and nobody hears even a whistling sound.
8. Evergrande faces bankruptcy while Alipay is going to be broken into pieces (Alipay is the former name of Ant Financial, an online digital banking and lending division of Alibaba).
9. Three Chinese warships turned up at the coast of Alaska on a freedom of navigation exercise to spread untrammeled freedom of the seas and American human rights.
On the surface, the events above are unrelated. But not to us Chinese. Rather, the point of contact between one and the other is as clear as day and night. Short and long define and make each other.
Now, for a paragraph on the threads that weave a relationship between, say, the merchant (including financial) class and Chinese warships in Alaska.
In the Confucian order of social status, which runs to five levels, six in certain epochs, the merchants ranked at the bottom of the pecking order, even until as late as the Qing dynasty, ending in 1911. This ranking is informal but deducible in how one addresses the other, say, at a temple gathering. Peasants are a rung higher than merchants. This is not a matter of simple social prejudice nor emotional bias. Our forefathers figured that the farm life requires more intelligence than people who count beans. Over generations peasants have to calculate increasing their yields on a given, fixed plot of land, work out fair land distribution among siblings, rate of water flows to optimize output, seasonal effect on grain harvests and so on. This is why socialism or Marxism is such an appealing political doctrine to the Chinese (and in Indo-China, Viets in particular, and Koreans).
All this is very rational and scientific, the way we organize society. Now take that to answer the question, Why is it people who hold public office, and soldiers in the PLA are considered as public service, have a social status higher than peasants? And peasants have a status higher than capitalists?
MATHS & HEAVEN’S MANDATE
This is classic, Problem No. 26, in the ‘Nine Chapters of the Mathematical Arts’ 九章算术 , compilation of mathematical treatises and problems made in the 800 years between 10th Century BCE and 2nd Century BCE. Problem 26 concerns farm irrigation:
‘A cistern is filled through five canals. Open the first canal and the cistern fills in 1/3 day; with the second, it fills in 1 day; with the third in 2 ½ days; with the fourth in 3 days, and with the fifth in 5 days. If all the canals are opened, how long will it take to fill the cistern?’ (See footnote for the answer.)
In Nine Chapters are geometry, Gaussian elimination maths, fractional and negative numbers, linear and algebraic equations, next to which are all sorts of shapes, prisms, pyramids, tetrahedrons, wedges, cylinders and truncated cones, talking about canals, ditches, dykes, farm roads, and which (Hudson, here’s something for you) the distribution of wealth in Problem 18. This, talking about a monetized economy and wealth distribution, is a millennia before the invention in the West of coinage:
‘There are two piles, one containing 9 gold coins and the other 11 silver coins. The two piles of coins weigh the same. One coin is taken from each pile and put into the other. It is now found that the pile of mainly gold coins weighs 13 units less than the pile of mainly silver coins. Find the weight of a silver coin and of a gold coin.’
The question above is for bureaucrats in charge of taxation and book-keeping. Merchants may make money, and lots of it, but they are not fit to rule for that requires wisdom, knowledge, and culture, none of which the like of Jack Ma or George Soros possess. All that is also to say that, on the one hand, the peasant farmer is foundational to the 5,000-year-long recorded Chinese civilization, producing the Nine Chapters, inspiring the literature of Li Bai 李白 701–762, and the astronomy of Cai Yong 蔡邕 and before him Zhang Cang 張蒼. But, on the other hand, it is bureaucrats who must preside over this civilization and nation farmers had built and soldiers to preserve and defend the same. This is what’s meant by a ‘civilizational state’, the Anglophone term popularized by Martin Jacques but which he could never manage to define clearly.
Recognizing the agrarian role, successive emperors, even Mongol barbarian conquerors, have turned to the Mandate of Heaven for legitimacy that modern-day, ignorant western academics have, like Internet trolls today (such as Rudy Fritsch) who are unable to produce any extract of the Mandate, likened it to the European notion in the Divine Right to Rule. This is patently false. One of the first task of Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of a united China, was to build a 160 li-long irrigation canal (1 li equals about 1 km, and the project’s chief engineer was a man poached from the Chu kingdom he later annexed). Is that characteristic of divine right? At his investiture ceremony at the top of a flight of steps flattened to a concrete platform, Shihuang, raising his sword, would declare: “In the name of Heaven, in the name of the Earth, to which both I declare my allegiance in the service of the people so they would forever prosper and live in peace.” An identical version of that investiture platform can be seen today in Beijing’s Tiananmen. In the English, it’s called the Temple of Heaven.
WAR WITH AMERICA
What’s being laid out above is the penchant of the Chinese State to intervene in the economy. Intervention is not a matter of ideology nor socialist market forces nor economic doctrine but of cultural and civilization necessity both of which are foundational to the Chinese existence. The never-ending role of the State to better the lives of the Chinese is the foremost requisite in governance. It is the existential condition.
Now, return to Morrison or Skinner, even Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, with their Anglo-American campaign to contain and thereafter to cripple China, possibly destroying us. In their campaign, what they and Anglo-America insist is, China or the Communist Party of China cease to be Chinese. And for what? So that they won’t “feel threatened”? If that’s the case, what then is the recourse left for Chinese because the ramifications in their options being presented to us is, Either it’s America or China. And here is our short answer: Let’s be done with your rigmarole. Yes, either you or us, dead or alive. War tomorrow if need be!
Take your best shot, America! Can you see why all 1.4 billion of us Chinese, Jian and I included, are willing to die, shedding the last drop of our blood to destroy America given there’s no other way to preserve the Motherland?
Because the peasant, agrarian culture – land by extension and necessarily – sits at the heart of Chinese consciousness for millennia, onward to political economy today, you can see why Taiwan will be reclaimed no matter what. Including, if it comes to that, flattening every inch of Taiwan. One might have heard this said: ‘We will never take any land that isn’t ours nor will we surrender an inch that belongs to us.’ Hence the Diaoyu island clash with Japan.
That credo of land also explains a number of things: In international relations, China has not in its soul nor psychology to act an imperial or colonial hegemon. This is in contrast to the biblical injunctions to “go forth and multiply” and have “dominion over the world,” but both taken as given in Anglo-American political culture. It explains why the Central government in Beijing have no problem, in both resolve and political will, to fell the like of Jack Ma, and in particular Tsai Ing-wen.
They are today castigated as traitors, not in the sense of betraying the nation or selling out to Americans but because they are acting un-Chinese, in effect betraying the laobaixing老百姓, the old fashion term from the days of the Mandate of Heaven: All life, all power, and all meanings derived thereof come from the land to which they must be returned. If emperors are required to swear on that promise, what more the merchant class and, on their behalf, the 21st Century politicians who never-ending screw the population while cloaked in snake oil salesman slogans of freedom and democracy. Hence, the fishermen breaking the cordon around Taiwan even without coast guard or military support.
JIAN CALLED
On the morning Biden called, Sep 10 Beijing time, SOHO’s Pan Shiyin and CEO wife Zhang Xin were at the airport checking in. Next day, television cameras zoomed in on the couple at the US Open. We had let him go, Jian said. She was reiterating what been on everybody’s mind about tycoons like Jack Ma and Pan Shiyi: “They can go, and please go. But leave the land, the buildings, and the money behind. These things belong to the Motherland.”
All that goes without saying, in particular when framed in the entreaties of the Mandate and in Confucian ethics. Pan Shiyi is not Pan Shiyi without China; he would be nothing. His wife, a loud mouth gold digger, fond of massaging her ego in front of an Anglophone audience, is another kettle of fish though. She is Burmese Chinese. You might take for granted Pan understood the gravity of the Chinese ethical codes and so explain why, like Jack Ma, he has not uttered a word, not since Jul 30 when the State Administration for Market Supervision 国家市场监督管理总局 placed SOHO China under investigations and thereby to torpedo their sale of Chinese property to Blackstone (see screenshot of announcement: https://postimg.cc/v1WqX2NH).
Pan Shiyi’s downfall isn’t, paradoxically, about its association with Blackstone no matter how much Reuters or Bloomberg might twisted it on that angle. It has to do with his life: His son Pan Rui 潘瑞, born 1990 (see this: https://baike.baidu.hk/item/潘瑞/14683891), is wanted by the police for posting fake news about soldiers killed in a 2020 clash with Indian troops on the Himalayan border. He is believed to have absconded to America where he is a national, after her mother. Another is an old associate and real estate tycoon Ren Zhiqiang 任志强 , jailed in 2020 for 18 years for redistributing calumny from CNN and western Press propaganda, in particular that China produced and spread the Covid-19 virus worldwide. American anti-China campaign invariably exposed the fault lines in a circle of Chinese tycoons who, like Soros and Pan, spits on a country they hate but not minding if they milk it.
America’s declared intent to destroy China exposed those fault lines in US-China relations, making it superfluous, hypocritical even, to continue put up with the like of Pan, his family, and others.
ALASKA! ALASKA!
When Biden called he seemed not to have realized that China is finished with America, like it is with Canada and Australia and Britain, indeed the entire Anglo-Saxon world. Xi Jinping only took the call out of politeness. This was in contrast to a dozen prior calls from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and State Secretary Antony Blinken. What was there to talk about. Not even the weather would be a fitting topic so that, to all intents and purposes, America-China relations are done in, remaining only. Why go on with the pretence: Blinken, Bible in one hand, dagger in the other. Hence the flotilla of four Chinese warships showing up in Alaska as return-gesture for the daily US incursions into China’s territorial waters.
China dares America to fire the first shot. After all, that’s what containment has come to: War. America has gone nowhere, whether over Xinjiang cotton boycott, genocide, sanctions; or Hong Kong riots and sanctions, Taiwan, Covid-19, Huawei and abduction of Meng Wanzhou, arrests of scholars and denial of visas to thousands of students returning for the Fall semester.
As America runs out of provocations, it’s left with the dilemma: What will it do when China retakes Taiwan by force? Peaceful unification has been written off.
There is no question, this will happen if not this year, then next.
Jian said she heard the story of the encounter between the PLA and the Taiwanese pilots. Three minutes after one of the F-16Cs were airborne, the latter found to his horror all communications with command base severed. There was just that endless beep, beep sounds. Then in that silence, he senses another plane alongside him. Turning his head, he could see through the cockpit the PLA fighter pilot side-by-side, smiling, and then displaying the Chinese universal sign of a heart.
I know that sign. Each time we parted for our separate workplaces, she would invariably flash it at me, thumb cross over to the forefinger. “What does that mean?” I once asked her. Her reply, “Where have you been this century? Don’t you know?” No, I don’t. I had seen the display often, in particular in group photos and on Weibo chatrooms and douyin (Tiktok) snippets. She giggled, tilted her head and said, Love!
Zhōngqiū jié 中秋节 is round the corner.
AUTUMN FESTIVAL
Until then Taiwan is still safe. But the pilots’ encounter tested the Chinese capability to complete shut down and block the island. During Taiwan’s Hanguang military drill had provided an unprecedented opportunity to test the capability when Taiwan’s airforce scrambled its jets. China’s military sprung into action, proving beyond all doubt that the technology worked.
Once the system is activated and deployed, Jian tells me, Taiwan’s entire mobile phone system will be silenced, planes will fly without aid of direction, radars will produce false alarms, street lights will all turn green simultaneously, power stations will stall, and port signals will just beep, beep, beep… all day long. Hanguang was abandoned after 30 minutes into its exercise, during which time the pilots flew almost as if blind.
Not even the Americans can save Tsai Ing-wen now, though we wish they’d try.
“Are you coming home?” “Yes, I have the tickets.” “Then can you pick up some durians? They are so expensive these days….” “Okay…”
These days, America is wondering what it will do once Taiwan is retaken. They don’t seem to have a clue: It has never happened before, that is, not having to wield the Taiwan card to dunk on China.
We are wondering too what the Americans are going to do. Maybe the US dollar will collapse. Which is fine by us anyway, Jian and I. We are not Jacks and Jeanies, and have nothing in US dollar denominated assets. Maybe property prices will fall in Hong Kong. Maybe Country Garden will go up for sale: 20 cents to a dollar. Maybe Japan will switch sides to China, you know, change big brother. Maybe the US, finding itself vulnerable from Alaska to Tokyo and Singapore will pack up and leave us alone for the next 100 years. When that happens, Jian and I could again go snorkeling, this time in the Spratlys!
“Promise, you will take me?” Jian wants to know. “Yes, promise.”
At the Spratlys I imagine a sign: “Chinese Only! Americans and Dogs not permitted to swim here.”
Not to worry, though, Michael Hudson. I have connections, and I will tell them you are a Friend, a true Friend!
Perhaps, too, that’s why Biden called: Can you at least leave us an airstrip, somewhere…. It’s a long way from Washington DC, you know.
Merkel? O! She wants to know when Audi and BMW can get back into business.
NOTES:
On Evergrande, see: 马云许家印深陷漩涡之中!英国金融时报:北京正式计划拆分支付宝!恒大集团总部被投资者包围,高管被限制自由!许家印称关于恒大破产消息不实!https://youtu.be/wAG54NvFeUk and https://postimg.cc/gallery/wH7JhRm
On the pair of White imitation parrots, Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin at the US Open, looking like Chinaman coolies in ill-fitting clothes at the Albert Hall concert: https://postimg.cc/hX153yR3. Also see: https://www.breakinglatest.news/business/pan-shiyi-and-his-wife-appeared-at-the-us-open-final-after-blackstone-gave-up-acquiring-soho-china-people-cnbeta-com/
On Sternberg: https://www.wsj.com/articles/soros-beijing-blackrock-mutual-fund-savings-housing-bubble-sse-hkex-ccp-xi-jinping-china-11631221987
On Lee Cheuk-yan and his banking receipts from his American paymaster over 20 years: https://postimg.cc/gallery/4Jv4ytb
On Scott Morrison’s remarks: “中国永远相对贫困才能确保西方架构安全” https://youtu.be/7vFYcg4qmhg. On Kiron Skinner’s remarks: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/state-department-preparing-for-clash-of-civilizations-with-china
Answer to Problem 26: 15/74 of a day
On Nine Chapters: https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/illustrating-the-nine-chapters-on-the-mathematical-art-their-use-in-a-college-mathematics-history-1
On the Mandate of Heaven. Because Chinese historical records go so far back and are so detailed and comprehensive, it is today possible to reconstruct in precise detail, down to size of urns, hairpins, hats and music instruments used in an investiture of an emperor 2,500 or 3,000 years ago. In the link (from time stamp 15:00 on) is an example carried out in the Gregorian year 238 BCE, complete with the Mandate of Heaven recitation. After which everyone shout in unison: 大王萬年 dawang wannian! https://youtu.be/lWmiR-T9Rfk.
On China’s visit to Alaska: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202109/1234184.shtml and https://youtu.be/WbBEL6R1qGQ and …
On State Administration for Market Supervision and SOHO China: https://www.dwnews.com/中国/60255922/潘石屹跑路生变SOHO中国卖身计划有新进展图. Also http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202109102092785178.html. For images: https://postimg.cc/XZ7kFhxS, https://postimg.cc/PL3zM4FL.
Thank you for a wonderfully informed and witty comment.
Thanks for your essay! I learned much I did not know about Chinese history, as well as the most recent happenings concerning Alaska and China’s island of Taiwan.
@Yun Lin, thank you for the most timely update..
note to Saker, this piece above deserves to be posted as a stand alone article
Cheers, M
Yun Lin. Enormous Thanks for this.
And agree Leprechaun
Saker this could be a featured comment.
In 1971 David Rockefeller convened a meeting of 300 CEOS of major US corporations in his penthouse in NY. At this meeting were senoir Chinese government officials. Rockefeller instructed the CEOs that they were to invest very heavily in China which is strange to say the least.
Why ? China was and still is the ideological enemy of the most capitalist free enterprise country on Earth.
Yet, these people were giving sustenance to their opponent to build up their industrial infrastructure.
This happened before in Nazi Germany and also after the Bolshevik revolution to kick start the USSR’S industrial and energy infrastructure.
Again, the question is why would arch capitalists build up opponents infrastructure. If anyone thinks it purely about money, I suggest they read the books of Professors Antony C Sutton, Guido Preparata and Carol Quigley!
Industrialists were, along with religions, spear points. Once you break into a country you can then steal away. And the other mechanism was to flood the country with propaganda (make the people rise up to want western crap/culture- it’s like a drug [but harder to combat]).
If anyone has a channel to Hudson I’d like to ask that he read these:
Sir John Glubb – Fate of Empires (a big note from me: Glubb failed to understand the KEY commonality, which was/is perpetual growth; otherwise it’s a definitive accounting of the rise and fall of western empires)
Lewis Mumford – The Myth of the Machine (two book series) (might be the most impressive read I’ve ever run across; human kind’s projection is readily documented here; although the last writing is from the early 1970s it is holding up eerily well- it’s easier now to see it than perhaps back then)