It must be
wonderful being Vladimir Putin and being the most powerful person on earth. And
not even have to say so yourself. The US Democratic Party is saying it for
Putin along with the entirety of the Western presstitute media and the CIA and
FBI also. The Russian media doesn’t have to brag about Putin’s power. Megyn
Kelly, the Western presstitutes, and Western leaders are doing it for
them: Putin is so powerful that he is able to place in office his choice
for the President of the United States.
I mean, Wow!
What power! Americans are simply out of the game. Americans,
despite a massive intelligence budget and 16 separate intelligence services
plus those of its NATO vassals, are no match whatsoever for Vladimir Putin.
I mean,
really! What is the CIA for? What is the NSA for? What are the rest of them
for? Americans would do better to close down these incompetent, but expensive,
“intelligence services” and pay the money to Putin as a bribe not to select our
president. Maybe the CIA should get down on its knees and beg Putin to stop
electing the President of the United States. I mean, how humiliating. I can
hardly stand it. I thought we are the “world’s sole superpower, the uni-power,
the exceptional, indispensable people.” It turns out that we are a
nothing people, ruled by the President of Russia.
When the
Democrats, CIA and media decided to launch their PR campaign against Trump,
they didn’t realize how inconsequential it would make the United States appear
by putting American democracy into Putin’s pocket. What were they thinking?
They weren’t. They were fixated on making sure Trump did not endanger the
massive military/security complex budget by restoring normal relations with
Russia.
There is no sign that American leadership in any area is
actually capable of thought. Consider Wall Street and corporate leadership. To
boost share prices Wall Street forced all corporations to desert their home
country and move the production of goods and services sold to Americans
offshore to where labor and regulatory costs were lower. The lower costs raised
profits and share prices. Wall Street threatened resistant corporations with
takeovers of the companies if they refused to move abroad in order to increase
their profits.
Neither Wall Street nor corporate boards and CEOs were smart
enough to understand that moving jobs offshore also moved US consumer incomes
and purchasing power offshore. In other words, the financial and business
leadership were too stupid to comprehend that without the incomes from high
value-added, high productivity US jobs, the American consumer would not have
the discretionary income to continue in his role as the economy’s driver.
The Federal Reserve caught on to Wall Street’s mistake. To
rectify the mistake, the Fed expanded credit, allowing a buildup in consumer
debt to keep the economy going on credit purchases. However, once consumer debt
is high relative to income, the ability to buy more stuff departs. In other
words, credit expansion is not a permanent fix for the lack of consumer income
growth.
A country whose financial and business leadership is too stupid
to understand that a population increasingly employed in part-time minimum wage
jobs is not a big spending population is a country whose leadership has failed.
It is
strictly impossible to boost profits by offshoring jobs without also offshoring
US consumer incomes. Therefore, the profits from offshoring are temporary. Once
enough jobs have been moved offshore that aggregate demand is stymied, the
domestic market stagnates and then declines.
As I have demonstrated so many times for so many years, as has
John Williams (shadowstats.com), the jobs reports from the US Bureau of Labor
Statistics are nonsense. The jobs in the alleged recovery from June 2009 are
largely low-income domestic service jobs and the product of the theoretical
birth/death model. The alleged recovery from the 2007-08 financial crisis is
the first recovery in history in which the labor force participation rate
declined. Labor force participation rates decline when the economy offers scant
job opportunities, not when employment opportunities are rising.
What we
know about US jobs is that the jobs are increasingly part-time minimum wage
jobs. According to a presstitute news report that might or might not be true,
there are only 12 counties in the entirety of the United States in which a
person can rent a one-bedroom home on a minimum wage income.
In response to this report, a professor at Virginia Tech
suggested that the government offer increased rental assistance and boost
programs such as the National Housing Trust Fund, which invests in affordable
housing.
In other words, taxpayers are to pick up the costs to Americans
of US corporations deserting the US labor force. Those Americans who still have
middle-class incomes will be taxed to cover the lost incomes that the
offshoring corporations and Wall Street have snatched away from American
workers who can no longer earn enough to pay for their own housing.
In other words, capitalism has reached the point in its descent
that it cannot exist without public subsidies for the people dispossessed by
capitalism.
On a
number of occasions, I have written about how many costs of production are
imposed on third parties, such as the environment. A significant percentage of
the profits of capitalist corporations comes from the political and legal
ability of the corporations to impose their costs of production on third
parties. In other words, capitalism makes money because it can impose its costs
of production on the environment and on people who do not share in the profits.
I have provided many examples of this, especially in the area of real estate
development. The developer is able to shift a large part of his costs to
others.
This cost shifting has now reached the level of inducing
Armaggedon. There is an effort to impeach Trump and put the warmonger VP Pence
in the presidency. As Trump campaigned on restoring normal relations with
Russia, a defeat of the attempt to reduce tensions would reinforce the recent
conclusion of the Russian military high command that Washington is planning a
first strike nuclear attack on Russia.
This is the risk that the entire world faces due to the
dependence of the power and profit of the US military/security complex on war
and enemies.
In other words, there is only one remaining rationale for the
existence of the United States of America — the interests of the
military/security complex — and these interests require a powerful enemy
whether real or orchestrated.
Former CIA official John Stockwell wrote: “It is the function of
the CIA to keep the world unstable and to propagandize and teach the American
people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on
arms.” The hatred and distrust of Russia that the West is currently being
force-fed reflects Stockwell’s revelation, as does the orchestrated hatred and
distrust of Muslims that has supported Washington’s destruction in whole or
part of seven countries and trillions of dollars in new US war debt.
Globalism, that is, labor arbitrage across national boundaries,
and financialization, the diversion of consumers’ incomes into interest and
fees to banks, have wrecked the US economy. The “opportunity society” has
vanished. Children have poorer economic prospects than their parents. The
offshoring of manufacturing and professional service jobs such as IT and software
engineering has collapsed the growth of aggregate demand in the US. The Federal
Reserve’s credit expansion was only a temporary reprieve.
Formerly
prosperous areas are in ruins. States’ budgets and pension systems are failing.
There is no payoff to a university education. Americans’ economic prospects
have been erased by globalism. Getting ahead requires connections as it did in
the aristocratic systems. The high concentration of income and wealth has
negated democracy. The government is only accountable to the rich.
American political and business leadership not only destroyed
the image of US sovereignty by placing American democracy in Putin’s pocket but
also destroyed the formerly vibrant American economy, once the envy of the
world.
Where can Americans find leadership? Certainly not in the
Democratic Party, nor in the Republican Party, nor in the media, nor in the
corporate community. How then does the US compete with Russia and China, two
countries with good leadership? Is war the only answer to the question?
Paul Craig
Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of
prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored
with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the
protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.
Copyright © 2017 Paul Craig Roberts
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