Miscellaneous News

solarz said:

Can you imagine the enthusiasm of PLAN soldiers when they learn they will be fighting the Japanese?

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Who needs "we will fight them on the beaches" speech to motivate their troops! When your enemy are doing it for you.

j17wang said:

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Graveyard of empires. Afghans are defeating the US the same way Vietnam did in the 70s. America is so cowardly.

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It's great isn't it, the U.S. left in the middle of the night all in a hurry. Left most of their personal belongings behind. Just like Viet nam. Yet, in western historical mindset, it's mission accomplished.

It's how their propaganda works. The fact they left thousands of their "loyal" translators, security guards etc to a fate of certain death. And yet like Viet nam it is somehow glorify as the commies fault, and it is portrait as people trying to escaped from the commies with shows like Miss Saigon to reinforced that image.

emblem21 said:

Never before have I wished death upon any as I wished for this fat idiot. And a horrible one he deserves for his lust for war on a nation that has yet to invade or subjugate anyone. He is going to witness hell like has never seen before in his life time. Does he not see how the USA is collapsing all around him

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Defiantly, he is one douchebag. Him and Cruz, and Gaetz. These are the people had they been in my school when I was a kid, I would definately been beat the sxxt out of them. They are the type that always go around with the biggest bully and does all the cheering.

Sad thing is they will be the front runner for the next republicans meal ticket for president.

Strangelove said:

US vs China...

View attachment 74548View attachment 74549

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Poor New York. But is it just New York?

GTI said:

As the predominant legal and political system - no it most certainly did not.

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That's entirely irrelevant.

BEYOND THE DOLLAR

Creditocracy: A Geopolitical Economy

by Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson - 07 JULY 2021

INTRODUCTION

As President Biden continues his predecessor’s New Cold War on China, it is clear that the pandemic has vastly accelerated the on-going shift in the international balance of power, away from the US and towards China. For former US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, it was likely a ‘hinge of history’: ‘f the 21st century turns out to be an Asian century as the 20th was an American one, the pandemic may well be remembered as the turning point’. It would erase 9/11 and 2008 from memory and rank alongside ‘the 1914 assassination of the Archduke, the 1929 stock market crash, or the 1938 Munich Conference’ (Summers 2020).

However, Professor Summers misses the point. The twentieth century, from our point of view, was actually more an attempted American Century than an accomplished one (Desai 2013) and the shift away from it is looking more certain and decisive than the ‘ifs’ in his assessment let on. The pandemic is less a hinge than an acceleration of the decline of US power based on financialised neoliberal capitalism (Desai 2020a). The structure of world domination that the US had sought to foist on the world in recent decades is breaking down. The US never succeeded; the structure was too unstable and volatile to work. Therefore, one cannot blame the pandemic for reversing even its limited successes. The reversal is rooted in a geopolitical economic earthquake whose rumblings date back decades. They have loosened more and more countries from the contradictory and crisis-prone structures of US domination.

The core of all international power structures of the ‘capitalist mode of foreign relations’ (Van der Pijl 2014) lies in the international monetary system – what James Steuart called ‘the money of the world’ in 1767, referring to the means by which countries settle their trade or financial imbalances among one another. The domination the US sought to exert was no different. At its heart lay the dollar-denominated international financial system that we call the Dollar Creditocracy. It has undergirded the dollar’s world role since the early 1970s and its unravelling leads the denouement of US power.

The financial commentariat is already expressing foreboding of the dollar’s coming doom. ‘The decline of the U.S. dollar could happen at “warp speed”’, warns Market Watch, while Reuters reports more sedately on how ‘King dollar’s decline ripples across the globe’. While set-tos between dollar boosters and gloomsters have long been a feature of the crises that have regularly punctuated the dollar system, what was remarkable is how many are changing sides. Benjamin Cohen (2020) warned of the end of the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ and Stephen Roach (2020) warned of a 35 percent drop in the dollar index over the coming two to three years. Although some boosters such as Barry Eichengreen (2020) stuck to their guns, they were clearly low on ammunition, unable to find solace in anything other than lack of alternatives.

Such commentators sense that doom lies ahead. However, they are far from explaining why. Cohen blamed it on Trump’s disastrous pandemic management, added to his tendency to weaponise the dollar, and Roach blames it on increased US borrowing. However, these explanations, like most commentary on the dollar’s world role, is tangled in that combination of wishful thinking and wager that one of us identified as the international financial intermediation hypothesis (IFIH) (Hudson 1972/2003). It emerged from the difficulties that ended the dollar’s link to gold in 1971 to conjure up a new basis for the dollar’s world role. By making the so-very-clever argument that the US was no ordinary indebted country but the world’s banker and that its deficits were loans to the world, a public service the world should accept gratefully by lifting capital controls and deregulating finance, this interpretation attempts to normalise the transformation of the US economy from super creditor to super debtor. However, it was never more than a barely adequate fig-leaf.

Our purpose in this article is to cut through this interpretation. Despite its faults, it dominates our understanding of the dollar system. In its place we reveal one that is theoretically sound and accords with the historical record, a geopolitical economy (Desai 2013) of the international monetary system of modern capitalism. We begin with a theoretical outline of how money operates under capitalism. We then consider how capitalism needs world money and, at the same time, makes its stable functioning difficult.

We then go on to trace the fundamental instability of the modern international monetary systems based on national currencies of dominant countries, from the gold standard to the current volatile and predatory dollar-centred system, and their close connection to short-term and speculative as opposed to long-term and productive finance. We conclude by discussing of the key instabilities of the dollar system and the paths that various countries and international organizations are already taking to move beyond its destructive logics.

• Money Under Capitalism

• World Money, World Creditocracy

• The Gold Standard, 1870–1914: Gold or Empire?

• The Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914–1945

• Bretton Woods: US Altruism or Imperialism? 1945–1949

• The Golden Age: Creditocracy in Abeyance, 1945–1971

• The Re-emergence of Creditocracy: 1971 to 2008

• World Money Beyond Creditocracy

• Emerging Alternatives

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About the authors:

Dr. Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

Michael Hudson is an American economist professor of economics at the university of Missouri Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He’s a former Wall Street analyst political consultant commentator and journalist. He identifies himself as a classical economist.

The MSM propaganda is either getting over confident or just plain sloppy.

Hmm this is interesting. These vloggers must be making some serious impact for BBC to be picking this up. I have heard also recently a German girl have come under attack for defending China on social media.

Not all african americans in the US are allowed to vote. Especially in more racist regions of america like texas, which was stolen from Mexico.

By extending the mature day of the loan to give out a lower interest rate is not really that much of a deal. But it does mean Montenegro doesn't want to deepen the engagement with China to avoid displeasure from the US and the EU.


On the other hand, Ukraine felt like it got short-handed of the deal and decided to reengage China



Why bother to make a response towards Gordon, Gordon Chang is already a laughing stock.

KYli said:

By extending the mature day of the load to give out a lower interest rate is not really that much of a deal. But it does mean Montenegro doesn't want to deeper the engagement with China to avoid displeasure from the US and the EU.

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On the other hand, Ukraine felt like it got short-handed of the deal and decided to reengage China

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Why bother to make a response towards Gordon, Gordon Chang is already laughable stock.

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Between the situation with Montenegro and Ukraine I'm reminded of a Chinese idiom that perfectly describes this situation:
"按下葫芦浮起瓢"

Which probably bests translates to "trying to play a game of whack a mole"

Temstar said:

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Hmm this is interesting. These vloggers must be making some serious impact for BBC to be picking this up. I have heard also recently a German girl have come under attack for defending China on social media.

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This lady I think.

Temstar said:

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Hmm this is interesting. These vloggers must be making some serious impact for BBC to be picking this up. I have heard also recently a German girl have come under attack for defending China on social media.

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They are scared of their narrative getting challenged. Maybe they can build a digital Hadrian’s Wall to wall off Chinese influence?