First a review - Who Rules Us? - The basic problem in America, therefore, isn’t Democratic versus Republican; it is instead democracy versus dictatorship. And this problem exists within each Party: each Party is controlled by its billionaires, not by its voting-public.
Next question - Who Wants
War? - Did
anyone ask you? Have you ever asked the
fundamental question?
General
Butler - War Is A Racket - “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during
that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big
Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a
gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for
American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for
the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of
half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I
helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers
in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar
interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit
companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went
on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few
hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I
operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket: The
Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
But what about the War on Terror? The
War on Terror? No – It’s actually a war on world trade – by America!
……and it is going on right NOW: Stranger things have happened in modern
history. Now appears to be the time for the Arab world to be finally ready to
join the
Quad that really matters: Russia, India, China, and Iran.
So how did we get here? History:
The
war in Ukraine is not really about Ukraine - There are two major reasons
that war has come to eastern Europe, and they have very little to do with
Ukraine or the horrible sufferings of the Ukrainian population.
But they have everything to do with Russia, its president, and Russia’s
current position in the
context of global politics and the heretofore inexorable advance of American
globalist hegemony.
Western Civilization was usurped by parasites - In
creating what became the Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land
and, in due course, the political system. It
abolished royal or civic authority, shifted the fiscal burden onto the lower
classes, and ran the population and industry into debt. – M. Hudson - But running the population, industry and even governments
into debt to an oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which is now trying to impose
the modern variant of this debt-based economic regime – U.S.-centered
neoliberal finance capitalism – on the entire world. That is what today’s New
Cold War is all about.
So
why do you not know or understand this?
At any rate, it is incredible that most people
haven’t a clue as to why the current world-and-time is so extraordinary,
amazing, and awesome. Part of the reason is, as stated earlier, most people
fail to see the big picture because they are fixated on personal things. They
care mostly about their jobs, family, and friends. Or, they are distracted by
leisure and entertainment, especially as there’s plenty of those for people who
don’t want to face reality. But, it’s also because people fail to see the significance
of the period they are a part of unless it is over and can be reappraised with
greater perspective.
So how did/do our rulers declare war on us? A
summary by Michael Hudson: Well, the world economy is now fracturing between two parts, the
United States and Europe is the dollarized part. And this Western neoliberal
unit is driving Eurasia and most of the Global South into a separate group. The conflict really is between
finance capitalism in the United States and Europe against other countries –
China, Russia, Iran, India – that are following the more traditional ethic and
strategy of industrial capitalism.
The question is: how are countries going to be economically
planned? Because every economy is planned by somebody. In the United States, the central planning has been
taken out of the hands of government and put in Wall Street. In the City of
London. A very rightwing philosophy. In other countries, there is a mixed economy – China and the rest of
Eurasia – and their objective of planning and money creation and credit is
to create industrial capital to create the means of production.
Obviously, also environmental cleanup now, not merely the means of
production but an overall economic system, not simply to make fictitious
capital, finance capital, without any reference to the industrial capital base,
the earning of labor and industry together.
So there are two economic philosophies and I began the book by
contrasting the dynamics of industrial capitalism with finance capitalism. And
industrial capitalism in the United States, Germany, England, and every country
where it took off, was to promote a public investment in basic infrastructure
monopolies in transportation, communication, education, healthcare.
The idea is that if the government would provide these basic
services and basic human rights at subsidized rates – or freely, as in the case
of education and healthcare – then employers would not have to pay labor a high
enough basic wage to make labor pay for healthcare – as in the United States
where 18% of GDP is for healthcare – or to pay for education, the 1.7 trillion
that goes for student debt in the United States, not mentioning the education
that is not debt-financed.
Finance capitalism basically sought to break away all of the public
infrastructure. Most financial fortunes and financial fortunes in history were
made just in the way that Zola had described, by prying thefts from the public
domain.
But the financial capitalism doesn’t say… You don’t have to steal
it; you actually make it your policy, giving away the financial domain in the
way that President Yeltsin gave away all of Russia’s natural resources, public
utilities, electric companies, anything that yields an economic rent that can
be just easy income without any investment. And you financialize it.
You’ve had, for the last – really since the 1980s, but even since
World War 1 – this movement to prevent industrial economies from being low
cost. But the objective of finance capitalism, contrary to what’s
taught in the textbooks, is to make economies high cost, to raise the cost
every year.
That actually is the explicit
policy of the Federal Reserve in the United States. Turn over the central
planning to the banking system to essentially inflate the price of housing,
with government guaranteed mortgages, up to the point where buying a home is
federally guaranteed up to absorbing 43% of the borrower’s income.
Well, you take that 43%, you
take the wage withholding for social security and healthcare, you take the
taxes; the domestic market shrinks and shrinks. And the finance capital
strategy is exactly what it is in the United States today, in Europe. Shift all
of the money away from the profits of industrial capital that are reinvested in
making new means of production. To expand capital into a shrinking economy
where the financial sector intrudes more and more into the economy of
production and consumption and shrinks the economy.
The rest of the book all spells out how this transformation from
industrial capitalism to finance capitalism occurred and how the fight between
the United States and Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, and India – it’s really a conflict of economic
systems. There’s
no rivalry because they’re not trying to do the same thing. The objectives of
the U.S. and Europe are completely different from the economic objectives of
Eurasia. It’s a war of economic systems. And that’s why the United States is
trying to prevent other countries from following the same path to industrial
prosperity that made the United States, Germany and other countries originally
rich.
So you have on the one hand a high productivity, high standard of
living economy that used to be in the West and is now in Eurasia, as opposed to
an economy of austerity planned by the IMF and central banks, as you’re finding
in Europe.
The Destiny of Civilization: Finance
Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism, or Socialism. – by Michael Hudson
And if this is too complicated for us rubes to
understand - our war is in the grocery aisle. GOT IT!